Calling all criminals: Come to Detroit!

We are in the middle of shift change. Maybe you should call 911 again.

~ Detroit Police 911 Operator’s response to a citizen in distress

NOTICE: Calling all criminals!

Are you a criminal? Do you take from others what is not yours? Do you want to live in a city where you can run wild and don’t have to worry about being hassled by the police? Then come to Detroit where you can be inside someone’s house robbing them while the owners are locked inside a bedroom calling 911, and the police will tell the homeowners: “We are in the middle of shift change. Maybe you should call 911 again,” or in another case, your 911 call goes into voice mail.

Calling all criminals! And don’t worry about rising violent crime statistics that year after year has made Detroit the murder capital of America and, according to Forbes Magazine, “The most miserable city in America,” because Detroit’s police chief refuses to report accurately all of the violent crime statistics committed by black people against black people here in Detroit. Here, even the police pad their own time cards with impunity.

Kwame Kilpatrick, the current embattled mayor of Detroit, seems to have a new scandal hit him daily since the so-called “sex, lies and text messaging” scandal first broke in late January. The Detroit Free Press published excerpts from over 14,000 text messages the mayor and his former chief of staff, Christine Beatty, exchanged with one another, conclusively proving that Kilpatrick committed perjury by firing Deputy Police Chief Gary Brown and former mayoral bodyguard Harold Nelthorpe during their whistleblower lawsuit settled late last year for $9 million.

Once all of the mayor’s text messages are reviewed and those of his top appointees are published, it will be clear to all the evidence of malfeasance, fraud, abuse, perjury, cronyism, obstruction of justice – perhaps even double murder? – as well as many other infamies reaching up to the highest levels in Detroit city government.

On this point, Detroit-area attorney Norman Yatooma has recently received a judgment from U.S. District Judge Gerald Rosen to view the text messages of the mayor and all of his top appointees in the denial-of-access claim Yatooma filed on behalf of dancer Tamara Greene’s 14-year-old son, Jonathan Bond. Greene was the stripper who was gunned down in 2003 after performing at a party at the mayor’s Manoogian Mansion.

Before I address Mayor Kilpatrick’s top law enforcement appointee, Police Chief Ella Bully-Cummings, let me give you an idea into the Machiavellian and Clintonian tactics the mayor regularly employs to seize, maintain and wield power.

Like a ganglord of the Crips, the Bloods or the Gangster Disciples, the last thing a gang recruit has to do to get into a gang is commit some egregious act like rape, sadistically beating someone up, or even murder. Why? So the gang will have something over your head to force your lifelong allegiance. One notorious gang even has the ominous motto: “In feet first, out feet first.”

These are the evil tactics Kilpatrick uses to demand allegiance to his omnipotent authority. Even the black preachers of Detroit aren’t exempt, which is why they have been so uncharacteristically silent for the past six years of Kilpatrick’s tyrannical administration. He has them right in his back pocket.

The mayor knew the political and legal heat he was under when he appointed Bully-Cummings police chief in November 2003. By that time, it had been over a year since his mysterious party at the Manoogian Mansion (October 2002) – a party the police chief of Southfield, Mich., was even invited to, but wisely declined; a party that was investigated by Deputy Police Chief Gary Brown, Lt. Alvin Bowman, Harold Nelthrope and barred by Bully-Cummings (at the direction of the mayor) when the investigation got too close to His Honor.

In fact, the very day Officer Brown’s investigation memo regarding the mayor’s Manoogian Mansion party was to become public (April 30, 2003), one of the three dancers at that party, Tamara “Strawberry” Greene, was viciously murdered as she and her boyfriend sat in a car at the corner of Roselawn and Outer Dr. – literally around the block from where I grew up in the late 1960s-80s.

A second dancer at the party, which the mayor and Michigan Republican Attorney General Mike Cox still insist was “an urban legend,” was tracked down to Atlanta and reportedly killed with the same 40-caliber police-issued weapon. All this drama for a party that never happened? Like my grandmamma used to tell me, “Boy, where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”

Bowman, a 31-year decorated veteran officer, was fired by Bully-Cummings and his life repeatedly threatened by fellow Detroit police officers for his investigations into the Manoogian Mansion party and the deaths of the two exotic dancers, which his independent investigation strongly implied were murdered by Detroit police officers.

Bully-Cummings has proven herself to be a worthy ally for Kilpatrick, for even as the mayor’s litany of infamies became public knowledge in the sex, lies and text messaging scandal, even as the murder rate rose in Detroit and as year after year Detroit won the dubious distinction as “murder capital of America,” this police chief has become very clever at cooking the books – altering or not accurately reporting the homicide and violent crimes statistics so that Mayor Kilpatrick could campaign in 2005 on a platform that Detroit’s crime rate was down. Down compared to what? Beirut, Lebanon, Iraq or Afghanistan?

Chief Bully-Cummings is an utterly compromised, corrupt and incompetent public official. She, like all of the other sycophantic appointees and cronies under Kilpatrick’s authority, will say and do anything to keep their coveted city jobs and lucrative perks.

Under Bully-Cumming’s leadership, there has also been a systematic and devastating brain drain in the ranks of the Detroit Police Department as hundreds of veteran police personnel were either laid off or forced into an early retirement. Detroit is now begging people to fill the vacancies, yet because of the criminal backgrounds or the mis-education of many otherwise able-bodied young black men in the city, Detroit regrettably has few qualified candidates for the police academy.

Consider this bitter irony: Would black people in Detroit and the so-called civil rights movement tolerate today the tyranny of a white racist leader like Alabama Gov. George Wallace or a sadistic, pathological police chief like a Bull Connor of the 1960s? No, because history has proven their singular valor against white racism. Then why do black people in Detroit and in cities across America sit so passively by as they have done here while being openly terrorized, abused, lied to, cheated upon and so utterly misrepresented by their own people?

Liberalism is killing my people here in Detroit, and they don’t even realize it.

Calling all Criminals. . . Come to Detroit!

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