Washtenaw County sheriff candidates Alyshia Dyer, Derrick Jackson and Ken Magee joined University of Michigan students and community members Monday evening at the Central Campus Classrooms Building to discuss their platforms. The town hall was organized by Students 4 Decarceration, a student-run organization that aims to end inequities in the criminal legal system, as part of their speaker series. All three candidates are running on a Democratic platform, and the primary election will take place Aug. 6.
Dyer is a former road-patrol deputy and marine deputy at the Washtenaw County Sheriff’s Office, serving for almost 10 years. Dyer also worked at Detroit’s Civil Rights, Inclusion & Opportunity Department and is currently a licensed therapist. She is originally from Ypsilanti and said at the event she began pursuing her career in law enforcement because of her negative experiences with the law growing up.
“I grew up here in this community in Ypsilanti and experienced childhood homelessness, as well as I ran away from home at an early age and had a lot of negative contacts with the police,” Dyer said. “It was the negative contacts I had growing up that really affected me as well as my friends. The neighborhood I grew up in, that motivated me to get into law enforcement because I wanted to be an officer that was helpful and not hurtful — the type of officer I wish I would have had when I was growing up.”
Jackson began his career at Ozone House, a shelter for homeless youth, before working at the Washtenaw County Clerk’s office as chief deputy. He is now the director of community engagement for WCSO, where he has worked on policing in the county for the last 14 years.
At the town hall, Jackson said he began his law enforcement career following the death of a neighbor in the custody of WCSO. He recalled trying, ultimately unsuccessfully, to get the former sheriff to attend a neighborhood watch meeting in Inkster.
“I never forgot what it felt like when I had to go back to my neighborhood and tell my neighbors I felt I could not convince him,” Jackson said. “From that moment forward, I had been dead set on changing and transforming the police. … I have these emotional scars from my childhood through my existence of being a Black man in America and dealing with police in a really hyper-violent neighborhood like Inkster. That’s the driving force for why I do this work.”
Magee has worked in law enforcement for more than 30 years, including as the chief of police for the U-M Department of Public Safety, now Department of Public Safety and Security, and as a United States Drug Enforcement Administration special agent and section chief. Magee has worked as a criminal justice consultant for the last 13 years in Ann Arbor. He said being away from Ann Arbor for multiple years, then coming back to negative changes, motivated him to run for office.
“I’m running for sheriff because I was born and raised in Ann Arbor,” Magee said. “I’ve traveled the world and gone to a lot of places but when I came home, it wasn’t quite the same town as when I was growing up … I feel that I have the skill sets to attack some of these problems and create a different atmosphere for not only Ann Arbor but for the rest of the county.”
Jackson said, if elected, he would increase the level of community investment that comes from the Sheriff’s Office.
“If we continue to disinvest in our communities, primarily in our Black, brown and poor communities, we will never deal with the real issues in our community,” Jackson said. “We are forced to call the police. We are forced to over-rely on policing.”
Dyer said while she believes in community investment, internal changes within the Sheriff’s Office are equally as important.
“For me, the Sheriff’s Office has been quite problematic, working there for the past 10 years,” Dyer said. “The reason I think that it’s so important to focus on reducing harm internally is that police are over-policing and, if police are actively hurting people in the community, that has cascading effects for whole neighborhoods. … So, yes, you have to change the soil, but you also have to make sure that law enforcement isn’t contaminating the soil.”
Magee called for increased transparency and public access to transactions at the Sheriff’s Office. He said this is done through hiring dedicated professionals who are open to adjustment.
“The two most important decisions I will ever make are who I hire and who I promote,” Magee said. “Maintain your traditional values as a law enforcement officer. Maintain that each and every single day, but always borrow from other modalities.”
Public Health junior Daphne Kaplan, Students 4 Decarceration president, said in an interview with The Michigan Daily that the town hall was an important source of information for students. Kaplan said she hoped to offer students the opportunity to learn about the local politics that affect their community.
“Sheriffs do play an instrumental role within our community,” Kaplan said. “For students who might be voting in this election, whether that be in the primaries in August or in the November election as well, I think it’s really important to be informed. This is local politics and that’s really more important than we think.”
Daily News Contributor Isabel Hopson can be reached at ihopson@umich.edu.