Detroit’s most famous moniker may be Motown; over the past dozen years its middle name could have been “consent agreement.”
Sadly, as the city’s downward spiral really took hold, virtually everything government related inside the border wound up in the ditch with a negotiated deal to make things right with a higher level of government. A consent agreement is essentially a white flag; an open admission that, try as it might, a governmental agency needed help getting things right. The public schools, the city itself (before the bankruptcy declaration) and most infamously the police department all had consent agreements meant to try righting the many wrongs.
The Detroit Police Department didn’t just have one consent agreement with the Feds, it had two. An inglorious feat to say the least!
The Detroit Police Department has a storied history of problems. It is often cited as the cause for that awful fulcrum moment of the city’s entire history; the 1967 riots. The then largely white police department was rough, gruff and at war with the city’s population. The “STRESS” crime unit was known for its especially brutal and even deadly brand of law enforcement. Mayor Coleman Young went about the business in the aftermath of putting more black and female officers on the streets and even imported a Japanese style of neighborhood policing as a way to try and change DPD’s culture.
Strangely and sadly, even though the department started resembling the city’s racial makeup, the police department couldn’t shed the brutally tough reputation.
During Dennis Archer’s administration the department did two things that led him to ask the feds to come in. First it mistreated crime victims and witnesses. It was, in some instances, attacking pretty much everyone in the process of getting convictions; even to the point of jailing Detroiters as a way to force them to testify when they wouldn’t cooperate. Then were the dozens of questionable police shootings, many of unarmed citizens, many of those fatal.
To be fair here, it was not every officer on the force participating in these abuses, but there were enough (both black and white) that showed the department was run amok.
It did not help in later years when former mayor and now federal jail inmate Kwame Kilpatrick turned the police department into a political organization instead of a police agency. His text messaging with his police brass showed more attention paid to how to impose power than performing better law enforcement. Then in 2009 there was still further embarrassment when “hizzoner" went and had another of his extramarital romantic dalliances with one of the Federal Monitors sent in to watch the police department. Sheryl Robinson Wood had to resign as a result of that one night stand.
Black eyes were the norm at the Detroit Police Department, but its low point came when former Detroit Police Chief Ralph Godbee (who moonlighted as a preacher) had to resign after several extramarital affairs became public. His mistress, herself a Detroit Police Officer, appeared on Facebook with a picture of her holding her service weapon in her mouth, threatening suicide because Godbee’s eye strayed to yet another woman.
The department was in desperate need of solid and dependable leadership. Well, in came Kevyn Orr with the city’s consent agreement and he hired a police chief from Cincinnati, a Detroit native and former Detroit Police officer laid off back in the ‘70s. Chief James Craig said on day one he saw the department lacked leadership, saw the city’s out-of-control crime problem and police officers begging him to allow them to just go out and be cops. He says he wanted a far better department and a more disciplined department working without consent agreements. He told Local 4 News in an exclusive television interview the changes he has brought begin and end with two things; training and accountability.
“Accountability; that’s the real key," Craig said. "It is not magic in adopting those police practices… when a police department isn’t trained that’s where the trouble happens. No structure, that’s what we saw in Detroit.”
In declaring the federal monitoring officially over now, Craig makes some big, yet modest brags. He declares his department is now held accountable, if there is trouble an officer is disciplined appropriately. He says DPD is transparent, and his relationship with the media is unlike anything we’ve seen in recent years. He called Thursday’s announcement “critical, not only are we a constitutional police department we are a model policing agency others can follow.” Those are some big words for his department to live up to. He is confident it can.
Kenneth Reed of the Detroit Coalition Against Police Brutality, an organization skeptical of that much change within DPD, admits the department has changed, but not nearly as much as Craig would have you believe.
“We will say the department has made strides as compared to the late 90s or 2000s," Reed said. "It is our position the department has not really changed. We still think there should be some supervision.”
But it is the federal government that makes that decision and it obviously feels the department has made sufficient improvement for it to pull up stakes and let Craig run his department without the need for someone watching over his shoulder. With that it is a new day in Detroit and a bright one at that despite the driving rain we’re experiencing Thursday night.
The bankruptcy, born from a consent agreement, yielded incredibly positive results. The DPS consent agreement should soon disappear if and when the Legislature finally decides to pass the governor’s education package that would largely return the district to local control. And now that the feds are gone from police headquarters, Detroit’s middle name can go the way of the buggy whip. No more white flags? Let’s hope it happens soon and stays that way.