News & Commentary

Recent tragic police-related shootings have demonstrated yet again that sudden, violent deaths at the hands of police can capture headlines and public attention. But out of sight and forgotten are thousands of victims of illegal racially discriminatory encounters with police who survived, but who nevertheless ended up in prison cells.

It isn’t really about bathrooms, is it?

Two important cases involving the ACLU of Michigan--one involving water shutoffs in Detroit and the other a challenge to Michigan’s emergency manager law--will be heard by the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati next week.

Rohit Rajan is a summer intern at the ACLU's West Michigan office. A rising second-year law student at Harvard Law School, Rohit says his journey into civil-rights activism started in high school while doing research, and he expects it continue for many years to come.

Like a coroner conducting an autopsy, economist and Wayne State University Law School professor Peter J. Hammer recently performed a highly detailed dissection of the Flint water crisis, laying bare the various pathologies that led to the poisoning of Flint's water supply.

Meet Jessica Lewis, a rising 3L at Harvard Law School and current ACLU of Michigan summer law intern.  

Slave patrols were committees of white men established to monitor, track, capture and torture enslaved Africans. Eventually, these groups supplanted local sheriffs and constables as the primary law enforcers, and they became what we now know as police departments. It is perhaps impossible to count the number of African and African-descended people who have died at the hands of slave patrols and police since the slave era. What we do know is that in the aftermath of each highly publicized act of police brutality, there are many who sing the refrain of a popular song in this country.

The City of Detroit had the wrong man, and Walter Hicks knew it.

Meet Lakyrra Magee, a Social Theory & Practice and Women Studies dual major at the University of Michigan. Lakyrra is one of the ACLU of Michigan’s undergrad interns for the summer of 2016.