The Wayne County Medical Examiner has declared the death of 35-year-old Kevin Matthews to be a homicide. Matthews was shot and killed Wednesday after a struggle with a Dearborn police officer.

In a brief statement issued today, the Wayne County Medical Examiner’s office listed the cause of his death as, “multiple gunshot wounds.” The manner of death was stated to be homicide.

Police said Wednesday that Matthews was a suspect wanted for a probation violation in Redford and was wanted for a theft that took place in Dearborn on the day he was shot.

He was spotted by a Dearborn officer and police say a foot chase then followed through a neighborhood near Tireman and Greenfield, on the border of Detroit and Dearborn.

The officer and suspect got into a physical encounter, with a struggle taking place over the officer’s weapon, police said Wednesday. Matthews was unarmed. He died at the scene.

The Dearborn police officer who shot and killed Kevin Matthews was placed on paid administrative leave following the shooting.

On Thursday, the National Action Network stood with the family of Kevin Matthews to express outrage over the killing of the 35-year-old Detroit man.

Dearborn Police say they are fully cooperating with the investigation, and look forward to making a complete and transparent public disclosure of information when the investigation is concluded.

A U.S. Department of Justice audit has found improprieties in the way Plymouth Township accounted for forfeited cash, cars and other property under a federal “Equitable Sharing” program that lets local police agencies share in the proceeds of property seized in joint investigations.

Plymouth Township received $1.9 million from the program between January 2010 and September 2014. It is not clear what prompted the audit.

The Justice Department has strict rules on how local agencies account for the profits from the sale of forfeited property, and the audit found a number of violations including who controlled the funds, how they were used, and the fact that the proceeds appear to have been earmarked for certain uses before they were received. Some of the township’s share of forfeiture proceeds were used to buy furniture, clothing, truck rentals and other disallowed expenditures.

The township police chief is responsible for filing accounting reports to the DOJ, and told auditors he was not allowed to receive copies of the bank statements associated with the program. Instead, the audit found that the township treasurer and governing body had much of that control and responsibility, which is contrary to the program’s rules.

Township Treasurer Ron Edwards is notorious in the area for his behavior.  He has abused 911 operators before for blocked roads during heavy traffic, and has been accused of assaulting a township clerk before.

In general, the funds from the federal sharing program are to be used for law enforcement, but the audit found thousands of dollars being used for non-law enforcement expenses such as $1,574 for floor mats, $3,272 for conference room chairs, $29,792 for civilian salaries (not uniformed officers) and other general township expenses.

At another time, the township used funds to purchase police vehicles, which was allowed, but failed to reimburse the forfeiture fund when it received $96,506 in manufacturer rebates for the cars. Additionally, the township recorded $21,591 in law enforcement expenses before the money from forfeited seizures was actually in hand.

The township was also cited for filing late reports and not promptly reimbursing the fund for non-law enforcement expenses.

None of this surprises Lee McGrath, Legislative Counsel for the Institute for Justice, a public interest law firm that has been spearheading civil asset forfeiture reform in states around the nation, including Michigan.

“The problems exposed in Plymouth Township reveal that state legislatures just can’t stop with the current round of forfeiture reform. Next year, they should come back and address the core issue which is the corrupting influence of forfeiture proceeds on law enforcement’s behavior,” said McGrath.

The Michigan Legislature recently passed a package of bills that establishes transparency requirements and raises the standard of evidence before property can be forfeited to the government. But the state still allows civil forfeiture; the seizing and transferring of property from citizens to law enforcement.

McGrath says states would be best to adopt the reforms enacted by New Mexico, which has banned forfeiture unless the owner of seized property is actually convicted of a crime. New Mexico also prohibits local law enforcement agencies from using the money from the federal forfeiture sharing program in cases in which the seized property is worth less than $50,000.

Seven states prohibit law enforcement from keeping proceeds from any forfeitures but McGrath says local agencies get around state laws by resorting to the federal Equitable Sharing program. He reports that New Mexico is the only state prohibiting that program in all but the most egregious drug cases.

“When I meet with state legislators, what I say to them is that they abdicated their responsibility when they give local law enforcement this ability to get money in this fashion,” McGrath said. “Law enforcement and members of the executive branch have both the purse and the sword.”

Plymouth Township Treasurer Ron Edwards, Supervisor Shannon Price and Police Chief Thomas Tiderington did not respond to efforts to get them to comment.

They did write a response to the audit, which is included in the report.

“The Plymouth Township Police Department will work closely with the Township’s Treasurer’s Office and the Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering Section to correct, amend and rectify the concerns identified in the draft report,” they say.

The Benton Township officer who was driving the police vehicle that struck and killed a woman Sunday was traveling over the speed limit and did not have the vehicle’s sirens activated at the time of the crash, according to a release from the Berrien County Sheriff’s Department.

The victim, 48-year-old Kimberly Anna Bedford of Hartford, was crossing the road at 9 p.m. Sunday in the 1200 block of Pipestone Road to get to a nearby store when she was hit, according to a release.   Officials claim Bedford had a high blood alcohol content and was crossing the road where there was no crosswalk.

Investigators also say that Bedford did not have any reflective clothing on at the time of the crash.

Benton Township Patrolman Eugene Anderson was responding to a domestic disturbance report at the time of the incident, according to the sheriff’s department.   He has been placed on administrative leave pending the outcome of an internal investigation.

Bedford’s full toxicology results are expected within two to three weeks, according to a release.

It was a death sentence.

David Stojcevski, a 32-year-old resident of Roseville, Michigan, was arrested for failing to pay a $772 fine stemming from careless driving. A court ordered him to spend a month in the Macomb County jail.

Over the next 17 days of his incarceration in a brightly lit cell—where he was denied clothing—he lost 50 pounds, suffered convulsions, and eventually began to hallucinate. He died in agony, from a combination of obvious, untreated drug withdrawal and galling neglect.

Making matters worse (if anything could be worse than that), the entirety of his demise was captured on jail surveillance footage. Indeed, Stojcevski was under self-harm watch—stemming for a profound misdiagnosis of his condition, which was drug addiction, not mental instability—and jail officials were supposed to be watching him constantly. Either their vigilance was inadequate, or they watched and simply didn’t care.

WDIV’s report on the story is a must-see, though it’s highly disturbing: the video shows clips from the jail footage while a medical expert offers commentary on the inhumanity of Stojcevski’s treatment.

Stojcevski was a drug addict, and was taking Methadone, Xanax, and Klonopin to treat his addiction. But without access to these prescriptions, he quickly went into withdrawal while in jail, according to WDIV’s expert. Withdrawal caused him to behave irrationally, but jail officials ignored these obvious symptoms and instead placed him in a cell for the mentally unstable. He was stripped naked—so that he couldn’t hurt himself—and forced to languish under the unceasing bright lights (the jail doesn’t turn them off, even at night).

On his last day of life, the man refused to touch his food and was too weak to get up from the floor.

At the first, obvious sign of drug withdrawal, Stojcevski should have been given adequate medical treatment. He was not a violent criminal, or a danger to the public. He was a man who hadn’t paid a traffic ticket.

Stojcevski’s family is suing Macomb County. A lawyer for the county told WDIV that the suit “lacks legal merit,” and expects the family to lose when the case goes to trial. Macomb County has no plans to settle, according to the lawyer.

By Robby Soave is a staff editor at Reason.com.

Michigan is one step closer to requiring police to keep track of how much property they seize from citizens.

Michigan’s Senate Judiciary Committee advanced a package of bills Wednesday to reform civil asset forfeiture.

Civil asset forfeiture is a widely used practice where police can seize property and keep it even if they don’t convict or charge someone with a crime. Then, that person must go through the complicated-and-often-unsuccessful process to get their property back from the police.

Though the set of bills were only scheduled for a hearing, Senate Judiciary Chairman Rick Jones unexpectedly called for a vote and approved the legislation. Now the bills can get a vote on the floor.

“For too long in Michigan, law enforcement has used civil asset forfeiture to seize cars and cash from average citizens who are never even charged with crimes,” Holly Harris, executive director of Fix Forfeiture, said in a statement. “In a bold and unexpected move, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted unanimously to pass a package of legislation that provides much-needed transparency and accountability to this process, and affords more due process protection to property owners.”

The legislation has passed the House. It would increase the burden of proof necessary to forfeit property and require police forces to keep records on the property seized. While the legislation does not address the major problems of police taking property from innocent people, Harris says it’s an important first step to reform.

The reforms are so weak, in fact, that even the Michigan Association of Police Officers (MAPO) has endorsed the legislation. Police are typically against civil asset forfeiture reform. In New Mexico, police fought tough reforms of civil asset forfeiture.

“While we caution lawmakers against making policy on any issue because of a few anecdotes that represent ‘outlier’ behavior, this package of bills is a reasonable, measured approach to improving transparency in forfeiture activities and diminishes the ‘policing for profit’ perception that has attached to this issue,” MAPO wrote in a letter last month announcing the endorsement.

Harris hopes once data is collected on how much money is seized, that information can be used to get more reform.

Ginnifer Hency of Michigan had everything taken from her  — including electronics, medicine and, oddly, the family’s ladder — simply because she had medical marijuana.marijuana. Hency’s example is one of many across the country that have drawn criticism of forfeiture laws.

“Under Michigan’s current regime, there is no enforceable requirement to report what was confiscated, and how that money was used. Such lax oversight has seen a rise in disturbing cases of possible abuse; such as the famous cases of Ginnifer Hency, whose house was raided because of her legal marijuana, or Annette Shattuck, who had a similar experience,” Jorge Marin, a policy analyst and criminal justice specialist for Americans for Tax Reform, said in his written testimony.

Civil Asset Forfeiture Explained In Two Minutes:

Originally publiches by Daily Caller

An FBI surveillance aircraft flying near Manassas Regional Airport in Virginia

According to flight data, over the weekend an FBI surveillance plane carried out a protracted overflight of the city of Dearborn, Michigan. Some 30% of the city’s population is Arab-American, which has made it a regular target for FBI sting operations.

Despite this, the FBI is loudly denying that the spy plane was conducting surveillance of the Arab-American community in general, insisting they “don’t conduct mass surveillance,” though they did not offer any details on actually what they were surveilling, and maintained there were no threats in the area of the flight, which includes Metro Detroit.

Though some Arab-American groups took that denial at face value, saying there is no reason to doubt the FBI, many aren’t so sure, and indeed the FBI’s overflights of US cities have tended in recent times to be for untoward reasons.

The Justice Department has been conducting such overflights in so-called “dirtbox” planes, which mimic the signals of a cellphone satellite, but being in the air instead of in orbit, are then connected to ordinary Americans’ phones as the closer signal, allowing them to seize cellphone data en masse from the air. The FBI has recently conducted such flights for the Justice Department as well.

If this proves to be the nature of this most recent flight, the FBI could theoretically claim Arab-Americans aren’t being targeted as such. After all, it is everyone who is a target, or at least their cellphones. Still, the FBI’s denial that it conducts mass surveillance as a general rule is demonstrably false, and the overflight is just one more in a troubling trend.

This post written originally by Jason Ditz for AntiWar.com

A judge who unsuccessfully tried to arrange child visitation for a father, decided that the best way to deal with the problem was to send the children to jail, according to court documents in Michigan.

Oakland County Circuit Judge Lisa Gorcyca ruled that the three children of Maya Tsimhoni are in contempt of court for refusing to meet with their father.

According to the Detroit Free Press, the children — ages 9, 10, and 15 — were found in civil contempt of court during a June 24 hearing in a bitter six-year custody battle between their parents, Maya Eibschitz-Tsimhoni and Omer Tsimhoni.

After two weeks in jail, the children remained defiant. The 15-year-old boy told the judge that he will not have a relationship with his father because he saw him hit his mother.

Becky Wehr with her dog Dexter

KALAMAZOO, MI — On her way to a Shipshewana shopping trip on June 23, Becky Rehr swung by the Kalamazoo County Sheriff’s Office to show her $35 receipt proving she finally renewed the license for the family dog.

While her 14-year-old daughter waited in the car, Rehr followed the clerk out of the reception area. To her horror, she found that she was not being led to an office, but to the booking area of the county jail, where she was fingerprinted, had a mug shot taken and was put in a holding area with jail inmates.

“They frisked me and put me in this intake cell with all these inmates in orange jumpsuits,” Rehr said. “I was pretty nervous.”

It took three hours before she was released on $100 bond, allowing her to return to her daughter, still waiting in the car.

“Luckily, she had her iPhone,” said Rehr, 47, of Cooper Township.

On Tuesday, Rehr faces arraignment on a criminal charge of failure to renew a dog license, a misdemeanor in Kalamazoo County punishable by up to 90 days in jail and a $100 fine. Her court hearing is before Kalamazoo County District Judge Christopher Haenicke.

Rehr admits she was lax about renewing the license for the family’s 11-year-old springer/border collie mix, Dexter. Still, she’s shocked and horrified her forgetfulness ended up in an arrest warrant and being booked, even though she had already paid the dog-license fees.

Her co-workers at Bronson Methodist Hospital “think I’m kidding,” said Rehr, who is a surgical nurse. “They think there’s no way this is how we’re spending our tax dollars.”

Criminal charges for not renewing a dog license are allowed under the Kalamazoo County animal control ordinance.

Steve Lawrence, director of Kalamazoo County Animal Control, said the agency seeks arrest warrants about “four or five times a month” for people who haven’t renewed a dog license. The county has 32,000 licensed dogs.

“We’re not looking to punish people,” Lawrence said. “We’re just looking for people to get their dog license.”

In Rehr’s situation, the criminal charge is typically dropped once the person shows proof of obtaining the license, said Carrie Klein, Kalamazoo County’s chief assistant prosecutor.

“Every case needs to be evaluated, but if it just completely got away from you and there’s nothing else going on, it likely will get dismissed,” Klein said.

It’s a different story if it happens repeatedly, or if Animal Control has reported other issues with the dog owner, such as animal cruelty, she said.

Both Lawrence and Klein said a warrant isn’t issued until the agency has given multiple warnings about an overdue license renewal, including letters, a notice posted on the dog owner’s front door and typically a phone call.

Rehr admits she got those warnings.

“I had every intention of taking care of it, but with the end of the school year and my job, it just totally got put on the back burner,” said Rehr, who has two teenage daughters and a husband who travels on business.

She finally got the license renewed on Thursday, June 18, she said.

Four days later, on Monday, June 22, she got a letter saying an arrest warrant had been issued and she needed to report to the Kalamazoo County Jail.

“I already had the license and I’m a law-abiding citizen,” Rehr said, so she figured she could show authorities the license and “get it taken care of.”

So the next morning, Rehr assumed she could stop at the jail, show officials the new dog license and the letter about the warrant, and soon be on her way. She couldn’t have imagined she’d be fingerprinted, photographed and detained.

Rehr’s husband Todd, an engineer, was out of town on business when Rehr called to tell him what happened. He couldn’t believe it.

“He was, like, you were what?” she said.

Rehr was relieved to hear from a Kalamazoo Gazette reporter that officials say the charge likely will be dismissed.

She said she’s called five lawyers for advice, three of whom told her she should hire an attorney and fight the charges and two who told her to plead guilty and it would likely get expunged down the line.

Rehr, whose said her only previous brush with the law is a speeding ticket, doesn’t want a criminal record — even if it is a misdemeanor.

“It doesn’t look good,” she said, especially for someone with a nursing license and who volunteers as a manager for a soccer team. “A misdemeanor is what you get when you have a meth lab or a DUI or something like that.”

Rehr said she’s shocked that Kalamazoo County considers renewal of a dog license a criminal offense rather than a civil infraction. A fine seems far more appropriate than treating a forgetful dog owner like a criminal, she said.

“My fault, my bad for misplacing and forgetting the license renewal,” she said. “But seriously?”

Written by Julie Mack for Michigan Live

EATON COUNTY, Mich. — Eaton County prosecutors announced Tuesday that they have declined to charge a sheriff’s sergeant for shooting and killing an unarmed 17-year-old during a routine traffic stop.

17-year-old Deven Guilford was pulled over by Sgt. Jonathan Frost for allegedly flashing his headlights. Apparently believing he was not required to show identification, Guilford recorded the encounter and refused to furnish his identification. The police officer forced Guilford from his car and gave the teenager electric shocks from his Taser. Both video recordings become unclear after this point, as Sgt. Frost kicks Guilford’s phone away and proceeds to shoot the teen seven times.

Deven Guilford, 17, shot and killed while unarmed

Prosecuting Attorney Doug Lloyd reviewed the investigation into the boy’s death, which included video from Sgt. Frost’s body camera, as well as video captured by Guilford’s phone. The prosecutor said he believes there is no reasonable suspicion that a crime was committed.

“No one wins in these particular situations, but it’s the prosecutor’s responsibility to look at the facts, make a determination from the facts. Was there a crime or was there not a crime?” he said.

Lloyd claims Guilford jumped up after being tased, climbed on top of Frost, and hit him in the face. There is no video that shows this, however, as the Guilford’s camera was kicked away from him before he was tased, and Sgt. Frost’s body camera went black. Police also claim Sgt. Frost’s vehicle did not have a working dashboard camera due to problems with its software.

Sgt. Frost said he feared Guilford was going to reach for his gun, so he drew it and attempted to fire. When the gun malfunctioned, Frost says he manually cleared a round from his gun then proceeded to shoot Guilford seven times.

Eaton County Sheriff’s Sergeant Jonathan Frost, who shot and killed the unarmed teen

Lloyd’s decision not to prosecute Sgt. Frost effectively clears the sergeant of any criminal wrongdoing.

Frost checked himself into a hospital to treat injuries he alleges Guilford gave him. X-ray scans showed no fractures of any kind, and Frost was released the following morning.

Guilford’s family hired attorney Hugh Davis, who says the family plans to file a civil lawsuit against Frost after he reviews evidence collected during the investigation.

Davis says the Guilford family believes Frost’s decision to remove Deven from his car before more officers arrived was “unreasonable.”

“The family is very unhappy. It’s just very hard to go from dimming lights or not dimming lights to being dead,” Davis said.

“There was no reason or necessity for the officer to physically remove our son from the car without considering other options to avoid an unnecessary violent escalation,” the family said in statement. “It must be also noted that Deven was not in possession (of) any weapon and emphatically told the officer that he was not armed.”

Frost was given paid administrative leave during the incident, and is soon expected to return to his job.

A video of the incident captured by Sgt. Frost’s body camera video is available below: