From [HERE] A mayor-appointed committee will review ways to better diversify Saginaw’s police force. The announcement came during today’s Saginaw City Council which featured community leaders — elected or otherwise — discussing how the police shooting of Milton S. Hall on July 1 should put in focus the Saginaw police force’s lack of diversity and the relevancy of a 77-year-old policy governing public safety hiring.

About 75 residents packed Saginaw City Hall during today’s City Council meeting. A majority of the crowd came to hear the council talk about the death of Hall, a 49-year-old black homeless man police report they killed when he was acting aggressively with a knife. Witnesses tell a different story. 

Mechelle Evans was at the Riverview Plaza on Sunday with her kids. Her son walked out a door before her and told her there were police outside. When she walked out, Evans said she saw several Saginaw Police officers and a man standing in front of them. "When I came out their guns were drawn. The dogs were out and the man was standing right by the wooded plant stand area in the front of the parking lot. "They were yelling 'get down, drop your weapon!' There was so much commotion," she said. Evans froze. Her kids stood still. She said the man was frozen, too."The man was not moving. He was just standing there looking. I think he was scared of the dogs and the yelling," she said.  Evans said she didn't witness the man go after police. "They opened fire and unloaded on him," she said. "When they opened fire it sounded like a bomb went off. We ran back in the store and it had to be maybe 20 or 30 shots, well at least that is what it sounded like."

Destiny Williams was also in the shopping center and said she heard the gunshots, then saw "the man lying down." [MORE] 

“The majority” of the six officers involved in the shooting were white, Mayor Greg Branch has reported.

 

Branch today announced he is forming a committee, led by Councilman Norman Braddock, to identify ways to strengthen the recruitment of minorities for police and fire forces.

The police force largely is white. As recently as 2008, minorities represented 35 percent of the then-97-officer department.

“We can do better,” Branch said. “We can find a way to do better."

Branch said he is still seeking membership for the committee, although he has commitments from former Mayor Gary L. Loster and Terry Pruitt, a member of the Saginaw chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

Both Loster and Pruitt during the meeting discussed some of the issues the group may address.

“This community remains traumatized and upset by this incident," Pruitt said when addressing the council. "We are seeking a commitment from the City Council and administration ... to complete an immediate review."

Dennis Browning, the city’s mayor pro tem and a former Saginaw policeman, suggested one hurdle that may contribute to a lack of diversity: Public Act 78.

Saginaw voters approved Public Act 78 in 1935. It gives police and fire hiring and promotion authority to the city’s Police-Fire Civil Service Commission.

Officials have said voters approved the act as a way of avoiding “political corruption.” An attempt to repeal the act failed in a May 2011 vote, and it remains law.

“For us to move forward, those are the things we really have to look at when we're hiring, when we're recruiting,” Browning said of Public Act 78. “It ties our hands sometimes.”

City Manager Darnell Earley at the meeting said the city could review Public Act 78 as part of an internal affairs investigation he plans to call for following the state police probe.

“The methodology will involve re-interviewing officers, policy, situation management tactics, threat elimination guidelines and tactics, equipment functionality,” Earley said of the planned internal affairs probe. “We will answer the questions posed to the City Council."

Loster said he wants to ensure such a police shooting “doesn’t happen again.”

“We're not indicting the police department; only those that are responsible,” the former mayor said.

Loster wasn’t the only ex-mayor to call for answers following Hall’s death. Joyce J. Seals also sat in the meeting’s audience.