From [HERE] All of the above. That's who is to blame for the City of Detroit's repeated failure to adopt federally mandated reforms at the Detroit Police Department, several people involved in the effort said Thursday in an unusual forum at Wayne State University.
They blamed the administration of ex-Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick for failing to get behind the reforms, police executives for resisting them and a federal judge for failing to crack the whip when the efforts stalled soon after they began in 2003.
"The initial reaction of the city was tremendous resistance," Assistant U.S. Attorney Judith Levy, the Justice Department's point person on the reforms, said in her first public criticism of the department in the seven-year reform effort. "We shook hands, and we began to fight."
Ron Scott, of the Coalition Against Police Brutality -- which pushed for the reforms to curb excessive force, mistreatment of prisoners and mass arrests of homicide witnesses -- faulted U.S. District Judge Julian Cook for refusing to let his group become a party to the legal proceedings to keep up pressure on the city to comply.
"We felt we were stepchildren to something we pushed for," Scott said. "We're the victims, and we're not involved in the process."
But a new day has dawned, according to Levy and Detroit Deputy Mayor Saul Green, emphasizing that the new administration of Mayor Dave Bing and Police Chief Ralph Godbee Jr. are dead serious about carrying out the reforms.
"We're past resistance," said Green, the former federal police monitor in Cincinnati. He reiterated that he, Bing and Godbee are committed to adopting the remaining reforms by the end of the year.
Under Bing, he said, the city has achieved 61% compliance with the two federal consent decrees -- double the rate before he took office. One decree, or legal agreement, is five years behind schedule, and the other is two years behind schedule.
Levy credited some of the progress to Robert Warshaw, a former police chief in New York and North Carolina who replaced court-appointed monitor Sheryl Robinson Wood, who quit in 2009 after Cook learned that she had had inappropriate communications with Kilpatrick.
But Scott and members of the audience who watched the power brokers discuss the reform effort said more needs to be done.
Malcolm Woods of Detroit said police pulled him out of his van while he was asleep outside his home, assaulted and handcuffed him without justification, then left without arresting him in October 2009. He said the police told him they had received a call about a break-in.
But when he filed a complaint with the Detroit police commission, he said he got nowhere.
"I got more help from the coalition than I did from the Detroit police commission," he complained.
"It happens all the time," a member of the audience said.
The forum, attended by about 60 people, was organized by the coalition, the National Lawyers Guild and the Damon J. Keith Center for Civil Rights at Wayne State University, which is trying to get the public more involved in demanding change.