Watching police

The Detroit City Council meeting this week was greeted by demonstrators who gathered to support greater police accountability and transparency. The city council is considering a new ordinance to require the release of body-worn camera imagery. Community members, who have been working on such legislation since 2020, are opposing this watered-down, weak version offered by Councilperson Angela Whitfield-Calloway.  

The objections to the proposal are significant. They include concerns that the proposed ordinance only applies to incidents that result in the death of a person or actual hospitalization of victims of police violence. It allows the police to present a “compilation” of footage and allows the footage to be redacted. It also allows 30 days to pass before the release of images and limits the time these images would be available to the public.

These objections are grounded in hard experiences of police misconduct and violence. 

First, there is a staggering backlog of citizen complaints alleging police misconduct. The vast majority of these complaints did not result in “great bodily harm” or death but were severe enough to cause a person to lodge a formal complaint. Unwarranted interactions, insults, physical force, and verbal abuse are often the subject of these complaints. Body cam footage that could resolve different accounts is often missing, in spite of policies demanding that cameras be worn and record all encounters.

All too often, these encounters do result in death. Here, the experience is one that questions police accounts of the necessity to use lethal force. The Coalition for Police Transparency and Accountability (CPTA) emerged from just such a situation. In July of 2020, Detroit Police officers killed Hakeem Littleton. Mr. Littleton was shot in the head while face down on the ground. Because of an immediate community response to the killing, Chief James Craig released body camera imagery to establish the justification for the police's use of deadly force. This curated footage did not actually show what the Chief claimed and CPTA provided an alternative narrative, using the very same footage, pointing out inconsistencies and raising questions about police conduct.

The proposed ordinance allows the police to continue a practice of editing footage to support their own account. This is why unedited footage must be made available.

The proposed ordinance also does not require the release of footage where police officers are witnesses to violence done by other officials. Most recently, we have seen the reluctance of police who were present when a bailiff shot Sherman Lee Butler to death in his apartment during the course of an eviction.  It took months of concerted citizen action to finally get the body cam images of police who were on the scene released. This imagery raised serious questions about the killing of Mr. Butler.

Just this week, in a small town outside of Chicago, the forced release of body camera footage by the Chicago Sun Times has raised serious questions about the killing of Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez, who was shot by ICE agents in an effort to apprehend him. 

This police footage is especially important as the current federal administration has removed the requirement for ICE agents to wear such devices.

People throughout our city are subject to multiple sources of surveillance. There are cameras on business, there are facial recognition programs, devices that record noise in streets, and read license plates as we pass by.  All of this monitoring is sold to the city council and the people with the promise of making us safe. Of course it doesn’t. 

One action that would increase the possibility of not being harmed or killed by police however, would be a strong ordinance that allows all of us to monitor and judge their actions. 

Now is the time to raise our voices to demand that the city council pass a clear ordinance to support police accountability. Support the community-based law. Read it here.