Videos that, according to Steve Neavling's Motor City Muckraker blog, show Grosse Pointe Park police demeaning African Americans are making news from New York to London this morning, though they have not yet appeared on Detroit's TV stations or newspapers.
Most of the videos are shot from squad cars while African American men are told to sing or “dance like a chimp,” Neavling reports.
The police department has opened an internal investigation.
Neavling has also reported a mentally ill man was the primary target of the racially charged videos that he says were taken by several Grosse Pointe Park officers.
One officer, Neavling writes, sent at least six videos of the same mentally ill man singing or stuttering on command. Sometimes the subject was in the back of a squad car; other times he was approached by police and told to perform for the camera.
At times he looked annoyed or embarrassed.
The department released a statement that was sent in an email by Capt. Steven Loch to Huffpost Detroit:
On Thursday, November 14, 2013, the Grosse Pointe Park Public Safety Department was contacted by an individual who said that he was in possession of video clips and a photo of African American males. The video clips and photo are allegedly made by an officer of this department. The department has begun an internal investigation of this matter. The Grosse Pointe Park Public Safety Department does not tolerate unprofessional conduct by its officers when interacting with any citizen they may come in contact with.
Neavling first reported on Friday that more than a dozen demeaning videos of black men were sent and forwarded from the phones of Grosse Pointe Park police.
Grosse Pointe Park is bordered on two sides by Detroit, and the borders -- Alter Road and Mack Avenue -- have become tenser over the decades as racial and income disparities widened. Grosse Pointe Park is 85 percent white; Detroit is about 85 percent black.
The story has been picked by the London-based Daily Mail, the New York Daily News and the national Huffington Post, among other outlets.
Neavling writes on the Motor City Muckraker Facebook page he will be a guest on ABC-TV's Good Morning America on Tuesday to discuss the videos.
