When Michigan State Police leaders meet with the City Council during a session at 6:30 p.m. on Monday, questions will focus on two levels.
First will come a pair of noted cases of video-recorded abuse by MSP officers. The first involved a 48-year-old passenger, Vance Martin, on Annesley Street a year ago, and the most recent high-profile victim was a 28-year-old pedestrian, Michael Wilson, on Webber last September. Police representatives will repeat past responses that they actively are weeding out the rare miscreants.
The second level, however, involves overall policy and procedure, not isolated incidents. Critics have asserted that state officers, and not only a few, routinely are assigned patrols at a rate of more than 100 traffic stops per week in the city. They view the high counts as a tactic of overreach often called “stop-and-frisk.”
An example of these complaints took place during a forum two weeks ago, when businessman Terry Reed outlined two recent encounters that did not get into physical violence, but in which he believed that officers acted excessively. The first involved frisking a snowbound motorist awaiting a tow truck, and the second was a case of verbal subjugation. Reed is not visible, but to hear his testimony, watch the video below.
Jeff Bulls of Community Alliance for the People, which hosted the March 17 meeting, said encounters such as Reed described may not make dramatic headlines, but they are all-too-common. As a result, he is pushing for changes in practices, not merely the discipline of a few “bad apples,” a term he says shortchanges larger problems.
Capt. Greg Morenko and Inspector Todd Mapes are on the agenda to represent MSP. We were unable to reach them in advance for their response on their frequency of traffic stops and pedestrian pullovers.
The state police presence gradually has grown in the city during the past decade, mainly because of local budget cuts. Monday’s summit takes place 363 days after a similar meeting on April 5, 2022, in the aftermath of the Vance Martin beating on Annesley.
At the time, The Saginaw News reported, state and city police leaders met with representatives from the Saginaw NAACP, the Saginaw African American Pastors (SAAP), and Advocates and Leaders for Police and Community Trust (ALPACT). All agreed to explore “ways to strengthen police-community relationships, offer training to deal with community crisis situations, enhanced measures to de-escalate situations and the importance of understanding cultural differences in urban areas.”
We attempted to learn what may have occurred in the aftermath of these pledges to pursue change, but we received no responses.
City Council meetings are broadcast on SGTV, Spectrum Cable 191, and on saginaw-mi.com, where advance meeting agendas are available. Replays are shown on YouTube.
