Take cities with high crime rates, infuse Michigan State Police troopers from other towns who racially don’t match the community’s makeup, and what do you get? “A powder keg that's just waiting to blow up,” said Cole Waterman, public safety reporter for The Saginaw News and The Bay City Times. “Everyone's mental health in that situation, from the civilians to the cops, is just rife with tension.” Waterman teamed with MLive investigative reporter Gus Burns for a package of stories this past week that examined Michigan’s Secure Cities policing program, which began in 2012. Their year-long project revealed some positive results – felony arrests in 11 cities participating in the program reached a high in 2022, the last year data was available, and violent crime has dropped in seven of the communities during the life of the program. But they also uncovered scores of citizen complaints of abusive police tactics or harassment, lawsuits that have cost the state $27 million in settlements, and reported on criminal charges against three troopers and disciplinary actions against several command officers and troopers. The state spends nearly $10 million per year to supplement local police forces with state troopers in Saginaw, Flint, Pontiac, Detroit, Lansing, Muskegon Heights, Benton Harbor, Inkster, Highland Park, Harper Woods and Hamtramck. Black populations make up a majority in most of those cities. Conversely, fewer than 6 percent of troopers statewide are Black. And an MLive review of records on troopers assigned to Secure Cities showed that 94 percent lived outside of the communities they patrol. One flashpoint is how troopers aggressively police these high-crime neighborhoods and pull over motorists for traffic or vehicle infractions. Those tactics work, the reporters said, but come at a cost. “(The police) are going into areas where they know there's high crime and pulling people over for minor crimes with the hopes that they're going to proactively get a gun or a felon,” said Burns. “They let 91 percent of people go, which (police) then say, ‘See, we’re not being harsh.’ But that’s not how it feels to a resident who’s pulled over for what they feel is a nitpicky reason.” Some citizens, elected officials and community leaders have suggested the state’s money would be better spent, with more constructive outcomes, if it were given to cities to hire officers into their own native police departments. Waterman and Burns cited reasons that’s unlikely to happen – Secure Cities started as an initiative by then-Gov. Rick Snyder and continues to be a gubernatorial directive; leaders in some communities embrace the program and want it to continue; and there would be logistical challenges to hiring locally. But other approaches are more realistic and were spelled out in a story on “solutions”. Those include working to engage state troopers more in the neighborhoods they patrol; hiring more Black troopers; and revising and refining tactics around pretextual traffic stops. “People said things like it takes more than having a coffee hour once a month to community police,” Burns said. “Do it the right way – go to that neighborhood, get out your car and meet everyone. Be there more than a couple shifts before you move to another assignment, you know?”
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