Attorney group: Black drivers targeted in DPD stops leading to legal CCW owners receiving felonies
DETROIT (FOX 2) - "What we're seeing is a vehicle form of stop-and-frisk," said Arni Chambers.
Chambers is with the Wayne County Criminal Defense Bar Association. He and other defense attorneys say Detroit police and the Wayne County prosecutor are targeting Black motorists for improperly carrying a concealed weapon.
"We saw a quadrupling of CCW-only arrests since the start of the pandemic in 2020," said Chanta Parker.
Parker, the managing director of the Neighborhood Defender Service of Detroit - says 97 percent of those people arrested - are Black.
And the attorneys with the public defender's office say 70 percent of their clients were legal gun owners - whose guns were simply stored improperly while driving.
"Seventy percent of these individuals are law-abiding citizens who - went and legally purchased a firearm and are just confused because they don't know what it is, or what it means, to open carry," said James King.
King, an attorney with the Cochran Firm, says people should be educated - not arrested.
"Instead they are arresting them and prosecuting them, and leaving them with five-year felonies hanging over their head," he said.
The defense attorneys say these arrests are racially motivated, targeted - happening in Corktown, Greektown, and Downtown - areas being gentrified - and they say thousands of cases are clogging up the court system. Defendants are waiting months for their cases to be heard.
"These non-violent cases are taking time and attention away from cases involving actual violent crime," Chambers said.
The public defenders say they took their concerns to the Wayne County prosecutor in 2020, but nothing was done - so now they're going public.
"Our demand is for these charges - for CCW only - to be dropped, because we know there is something going on here with regard to racial disparity," Parker said. "And second, we are demanding that police make the stop data available to the public."
The Wayne County prosecutor tells FOX 2 in a statement that they have not seen the data and can't corroborate the numbers, but that approximately one-third of the CCW cases presented to them do not result in criminal charges. The prosecutor's office added that new programs will be announced in the next several weeks that will address the backlog of CCW cases.
"We believe this is an unjust practice that's destroying the lives of Black Detroiters and it must stop," Parker said.
