Lenawee Police & Citizens

By Drew Saunders PROTECT & SERVE

UNDERSTANDING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE POLICE AND THE CITIZENS OF LENAWEE COUNTY

By Drew Saunders

The relationship between the police and citizens in the United States has been at the forefront of a cultural and political divide for generations, especially in the last decade. But is the relationship between law enforcement and the people they are sworn to protect under strain in Lenawee County?

“The average citizen, I think, has an OK relationship. I think what happened last year with the ongoing shootings with young Black men; there is an ongoing mistrust between citizens, especially minority people,” Lenawee County NAACP President Jeanette Henagan said. “They do not trust law enforcement, but the average general person who doesn’t have any negative contact with police, they have a pretty good relationship in this county.”

Police chiefs across the county told Our Town that they have a great relationship with the local communities, across all demographics. Leadership from the Lenawee Branch of the NAACP agreed that they have an overall good relationship with police leadership, but said that there is room for improvement on an individual o cer level. Lenawee Democratic Party Chairperson Juanita Kelley and Vice-Chairperson Bill Swift agreed that police chiefs are doing their best to engage with the community attentively and fairly.

“I think it is generally good,” Swift said. “It seems as though the Sheri is interested in quality police work and being very involved in oversight of his o cers. That seems very encouraging. That’s not to say that there haven’t been any issues at the county level. It appears as though, for local policing … we’re not aware of any particular issues.”

Police leadership meets with members of the community all the time, but the Lenawee NAACP told Our Town that they want to see the individual patrolmen attend, too, to open dialogue on all levels of law enforcement. They agree with police leadership that they have a good working relationship with them, but that that is not always the case with individual o cers.

“I have a good rapport with the police chief and the sheri ,” Peter Martinez, a local community organizer in Adrian, said; although he did report that some people he knew felt stereotyped by the police.

Our Town could not confi rm any individual incident of bias in policing, with everyone except for Martinez referring to any incident of Lenawee-specifi c discrimination as either a rumor or a general perception. Any reported issues of discrimination or profi ling seemed to be specifi c to individual o cers or incidents and not whole departments.

“We would like the citizens to begin to trust law enforcement. We want them to be more open and approachable … and for the citizens to think of them as a help instead of someone who is out to harm them,” Henagan said. “We want open lines of communication with local police.”

In some major cities this comes in the form of a civilian oversight board, which scrutinizes the day to day performance of police. This is usually intended as a transparency initiative by providing a regular review of police behavior by civilians outside of police administration, and to improve the overall relationship between the police and all demographics that they serve, from minorities to people from di erent parts of town to people with special needs.

“Nationally, I think a lot of these things are going to be mandated. I like to do things before they are mandated,” Lenawee County Sheri Troy Bervier said.

Oversight boards come in many forms, with some operating on a city-wide, or a precinct by precinct level; and their powers vary from being purely advisory, to having subpoena power, to having a voice in the hiring and fi ring of o cers and in various forms of starting prosecution. Selection processes for these boards also varies from community to community. Kelley said she supports the ability of such a board to submit subpoenas, but not starting prosecutions.

“We’ve been in talks with them for months. I’m not sure if it’ll ever come to fruition or not. I don’t know if it needs to. Any time we’ve had an issue, they’ve been more than willing to meet with us,” Lenawee NAACP Criminal Justice and Legal Redress Chairperson Joe Costello, said. And even if such a board is formed on a city or county level, Costello told Our Town that the Lenawee NAACP wasn’t interested in establishing the more powerful, subpoena-empowered form of a civilian oversight board. “We just want to open up the lines of communication. … Citizens have a lot to learn about why o cers do what they do, and I think maybe o cers need to learn about the perceptions of the citizens. And not just when the wheels fall o .”

“I don’t see the necessity,” Ted Dusseau, the chairman of the Lenawee County Republican Party, said of the idea of a civilian oversight board. “But if the general population thought it was needed, I don’t see anything wrong with having one.”

Dusseau also told Our Town that the police generally have broad support in Lenawee County, with there being no real di erences between the sheri and any local jurisdiction.

“It appears to me that the younger generation doesn’t respect the police and quite obviously don’t want to be told what to do and what not to do, and that it comes from home,” Dusseau said. “They get stopped for a tra c stop, or something and they rebel against giving their identifi cation, or they’ve been drinking, or they’ve been on drugs or whatever. … They don’t want to accept that responsibility because they’ve created the problem.”

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics — the inhouse statistical authority for the Department of Justice — white Americans are about half as likely to experience a use of force by law enforcement as Black Americans. The BJS found in its most recent Contacts Between Police and the Public report last December, that in 2015 African-Americans experienced a physical altercation of some sort with the police about 5.2 percent of the time when brought into police contact, compared with 5.1 percent of the time for Hispanic Americans and just 2.4 percent of the time for white Americans.

Compare that with 2018, where Black Americans’ experience of the use of force went up by one tenth of a percentage point, while the number of incidents for Hispanic and White Americans both went down slightly.