By Adam Barrett
Appeal to Detroit City Council by Detroit resident Adam Barrett
We’re at the point now where they’re going to have to clearly define what “assist” means when they say “DPD does not assist in immigration work.”
If you believe that “crowd control” is merely about protecting people on both sides of a protest, in a vacuum, then that’s one thing. But if you believe in context, then you’re forced to admit that the entire reason crowd control is needed is because the federal activity in question is so objectionable to such a broad slice of the population that it sparks protest practically wherever it occurs…whether the raids are constitutional or lawful is somewhat moot. According to our city charter the people have ultimate authority over the direction of the police department.
If the federal activity in question cannot proceed without crowd control from DPD because of said objectionability and the associated protests, then it follows that DPD is in fact facilitating the objectionable federal activity. No crowd control is needed from local police when the IRS arrests someone for evading their taxes, or when the FBI raided [Councilman] Scott Benson, or any other routine federal operation…so why is ICE special? If the raid cannot occur without DPD crowd control, then DPD are necessarily assisting immigration raids (or unconstitutional abductions, or whatever you want to call them).
In a perfect world the feds should be warned they cannot expect to perform such objectionable activities here while counting on DPD support, and furthermore that if the activities continue, and continue to endanger the Detroit public, DPD will be forced to take whatever measures are necessary to protect the public from federal agents (since without DPD crowd control, the MAGA feds would likely just use rifles to solve the issue). But we all know that half the DPD officers today are ICE-sympathizer white boys with a Livonia address, and that DPD is therefore little more than an occupational army with an even worse reputation for brutalizing brown Detroiters with militarized hardware than ICE, so this would of course be disappointingly unlikely to work.
It is feeling more and more futile to debate concepts of “legality” and “constitutionality” when we are clearly deep in a national constitutional crisis and plunging deeper by the day. The police have not played by the rules for decades (if ever), so why should we? The entire point of protest and resistance is to push back on processes that are legal but not just…the entire point is to disrupt something that the people disapprove of, after we have exhausted / been deprived of redress via the normal means, in order to force a crisis that necessarily results in the desired change to the status quo. It should be the local government’s focus to take every step possible to protect civilians, and ensure that the coming crisis is not also a tragedy.
Finally, the “No Secret Police Act” is a proposed legislation in California that aims to prohibit law enforcement from covering their faces during operations and requires them to clearly identify themselves with uniforms, name tags, or badge numbers. I am asking City Council to expeditiously introduce their own such ordinance for Detroit.
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