A couple weeks ago I was in Detroit for the first time in several years. If you’ve never been to Detroit but want to get the same experience go to a local video store and rent the cheesy John Carpenter film, “Escape from New York.” The cityscape of Carpenters’ futuristic New York isn’t that different from Detroit (the Detroit Free Press/Detroit News building, for example, has enormous fences and brick walls as protection and looks more like an armed fortress than a newspaper).
Ironically Detroit police can’t seem to do much about crime even though they routinely violate the civil rights of suspects and now, it turns out, witnesses as well. The Detroit Free Press reported this week that last year a federal prosecutor contacted Detroit police chief Benny Napoleon to warn him that his department’s policy of arresting witnesses to crimes was unconstitutional.
Apparently the police have a written policy such that when investigating murders they arrest witnesses, family members and anyone else in any way contacted with the crime on top of arresting any suspects. As Michael Steinberg of the American Civil Liberties Union tells the Free Press, “Arresting people and interrogating them without probable cause to believe they committed a crime is a blatant violation of the Fourth Amendment.” Witnesses can apparently be arrested if they are likely to flee, but this requires the approval of a judge. Detroit cops were simply arresting everyone in the vicinity, taking them down to the police station for interrogation, and then releasing them — sometimes not until several days later.
And of course since this is Detroit, even the fact that the city was paying thousands of dollars to settle civil suits over the practice didn’t motivate Napoleon to put a stop to it. According to the Free Press, Detroit last year settled a false arrest suit for $500,000, and yet the policy remained in place.
Police had been warned: U.S. prosecutor and chief discussed witness arrests. David Ashenfelter and David Zeman, Detroit Free Press, March 22, 2001.