Metro Detroiters slapped with flimsy tickets linking them to hookers and drug dealers

(WXYZ) DETROIT -  

It was a route home Robert McGowan had taken dozens of times before. But on a night in August, his trip back from a Detroit house was different.  As he made a turn, Robert noticed a police car.

That officer wrote him up for a decaying license plate.  But it wasn’t until the next morning that Robert looked closer at that ticket, and saw two words that made him panic: prostitution and narcotics. 

"I was driving down the street," McGowan said.

"I wasn’t sitting with my feet hanging out the window, I wasn’t having fun skipping up the sidewalk.  I was driving home.

Turns out the cop wrote Robert up for loitering in a place known for prostitution and narcotics. It’s a misdemeanor charge with a penalty of up to $1000 and 93 days in jail.  McGowan says he got the ticket because he was profiled.     

"    He pulled me over because I don’t look like I belong here after dark and my car is not a very pretty car," he said.

What he was doing was something that doesn’t normally grab the attention of Detroit Police: mentoring a 12-year-old boy.  McGowan and his wife both mentor Jerry and his sister Linda.  Over the summer, Robert enrolled Jerry on the same Royal Oak football team his own son plays for. 

"He'd come over to our house after practice, eat dinner with us...and then right around dark we’d take him home," he said.

Michael Tonon was out after dark, too. The power company he works for dispatched him at the corner of Remington and Charleston to check on possible downed power lines. And that’s when he came face to face with a Detroit police officer, who was asking some pointed questions.

"He said, 'Didn’t I tell you there’s drugs and prostitutes (around here)?' " he recalled.

"I said, 'You wanna search my vehicle, there’s no drugs or prostitutes in here!' "

Tonon told the cop he was there for work, and even had his company call DPD to confirm it.  But that wasn’t enough.  He too got a ticket for loitering in a place of illegal occupation. 

Southfield lawyer Daniel Romano represents McGowan, Tonon and about 20 others from both city and suburb hit with the same type of violation.

"What does that mean?  I don’t know.  I don’t think the Detroit police officers know what it means.  It means what they want it to mean at the time."

Romano says the law is vaguely written and allows police to abuse it. 

"You can’t loiter when you’re at your friend’s house.  You can’t loiter if you’re moving in a car. You can’t loiter when you’re at your own home," Romano said. 

And yet that’s exactly where Otis Evans was.  Sitting on his front porch with his wife last Fall, they were both relieved to finally see Detroit Police at the home across the street.  They say for years, it’s been a haven for drugs and other narcotics. Otis was surprised when one of the officers on the scene wanted to talk to him.  

"I told him, for what," Evans asked.

"He said, 'Because I said so.'  I walked down to the bottom of the steps and he handcuffed me."

Eventually the cop took the cuffs off, but not before giving Otis that same loitering ticket.

Detroit Police Chief Ralph Godbee declined to talk about these cases. Instead he released a statement that says, in part: “…over the course of a year thousands of individuals are arrested by officers of the Detroit Police Department and many more individuals receive citations…we are not in a position…to respond to claims that cases were mishandled.”

That’s little help to McGowan, who spent months worrying about his court date thanks to those two words written on his ticket.  Last month in Judge Deborah Ford’s courtroom, he was relieved to hear two more.

Case dismissed. 

McGowan, Tonon and almost all of the two dozen people suing the city over their loitering tickets have had them thrown out of court.  Now they’re going to court to take on what they call a police department that’s out of control.  A class-action lawsuit was filed in federal court in October. 

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