Board to oversee discrimination complaints filed by citizens
The Mount Pleasant Human Rights Committee voted 8-0 in support of “the spirit” of a proposal to create a Citizens Review Board to oversee cases in which complaints have been filed in regards to race and ethnicity.
The Community Action for Black Lives presented a proposal for the CRB at the Human Rights Committee meeting on Monday.
Seventeen people attended the meeting at the Isabella County Building.
“I’ve been here over 40 years. We have the same racial complains today as we did 40 years ago,” said Mount Pleasant resident and the presenter of the proposal, Joyce Henricks. “We’ve had the community reach out to the police and other organizations and I have not seen a significant change."
Community Action for Black Lives is a subgroup of Mount Pleasant Area Diversity group formed last summer to engage residents in seeking solutions to “prevent and address racial harassment and abuse in the community," according to its purpose statement.
The proposed board would be comprised of nine appointed people: two by the city commission, two by the county commission, two by CMU, two by the Saginaw Chippewa Tribe and one by the Mount Pleasant Area Diversity Group.
“Maybe I’m not seeing the right thing or maybe I’m speaking to the wrong people, but whenever I get a person of color willing to confide in me, I hear terrible things happening to them,” Henricks said. “Those are the same stories I heard when I first came here. Forty years ago I thought we wouldn’t need this board by now, but none of that has changed.”
The CRB’s purpose would be to create a complaint review process free from bias and informed by actual police practice, to increase police accountability and credibility with the public and to improve communication between police agencies and the community.
Henricks said this could eliminate a majority of the complaints being received, like black persons being stopped by officers “just because they’re black or walking at night.”
The proposal requests officers to receive at least six hours of training in civil rights legislation and community relations, provided by the American Civil Liberties Union. There would also be consideration of the use of police body cameras.
