Keyon Harrison, an African American 16-year-old, was doing nothing wrong as he walked home from school on a spring day in Grand Rapids. But a police officer thought he looked “suspicious” — so the officer stopped Harrison, questioned, searched him and took his photograph and fingerprints.

Harrison was never arrested or charged with any crime. But his photograph and fingerprints now sit in a government database, along with thousands of others that Grand Rapids police have collected over the years under similar circumstances.

This is wrong. It’s also unconstitutional.

The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution protects us from “unreasonable searches and seizures.” It places the onus on the government to show that people have done something wrong — not on members of the public to prove that we are doing something right.

That is why attorneys from the ACLU are representing Harrison and another Black teen, Denishio Johnson, in a Michigan Supreme Court case challenging the Grand Rapids Police Department’s “photograph and print” policy. The Mackinac Center for Public Policy, in a brief co-authored by the Cato Institute, filed a brief supporting the effort.

The court should declare the “photograph and print” policy unconstitutional for reasons conservatives, liberals and everyone in between can get behind. Fingerprinting is a “search” under the Fourth Amendment because it involves the physical intrusion onto someone’s body in order to obtain personal information, and because it violates our reasonable expectation of privacy by collecting unique biometric identifiers.

And when police take someone’s fingerprints just because they think that the person looks suspicious, the search is “unreasonable” because it does not fall within a recognized exception to the Fourth Amendment’s bedrock requirement that police obtain a warrant.

From a historical perspective, too, it is very likely that forced fingerprinting, without a court’s approval, would have been considered an unreasonable search or seizure at the time the Fourth Amendment was enshrined in our Constitution. Backers of this practice, therefore, do not have the original meaning of the Fourth Amendment on their side.

Further, the “photograph and print” policy encourages racial profiling, undermining community trust. Stop-and-frisk tactics by police departments are notorious for their racial disparities and have been held unconstitutional by federal courts.

Early in this case, a review of several hundred incident reports found that 75% of the people stopped by the police and subjected to the “photograph and print” policy were Black, while just 15% were White. The overall racial makeup of Grand Rapids, by contrast, is 21% Black and 65% White.

Meanwhile, we should all be alarmed by the privacy implications of policies that allow the police, just by deeming someone suspicious, to deploy advanced technology that will collect and analyze highly sensitive biometric information and store it in a law enforcement database indefinitely. This case is about fingerprints, but soon we may be confronting iris scanners or even DNA harvesting.

Police have a tough job. But the first part of that job is respecting the constitutional rights of the people they serve. The Michigan Supreme Court should reaffirm these Fourth Amendment protections.

Dan Korobkin is the legal director of the ACLU of Michigan. Jarrett Skorup is the director of marketing and communications at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy.

Read the full story in The Detroit News.

William D. Lopez is a clinical assistant professor of health behavior and health education at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. He is also the author of Separated: Family and Community in the Aftermath of an Immigration Raid. The critically acclaimed work, set in Michigan’s Washtenaw County, details the terrible strain that immigration raids place on Latinx communities—and the families and friends who must deal with their extensive fallout. To help mark Hispanic Heritage Month, Mr. Lopez sat with us for an interview. 

Do you do anything special to celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month? 

In my house, not specifically. As a Latino, the father to two multi-racial Latino children and the child of an immigrant mother, I like to think the culture that shaped my life is something that is constantly in the foreground. In my house, we try to integrate cultural pride into the books we read, the movies we watch, and in the stories, we tell each other, 12 months of the year.  

What do you think about the term Hispanic? 

Ha, great question. When I was growing up in Texas, my mom, born in Mexico, used the term Mexican. I remember discussing when and who got to use “American.” As I grew older, I started referring to myself as Hispanic, then Latino. I haven’t adopted Latinx in every setting, but my daughter has! How we describe ourselves is part of an ongoing, constant discussion shaped by our collective resistance and creativity. It’s critical to keep refining the terms that define and sustain us. But, at the same time, ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) is going to use the same system and tools to oppress us regardless of how we qualify ourselves. So we also have to remember to work against the policies that target us no matter how we identify.  

What’s your thumbnail description of Separated? 

It is a book that chronicles the aftereffects from a single ICE raid in Washtenaw County. By following the ripple effects of what happens in the lives of those who’ve been affected by them, I wanted to force us to think about the broad impacts of how these raids affect not just the people caught up in them, but also their families and the communities they live in. 

What motivated you to write it? 

A good mix of anger and rage at the oppressive and violent systems that are operating in my community are probably good starting points. But anger and rage are not very sustainable. So, I’d say I’m also motivated by my love for the people I see dealing with state-sponsored oppression, and the creativity and resilience they show in the face of that. I wanted to show what people are able to achieve beyond merely surviving. This is story worth telling, and to be in position to be able to tell it is really an honor. I couldn’t imagine anything more rewarding as a career. 

One reviewer of wrote: “Lopez's book is one of the most powerful examples to date of an academic using deep study and radical empathy to indict a profoundly evil system.” How does it feel to receive a review like that? 

I loved that review. What I like about particularly is the phrase “radical empathy.” A lot of times as an academic, you are told that you have to be “objective” and remove emotion from your work. But we don’t function as strictly intellectual or emotional beings. The secret to moving forward as researchers and activists is finding the intersection of those two aspects of ourselves, to bring and merge both our empathy and emotion and our intellect. That’s how I approached this, so it feels great to hear that the story you’ve told is one that people are learning from. 

What is one thing you would like for non-Hispanics to think about as we mark this month? 

On the one hand, I would like the contributions of our broader culture to be in the foreground. Our music, our literature, our art. I’d like to see that all celebrated. On the other hand, I’d like for people to remind folks of the racial profiling that targets my community, and other communities. People need to be aware that forces are at work actively trying to remove large portions of a community whose culture we are celebrating. If we don’t reflect on that, I don’t think the purpose of this month is really being served. Don’t listen to our music and eat our food and remove our families.  

Are there any points we didn’t talk about that you’d like to raise? 

Yes. I’m very excited about the next generation of folks doing this work. They seem to automatically take a much more intersectional approach by pushing the boundaries of are what traditionally thought of as Latinx communities to create a future where there is even more Black and Brown solidarity. 

For more than a year, Detroiter Theodore Rice has been in court battling to remain in the place he’s called home for more than a quarter century. As a result, he’s seen firsthand how crucial it is for people facing eviction to have legal representation when going up against a property owners experienced in using the judicial system to their advantage.

Prior to the COVID-19 outbreak and ensuing moratorium on evictions, about 30,000 Detroit households a year faced the threat of eviction. Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has ended the moratorium, there is an urgent need for the City of Detroit to help people in immediate danger of being forced from their homes.

People like Theodore Rice.

When Rice lost his home to tax foreclosure in 2017, an investor purchased it through the county’s annual property auction, then offered a deal he said would allow Rice to remain in the house. Rice, who is Black, says he was duped into believing he was buying back the property on a land contract, paying $500 each month with the goal of eventually reclaiming ownership. Unbeknownst to Rice, the document he signed offered no more protection than a standard lease. 

A self-employed carpenter and auto mechanic, work began drying up for Rice last year as the COVID-19 pandemic started to spread. As a result, he was unable to make the monthly payments.

The owner of the property quickly filed court papers to have Rice evicted, and kept pressing the case even though the moratorium was in place. Like many landlords, he wanted to pave the way for eviction to occur quickly once the federal moratorium ended.

Severely damaged by an electrical fire that destroyed part of the roof several years ago, the house is really not fit to live in.

Rice was able to connect with Vanessa Fluker, a Detroit attorney who specializes in representing people facing eviction. Having her at his side, in a case that remains ongoing, has given Rice hope, and a fighting chance against a property owner whose companies have taken hundreds of renters to court.

“I know right from wrong, but I don’t know the law," Rice said. "And unless you have someone representing you who does know the law, and how courts operate, the average person doesn’t stand a chance.”

He’s absolutely correct. Which is why, in cities and states across America, momentum is building for a movement known as "right to counsel," or RTC. So far, 10 cities and three states have implemented some form of RTC.

Just as indigent people are provided attorneys at no cost if charged in a criminal matter, low-income people need representation in civil cases involving something as disruptive and harmful to a family’s wellbeing as an eviction.

Renters living on low incomes seldom have the resources to pay for an attorney, unlike the vast majority of landlords. Of the approximately 30,000 eviction cases filed in Detroit’s 36th District Court in 2017, landlords had legal representation 83% of the time; that same year, fewer than 5% of renters had an attorney, according to Detroit’s United Community Housing Coalition, a nonprofit that provides legal help to people on low incomes at risk of losing their homes.

Not surprisingly, that sort of tilted playing field leads to drastically disparate outcomes.

As the Center for American progress has reported, two eviction-prevention pilot programs in Boston provide clear evidence of the huge difference having a lawyer makes in eviction proceedings: two-thirds of the tenants provided legal representation were able to retain their homes, while two-thirds of those without lawyers were evicted.

Like so many of this country’s problems, racism and income inequality are significant factors.

“Due to decades of inequalities in our housing system, communities of color and low-income women feel the impacts of eviction the most — Black women in particular,” according to the national ACLU. “Black women are more than twice as likely to have evictions filed against them as white people," according to the national ACLU. "Less than half of Black and Latinx families own their homes compared to 73% of white families. Black and Latinx tenants are also twice as likely as white tenants to report that they have little to no ability to make rent each month.”

Because people of color are disproportionately affected, the problem is particularly acute in Detroit, a city that is nearly 80% Black with a poverty rate that tops 30%, making it the second most impoverished city in America.

Once a national leader in Black homeownership, a majority of Detroit residents now live in rental properties. That, combined with high poverty rates, results in a shocking number of evictions. In 2016, for example, there were 6,664 evictions in Detroit, according to researchers at Princeton University’s Eviction Lab. That amounts to more than 18 families losing their homes every single day.

“When a person has to go down to the 36th District Court, when they risk losing their home, their place in the neighborhood, their child’s spot at school, and so many other things are on the line, that person should not have to walk into court alone," Tonya Meyers Phillips, director of Community Partnerships & Development at Detroit’s Sugar Law Center for Economic & Social Justice, said during an online forum hosted by the newly formed group Detroit Right to Counsel. "If an individual cannot afford legal representation, then legal representation should be provided for them."

That coalition, which includes the ACLU of Michigan, the United Community Housing Coalition, Michigan Legal Services and other organizations, is asking the city to implement a plan that will provide attorneys for 20% of individuals facing evictions each year for the next five years at a cost of $4 million dollars.

For those who might question whether this is a wise use of public funds, it is important to consider the other side of that equation: What is the cost of doing nothing, to residents, neighborhoods, and the city as a whole?

The short answer to that question is that the cost of inaction is massive, both in terms of dollars as well as human suffering.

The economic and social benefits of providing an eviction right to counsel in Detroit include:

• Reduced blight as more homes remain legally occupied
• Reduced costs incurred by the city of Detroit for homeless outreach
• Reduced costs for emergency shelters, rapid rehousing and emergency rental assistance.
• Reduced policing costs related to squatting and criminalizing homelessness 
• Reduced costs associated with education instability and employment instability
• Reduced costs associated physical and mental health care emergency services
• Reduced population and tax base
• Increased stability for families, schools, and neighborhoods.

If those sorts of factors are considered, RTC turns out to be remarkably cost effective. A study done for The Philadelphia Bar Association found that $3.5 million spent on eviction representation would save the city $45.2 million in shelter costs, health care costs and mental health costs — a return on investment of $12 for every $1 spent on Right to Counsel. 

For Detroit to realize those benefits, and to avoid the trauma and hardship evictions create for families, the city must act quickly to provide legal representation for people on low incomes facing eviction. 

As for Theodore Rice, he’s struggling to deal with the dread of what could happen now that the moratorium has ended.

“I can’t sleep at all, I’m worrying so much,” he says. “But at least I’m able have some hope, because I’m not facing this alone. I have someone who knows the system standing beside me, and fighting for me. I don’t even want to think what it would be like if that weren’t the case."

Read the full story on the Detroit Free Press.