A Michigan Court of Claims judge ruled that state policing regulators can keep secret the names and employment histories of current and former officers throughout the state, but Metro Times and Invisible Institute plan to appeal the decision.
Judge Christopher P. Yates decided Friday that Michigan State Police can withhold the records under exemptions in the state’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), dealing a setback to a national effort to track so-called wandering officers who move from department to department after engaging in misconduct.
The University of Michigan’s Civil Rights Litigation Initiative filed the lawsuit in November 2023 on behalf of Metro Times and Invisible Institute, a nonprofit based in Chicago. The news organizations argued the records are essential to identifying wandering cops.
David Seaman, a student attorney for the CRLI, said the decision undermines the transparency that Michigan’s public records law was designed to protect.
“A secret police force is a sign of an authoritarian government, not a democracy,” Seaman said. “The Michigan legislature passed FOIA to ensure that the government remains transparent and accountable, not to allow the government to hide something so basic as the names of its employees.”
The case centered on records held by the Michigan Commission on Law Enforcement Standards, or MCOLES, which is housed within MSP and regulates police licensing in the state. In January 2023, Metro Times and Invisible Institute requested the names of all licensed officers in Michigan, along with information about their employment history.
State police denied key parts of the request, arguing that releasing the names would violate an obscure FOIA exemption for records that identify law enforcement officers, amount to a clearly unwarranted invasion of privacy, and could endanger officers and their families by exposing them to doxing, a form of online harassment that involves publishing someone’s personal information.
Yates agreed with MSP, ruling that one FOIA exemption applies to active law enforcement officers and another applies to retired officers. In his eight-page opinion, Yates wrote that the exemptions “fit those two groups like a glove.”
For active officers, Yates concluded that the public interest in nondisclosure was strong because releasing the records would identify “every single active law-enforcement officer” in Michigan. Although the judge acknowledged that “no free society wishes to be subjected to secret police,” he wrote that officers should be identifiable while on duty but not necessarily in their private lives. He did not make clear how this principle would function in this or future requests, given that this request only sought professional information about the officers.
For retired officers, Yates ruled that MSP could withhold identifying information under FOIA’s privacy exemption. He wrote that most retired officers still have firearms and that the Michigan Supreme Court has stated in a previous case that “gun ownership is information of a personal nature.” Yates also argued that the records would reveal little about the inner workings of government because the officers’ licenses had not been revoked.
The ruling notes that MSP has already turned over the names of officers whose licenses were revoked. But the news organizations seek more extensive records, including information about active officers and former officers whose licenses were inactive, lapsed, or otherwise not revoked.
The decision comes more than a year after Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel took the unusual step of siding with Metro Times and Invisible Institute, despite her department’s role in representing state police in the lawsuit.
In an April 2024 friend-of-the-court brief, Nessel argued that MSP should release the names in the interest of transparency and accountability.
“Our State — like all states — gives a great deal of power to law enforcement officers — and not just a great amount of power, but indeed a monopoly on such power,” Nessel wrote at the time. “But it is an axiom of human nature that giving some people power over others entails a risk that this power will be abused. And to this end, our laws generally require that those who wield governmental power do their work in the sunlight.”
The records are part of Invisible Institute’s national project to create a searchable database of police employment histories. The National Police Index launched in September 2024 without Michigan data because MSP has refused to release the records.
More than two dozen states have disclosed the names of certified officers to the news organizations, including Michigan’s neighbors Indiana and Ohio. In Wisconsin, last week a circuit court judge ruled in favor of a similar lawsuit brought by The Badger Project and Invisible Institute, writing that law enforcement officers “necessarily relinquish certain privacy and reputational rights by virtue of the amount of trust society places in them and must be subject to public scrutiny.” Michigan’s refusal also made MSP a finalist in 2024 for Investigative Reporters and Editors’ Golden Padlock Award, which recognizes the most secretive public agencies and officials in the country.
Without the ability to track wandering cops, the public may never know when officers accused of misconduct are hired by another department.
In October 2023, Metro Times revealed that the Detroit and Eastpointe police departments violated a 2017 law intended to prevent wandering officers from landing new jobs after misconduct allegations. Former Detroit cop Kairy Roberts was hired in Eastpointe despite an internal Detroit investigation that found he punched an unarmed man in the face in Greektown, failed to provide medical aid, and lied about the encounter.
Detroit failed to report the alleged misconduct to MCOLES, and Eastpointe falsely claimed Roberts had met the character fitness standards required to reactivate his license, MCOLES Director Timothy Bourgeois previously told Metro Times. After we reported on the hiring, MCOLES suspended Roberts’s license. He later resigned from Eastpointe.
In March 2024, Metro Times also reported that the Warren and Romeo police departments appeared to violate the same law after a Warren officer retired while under investigation and later got a job in Romeo.
Supporters of the lawsuit say access to officer names and employment histories is needed to determine whether police accused of misconduct are quietly moving from one department to another.
