Four of the newly elected members of the Board of Police Commissioners have officially been sworn in.
Henrietta Ivey, Darious Morris, Beverly Watts, and Victoria Camille, who represent Districts 1, 3, 5, and 7, respectively, were sworn in Wednesday by City Clerk Janice Winfrey at the historic Ossian Sweet House on the city’s Southeast side. Ivey, Morris and Watts all won as write-in candidates in their races.
The Board of Police Commissioners is the city’s civilian oversight board, which former Mayor Coleman Young created in 1974 to help residents have recourse when dealing with police officers accused of misconduct. The STRESS Unit, which was a Detroit police unit, began harassing, beating and killing mostly young Black men in 1971, which further damaged the relationship between the city’s law enforcement officers and the residents.
The board is also responsible for receiving and investigating non-criminal police misconduct complaints, forwarding criminal allegations to the appropriate investigating authority and serving as the final authority for imposing or reviewing disciplinary action taken against any DPD employee.
Morris said he is eager to help repair the relationship between young Detroiters and the city’s police department.
“We also need to just raise awareness of what the police commissioners do,” Morris told BridgeDetroit. “A lot of the times, when I talk to younger people about us, they think we are actually police officers. So there’s still people who aren’t sure of what we are and what we do.”
Watts also wants to work on the relationship between community members and police, which she says is “already much improved” from decades ago.
“One thing I heard a lot when I was on the campaign trail is that people want to see more police on foot patrols, beat cops,” Watts said. “So that’s something early on that I’ll be talking to (Chief Todd Bettison) about.”
Camille, the only commissioner sworn in Wednesday who made it onto the November ballot, said her first order of business is to improve constituent services and find ways to better communicate with residents in District 7.
“I want to make sure that people are educated about the board of police commissioners, they know how to file complaints, they know how to show up to meetings, they know how to provide input and expand the different ways that people have a way to provide feedback,” Camille told BridgeDetroit.
Camille, who briefly served as the board secretary in 2023, said she is familiar with the workload coming for her and her colleagues heading into 2026.
“I’m pretty familiar with District 7 and how (Commissioner Ricardo Moore) has supported people in the past, so I know that I want to continue his legacy of being accessible to community members and just helping folks get to the resources that they need,” she said.
Daniel Baxter, COO of the Detroit Elections Department and founder of the Dr. Ossian Sweet House Foundation, said he wanted to swear in the incoming members of the BOPC at the Ossian Sweet House because of its historical significance. Before the commissioners were sworn in, Baxter, who grew up in the Sweet House, gave the story of how Dr. Sweet, a Black physician, successfully beat a murder charge in 1925 after a member of a white mob was shot and killed outside of the house while trying to intimidate the family.
Four of the police officers who were supposed to protect Sweet and his family, according to Baxter, were members of the Ku Klux Klan. Baxter said it was important to remind the commissioners of how far the city and its relationship with law enforcement have come in the past 100 years.
District 4’s newly elected commissioner, Scotty Bowman, was sworn in earlier this week while Lavish Williams, the newly elected commissioner for District 2, will be sworn in Friday morning. District 6 Commissioner Lisa Carter is the only incumbent who was reelected to the board.