A police car cuts through a bleak, frozen night-time cityscape. It’s beautifully and cinematically shot from above. Flashing lights and sirens are switched on; it’s responding to a shooting. We’re in Flint, Michigan which, since its boomtime in the 1950s and 60s, has suffered body blow after body blow. The decline of the auto industry and the withdrawal of General Motors, deindustrialisation, disinvestment, depopulation, urban decay, drugs, poverty, and a whole lot of crime.

Not enough? So throw in a public health crisis as well. The water supply became toxic after a policy decision that was supposed to save money. Kick them when they’re already on their knees. Well, slowly poison them, to be precise. Where better place to set an observational documentary series from the point of view of a city’s police force? The force is at breaking point, with crippling cuts and soaring crime and a community that’s losing faith in them. There are just nine cars to patrol the city, officers numbers are down from 300 to 98.

The Flint Water Plant Photograph: Carlos Osorio/AP

There are some good characters among those 98 though. Like Bridgette Balasko, who saw her first stabbing on the first day in the job, her first homicide on day four. Now she can’t remember the last time she was bothered by a dead body. And Robert Frost, who’s here for exactly those reasons. “The attraction of Flint was this is where the action was, the violence,” he says. When Frost, who knew he wanted to be a cop the first time he saw a police car as a kid, retires, he wants to be able to say: “Hell I lived it, I went through the worst and I survived.”

Flint Town so rich it’s almost impossible to binge. You need to pause between courses, to take it in

Observational documentary is made by interesting characters, as well as by what’s going on. This has both. So much going: in the police force, in the city: a crisis meetings with the community who - as officer Devon Bernritter says, “don’t give a fuck about what our current union crisis is or pay or whatever, they need help”; a visit from Bernie Sanders; the police force Christmas party; the election of a new mayor, Karen Weaver, and of a new police chief; a new tracking dog, called Sonitrol after the security company that paid for it, they have to find innovative ways of doing things in Flint.

And all of that in the first episode. Brutal, unflinching, real (though it’s worth remembering they’re not going to forget they’re being filmed), Flint Town so rich it’s almost impossible to binge. You need to pause between courses, to take it in, even if a lot of is hard to digest. Beautiful to look at though, the camera cruises slowly and past extreme urban dereliction. Not forgetting the crime of course. A robbery and assault leaves a man needing 16 stitches and a massive scar across his face. A reckless driver is pulled up, three times over the limit. And that shooting; now a young man lies lifeless in the snow. “He’s my son!” wails his distraught mother. Turns out he was 16.