Last year, the Detroit Police Department's new police chief, James E. White, acknowledged that law enforcement has a trust problem.
"I think you get the people to believe in policing and trust the police by partnerships. You get the increased trust through transparency and acknowledgment," he told the Detroit Free Press, adding, "I'm not speaking to Detroit, just generally speaking. So there has been a lack of trust in policing."
Well, things are off to a bad start. On Thursday night, DPD released the following vague statement in an email with the subject line, "Statement from Chief James E. White Regarding Officer Charged':
“The allegations stemming from this investigation, which have spanned several years, are disturbing and do not represent the overwhelming majority of the hardworking men and women of the Detroit Police Department. The DPD will continue to cooperate with the investigation.
Today, I am making a request to the Board of Police Commissioners that the officer-involved be suspended without pay pending the outcome of this matter.” - James E. White, Chief of Police
That's it. That's the whole statement. There is no mention of which officer was charged, or the crime allegedly committed.
A quick Google search pulls up a Fox 2 article published Thursday about a DPD officer named Michael Anthony Carson, who was arraigned on two counts of first-degree sexual conduct on Wednesday for raping a minor in West Bloomfield.
According to the article, Carson, 60, is accused of abusing the child for seven years, since the child was 6.
The obfuscating language commonly used by police was undoubtedly a huge factor that led to the 2020 summer of protests against police brutality. When the Minneapolis Police Department first described how George Floyd died, it simply reported that a man died after he "appeared to be suffering medical distress." A now-famous video shot by a 17-year-old bystander later showed that Floyd died after officer Derek Chauvin kneeled on Floyd's neck while other officers looked on. Chauvin is now behind bars for manslaughter, but he almost certainly would not be if the enormous discrepancy between how MPD described the incident and the video evidence was not revealed.
Police departments — and the journalists who parrot them — routinely use a passive voice and vague phrases like "officer-involved shooting" to describe when cops shoot people. Police love to say "officer-involved." In his statement, White says that the "officer-involved" should be suspended without pay, even though that doesn't grammatically make sense. Police are just so used to typing "officer-involved" that at this point it's muscle memory.
Metro Times replied to the press release by asking who the officer was, what they were charged with, and why DPD and other police departments always have to be so unnecessarily opaque about everything. We have not received a response.
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