The Michigan Bureau of Elections is investigating a complaint that alleges the Shelby Township Police Department violated state law by using public resources earlier this month to host a campaign event featuring Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance.
The complaint was filed Friday, two days after Metro Times raised questions about the legality of recent Donald Trump campaign events at the Shelby Township Police Department and the Livingston County Sheriff’s Office.
The Michigan Campaign Finance Act makes it a crime punishable by 93 days in jail to use public resources to support a political candidate.
Vance delivered a campaign speech outside the Shelby Township Police Department on Aug. 7, with cops nodding in agreement as he attacked Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, calling the vice president a “chameleon” whose words “can’t be trusted.”
“She’s a fake,” Vance said. “And the American people have to look at her record if we actually want to know how she stands on the issues because her words simply can't be trusted.”
Macomb County Prosecutor Peter Lucido, a Trump-supporting Republican, also spoke at the event.
It’s unclear how this was anything but a campaign event.
Shelby Township resident Melissa Arab, who filed the complaint, says it's unnerving that a police department would use taxpayer resources to support a political candidate.
"It's very intimidating to see the police officers lined up behind Trump and Vance," Arab tells Metro Times. "It's very scary."
Arab says she hopes state officials take action to prevent future abuses of public resources.
"I feel like we can get the attention on it, and if they can spank these police departments right now or put someone in jail for 93 days, it will stop in the rest of the state and country. You can't have him doing this across the country."
Neither the police department nor township officials returned calls from Metro Times for comment.
Standing behind Vance at the event was Shelby Township Police Chief Robert Shelide, who called George Floyd activists “barbarians,” “wild savages,” and “vicious subhumans” who belong in “body bags” on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter in 2020.
In October 2020, anti-police brutality activists were charged with misdemeanors and felonies in Shelby Township for peacefully marching on the street. Police in riot gear rushed, assaulted, and arrested the protesters.
Five protesters were originally jailed and charged with felony counts of assaulting, resisting, and obstructing a police officer. A handful of other protesters were charged with misdemeanors.
Shelby Township is in western Macomb County, which has a long and ugly history of racism. In 1972, pro-segregation demagogue George Wallace won the presidential primary election in Macomb County. Macomb County is also home to the so-called “Reagan Democrats” who overwhelmingly supported Ronald Reagan.
Shelby Township, with a population of 80,600, is 90% white and voted for Trump in the 2016 presidential election by a two-to-one margin. Trump didn’t perform as well in 2020, but still picked up 61.6% of the votes.
Unlike a lot of Macomb County, the township is relatively affluent, with a $74,400 median household income, compared to $55,000 in Michigan.
On Aug. 20, Trump held an event at the Livingston County Sheriff’s Office in Howell, where the former president spoke in front of two banners each that read “Make America Safe Again” and “Michigan is Trump Country” and spoke from a podium emblazoned with the Trump 2024 campaign logo.
With two-and-a-half months before the presidential election, Trump peddled lies about a fictitious spike in crimes and portrayed big cities “almost all run by Democrats” as lawless.
The Bureau of Elections received at least two complaints about that event last week, which allege that sheriff’s officials violated the Michigan Campaign Finance Act by using public resources to support Trump’s campaign.
A day before the event, Sheriff Michael Murphy claimed in a video that it was not a political event, despite the looming campaign signs.
“Let me make a couple of things clear: One, this is not a political event. This is a press conference,” Murphy said.
