Last week the body cam footage of the police shooting of Alonzo Lee Perkins was released to the public by the Detroit Free Press. The video shows 18-year-old Lee-Perkins running away from police who are shouting at him. Officer David Gozalez raises his gun and fires off four shots, three of them hitting Lee-Perkins in the back.
This footage is brutal. But what we don’t see is equally disturbing. No one rushes to offer first aid to the young man bleeding on the street. No one seems concerned to call an ambulance. We have yet to see the minutes before the shooting.
What we know is that another young man was shot and could have been killed by a police officer firing his weapon for no reason. The so-called justice system refuses to prosecute the officer, while charging young Lee-Perkins with a felony.
The outrage of this shooting intensifies larger questions of Detroit Police behavior and the public right to protection from police violence.
The Detroit Free Press documented in an investigation in 2025 “that 20% of Detroit police shootings over the prior decade began with attempted stops for nonviolent offenses − often suspected gun possession − and escalated with foot chases.” Emphasizing this pattern, the community press conference held in support of Mr. Lee-Perkins was held a year after the shooting of Tracey Allen, as she drove away from a routine traffic stop. Allen was shot six times in the arms and legs as she sat in her car. She drove to a police station while injured, looking for help.
An earlier Detroit Free Press investigation in 2024 found that over seven years, a third of Detroit police shooting survivors were either not charged with or convicted of the conduct for which they were shot.
Almost everyone who lives in Detroit knows that police pose a clear and present danger. Between 2022 and 2025 the city of Detroit paid nearly $64 million across 111police related settlements. While money cannot compensate for the pain and loss people have endured, it gives us some indication of the depth of the problem of police violence.
This emphasizes the importance of timely, unedited release of body cam information to the public in any police use of force or allegation of misconduct.
The intensity of the resistance to the release of this footage, especially by the police union, should be a signal to us about how important it is as a tool for public accountability.
The demand for the public release of body cam footage gained momentum after the police killing of Michael Brown in 2014. The hope had been that increased monitoring of police behavior would serve to counter excessive force. Over the course of more than a decade, this promise remains unfulfilled. A recent Department of Justice review of research suggests body cam recordings have been “ineffective” across a range of metrics, including officer use of force, officer injuries, officer-initiated calls for service, traffic stops, field interviews, and arrests.
We fully support the demands for the timely release of all body cam imagery related to use of force and allegations of mis conduct. We encourage the Detroit Board of Police Commissioners to pursue access to this footage and find the now murky decision to restrict such access outrageous.
Establishing civilian oversight and setting up real consequences for the use of force is becoming more important with each passing day, with the application of AI.
A recent study concluded:
As body cameras are increasingly integrated into larger surveillance networks, they will evolve from standalone, passive recording devices to nodes in a smart network of connected law enforcement tools.[91] Feeds from public and private cameras—everything from traffic cameras to doorbell cameras—will combine with body camera feeds to offer police 360-degree coverage of a neighborhood or even an entire city.
Whether standing on a corner or driving a car, police view us as “fair game.” We need to collectively assert our desire for communities free from police violence. We can begin by making sure we have the power to watch the police, rather than giving them the power to watch and shoot us.