Dyer is a road patrol deputy-turned social worker who campaigned on a reform vision that includes trying to steer people away from the justice system rather than draw them into it. Her win in November is a culmination of prior wins by a coalition of reformers in the county that also brought progressives into the prosecutor’s office and courts. 

Dyer has worked with these reformers to lay out plans to reduce unnecessary police encounters and arrests by limiting officers from making stops for certain low-level violations. She has pledged to address the stark racial disparities in traffic enforcement by ending quotas for traffic stops, and says arrests are the wrong tools for dealing with substance abuse and the opioid crisis: Her approach rejects the war on drugs and aims to steer people towards support rather than criminal punishment.

“Looking at the disparities involving drug arrests, there was a general understanding that we don’t want officers wasting their time,” Dyer told Bolts in an interview. “There is a frustration when officers are nickel and diming or getting involved in low-level things, and a frustration with pretext stops in general was resounding countywide.”

Dyer’s platform appealed broadly to voters in the liberal college town of Ann Arbor, as well as the surrounding rural areas where even many voters with more conservative values are fed up with the kind of policing that cycles people through the legal system without addressing their needs. 

But to effectively carry out her plans, Dyer will also need allies in the justice system. She has at least one in Eli Savit, who was just reelected as Washtenaw’s Prosecuting Attorney after running unopposed. Savit first won office in 2020 at the height of the racial justice movement that swept through the country following the police killing of George Floyd. The movement helped give rise to a brand of progressive prosecutors including Savit, who embraced a less punitive approach that broke away from his tough-on-crime predecessor. His office took aim at the issue of racial profiling by announcing he would drop the charges in situations where officers use minor traffic violations as an excuse to search for drugs or other contraband. A slew of other policies offered leniency towards juveniles arrested on minor offenses, and declined charges for consensual sex work and certain low-level drug crimes — but those reforms can only make an impact after an arrest has already been made. 

Now with Dyer as the county’s top cop and Savit as its lead prosecutor, they hope to move these reforms forward by working collaboratively on policies that were previously siloed in different parts of the justice system. 

“What you see in Washtenaw is a lot of different partners in conjunction with the community are largely working towards the same goals and from the same playbook,” Savit said. “It reflects our community values. Ultimately, what people in Washtenaw want is for us to work together to get people on the right track, rather than cycling them through the justice system over and over again in an ineffective fashion.”

In November of 2020, Savit’s win was hailed as a success for the progressive prosecutor movement that for at least a decade has sought to reform local DA offices across the country. His policies gave reformers in Washtenaw an inroad for curbing the harm wrought on by excessive criminal punishment by deflecting some low-level arrests. 

Savit regards his policy on pretextual stops — where minor traffic violations are used as an excuse to search cars for contraband — as a success. His office initially declined several of those cases, Savit told Bolts. But soon, police agencies across the county largely stopped sending those kinds of cases to his office. The approach later gained support in Ann Arbor, the county’s largest city, where the city council unanimously voted last year to limit police from stopping drivers for minor violations like cracked windshields or broken taillights that do not pose any risk to traffic safety. 

Now with Dyer in office as well, organizers hope to stop even more of those arrests from happening in the first place. 

“Our racial disparities in low level traffic stops are through the roof at the sheriff’s office,” Dyer told Bolts. “Regardless if the prosecutor decides to charge a case, the harm is still caused at the forefront. Avoiding those stops when possible, when it’s not a safety-related issue, is really important. There are so many instances where somebody has been pulled over, pulled out their car and searched. The police find nothing. They let them go, but the harm stays with that person.”

Like Dyer, Savit also embraced a legal strategy for addressing drugs that is focused on harm reduction and rehabilitation rather than punishment. His office decriminalized the possession and distribution of controlled medications like methadone and buprenorphine that are used to treat opioid addiction and curb fentanyl use. Like with the traffic stop arrests, very few of those cases now come across Savit’s desk. The remaining arrests for illegal possession of methadone or buprenorphine mostly come from people incarcerated in nearby prisons, and Savit’s office typically drops those cases, he said. Even though prosecutors rarely need to decline charges now, it is critical to have a public policy in place so the fear of criminal penalties will not deter people from accessing life saving medications, he said. 

“Why on earth would we want to be discouraging somebody from using a medicine that we know is an alternative to using a dangerous drug that could kill them? We want less overdose deaths, not more. ” Savit told Bolts.

But a policy of non-enforcement is only effective if the entire criminal legal system is aligned across prosecutors and police, which isn’t the case for most places in the state. As Michigan has scaled up harm reduction initiatives in recent years—funded in part by payouts from pharmaceutical companies acquired through opioid settlements—the enforcement around controlled methadone and buprenorphine has been a patchwork across the state and even within Washtenaw County. 

Dyer’s position—that criminal enforcement and arrests are the wrong way to address addiction issues—is rooted in her background as a social worker and therapist. She has advocated for unarmed community responders and public health outreach workers to deal with opioids, rather than police. And she plans to end internal quotas that encourage officers to make stops, search people for drugs, and cite or arrest them for minor drug violations.

Having a sheriff who’s onboard with harm reduction tactics helps establish a uniform approach to managing the opioid crisis, said Jonathan Laye, program director for Supportive Connections, a social service group aimed at steering people away from the justice system.

“The county is definitely starting to go in the right direction when it comes to prioritizing treatment or engagement rather than locking people up over petty stuff. The question is really getting people in the right places who understand the difference between a symptom and a crime,” Laye said.

Even when police don’t make arrests for drug paraphernalia, those items are sometimes still used by officers as probable cause to justify a search, said Cindy Bodewes, president of the Washtenaw Regional Organizing Coalition, a grassroots group pushing for reforms in the county. She hopes Dyer will bridge the “disconnect between the prosecutor’s strategy and arrest strategy,” Bodewes said.

“That’s why it is so important to have a law enforcement policy in place in order to have harm reduction in a community where they don’t have to be looking over their shoulder, afraid of the police taking action, regardless of whether they can be charged or not,” Dyer said.

Even when prosecutors signal that they will not pursue certain cases, changing the culture and behavior of police departments can be more difficult. Police leaders don’t always know what is happening on the ground, and are sometimes unaware that officers need to be brought up to speed on policy changes, Bodewes said. That is why it is important for grassroots organizations and community members to have a way to “report directly to the sheriff,” she said.

Dyer says her experience as a rank-and-file deputy showed her the extent to which officers are often slow to adapt to new policing strategies, especially when changes are not written into department policy and backed with additional training. 

She is forming community advisory committees on issues like traffic stops, jail visitation and mental health to bolster transparency and accountability by allowing the public to help shape department policy. Savit formed similar committees after first winning office to develop his reforms, which also helped prosecutors develop a restorative justice process that diverts people from criminal punishments. Dyer aims to create another group of diverse community voices to make policy recommendations directly to her office. It’s another step, she says, to ensure that her advisors are not just an echo chamber of police brass: critics will have access to the inner workings of the department.hold their elected officials accountable. 

“Having a community that is educated around what we’re doing, our operations, our policies, can be a really powerful ally to make sure that what I think is happening at the top is what’s actually happening at the bottom,” Dyer said.

Dyer’s and Savits’ victories last month were an exception to what was largely a nationwide turn away from reform politics. 

In Chicago, retiring State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, who championed reforms like the abolition of cash bail statewide and the development of the nation’s first restorative justice community court, will be replaced by tough-on-crime Democrat Eileen O’Neill Burke, who has promised to roll back some of Foxx’s policies. In Los Angeles and Alameda Counties, progressive prosecutors George Gascon and Pamela Price were unseated amid complaints that their lenience was to blame for crime, which has largely declined since the pandemic, and social issues like opioids and homelessness. On the national stage, the Democratic party’s national platform abandoned issues like police violence and mass incarceration that were at the core of past campaigns. 

For many observers, this election signaled a waning in the strength of the criminal justice reform movement that came into full force just four years ago. 

But criminal justice reform has managed to remain on the agenda in Michigan. In October, the state enacted an overhaul of the juvenile justice system to eliminate most of the fines and fees that saddled young people with debt and penalized them for being unable to pay. Widespread dissatisfaction with the juvenile justice system helped stoke an appetite for continued change in Washtenaw, according to some of Dyer’s supporters. She wasn’t the only progressive candidate running for sheriff in Washtenaw. She narrowly won the primary against Derrick Jackson, the current director of community engagement at the sheriff’s office who works closely with grassroots reform groups and has a track record of boosting diversion efforts. In many communities, Dyer’s message resonated more deeply in many Washtenaw communities because her vision for reform was more bold, said Carolyn Madden, co-chair of Friends of Restorative Justice. 

“It was a matter of being a bit more progressive, a bit more out there, a bit more bold. And that is what we need in our criminal justice system right now—some boldness—and Alyshia seems to want to make some real change,” Madden said. 

Madden’s organization has already worked with Savit to help develop his office’s restorative justice process to repair the harm caused by a crime without “heaping on punishment,” Madden said. The program puts charges on hold for 18 months while the perpetrator of a crime works with the victim and community-based mediators to repair the harms they caused and address the underlying issues that led to their actions. Prosecutors drop the case if there are no new violations at the end of the period—though offenses that pose a serious risk to public safety or involve domestic or sexual abuse are not eligible for restorative justice. She hopes Dyer’s expertise in social work will help expand restorative justice practices in Washtenaw and improve opportunities for rehabilitation both in the community and in the jail.

“When police work very closely with the community, they know the people and they can go about addressing issues with different kinds of programs. Even if you’re not going to arrest them, particularly young people, you have to help them. You have to give them other things, especially if it’s a result of young people being confused or impoverished,” Madden said.

The county is already piloting a program to that effect: the Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion and Deflection (LEADD) initiative, which was spearheaded in part by Jackson’s community engagement team within the sheriff’s office. Unlike typical diversion programs, where the court drops charges once a person meets certain conditions like completing drug treatment, LEADD allows county officers to connect someone to a case manager to get the support they need in lieu of making an arrest in the first place.

“The goal is to provide an alternative to arrest or citations for individuals who have unmet basic needs that stem from things like mental illness, substance abuse, and severe poverty and homelessness. It can increase the number of people getting the services they need and decrease the number of people in contact with the criminal justice apparatus,” said Hailey Richards, the program coordinator for LEADD.

Many of Dyer’s supporters hope she will continue to build upon the LEADD program, which is currently being tested in Ypsilanti Township, and expand it across the rest of the county. The pre-arrest diversion model “is a less harmful way police can offer someone assistance, and it can really help change people’s lives,” Dyer said. But there remains a need for community-based alternatives for responding to many issues that armed law enforcement officers are not best suited to deal with. Dyer says she also plans to support these by using a portion of the county’s budget dedicated to mental health and public safety initiatives.

“We as a country have dumped everything on law enforcement. But officers are not doctors, are not social workers, they’re not therapists, and we keep expecting them to be. I talk to officers who say they don’t like to go on low-level calls or calls involving mental health when they’re not trained to understand how to handle it,” Dyer said.

 “We have a unique opportunity to really start building safety net responder programs that avoid the legal system.”

The post A Michigan Sheriff and Prosecutor Join Forces to Implement Progressive Policy appeared first on Bolts.

“It’s like these little cuts and scrapes that happen over time for Black mothers who have kids on the road who are driving,” Harrison said. “When I knew my youngest son was on the road, I was nervous all the time. I was on edge. When he called me, sometimes it was like my heart would stop.”

Harrison’s resulting policy, the Driving Equality Ordinance, passed handily in 2023 in the small progressive university town that often welcomes reform. The measure prohibits officers from pulling drivers over for small infractions, allowing them to send drivers a ticket in the mail instead. Now, the policy has also set the stage for a larger debate across Washtenaw County, where Ann Arbor sits. There, candidates in the race for county sheriff have echoed local calls to reform traffic stops, but have diverging visions on policy.

Sheriff Jerry Clayton announced in 2022 that he wouldn’t seek reelection after serving four consecutive terms leading law enforcement in Washtenaw. With no Republicans in the race, voters will choose Clayton’s successor in the Democratic primary on Aug. 6. Clayton never formally limited officers from making stops for equipment and registration issues. But he did previously speak out against the use of traffic stops to search drivers and fish for contraband after prosecutors decided in 2021 to stop charging many cases where drivers are arrested during a non-safety-related traffic stop.

Alyshia Dyer, a former deputy sheriff and social worker who is one of the three candidates in the sheriff’s primary, previously advocated for the Ann Arbor restriction on non-safety traffic stops and said she would scale the policy across the entire county if elected. 

One of her competitors, Ken Magee, does not support a restriction on non-safety stops, but has proposed a policy to reduce fines and fees from traffic enforcement. The third candidate, Derrick Jackson, has also included reforming traffic enforcement as an item on his platform, though his proposal for a comprehensive traffic stop study is less sweeping than the others’ plans. 

The traffic stop policy of whomever wins the race will most heavily affect those living not in Ann Arbor, but in surrounding areas like Ypsilanti Township, where the local government relies on sheriff’s officers in lieu of having its own police department. Nearly half of the 27,000 stops by sheriff’s officers in Washtenaw County in 2023 happened in Ypsilanti Township, where Black people make up a higher portion of the population than Ann Arbor and the county at large, data shows. 

“Traffic enforcement can often be a gateway for funneling people into the legal system. And even if you don’t get a ticket, it can cause a lot of trauma for people,” Dyer said. “Blanketing communities by making these low-level stops… I think all it does is criminalize the neighborhood instead of investing in the neighborhood to make it safer.”

Dyer’s approach to reforming traffic stops grew from her decade in the Washtenaw County Sheriff’s Office, where she encountered both pressure from the chain of command to do high volumes of traffic stops, and the negative effects of those stops on communities.

“I saw when I was doing community engagement work that it actually was reducing violence in the communities I was frequenting. But I was frustrated because I wasn’t getting evaluated on that good community engagement work,” Dyer told Bolts. “Instead, it was all about how many traffic stops, how many tickets or arrests you’re making.”  

It is illegal for law enforcement departments in Michigan to require officers to meet quotas for traffic stops, tickets and other activity. But even without a formal quota, higher-ups often evaluate officers’ performance using those metrics and officers are trained to initiate frequent contacts with civilians “to show they are being productive,” Dyer said.

“I really believe when you evaluate officers on punitive metrics like traffic stops, it creates an issue with over policing,” she continued.

In Ann Arbor, these policing practices rarely broke down evenly across racial lines. Around the same time that Harrison put forward the policy to reduce unnecessary encounters between police and civilians, Eastern Michigan University released a study that documented significant racial disparities in traffic stops conducted by the Ann Arbor Police Department. The study found Black drivers were stopped twice as often for equipment violations and searched at five times the rate that would be expected given their portion of the local driving population.

“It’s our goal to provide law enforcement services without bias or favor,” Ann Arbor Mayor Christopher Taylor told Bolts. But traffic stops based on equipment violations, where the racial disparity is the widest, generally “do not have any material public safety benefit.”

Harrison’s plan to take low-level violations like tinted windows, burned-out tail lights and loud mufflers off of police officers’ plates was intended to curb racial bias by preventing unnecessary police encounters. It is also meant to allow officers to focus on things that really make a difference when it comes to safety. Harrison based the ordinance on Philadelphia’s Driving Equality Act, enacted in 2022, that made it the first major city to limit officers from making stops for certain minor traffic offenses. 

“I want to free up the police department to go after speeding, running red lights, and those violations that can get someone seriously injured,” Harrison said.

The ordinance passed unanimously through city council with virtually no opposition. To Harrison’s surprise, the local police union did not challenge the reform, even though it limited officers’ authority.

“There is a common understanding that this is something the police should be okay with, in this day and age,” Harrison said. “I feel like we can be leaders, and we can set the example.”

In fact, police leadership announced that officers would stop pulling over drivers for equipment violations even before the ordinance took effect. “There is always a struggle with a change in culture,” said Ann Arbor Chief of Police Andre Anderson about the process of implementing the policy. (Anderson wasn’t police chief when the ordinance first passed, but is now overseeing its rollout.)

Despite some initial hesitation officers have been receptive to making changes that “ensure our actions build trust and don’t damage the relationship with the community,” Anderson told Bolts. 

The Driving Equality Ordinance in Ann Arbor served as a direct policy model for Dyer’s plan to end non-safety traffic stops throughout the county. Dyer’s proposal aims to end the indirect quotas by limiting the authority of sheriff’s deputies to pull drivers over for low-level infractions, including many of the same equipment and registration issues. Such a policy would have an immediate effect on traffic stops in Ypsilanti Township, Superior Township, and rural parts of the county where sheriff’s deputies routinely patrol. Shifting the culture within the department is equally important, Dyer said, and that’s something that must be achieved by restructuring the way officers are evaluated.

Michigan’s rules for funding the legal system also cloud the motive for county officers to do stops, since district courts are funded in part by traffic ticket revenue. The court in Ypsilanti Township has in recent years budgeted for some $625,000 in fees such as traffic tickets to flow through the court, accounting for up to a third of its funding, records show. 

The state’s Trial Court Funding Commission released a report in 2019 that said it was imperative to separate the justice system from penal fees due to risk of excessive police and court enforcement being used to boost municipal revenue. The funding mechanism risked a budget crisis for some courts during the coronavirus pandemic when fewer drivers were on the road and revenue plummeted, Dyer said.

“Local municipalities become reliant on it. What we realized during COVID is that it’s not sustainable,” Dyer said. “We shouldn’t be using deputies to be revenue generators.”

Magee, a former federal agent and one of Dyer’s opponents in the race for sheriff, also insists there should be no conflict of interest or incentive for officers to stop drivers for any reason besides traffic safety. The justice system shouldn’t balance its budget on the backs of working-class drivers, he said. But a blanket policy against stopping drivers over certain equipment and registration violations reaches too far and “flies in the face of traffic safety standards,” Magee told Bolts.

“These are traffic offenses that are geared towards making sure people’s vehicles are roadworthy and safe,” he said, adding that equipment standards prevent danger like carbon monoxide poisoning due to faulty mufflers.

Instead, Magee would reorient the ticketing system toward education rather than a financial penalty. Instead of paying a fine or challenging the ticket in court, Magee’s traffic education model would give drivers a third option: a short online course that addresses the specific traffic violation. Completing the 15- to 30-minute course suspends the ticket, and if the driver keeps a clean record for 18 months, the violation is dismissed without a fee or adding points to the driver’s record.

“Why are we utilizing this as a cash cow for the court systems?” Magee asked. “Traffic enforcement has to be about prevention of harm and educating people. It should not be a punitive process. An educated driver is going to save lives.”

Besides creating a traffic education model to take the money out of the traffic stop equation, Magee says the sheriff’s office must create “checks and balances” to address any biased policing and ensure officers aren’t making traffic stops just to make searches. 

To do this, Magee is proposing the creation of a countywide independent civilian oversight panel to investigate complaints of officer misconduct, review internal investigations and track any patterns that emerge in enforcement activities. Such accountability mechanisms are necessary, Magee says, to make sure existing guardrails like the quota ban are actually followed.

“Leadership has to hold their troops accountable to make sure those trends don’t lean towards racial bias, and leadership has to be held accountable for making sure those policies are adhered to,” Magee said.

Traffic stops are not the only issue that the incoming sheriff will face; at a public forum in May voters also questioned the candidates on how they would manage conditions at the local jail, develop programs for mental illness and substance abuse, and strengthen transparency and community partnership. 

But traffic enforcement is the most common encounter that people have with law enforcement, and in a progressive county where each of the candidates is trying to position themselves as a reformer, the differences between their platforms on this issue could impact how thousands of people experience their county’s policing force. 

Jackson, who is the current Community Engagement Director for the sheriff’s office and has received outgoing Sheriff Clayton’s endorsement in the race, has defended the current sheriff’s approach to reducing traffic stops and insisted that improvements are already in the works. While Jackson, who did not respond to Bolts’ request for an interview, proposed a study to analyze enforcement patterns, he approaches the issue of traffic stops as something to address through management rather than through a new policy. 

On the other hand, Magee and Dyer are more focused on entirely removing incentives for officers to make stops to gain ticket revenue or search for contraband. It’s a fundamental rethinking of the role of sworn officers in traffic enforcement that Anderson, the Ann Arbor police chief, says is happening more broadly. 

“It is something being considered all across the country, that at some point we will evolve in law enforcement where there may be alternative ways to address some of the more minor infractions,” Anderson told Bolts. “It may not be the police. There may be another way to address these concerns.”

The post A Michigan City Ended Low-Level Traffic Stops. Now the County Could Follow. appeared first on Bolts.

A Supreme Court majority has signed on to a draft opinion that would end federal protections for abortion rights, Politico reported last night. “We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote, saying it was time to “return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.” If issued in coming weeks, such a ruling would immediately criminalize abortion in states like Michigan that already have anti-abortion laws on the books, with other states sure to follow.

The end of Roe would spark conflicts in all 50 states, with governors and legislatures newly empowered to set their state’s course on reproductive freedom. But even within each state, county officials would end up with a great deal of discretion, sparking an uneven patchwork of policies that would vary from one locality to the next.

In states with newly-enforceable laws criminalizing abortion, prosecutors would decide how harshly to target people who provide or receive an abortion, and in some cases local officials have already shown their eagerness to use the criminal code to go after reproductive rights. But prosecutors could also draw a protective line in the sand and refuse to bring abortion-related charges. 

From Michigan to Texas, some prosecutors are already vowing that they will not prosecute abortion. And similar questions may quickly reverberate across prosecutors’ offices nationwide, including some like Arizona or Tennessee that have both “trigger laws” on the books and prosecutors’ races this fall.

Eli Savit, prosecuting attorney of Michigan’s Washtenaw County (home to Ann Arbor and nearly 400,000 people) is among the prosecutors already vowing to not prosecute abortion in a state that could soon criminalize it. A progressive who first won in 2020, Savit joined six other prosecutors last month promising to support reproductive freedom and declaring that Michigan’s 1931 law making abortion a felony—a so-called trigger law that’s on the books in some form or another in 21 other states— is unconstitutional. 

Bolts talked to Savit about the importance of prosecutors when it comes to abortion rights—and also the limits of their power as those rights are under threat.

You signed a letter just a few weeks ago, alongside six other prosecutors, stating that you “cannot and will not support criminalizing reproductive freedom.” What concrete policy would your office adopt if Roe is overturned? Would you ever bring charges under Michigan’s 1931 anti-abortion law if it goes back into effect?

I can’t speak for the other prosecutors, but I’ve been very clear about this. Categorically, we’re not prosecuting abortion in Washtenaw County. We’re not prosecuting people that obtain abortions. We’re not prosecuting doctors. We’re not prosecuting medical providers. We’re not prosecuting under that law. 

What leads you to take this position?

A prosecutor’s job should be to protect the health and welfare of people in their communities. And what we know is that the potential overruling of Roe vs. Wade, and in Michigan the recriminalization of abortion, will set the health and welfare of our community back a great deal. 

I do not want to be presiding over a prosecutor’s office that has anything whatsoever to do with criminalizing people for exercising reproductive freedom, with criminalizing doctors for providing abortion, with reviving the days in which abortion was done in the shadows without proper health and safety techniques being utilized. People died regularly from abortion before Roe vs. Wade. To not take the stand that we did, to not say very clearly that we will not prosecute abortion, there could be blood on our hands. That’s something that I don’t find acceptable in any way, shape or form.

If Michigan’s 1931 law takes effect, who could face criminal charges where prosecutors choose to enforce it?

It is not exactly clear at this point. Very obviously, the law would criminalize providers; the law has archaic language relating to inducing a miscarriage. Is there a criminal liability potentially under that law for women, for people that are seeking abortions? Potentially. My understanding is that that’s an open question but the threat is there. And the very ambiguity in the law makes it in some ways even more pernicious, because there’s so much uncertainty about what it means if the Supreme Court overrules Roe.

As the Supreme Court stated in Casey, “liberty finds no refuge in a jurisprudence of doubt.” By the same token, nobody in my community should have any doubt as to whether they’ll be facing criminal charges as a result of an abortion. 

A prosecutor in a neighboring county criticized your letter, saying it’s beyond the role of a prosecutor to say they will not apply a law. You have taken the similarly categorical stance of declining categories of charges on other issues, such as sex work. What is your response to that type of criticism, and why do you think it is the role of a prosecutor to take the stand you are taking?

If people think that categorical declination to enforce an archaic law somehow violates the oath of office, then they’ve got problems with prosecutors across this state for not prosecuting adultery. That is still a law on the books in Michigan; there’s a law that criminalizes adultery, and not a single prosecutor is spending any time and any resources prosecuting people for cheating on their spouses. I think there’s virtually unanimous consensus that whatever you might think about infidelity, it’s not something that is the proper provenance of the criminal legal system. 

Prosecutors do this all the time. We elect prosecutors precisely to exercise their discretion in line with the community’s values and in line with their views as to the health and safety of the community. That’s what I’m doing here. 

Certainly, I think that the [1931 anti-abortion] law needs to be overturned—we have ballot amendments here in Michigan that would do that, there’s litigation going on—because a prosecutor’s discretion is only good until the next election. And if people don’t like it, I’m answerable at the ballot box. But right now I’m doing what I believe is in the best interest of my community, what the people of Washtenaw County elected me to do, and that’s what prosecutors do day in and day out. 

As long as Michigan’s law stands, are you concerned about other law enforcement or state government preempting your discretion? 

I do think it’s important to be honest about the limits of my authority. ounty prosecutors exercising their discretion not to charge abortion is great. But discretion only goes so far. So long as our 1931 abortion ban remains on the books, law enforcement could investigate and even arrest people for abortion—notwithstanding what the prosecutor ultimately does with charging. Similarly, Michigan law already allows the attorney general to prosecute any state-level case in Michigan, so there’s already the theoretical possibility that a state-level prosecutor will step in. Our current AG, [Democrat] Dana Nessel, has made it abundantly clear that she won’t prosecute abortion, either. But it’s a structural concern here in Michigan.

That’s why this is really an all-hands-on-deck approach. That’s why I’m strongly supporting the ballot initiative in Michigan to amend the state constitution to expressly protect abortion. It’s why I’m supportive of both the governor and Planned Parenthood’s lawsuits seeking to strike down the 1931 law under the Michigan Constitution. And it’s one of many reasons why we need to elect pro-choice majorities in the Michigan Legislature, and re-elect our pro-choice state-level officials.

What would you say to prosecutors around the country who may have pro-choice views? How should they respond to Roe being overturned?

Every jurisdiction is different, and I don’t purport to tell other prosecutors what to do. But every prosecutor I know wants to do what they can to keep their communities safe, and to ensure that people feel safe and secure.

People are scared right now—scared that a fundamental right that’s been expressly recognized for nearly 50 years is about to be swept away, scared they’ll no longer have full control over their own bodies or their decision whether to have a child, scared that they may be investigated, arrested, and prosecuted for exercising a right they believed was sacrosanct. So, for me, the position was an easy one. I’ll be damned if I’m going to prosecute anyone for exercising a right that I believe is fundamental. And I think it’s important to let my constituents know that, in no uncertain terms.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The post What Will Your Local Prosecutor Do After Roe Falls? appeared first on Bolts.

In the heightened atmosphere of former President Donald Trump’s administration, energized pro-immigration activism pressured many local officials to pull back from working with ICE and with Customs and Border Protection. Their successes helped hinder Trump’s drive for deportations, since internal immigration enforcement in the United States really functions through localities. It is local law enforcement that feeds ICE the data it needs to find and detain people, sheriffs who often hold detainees in their jails, cities and counties that decide when to coordinate with ICE.

Now President Biden has signaled an intent to undo Trump’s immigration legacy. The route so far has been somewhat lethargic and plagued by a disorganized approach to the border, but Biden has used his executive power to shift who will be targeted for deportation. Trump effectively made everyone without legal status an equal priority for deportation, a policy that led to the arrest of many longtime residents that the agency saw as easy pickings. Biden has reinstated more prioritization, instructing ICE to redirect its attention to people who have arrived recently as well as some people with criminal convictions. 

But his new guidelines are a far cry from the freeze or end of detentions and deportations that many activists are demanding. Even if his plan was respected by ICE agents, it doubles down on connecting immigration enforcement to a criminal legal system rife with profiling. This has compounded the scrutiny on how, and whether, local officials will cooperate with ICE.

Eli Savit, the recently elected prosecutor of Michigan’s Washtenaw County (Ann Arbor), told The Appeal: Political Report that it would be “pretty cold comfort” for wary community members if he were to say, “Well, we’ll work with ICE and cooperate with federal immigration enforcement if we like the president.’” 

Savit announced in February that he would bar information-sharing between his office and ICE, and help people obtain special visas reserved for trafficking victims and those who assist in the investigation of crimes. Other officials around the country have also forged ahead on sanctuary policies and curtailing their involvement with immigration enforcement.

Still, immigrants’ rights activists see new dangers on the horizon. Now that ICE is under the purview of a president who has repudiated his predecessor’s xenophobia and seems to be taking steps to ensure that a narrower group of people are targeted, some local officials may treat these changes as license to step away from earlier commitments. And this is driving activists to explain why the shifts underway are not enough and to press forward with their case against establishing or resuming cooperation with ICE.

In New Jersey, which has seen hunger strikes and vocal activism, local Democratic policymakers backtracked on their willingness to end ICE contracts in December, pointing to Biden’s arrival, and alarmed activists are now raising concerns that the legislature is wavering on whether to block counties from providing detention space to ICE. 

Rosa Santana, who was a program director at the immigrants’ rights advocacy group First Friends of NJ & NY and now works at the Brooklyn Community Bail Fund, says numerous officials have told her that they are now more comfortable with immigration enforcement since it is more focused on people with a criminal record. 

“You need to stop that narrative,” Santana said she told them. “It doesn’t matter if someone has had a past criminal conviction. They’re not [in detention] because of a past conviction. They’re there because of their immigration status.” (Immigration detentions are a civil, not criminal, matter. People are being held, often in private facilities with poor conditions, on top of any detention they may have also served because of a criminal arrest, and without the protections afforded to criminal defendants.)

Advocates also stress that ICE often ignores purported priorities, exploits what might seem like limited carve-outs, and can make even minor interactions with the criminal legal system snowball into deportation proceedings.

“What ICE represents doesn’t change because there’s a Democrat in office,” Katy Sastre of the New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice told the Political Report in December. “They represent family separation.”

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The administration’s shift in objectives was set off by an executive order that Biden signed on his first day in office. It is outlined in a memo issued by acting ICE director Tae Johnson, which redefines who will be targeted for most standard activities undertaken by ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations, including decisions linked to immigration detention and requests for local law enforcement.

The memo names three categories of people presumed to be priorities for enforcement: national security risks, such as people suspected of terrorism or espionage; people who attempted to enter or arrived in the country on or after Nov. 1, 2020; and people who are considered “a threat to public safety” because they are convicted of certain crimes or involved in gang activity. This last category is the most open to interpretation. But the guidelines don’t preclude the agency from arresting and deporting anyone else without legal status. 

Biden’s directives are, broadly speaking, a return to the instructions outlined late in Obama’s first term by the so-called Morton memo. That memo narrowed immigration enforcement, and in that sense it was a victory for activists who gave Obama the moniker “deporter in chief” early in his tenure. But its implementation left a lot to be desired. Chicago Alderperson Carlos Ramírez-Rosa told the Political Report that he recalls going to the local ICE field office after the memo went into effect to assist constituents who had open deportation cases and should have been protected under the new criteria, yet ICE agents rejected many of their claims.

ICE typically isn’t strict about following federal directives, and there is limited oversight and a limited set of tools that could force the agency to actually comply. 

Ellen Pachnanda, supervising attorney of the New York Immigrant Family Unity Project, worries that history is repeating itself, amid broader signs that ICE agents do not feel bound by Biden’s directives. Her organization has been trying to get people who don’t fit into the prioritized tiers released from detention, to no avail. “ICE retains a great deal of discretion to enforce the immigration laws as they see fit, and not necessarily follow the enforcement priorities,” she said. The agency has its own defiant internal culture and each field office operates a bit like its own fiefdom, and the extent to which each one complies will probably vary.

But even if they were followed to the letter, the administration’s instructions would not narrow the threat of deportation nearly as much as people may think.

Johnson’s memo, for example, directs ICE to prioritize people convicted of “aggravated felonies,” as defined in the immigration statutes. Despite the foreboding name, an aggravated felony does not have to be a felony nor an aggravated offense. It can include lower-level behaviors like perjury and theft—if the punishment imposed is at least one year in prison—and filing a false tax return. Advocates have similarly decried the fact that the Dream and Promise Act passed by the House last week, which is seen as a general road map for congressional Democrats’ priorities, contains a number of carve-outs that would bar people with criminal contact from access to its relief provisions.

“People try to separate criminal justice reform and immigration reform, but it’s a never ending-cycle,” said Pachnanda. “The very communities that are targets of the police, and have been, the Black and Latinx communities, now are going to be left out of immigration reform because of these old convictions.”

These issues have raised concerns that Biden’s team has not seriously grappled with the ways a racist criminal legal system intersects with immigration enforcement.

Even routine contact with law enforcement, to which people of color are far more likely to be subjected, can be the spark that leads to deportation by putting people on ICE’s radar through automatic criminal justice data-sharing. Local law enforcement can not only be the spark but the reagent when, for example, sheriffs and other jail wardens choose to do ICE’s bidding and help actively identify and detain people who may have violated immigration law. 

ICE can make custody determinations pretty much any way it sees fit, and seek to keep people behind bars based on its own assessments of their dangerousness. Even if someone is initially arrested on criminal grounds, they can be kept in detention on civil grounds if ICE requests it even after charges are dropped and even after they have completed their sentence. 

Since November, a slate of new sheriffs who won with the support of immigrants’ rights groups have ended their offices’ long-standing policies to detain people for ICE. One of them is Kristin Graziano in Charleston County, South Carolina. She says she would not be allowed to tell a judge, “I think this guy’s really dangerous, and I know he’s already served his time … but I think [he] needs to stay in jail.” She added, referring to ICE, “we can’t do it, and neither should they.”

Graziano told the Political Report that ICE tried to strong-arm her into continuing to cooperate with the agency after she became sheriff. “They came to meet with me and to congratulate me, and to ask to work together, but in the same sentence threatened to ramp up enforcement in my community if I didn’t do what they wanted,” she said. ICE’s public affairs office did not reply to a request for comment on her statement.

Instead Graziano announced in January that she was ending an agreement to detain immigrants and pulling Charleston out of ICE’s 287(g) program, which gives sheriff’s deputies the authority to run immigration checks in jails and hold people on suspected immigration violations. Graziano has doubled down on her decision since Biden entered the White House, defending it in the Post and Courier this month. 

Other local officials are also taking steps to protect people from immigration enforcement. Savit, the Ann Arbor prosecutor, asked his staff in February to take the collateral consequences of convictions into account when they prosecute cases. He also plans to prosecute fewer lower-level offenses in the first place. “I don’t see much use in sending a 19-year-old back to a country that they do not know because they were caught with a small amount of drugs, which is something that, for a citizen like me, wouldn’t even carry jail time and I’d be allowed to move on with my life,” he told the Political Report.

Ramírez-Rosa, the Chicago alderperson, fought to stop public authorities in the city from being allowed to share information about people who were in the city’s gang database with ICE, alongside other loopholes. People may see that to be a small, targeted exception, but the city’s gang database is a notoriously flawed and expansive mechanism that ultimately stripped immigrants of their sanctuary protections based on evidence as shoddy as wearing the wrong clothing.

Ramírez-Rosa says his objective was to communicate to undocumented and mixed-status households that “in no case, no exceptions, could their interaction with the Chicago Police Department, or with city officials, result in the local police or city officials turning them over to ICE.”

ICE and its allies assert that cooperation between their agents and local law enforcement enhance public safety, but immigrants’ rights activists point out that it leads the immigrant community to be reticent to interact with local law enforcement and even emergency services and other public or municipal agencies. Vulnerable immigrants and their families are often not in a position to parse the particularities of their jurisdiction’s cooperation guidelines to determine their level of relative safety; any cooperation at all sends the simple message that their local officials are working with ICE.

When public officials in sanctuary jurisdictions leave carve-outs in non-cooperation policies, there are slip-ups, and those cannot be undone. ICE will file removal proceedings no matter how someone came to their attention, such as the case of a man turned over to ICE in New York City based on an acknowledged “operational error.” 

“The mistakes lead to removal, they lead to death, they lead to the destruction of families,” said Pachnanda, the New York Immigrant Family Unity Project attorney.

Those who vow to continue resisting ICE say this is about their community’s needs, not about whoever is occupying the White House. “Even when you’re able to win those changes at the federal level,” said Ramírez-Rosa, “it can be very tentative because a new president like Trump would come along and undo all of that.” 

Asked if the change in administrations had factored into her decision to pull out of ICE’s 287(g) program, Graziano said, “I could care less about national politics, and quite honestly I’m fed up with all of it. Change happens at the local level.”

The post Why ICE Cooperation Is Dangerous Even with Biden in the White House appeared first on Bolts.

Eli Savit, the new chief prosecutor of Washtenaw County, Michigan (Ann Arbor), announced today that his office will no longer seek cash bail. His policy is the latest victory for advocates nationwide who are working to eliminate financial conditions for pretrial release. It comes on the heels of similar announcements in December by prosecutors in California and Virginia.

Savit, the county’s first new prosecutor in 28 years, ran on ending cash bail during his 2020 campaign. “One’s wealth must never play a role in their detention,” he told The Appeal: Political Report in August.

He is issuing a 20-page policy directive today that cites several reasons for opposing cash bail, including that debtors’ prisons are illegal in all 50 states and that cash bail stands at odds with the country’s legal principle of “presumption of innocence.” 

“We’re very excited about Eli’s no cash bail policy,” said Twyla Carter, national policy director at The Bail Project. “We’d love to see other elected and appointed officials follow suit, and ultimately what we want to see is the decriminalization of poverty, mental health and addiction.”

According to a state task force report released last year, people detained pretrial have comprised roughly half of Michigan’s jail population in recent decades, often because they couldn’t afford their bail. And this sparks great disparities in incarceration. Preliminary analysis by the ACLU of Michigan found that Black people in Washtenaw County were 8.55 times more likely than white people to be incarcerated because they couldn’t pay bail. 

These trends are not unique to Michigan. Nationwide Black and Latinx people are more likely to be incarcerated pretrial than whites charged with similar crimes, and nearly half a million legally innocent people sit in local jails every day, according to an analysis by the Prison Policy Initiative. 

Researchers have found even brief periods in jail can hurt job and housing prospects, negatively impact children, and increase the odds that a defendant will plead guilty. 

Prosecutors don’t set bail themselves, but their recommendations and motions weigh heavily on what judges do. Over the last few years, prosecutors elected on progressive platforms have reformed the use of cash bail, including Kim Gardner in St. Louis, Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, and Rachael Rollins in Boston, especially for lower-level offenses. Studies have found that jurisdictions that have experimented with bail reform have not seen an increase in crime.

“We know from our almost 16,000 bailouts, including in Washtenaw County, that when a defendant’s financial needs are met, when they have rides, text message reminders, child care, they show up to court,” said Asia Johnson, a communications associate at the Bail Project.

But only in January 2020, when Chesa Boudin became the district attorney of San Francisco, did a prosecutor announce that they would no longer request cash bail under any circumstance. 

Others have since joined Boudin. Sarah George, the prosecutor of Vermont’s Chittenden County (Burlington), rolled out a similar policy in September, followed in early December by George Gascón, the newly elected DA of Los Angeles. A few weeks later, Steve Descano, the chief prosecutor of Virginia’s largest county (Fairfax County), announced that his office would also not request cash bail, formalizing a practice he established after taking office a year ago.

“Simply put, cash bail creates a two-tiered justice system—one for the rich and one for everyone else,” said Descano in his recent announcement. 

Still, criminal justice reform advocates are wary of some limits of these prosecutorial reforms and of the continued reliance on pretrial detention, including for factors tied to money.

In Washtenaw County, according to Savit’s directive, prosecutors “can and will” still seek unsecured and surety bonds, which require payment from a defendant or third party if they fail to show up in court or otherwise break the conditions of their release.

Michigan law requires that in some cases judges must impose a cash or surety bond, though Savit’s directive also enables prosecutors to seek secured bonds more broadly. He told the Political Report this would be “very rare.” Surety bonds require a third-party to show they could afford to pay a bond if a defendant breaks release conditions, which hinders the ability of defendants with impoverished families to gain release. In some cases, surety bonds can even require a defendant to provide upfront payment to secure a third party’s intervention, but Savit said he is steering staff away from for-profit commercial bond agents. “It is not appropriate to require a defendant to secure a surety from a for-profit commercial actor,” his directive notes.

“I don’t want anybody to be put in a position where they have to pay upfront money—to the court or a third party—to secure their release,” Savit said. “If surety bonds are being used by courts to require such an upfront payment, we’ll re-evaluate and adjust as needed.”

Phil Mayor, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU of Michigan, says the “knee-jerk reaction” shouldn’t be a threat of financial penalty later in the legal process either. “We need to continue to be worried about the poverty trap that our criminal legal system easily devolves into,” he said, noting that defendants sometimes miss court hearings for fear of losing their jobs, or failing to find child care or reliable transportation. 

Savit’s prosecutors can also choose to recommend the denial of pretrial release for some serious offenses, including murder, armed robbery, and repeat violent offenses. Advocates worry that asking prosecutors to decide who presents a safety risk before they have been afforded a trial poses problems, especially when those determinations are made with algorithmic tools that researchers say are faulty and racially biased. Savit, however, is avoiding the algorithmic tools, and told the Political Report he “consciously chose not to go down that route” because he “read the studies and knows those can often reinforce human and racial biases.” 

Washtenaw  prosecutors will still be permitted to request nonfinancial conditions for pretrial release like drug and alcohol testing, GPS tethers, and in serious instances, oversight by a “responsible” member of the community, though Savit will encourage his staff to articulate specific reasons for seeking such conditions. 

In many jurisdictions the cost of GPS tethers is borne by the defendant, which can either lead to new forms of debt or an inability to leave jail altogether. Savit told the Political Report that while he sees a tether as “far preferable” to forcing someone to sit in jail, he does worry about the costs of the devices charged to the defendant. 

“We need to put our heads together and work collaboratively, and some of this probably will take changes at the state level,” he said. Michigan’s legislature recently enacted some reforms spurred by the state task force on pretrial justice, but lawmakers have yet to tackle bail.

Mayor, who consulted on the new Washtenaw policy, told the Political Report that he had urged Savit to make any pretrial restrictions limited and rare. “I think his new written policy reflects that, but the proof is going to be in the implementation,” he said. “I have strong optimism that it is Eli’s intent to implement things in a way that’s designed for pretrial detention to be the dramatic exception and not the rule, but the test will be in the buy-in from line prosecutors and judges.”

There have been similar concerns in Fairfax, Virginia, where advocates note that an end to cash bail—while positive—will not inevitably lead to justice or even pretrial release.

“What’s been more prevalent in Fairfax is the over-conditioning of release—like requiring a probation officer, mandatory drug testing or mental health treatment,” said Bryan Kennedy, a public defender in the county. “The judges definitely over rely on it, and prosecutors ask for it more than they should.” Kennedy says Descano has also stayed fairly quiet when judges send people back to jail for missing court hearings due to poverty-related issues, and there have even been times when Descano appealed a circuit court’s decision to release somebody pretrial. (Descano told the Political Report that’s “not something that happens regularly.”)

In Virginia, unlike other states, there is also no constitutional right to bail, which means the list of eligible offenses for detention without bail includes everything from driving without a license to murder. Kennedy says he and his colleagues worry that, without addressing that on the state level, judges might just detain more people if cash bail is not an option. 

Descano has called on the state legislature to reform the pretrial system and end cash bail, as did the association of progressive Virginia prosecutors in a letter released today.

Michigan organizers say they will keep an eye on how things unfold in Washtenaw as well.

Trische’ Duckworth, an organizer of anti-police brutality protests in Washtenaw County and the executive director of Survivors Speak, told the Political Report that she’s thrilled about Savit’s new cash bail policy and that she didn’t have to “twist Eli’s arm” to take it on. “He came in with a vision,” she said. 

“But I tell him all the time, ‘I’m watching you,’” she added. “I say, ‘Don’t get your first protest.’”

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