Assessing Police Reform in Ann Arbor Five Years After Aura Rosser’s Murder
(A Social Movement Perspective)
1. The Ann Arbor police department murdered 40-year-old Aura Rosser five years ago this past weekend.
2. Like I said last Friday, I spoke to the Michigan Daily about the anniversary of her murder for a series they published recognizing the anniversary. Again, I am happy they published something. Rosser’s family deserves remembrance and our struggles for justice should be documented. However, I disagreed with the framing of the coverage with its attention to progress and the dominance of elite perspectives. And at least in the piece I was quoted, I felt the Michigan Daily gave too much attention to the official interpretation of events surrounding Rosser’s murder.
3. In the phone interview, I mentioned how I believed Mayor Christopher Taylor and the city did little to help Rosser’s family. They did not adopt any of our demands for justice (I named two of the three demands.). I believe Taylor and the city failing to deliver justice to Rosser make their remarks contradictory, at best, if not disingenuous.
4. Disclaimer — What I am offering is my own interpretation and perspective as an organizer (not leader), observer, and historian. This is not an authoritative account. I also want to recognize that I have the privilege of time, compared to some others, to write this. I am not speaking for anyone else involved in the movement.[1] I am sure others involved may disagree with my portrayal. In fact, there are other activist accounts online. Here’s a piece members of Ann Arbor Alliance for Black Lives wrote for Viewpoint Magazine while they carried on the struggle for justice for Rosser and her family. In what follows, I will only offer full names of participants as they appear in the media.
5. This essay also serves as an explanation of how I developed an abolitionist perspective. There were many folks whom I worked with from the Student Union of Michigan (SUM) and other activists who articulated this politics from the onset of our organizing. I learned much from them.
Arguments:
6. It is important to think about the development of police reform between 2014 and 2018 in Ann Arbor from a radical, anti-racist, feminist, and social movement perspective. Also, one must also remember how mental health intersects with state violence, but one should consider this without resorting to criminalizing and stigmatizing victims.
On this note, black women organizers put the intersection of gender, race, class, and sexuality into the center of our analysis. Kyera Singleton articulated this analysis in the beginning of the struggle whereas organizers such as Shirley Beckley, Maryam Aziz, and Rebecca Anuru (Formally Ahmad) kept variations of this view at the fore of our minds and those in power.
So, it’s true. There were reforms. But the state sought changes after organizers, activists, and citizens pushed for them. Mayor Christopher Taylor and police officials often resisted outside pressure and sought to coax activists to engage them (and institutions of the state) on their terms. This often entailed encouraging folks to engage in individualist advocacy and/or interest group politics — anything other than agitation, protest, and struggle. (Some would contend that this what they’re supposed to do in their position.)
Regarding governance — Taylor has expressed progressive and liberal rhetoric in response to national political developments. He has also expressed a degree of dissatisfaction at Rosser’s death. But, when it comes to addressing concerns regarding policing in Ann Arbor, he has acted as a conservative. He also joined in an institutional front with the police, prosecutor, and the MI state police in expressing a racist and sexist view of Rosser, as well as racial denial, in an effort to exonerate the state. The vital thing to remember here is that no mayor or city official can claim to be progressive if they are captured by capital and police power.
Finally, critics like Adolph Reed, Jr. are right in this case — beware of the liberal who espouses anti-racist rhetoric. Condemning white supremacy (as Mayor Taylor has done) and racism sounds good to the ear. But the reality of liberals articulating superficial anti-racist positions in service of protecting normal state of affairs in policing is bitter to the tongue. Remember that liberal positions regarding police are conservative in the sense that such a view desires to support law enforcement’s, or the state’s, presumption of monopoly control over the threat, and use of, institutional and collective violence. This is a status quo position shared by self-identified liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats.
7. Aura Rain Rosser was born in the Lansing area in Michigan, but eventually graduated from Cass Tech in Detroit in 1992. She was a resident of Ann Arbor, an aspiring artist, and a mother of three children. Rosser moved to the Ann Arbor area to reside closer to rehab facilities since she lived with addiction. But, according to her sister, Shae Ward, Aura was “very artistic and deeply into painting with oils and acrylics.” “She’s a culture-type of gal,” Ward called Rosser in the aftermath of her death. “She was a really sweet girl. Wild. Outgoing. Articulate.”
8. Late on November 9, 2014, Ann Arbor officers Mark Raab and David Ried tased, shot, and killed Aura Rosser, a 40-year-old black woman, after responding to a domestic violence call. Rosser’s partner, Victor Stephens, claimed Rosser attacked him with a kitchen knife in the 911 call. According to the Washtenaw County Prosecutor’s 12-page report, Officers Raab discharged his taser and Ried fired a shot simultaneously within 5–10 seconds of entering their home. The officers obviously claimed they were in danger.
Two weeks later, around forty of us watched in sorrow and horror as St. Louis County Prosecutor Bob McCullough announced that the state would not seek charges against Darren Wilson for killing Michael Brown that August. We were stunned and hurt. But we had a protest planned for the following evening.[2]
On the evening of November 25, hundreds of us gathered at the Diag to protest the St. Louis Prosecutor’s decision and the murder of Aura Rosser. The action was also internationalist as we gathered in solidarity to recognize apartheid in Palestine and the students disappeared in Ayotzinapa, Mexico.
We transformed this space into one critical of state violence and one in support of a radical internationalist vision for justice. Folks unfurled “ACAB” banners at the library. Organizers representing all of these causes spoke. It was one of the most moving protests I’ve ever been involved in. I was sick with grief all day and I finally collapsed into another organizer’s arms in a ball of tears after I spoke and I do not think I stopped crying until after we completed our march. This activist, and now Ypsilanti city councilmember, Anthony Morgan, punctuated the march with a call to implement a “Black Agenda”
Many of us began organizing after that march. We held political education events discussing the history of racist policing in the U.S. and the “double” and “triple” jeopardy black women encountered when dealing with state violence.
7. On December 12, 2014, the city entered in the fray to defend itself. The city issued a press release informing the public that the Michigan State Police was still conducting its investigation. Also, the city released the name of the officer — David Ried. The city’s press release read, in part:
“Officer Dave Ried was the officer who discharged his firearm in this incident. Officer Ried has been an officer with the Ann Arbor Police Department for 15 years. During that time, he has been an excellent officer who has earned my confidence by routinely demonstrating sound judgment and professionalism.
Officer Mark Raab, a 15 year veteran of the Ann Arbor Police Department, was the other officer on scene at the time of this incident.”
It is no surprise that the city painted Ried in a glowing light and minimized Raab’s role. Their press release also failed to mention Raab discharged a taser as Ried fired his weapon, an occurrence that raised questions.
8. On December 15, around 100 people gathered at City Hall for a protest. (I was not there. I went home for the holiday break.) And according to journalist Kate Abbey-Lambertz, they marched into the city council meeting. The organization issued the three demands we had discussed at the prior mass meeting: “Fire Ried immediately, release more information about the shooting and donate funds to cover Rosser’s burial.”
At that action, as radical historian Peter Linebaugh, who was a participant, recounted in a Counterpunch article, “What the Mayor Laughed At,” we got a glimpse into the type of liberal leadership we were going to face for the next few years. Longtime Ann Arbor community activist, Shirley, proposed using her three minutes to address the council for a moment of silence for Rosser, out of respect to her and her family. According to Linebaugh’s account, the mayor adjusted the speaker timer after Beckley sat down and tried to move on without allowing everyone to take a moment of silence. Then, once everyone protested, another attendee stood at the podium and folks noticed that the mayor laughed, or, “was it a giggle?” Linebaugh parenthetically asked.
The mayor, knowingly, or unknowingly, sprinkled salt into the community’s wounds that night. But, it also revealed the limits of the state to actually treat Black people and their concerns with the dignity and respect that they have always deserved. This exchanged represented one of many moments when bureaucratic processes “got in the way” of humane treatment of Black people and people of color. It is possible the mayor lost some of us that night.
This action in little-ol’-liberal Ann arbor also highlighted a political and intellectual contribution to the developing struggle against racist and classist state violence in the United States — highlighting the invisibility of the death of black women and our failure (especially from us black men) to collectively respond. One of the organizers, Kyera Singleton, a PhD student, began to articulate an antiracist and gender analysis of Rosser’s murder, one that we all would articulate. Abbey-Lambertz quoted Singleton:
“It’s really important that we break the silence about who’s a victim of police violence,” Singleton said. “We can’t be silent when it happens to a woman and then go out and march when it happens to a man. … These national movements often take place around the bodies of men, and then black women may get erased.”
While we were marching, dying in, and taking over city council meetings for Black men who were victims of state violence, Singleton injected the problem of what black feminist Frances Beal called, “double jeopardy,” or what Kimberlé Crenshaw would eventually famously coin, “intersectionality” into the conversation. Ironically, Rosser’s murder and Singleton’s analysis would not reach the level of attention as Brown or Eric Garner. Black scholars, especially Black women scholars, and activists paid attention, though. Historian Robin D.G. Kelley contextualized Rosser’s murder in his Counterpunch article, “Why We Won’t Wait,” and attorney, intellectual, and organizer, Andrea Ritchie, wrote about Rosser’s murder in her book, Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color. Crenshaw’s think tank, the African American Policy Forum included Rosser in their #SayHerName report documenting state violence against black women. But, it would not be until Sandra Bland’s death before we had a slogan that highlighted Rosser’s invisibility — “say her name!”
9. As we began organizing under the name, Ann Arbor to Ferguson (A2F), the Michigan State Police completed their investigation of Rosser’s murder.
And on Friday, January 30, 2015 (after 5PM), the Michigan State Police’s report, Washtenaw County Prosecutor Brian Mackie’s, and the Mayor’s response to Rosser’s murder spilled onto the internet (in our Facebook feeds, etc.) as we prepared to meet.
Washtenaw County Prosecutor Brian Mackie concluded in the memo, “that when Officer David Ried shot and killed Aura Rain Rosser on November 10, 2014 he acted in lawful self-defense.”
I was not surprised. I just added this decision to the growing list of disappointments in the state failing to actually protect black people and hold state actors accountable for murder. We promptly planned a march for the following day in response.
Mayor Taylor’s Facebook statement on Rosser’s death, however, moved me to write. In his statement, he called Rosser’s death “a tragedy” and pointed to mental illness and drug use as contributing factors, not racism. Here’s his statement:
Taylor’s statement was problematic, to say the least. Like the recent Michigan Daily piece, he tried to appeal to a teleology of racial progress (which really only hurts Black people) while denying that race had anything to do with her murder. He stated this in the context of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice, and the intensification of the national conversation around policing. “How could Ann Arbor act like it was so different than Ferguson,” I thought. I decided to write something that night.
The following day, I published, “Ann Arbor is America: The Police Kill Aura Rosser and the System Exonerates Itself — Again.” The title indicated my frustration with the state. I tried to provide an anti-racist and gender analysis of the process and the media coverage of Rosser’s murder. I also decided to take aim at the wanna-be progressive sheen of Ann Arbor politics.
In a reprise of the New York Times Michael Brown is “no angel” article, the Michigan State Police’s and the County Prosecutor’s reports focused on Rosser’s mental health, drug use, and criminal past. “The toxicology report does show high levels of cocaine, cocaine metabolites and alcohol in Ms. Rosser’s system…Witness statements and evidence found in the home made it clear that Ms. Rosser had smoked crack cocaine,” the report stated.
This alerted to me two things: first, the state police, the prosecutor, and the mayor all issued a possibly coordinated and consistent response, on a Friday after business hours in an attempt to thwart any critical response. And I might add, their comments on Rosser’s mental state and her drug use suggested that those factors were more important in her death than the officer firing the fatal shot. Secondly, the way that state institutions in Southeast Michigan aligned to malign Rosser not only reflected the racist and fatal flaw of the U.S. justice system, it underscored how Ann Arbor was like Ferguson; the tragedy of Ferguson was not property destruction, but Michael Brown’s murder and the ways that law enforcement, some city leaders, and observers in the media continued to criminalize Brown. Thus, the state’s response to Rosser’s murder followed a pattern — stigmatize and criminalize the black victim of state violence. Then, media sources would disseminate the official account.
This pattern is the reasons why radical organizing against state violence is essential. It is necessary to offer a counter narrative and counter programming. That is what motivated me to write the following:
“Ironically, criminalizing and stigmatizing Aura Rosser by focusing on her drug use, while the Mayor denies the role that racism plays in local policing, does not make Ann Arbor look like the progressive exception it claims to be. The shooting of Aura Rosser confirms how Ann Arbor looks like the rest of America. Appraisals of Rosser’s character in the local media and in the prosecutor’s report reads more like the characterizations of Ezell Ford and Michael Brown.”
But, in the following comments, I sought to echo Singleton by way of Frances Beal:
“The crucial difference is that Rosser is black and female. Being black and female in America today means that black women not only die at the hands of the state like men, their suffering is obscured while making their physicality and psychological state hyper-visible. Black women’s suffering is unseen by the authorities, but the state tries to highlight how they are “aggressive” and hysterical.”[3]
I concluded the piece by calling out the performative liberalism that governed Ann Arbor politics:
“We need to give up the liberal farce when it comes to matters of race and policing in Ann Arbor and Washtenaw County. Ann Arbor is not some liberal oasis in America. It contains the vestiges of racial inequality and economic exploitation like any city in the United States. If we do not give up this farce, we will join the authorities in rationalizing the next instance of profiling and brutality. The cycle of black death will continue. That’s why it’s important to act today, next week, and the following. #BlackLivesMatter”
10. People’s Retort and ACLU’s Report
In the course of organizing, I learned radical social movements in an “liberal” city have two functions and responsibilities when operating in the context of police violence and murder: 1.) Challenge liberal & state theories of criminality, and 2.) advance a different vision of urban living that puts Black peoples’ — everyone’s — humanity first.
While we organized, some of the activists gathered clandestinely to conduct their own investigation of Rosser’s murder. They applied a radical analysis to existing evidence and collected some more supplemental information. They published the product of all of their intellectual labor, the People’s Retort to the Prosecutor’s Report, in April 2015.
The authors of the Retort built upon prior critiques of the city as “progressive,” or “liberal,” and the state’s racist and sexist characterization of Rosser.
They also raised questions about the MI State Police’s investigative process. The authors advanced an argument about the process that called attention to the need for greater community oversight, something other organizers were working on: “Police investigating police can never mean an independent investigation” (5).
In the course of critiquing the state’s narrative of Rosser’s murder, the authors settled on a crucial question — “Taser and gun at the same time? It makes no sense!” (10)
The Michigan ACLU raised the same question in its report on Rosser’s murder. Appearing the day before the Peoples’ Retort, the ACLU released the results of its investigation and raised the same question as the authors of the Retort:
“Police claim Ms. Rosser approached two officers with a raised knife. Both officers confronted the same threat at the same time, but one officer responded with less than deadly force (a taser) and the other officer responded with deadly force (a firearm).
Who makes the call whether deadly force was an appropriate response, or whether instead it was excessive and deserving of criminal prosecution?”
The ACLU concluded that the state should adopt the election of a statewide independent panel of prosecutor to investigate police killings. This obviously has not happened.
With the Retort, Ann Arbor activists joined others who struggled against police brutality and state violence to indict law enforcement. One of the more relevant example, in terms of geography, that comes to mind is Detroiters’ movement to abolish Detroit Police Department’s “Stop the Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets,” unit, which was responsible for killing more than 20 Detroiters in little over than two years. Organizers marched and protested, but many on the left also challenged liberal theories of crime — focusing on crime as the product of bad behavior was moot in a capitalist and racist system. Radicals argued that society should focus on the real criminals — the police, corporations who pollute the environment, and individuals like Richard Nixon.
11. Fundraising is no substitute for justice, but it had to do
State institutions in the United States often do not do a good job/or know how to adequately offer justice to Black people after inflicting violence upon them. In large cities such as Chicago and New York City, there is enough people pressure and resources for Black people and people of color to win some sort of redress. But this often comes from legal and political struggle where families must acquire support from lawyers and a community with power willing to fight on their behalf. All of this is not the case in Ann Arbor. We demanded that the city pay for Rosser’s funeral costs and offer some material redress to her family, but they failed. Thus, Ann Arbor to Ferguson, like many radical organizations, had to step into fill this void left by state institutions.
One of the organizers, Shirley, had developed a relationship with Rosser’s family and served as a conduit for their wishes. We organized a fundraiser for the family.
A2F launched the fundraiser online in December, then held a community event after our May Day march in 2015. According to our meeting notes, we raised nearly $3,000.[4] It really was not much for a family, but it was $3,000 more than our “liberal” or “progressive” government gave to Rosser’s family.
12. Some reforms…
In the Michigan Daily article published last Friday, Ann Arbor mayor Christopher Taylor points to the reforms that the city instituted after Rosser’s death. Taylor told the Daily, “The Ann Arbor Police Department takes training very seriously and has always taken training seriously,” Taylor said. “After the death of Ms. Rosser, we emphasized training in connection with mental illness, bias and de-escalation. We also at the time did a process obtaining body cameras, and that process was accelerated. We (are) now on the second or third generation of body cameras, just recently.”
Former Ann Arbor police Chief James Baird concurred with Taylor. He told the Daily that the Aura Rosser killing shaped his approach to leading the department.
It is true. The city and the police chief serving at the time, John Seto, sought some reforms after Rosser’s murder. However, the city and the police did not seek policy changes out of the goodness of their hearts. What is gleaned from their remarks five years later is an elite and institutional history of change that erases political organizing — “We recognized a flaw in the system (Rosser’s ‘tragic’ death) and we fixed it. This is progress.” However, what Taylor fails to mention is that the state announced these changes, even if we did not advance any calls specifically demanding them, after we filled the streets, agitated in city council meetings, and organized. Taylor and the city also failed to actually deliver justice for Rosser and her family.
And they continued to ignore our demands.
13. SAY HER NAME! SAY HER NAME! (Charlottesville 2017 Rally)
What I, and I suspect others, began to pay close attention to was the political and rhetorical dissonance that supported liberal governance in Ann Arbor. In other words, some liberal officeholders tended to “talk a good game” — express progressive positions in certain contexts, especially in response to national and international tragedies, while seeking to maintain the status quo, at best, and advancing reactionary positions, at worse, in local politics.
Ann Arbor activists forced Mayor Taylor to demonstrate his political dissonance in front of hundreds of people who attended a solidarity rally for Heather Heyer and those opposing white supremacists and wanna-be fascists in August 2017.
In some of his remarks at the rally, the mayor declared, without irony: “Your party has elected an authoritarian bigot to be our president,” he said. “We must renounce the president and his apologists.”
It is true that it is easier for a mayor politically to criticize white supremacists who were not his constituents and who were marching in Charlottesville like drones chanting “You will not replace us.” It is also politically expedient for the Mayor to criticize a president like Trump in front of many who probably already supported him.
As I prepared to speak, I noticed and grew angered at the Mayor’s (as well as many of the white speakers’) political dissonance while standing in the crowd. While I wrote some remarks beforehand, I decided to speak more frankly after listening to the Mayor and others (including Representative Debbie Dingell) quote the nice parts about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s politics and do the easy work of condemning white supremacy outside of Ann Arbor while ignoring structural racism where we lived and worked. I said, with the mayor looking on:
“We must go beyond the bare minimum. What about Aura Rosser who was shot by the Ann Arbor police in 2014? The responses to her killing resemble the response to the killings of Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin. Right? Michael Brown. Authorities in this city tried to demonize her. Focus on her drug addiction. Focus on her poverty. These things might be true. But if we’re going to be, somehow, any sort of exception, then you have to go beyond the bare minimum. You can’t be like Ferguson. You can’t be like Baltimore. You can’t be like Trump. We got to do better.”
(Video of my speech embedded in this story.)
Then, local organizers interrupted Mayor Taylor while delivering remarks and demanded that he say Aura Rosser’s name. The organizers’ chant, “Say Her Name! Say Her Name!” clearly frustrated the mayor and he reiterated his prior talking point about Rosser’s drug addiction, then stammered, “Well I’ve said her name and I’ll say it again and again, it was a tragedy for all of us and I regret it every day that it occurred in our city and we’re going to do everything we can to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
In a perfect world, we would have done more to prepare the crowd for this payoff. We could have circulated leaflets highlighting Aura Rosser’s murder and the Mayor’s responses to that and the organizers. We could have hung up flyers documenting this as well. Unfortunately, this rally and our opportunities to speak, came together rather quickly. I was not aware of folks planning the chant. This all felt spontaneous. Also, many of us started organizing around other issues, including the appearance of misogynist, Islamophobic, xenophobic, and racist white nationalist posters on campus. Activists forced the Mayor to deliver the punchline, but we failed to set up the joke.
14. Oversight
Shortly after the police murdered Rosser, we pushed for city government to review the system of policing. Some members of city council supported our call after our protests. All of our calls for oversight led to a three year odyssey that, again, demonstrated the inability of the city’s bureaucracy to instill more accountability into the system of policing.
Initially, several University of Michigan Law students and other members of Ann Arbor to Ferguson started working with the Human Rights Commission to develop a plan. The working relationship between A2F and the HRC hit a snag in May 2015 when members of the HRC stated that A2F’s participation would taint the process and that some of the organization’s demands for greater transparency were “biased.”
Eight of the demands (the ninth called for funding) might have been far reaching, but, that is the point. Organizers should seek to make radical demands on institutions, not just in an attempt to agitate (which is important), but to call attention to the transformative and democratic possibilities in public safety. Also, and at the very least, transformative demands expands the boundaries for reform, if a total makeover and/or abolition are unlikely. It is the job of radical social movements to expand our ever-constricted political imagination.
In November 2015, the HRC released its report calling for the formation of an “all-volunteer civilian police review board.” The other recommendations included adopting “alternative dispute resolution methods” involving the use of various complaint methods, hiring a consultant “knowledgeable about best practices in policing, training, complaint handling, and oversight,” as well as implementing crisis intervention teams.
The HRC failed to adopt any of A2F’s demands. However, it seemed like we could support an effort to inject more accountability into the “police-community relations” (as if the police and community hold equal power). The HRC’s recommendations, however, called for more citizen engagement with state institutions with little protections of those who might issue complaints.[5]
We heard little from city government about next steps following the HRC’s release of their report. Then, the new police chief, Jim Baird sent a memo to city council expressing reservations about the HRC report. Baird supported an external review of the police.
Yet, when it came to the HRC’s main recommendation of creating a civilian police review board, Baird stated, “I do not support this recommendation at this time” (Baird Memo, 5). He then continued, “The commission’s report does not identify or even suggest systemic issues within the ranks or leadership of the agency…It identifies that there is a small segment of the population that remains upset by the justified use of lethal force in the Rosser incident.” So, Baird basically dismissed organizers and those living in Ann Arbor who supported greater police accountability.
The HRC renewed its call for citizen oversight a month later. And, again, after a year of silence on the matter from the city government, the city council approved a $200,000 to hire a Chicago-based security consulting firm, Hilliard Heintze to investigate the relationship between Ann Arbor’s police and the city’s citizens.
The decision to hire a consulting firm to conduct this assessment seemed unnecessary. I thought, why not just adopt the HRC’s recommendations?
I told the Daily:
“’The snail-like movement of this process makes me wonder whether or not city government wants citizen oversight. It is clear that the police do not want it because (Baird) has already said so. However, I do not care what the chief says, every police department in this country needs citizen oversight, including Ann Arbor’s.’”
The decision to hire Hillard Heintze highlighted the city’s neoliberal approach to police reform. Rather than adopt the HRC’s policing recommendations, let alone A2F’s more democratic demands, the city outsourced the process. And many of us were alarmed to learn that the city contracted out this important task to an organization that featured a law enforcement consulting division with people who drew their expertise while working for the Chicago and New York Police Departments, two institutions with notorious histories of racist and violent policing.
When Hillard Heintze began to conduct its review, the movement to acquire justice for Aura Rosser and her family had transformed dramatically. A2F morphed into Ann Arbor Alliance for Black Lives, an organization led by Queer Black women. However, the Ann Arbor Alliance for Black Lives was not operating in 2018 when representatives from Hillard Heintze appeared as members pursued their studies, graduated, moved, or began engaging other issues on campus and in the community.
Yet, a new group of organizers, mostly women of different generations, spanning the political spectrum, came together as Transforming Justice Washtenaw to engage the consulting firm and the city’s process of developing a civilian oversight board.
Hillard Heintze advocated for a model of “co-produced policing commission” Co-produced policing is just another way of saying “community policing.” But, at least according to the firm’s report, it would really expand police forces and maybe allow for communities a bit of a say of how they should be policed.
Co-produced policing is also a nakedly neoliberal conception of “community” policing. I recall at one meeting where the representatives from Hillard Heintze presented their report at city council. One of them suggested that business leaders (small business and Fortune 500 companies) should participate in the co-produced policing commission. I thought, and posted to my Facebook page, who does the police already protect? The police operates to defend property and those who own it. I thought, at the very least, members of any police commission should come from communities of color, workers, and poorer folks.
TJW, like Ann Arbor to Ferguson and the Ann Arbor Alliance for Black Lives that preceded it, sought to intervene in the political process with the hopes of expanding the participatory scope of the potential civilian review board. The organization advocated for reasonable demands challenging the privilege of police power in the accountability process. They also communicated with Dwight Wilson, a member of the Human Rights Commission who was a longstanding advocate for reform. In their statement, however, TJW called for the review board to exclude members of the police department in the interests of independence, possess the ability to conduct its own investigations “even in the absence of a formal complaint,” acquire access to relevant documentation regarding law enforcement from relevant city institutions, participate in hiring processes, and engage in educating folks in the community about its processes. Then they demanded that such a board be made up of citizens “representing marginalized community groups including: people of color; people who have been incarcerated; and people who work in the following fields: mediation/conflict resolution, mental health, housing, homelessness, anti-racism organizing, and transformative justice.”[6] They also called for a $100,000 budget, which was substantially more than what Ann Arbor to Ferguson demanded.
Again, TJW had to contend with Mayor Taylor’s allies, like City Administrator Howard Lazarus (who often ignored the organizers at public meetings and could often be seen checking his phone while activists spoke), and another friend of Mayor Taylor’s who served on the task force charged with devising a plan for creating the board. They tried to use the process, the law, and the city’s collective bargaining agreement with the police to stymie TJW, but the group seemed to win over some who were appointed to the Police Task Force.
Firm releases comprehensive report: https://www.michigandaily.com/section/ann-arbor/aapd-holds-work-session
Eventually, the task force assigned with creating a plan for citizen oversight sent its findings to city council and the mayor. While obviously members of the task force agreed to a plan for a citizen-led oversight board, guess where the thrust for a more democratic institution came from? Members of TJW and its allies.
The City Council voted down the ordinance establishing a more democratic, citizen-led, oversight board. In this same meeting, the mayor accused activists of “bullying and intimidation”: “They did it with bullying and intimidation from the audience, and that I believe influenced their work product.”
The mayor also argued that he wanted a commission that was “consistent with state law, the city charter and collective bargaining agreements, and he doesn’t believe the task force proposal did that,” according to the Michigan Daily.
The Police Officers Association of Michigan sent a letter to Mayor Taylor days before this meeting expressing their dissatisfaction. They took aim at organizers’ anti-racist analysis of policing in Ann Arbor:
“It is urged that the City of Ann Arbor reconsider its perilous course of action and refrain from adopting an ordinance that is spawned from hypocrisy, fueled by defamation, and proposed without local justification.
The preamble of the task force proposed ordinance is a deplorable rant filled with bias and prejudice against law enforcement. To state that the City of Ann Arbor ‘acknowledges that law enforcement, across the nation, have historically defended and enforced racism and segregation’ is nothing less than a direct attack on Ann Arbor police officers. The language in the preamble demeans the overwhelming number of law enforcement officers who dedicate their careers and lives to the safety of Ann Arbor citizens.”
Obviously, one should not expect a police union to agree with organizers about law enforcement’s historical role in buttressing racial and class segregation and protecting those who own private and productive property in the United States. Yet, despite the fact that it was an Ann Arbor police officer who murdered Aura Rosser, and it was police officers who were killing black, brown, and Native people throughout the United States, this ordinance was the object that “lacks moral justification.”
A little more than two weeks later, City Council passed Mayor Taylor’s plan for citizen oversight unanimously. According to the Daily, “The Independent Community Police Oversight Commission, proposed by Taylor, gives the mayor the power to appoint 11 commission members and would be a part of city government.”
In this process of struggle, city government rearticulated activists’ and community folks’ demands for a truly independent, citizen-led, and democratic police review board. I cannot comment on how satisfied community folks and members of the commission are with this outcome. But, from the perspective of a radical, what they devised was an elite-driven model that was in closer proximity to state institutions. In other words, powerful individuals and groups in institutions do their jobs in times of crisis — they incorporate the community folks’ and protesters’ demands and present them back to the public in a manner that reflects their interests.
Yet, Mayor Taylor and others missed a key point about advancing radical demands embedded in more democratic oversight — radical political demands do not respect established legal and institutional boundaries for reform BY DEFINITION, nor do they respect collective bargaining agreements between ostensibly reactionary police unions and city governments. The long-term goal of transformative, abolitionist work is to either transform and/or dismantle institution in the process of building a more humane society. Our short-term goal was to perform the intellectual and political labor of expanding possibilities, or as the late Marxist sociologist Erik Olin Wright called, “envisioning real utopias,” and communicating to the public that these alternatives were worth fighting for.
What Mayor Taylor confused with ruckus, we call political struggle. And the reforms that they cite might not have come about without community people and students organizing and engaging in this struggle.
15. Memory, Movements, and Change
So why did I take the time to write this excessively-long essay? In The Long Sixties: From 1960 to Obama, the late activist-intellectual Tom Hayden writes, “There are those who, never favoring social movements or reforms in the first place, wish to banish the memories of social movements altogether or discredit them with a false triumphalism” (15).
I received the foul odor of this triumphalism arising out of Mayor Taylor’s comments about police reform. I am not surprised. Folks in power always seek to reframe and defang political struggle conducted by radicals and those among the grassroots. Mayor Taylor characterized police reform in Ann Arbor as the product of mutual cooperation between community people and elected officials. Now, I am not commenting on any personal or professional relationships that some individual activists might have with the mayor. However, the changes in policing, as reformist as they are, were the product of longstanding frustrations and agitation from those already living in the community and activist organizing and protests that attracted the participation from hundreds in Ann Arbor and surrounding communities. This was struggle. And the movement for justice for Aura Rosser and her family arose out of a black feminist analysis of state violence articulated by queer black women, cis gender black folks, and the rest of the participants. This, too, was part of the struggle.
Now, it is in Mayor Taylor’s and police officials’ best political interests to frame the recent history of police reform as a narrative of progress — the liberal state committed a fatal mistake, someone died as the result of “tragedy” (and bad behavior), and the state corrects itself. It does so by trying to limit radical and democratic elements in reforms. Ultimately, the state investigates, exonerates, and then elevates itself in its history of political change.
To those working in state institutions, we were the “small” group of pesky, loud, and disruptive activists who would never be happy with any reform. This is not entirely untrue. But what else is not true is that we did not care to reduce harm in the short-term and that we were a parenthetical comment or a footnote in the narrative of political struggle around policing in Ann Arbor. While the state police commenced its investigation of Rosser’s murder right after the incident, neither the mayor, nor the police, announced any sort of substantial changes in the process of policing. We mobilized and moved more swiftly for justice for Aura Rosser and her family. We issued demands. They were ignored. In some cases, we even worked within these institutions, albeit in a highly critical manner and from a radical perspective, and we were still ignored and dismissed. So, there is no surprise that the state would “misremember” its disrespect. This willful political amnesia is partly the reason why it was important for organizers to force the Mayor to say her name — Aura Rosser.
16. Coda
It’s the people — citizens and workers — who define justice, not law enforcement and those beholden to the power of police and capital.
Struggling for justice for Aura Rosser, at least in my experience, has been a crash course in trying to rethink established understandings of crime (and criminal behavior) and narrowly-defined, racist, sexist, and classist laws that protect the state and private sector.
We live in a system of urban governance where mayors and other local political officials are either full-throated spokespeople for police power, or they are captured by it. This is how I learned to approach the police in the wake of murders of Black, Brown, Native, and, yes, white folks after Michael Brown’s and Aura Rosser’s murders. I learned that by doing this political work, we were confronting the heart of raw power in U.S. cities and towns. Many of us are aware of how cities and states typically devote tens of millions of dollars, sizable amounts of their annual budgets to law enforcement, which only serves to grow police power. Even in Ann Arbor, law enforcement expenditures took up 25% of Ann Arbor’s police budget in 2018. And, depending upon where one lives, one recognizes the popularity of law enforcement and its rhetorical and political power when people display “thin blue line” decals.
I understood that we confronted power and worked within serious systemic constraints. I knew many of our humane and transformative political demands would not be met. And this is all despite the fact I thought, and still think, that Mayor Taylor could have and should have done more for Aura Rosser’s family besides the constant lamenting of her death as “tragic.”
There are obviously many issues (i.e. economic, or downtown, development and labor) that can highlight the neoliberal contradictions in self-described liberal and progressive governance, but few issues reveal the reactionary underbelly of self-described liberals and progressives more than policing. Mayor Taylor tried to toe the line between being rhetorically sort-of anti-racist and actually perpetuating racist stereotypes and narratives about black people who are killed by the police. Then, when confronted about the city’s slow moving or outright resistance to reform, he often pointed to police leadership, the police union, or the law as reasons why we could not devise a more humane and democratic system of public safety. There was never any discussion suggesting that maybe these laws should be changed, maybe police budgets should be severely curtailed, at least, or that maybe the power of police unions should be checked. Instead, we had to negotiate the bureaucratic maze and confront the institutional stonewalling that often demobilizes people. This institutional struggle politicized and radicalized some of us, including myself, and eventually provoked us to advance “unreasonable” demands. Yet, what folks in power did, and do, not understand is that police murdering citizens for what they look like, or because of where they live, and getting away with it because the victims and their families are black, brown, native, and/or poor (even if it is just one death), is an extremely unreasonable, uncivil, and intolerable ask by the state — no matter if an injury or death is a mistaken “tragedy,” or not.
If changing policing is left up to the police, we know they will never change. I never expect the state to just give up their institutional power. This is why I try to participate in the struggle to help build people power whenever I am able. We build power with the hopes of one day abolishing racist, patriarchal, settler-colonialist, and capitalist institutions. Of course, part of building power is delivering some short-term wins, reducing harm, and caring for people wherever we can. But we should remember that participating in what some may consider the folly of trying to imagine a new society and advancing what an activist friend called ‘visionary demands’ is the fuel for radical social movements and standing up for these demands, at the very least, help build power and drive social and political change.
Now, some may ask, “why be fine with being called unrealistic and unreasonable? Don’t you want to get things done?” I will always respond with, “Sure. It is true that we might not ever reach our ultimate goal. Most radical activists do not. But, we have gotten some things done and we have done so while maintaining something that no politician nor agent of the state will ever be able to take from us — our dignity.”
Obviously, one response to this could be, “Well, they can ignore you.” Me: “They already do, even when we engage them in their institutions. But they do not ignore us when we build enough mass power to protest and disrupt their usual practices.”
I’m not a “burn it all down” nihilist. We have to struggle to envision and implement more humane and democratic institutions, or arrangements. And any institution that is too powerful and that murders people should be dismantled and all of the productive resources must be turned over to the people.
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*I also recognize that this piece is pretty light on criticism of our organizations. Like all movement organizations, especially those relatively ideologically and politically diverse, we experienced much internal tension. We strove to harness this tension and direct our energies towards collective action, but we obviously were not always successful. And while I think it would take a lot more space to discuss my personal and our collective shortcomings, I will point out two that Black activists rightfully pushed us on: 1.) we failed to embed ourselves in, and to build lasting relationships with, Black communities, and, 2.) we never devoted our attention to pressuring the Washtenaw County Prosecutor, Brian Mackie. D’Real Graham, one of the Ypsilanti radical organizers ran a grassroots campaign against Mackie in 2016.
[1] I want to thank Aura Rosser’s family, especially her sister, Shae Ward, for supporting us. I cannot fathom the pain they must be feeling this time every year.
I also want to acknowledge all of the members of organizations that I worked with in this struggle. I will not name many individuals, but the various groups out of respect for privacy and so I do not forget anyone: Student Union of Michigan, Graduate Employees Organization, Ann Arbor to Ferguson, Ann Arbor Alliance for Black Lives, Radical Washtenaw, Transforming Justice Washtenaw, and the Huron Valley Democratic Socialists of America.
[2] It’s important to note that folks in Ypsilanti protested Rosser’s murder before the one at the Diag took place. See Some members of Ann Arbor for Alliance for Black Lives, “Ann Arbor Alliance for Black Lives, “Ann Arbor Alliance for Black Lives,” Viewpoint Magazine.
[3] These comments rightly garnered the most attention from activists and scholars. I would revise these comments to include highlight how the state kills trans folx specifically too.
[4] Meeting notes. In author’s possession.
[5] I would not support this today, as someone who has grown to adopt an abolitionist perspective on the U.S. system of criminal justice.
[6] Transforming Justice Washtenaw, “A Path Forward: Toward Police Review in Ann Arbor: A Path Forward.” In author’s possession.
Appendix:
Radical Washtenaw and Ann Arbor to Ferguson, “Black Lives Matter Timeline”
