Activists Aim to Shut Down Dearborn to Protest Police Shooting

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DEARBORN, MI – Protesters with the National Action Network, Take on Hate and Black Lives Matter plan to march and shut down a stretch of Michigan Avenue Monday night to protest the fatal shooting of an unarmed suspect by a Dearborn police officer last month.

The march begins at the Kroger parking lot at 6:30 p.m. at Michigan Avenue and Greenfield, and will continue a few blocks to the Dearborn Police Department at 16099 Michigan Ave., organizers told the Detroit Free Press.

Kevin Matthews, 35, of Detroit, was shot multiple times on Dec. 23 during a struggle with the police officer, a five-year veteran of the department who is on administrative leave pending the completion of an investigation by the Detroit Police Department.

The Rev. Charles Williams, president of the Detroit Action Network, said protesters hope “to mimic what happened in Chicago” and other cities where protests were held to protest police shootings of unarmed black suspects.

Also on Patch

• Officer Fatally Shoots Unarmed Suspect in Struggle
• Dearborn Officer on Administrative Leave After Shooting
• Black Lives Matter Protest Planned in Dearborn

“We’re going to be shutting down Dearborn,” Williams said. “We have to send a message throughout the nation that it is not OK for young African-American, unarmed men to continue to get shot down by police. ... We will shut business down. This is a move to make sure that we actually send a message throughout this country that police brutality cannot continue.”

According to police statements, Matthews allegedly went for the officer’s gun after a short foot chase from Tireman and Greenfield in Dearborn into a nearby Detroit neighborhood. Matthews reportedly had been involved in a larceny in Dearborn, and was wanted on a $2,500 misdemeanor warrant from Redford Township.

Dearborn police said Matthews was a chronic problem in the city, according to WXYZ-TV. However, civil rights groups said that Dearborn police aggressively targeted Matthews, who reportedly suffered from paranoid-schizophrenia, but was harmless.

“On many occasions, officers who dealt with him didn’t arrest him, did not take him to jail,” Williams said at a news conference. “They took him home. We want to know why on so many occasions they did that, but why this time was different?”

The march will be peaceful, Take On Hate campaign manager and former state Rep. Rashida Tlaib told the Free Press.

“We feel a sense of responsibility to elevate the voice of this victim,” Tlaib said. “People are devastated at how he was chased down and shot in a back yard. ... We’re going to make sure that Kevin Matthews’ death was not in vain. ... We want to make sure that we hold them all accountable and it takes us being out there and being public in trying to achieve some sort of reason.”

According to a report last year by USA TODAY that analyzed arrests in 2011 and 2012, Dearborn police arrest blacks at 26 times the rate of whites. The department arrested 4,500 black people — more than half of all arrests during those years — according to the reports the department submitted to the FBI.

Dearborn is predominately white — only 4 percent of residents are black — but Police Chief Ronald Haddad said at the time that it’s unfair to measure arrest records against the city’s demographics.

“We treat everyone the same,” he said.

» Kevin Matthews photo courtesy of Karen Matthews