Kate Wells

When gang violence breaks out in the roughest parts of Detroit, even the police call for help.

The gang squad is a special, paramilitary unit of the Detroit Police Department.

They're either necessarily tough, or notoriously brutal, depending on who you ask.

But if the city’s Mayor and the Police Chief have their way, the squad's days are numbered. 

Big guys with big guns

Think about it: big guys, with big guns, cruising the city’s toughest streets in the name of law and order. You know what we have here? A reality TV hit.

But dang it, a quick Google search shows the National Geographic Channel beat us to the punch.

Their “Inside Detroit Gang Squad” aired a few years ago, with all the dramatic music and drug raids you’d expect.

For art teachers in Michigan, it may be hard to even remember what “good news” feels like.

Between budget cuts, pink slips and declining enrollment, more than 108,000 Michigan kids don’t have any art access in their schools. That’s according to a 2012 statewide survey.

But for some 20,000 students, that’s about to change. They’re getting…a free bus ride.

"The money is just not there."

You think your freshman year was crazy? Ha. You never had to balance finals with your part-time job as the “World’s Best Apple Reporter.”

Mark Gurman can't legally buy himself a drink to celebrate his new unofficial title, which BusinessInsider recently bestowed on the 19-year-old University of Michigan freshman.

Actually, Gurman's been painstakingly tracking Apple since high school, when he first picked up an iPod.

Grab your muskets and hitch up your hoop skirts, because this week, ArtPod takes a trip aaaall the way back to the Civil War.

One hundred and fifty years after the war (also called a sesquicentennial, which it turns out is a very tough word to say on the radio), we go inside Michigan State University’s dusty archive of letters between Union soldiers and their Michigan families.

Detroit’s gang squad, the special police unit that fights organized street crime, is on the chopping block.

Mayor Dave Bing wants to reassign the 20 or so officers on that squad to regular beat patrol.

He says the only way the city can turn a corner on its crime epidemic is by creating a more visible police presence – and that means some tough calls, given all the recent staff and budget cuts.

Bing is also weighing whether to reassign the officers tasked with protecting city council members.

It’s baaaaaack. After a brief hiatus (we missed you, too!) ArtPod is bigger and better than ever, bringing you all the Michigan artists and thinkers we’re following now.

This week, we’re hashing out the best of the Arab American film festival in Dearborn. Every festival has its inside-baseball politics about which films get in and which don’t. But Sundance just might be a cakewalk compared with trying to tackle the Arab spring and the Syrian conflict in just one week of screenings.

We hear from the guy who’s got that job, and we get the rundown on his favorite picks of the year.  

We’re also heading to a Detroit shelter for LGBT teens. Michigan Radio’s Kyle Norris tells us how these young men (and a handful of women) are making their own kind of families, with a little help from Madonna: it’s called vogue dancing, and for gay youth in Detroit, it’s brave stuff. You’ve gotta hear this story, and then you need to check out this video:

Then, we cut the baby boomers some slack for a change: sure, they’re notoriously self-obsessed and nostalgic for those groovy gone-by years of their youth. But guess what? So are Millenials! (Hint: young adults born after 1981.)

You know how they say 40 is the new 30? According to Michigan's Constitution, 70 is the new senile. 

If you're over the age of 70, you can't be elected or appointed to the bench in this state.

That's a rule that dates back to 1906, according to former Supreme Court Justice Marilyn Kelly, when life expectancies were shorter.

For Kelly, a Democrat, the law means she had to step down when her term ended in January. She's 74. Asked how it feels to be too old to do her job, she laughs.

We're getting a lot of feedback about last week’s series on the fungal meningitis outbreak in Michigan. Some of you loved the series. Some of you, not so much.

But there is one response that we want to share with you. It’s from Dr. Stephen Andriese, whom our reporter Kate Wells interviewed and quoted in the piece.

Dr. Andriese works at Neuromuscular & Rehabilitation Associates of Northern Michigan, which received and administered some of the contaminated drugs that led to this outbreak.

Just call him “Big Dog.”

That’s allegedly how Highland Park police officer Price Montgomery prefers to be addressed, at least when he’s soliciting $10,000 bribes, or trafficking drugs while wearing his firearm and police badge.

At a press conference Friday morning, the FBI broke the news that it’s arrested four Highland Park police officers, including Montgomery.

They’re in custody and being charged with armed drug trafficking and taking bribes. If convicted, they could face up to 55 years in prison.

Nobody thought fixing Detroit’s debt woes was gonna be easy.

But these days, it might be especially painful for city workers and their families.

Some 2,000 pink slips have already gone out in the last few years. And now, another 500 cuts are scheduled for February.

It’s already worrying union leaders like Leamon Wilson. The president of the AFSCME Local 312 told the Detroit News that more cuts could cripple the city’s bus service. “You can’t deliver the service…It was already functioning at a bare minimum. I don’t see how anything is going to be functioning.”

Steve Major doesn’t have a lot of time for breakfast these days.

“I actually had two Reese’s Peanut cups and um, a Mountain Dew,” he laughs, a little bashfully. “I had to meet for an interview at 8 o’clock and I’ve pretty much been up and running around since 6:30 this morning.”

A former law enforcement official and firefighter, Major now runs an emergency vehicle company. Lately though, he’s busy organizing a Michigan memorial procession for the victims of the Connecticut school shooting.