James Craig, Former Detroit Police Chief, Is the Tucker Carlson Favorite Gunning to Be Governor of Michigan - The Daily Beast

It was July 2020, and Nakia Wallace was on the streets of Detroit when, she says, police threw a young man to the ground and placed a knee on his neck.

The crackdown came under the leadership of James Craig, the Black chief of police in Detroit who took the reins in the city in 2013 after previous stints in Maine, Cincinnati, and the Los Angeles Police Department.

But in interviews on Fox News with the likes of Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham that began well before his retirement, Craig has defended his aggressive response last summer as the reason his city didn’t “burn” like Portland or Seattle.

“We never retreated,” he said of his police department.

Craig declined a request to be interviewed for this story, and the Detroit Police Department also declined to comment.

Despite Craig’s tagline, a slew of lawsuits have been filed against him, the Detroit Police Department, and the city over last summer’s police response to the local iteration of a nationwide revolt against racist cops.

One of the largest includes 14 protesters; Wallace is among them, along with other members of Detroit Will Breathe, a nonprofit Black Lives Matter organization founded days after Floyd’s murder.

In response, city lawyers argued the police department experienced nearly 100 straight days of protests, and that officers had been attacked with railroad spikes, frozen bottles of water, bricks, and rocks, and had lasers pointed in their eyes.

In response to Wallace’s personal claims, the city has suggested that she was taken down by an officer with two arms, and that as Wallace allegedly resisted, an officer briefly had their arm around her neck for a time period that was too short to count as a chokehold.

The original suit on behalf of protesters against the police department and city is still ongoing.

Wallace echoed that argument, explaining that she wasn’t sure why some people were shocked Craig has come out as a right-wing conservative since retiring from the Detroit Police Department on June 1.

Some, like Horace Sheffield III, a longtime city civil rights leader and pastor, said they even believed he had a good shot at winning a portion of the solidly Democratic Black voters in the city of Detroit.

After all, Sheffield said, Craig was a popular chief because of his willingness to appear at community events and seemingly hear folks out.

Although Craig said he was running on national television this week, he appeared to walk back that claim on a local Detroit radio show, stating he’d launched an “exploratory committee” and would be going on a “listening tour” before making a formal announcement after Labor Day.

“They like the job that he did,” Sheffield said of the Black community in Detroit.

He was often called on to defend the police response and rail against liberal leaders in states like New York and Chicago, becoming something of a conservative cult hero for his harsh criticism of Black Lives Matter and embrace of Donald Trump during the protests?

Adolph Mongo, a longtime Detroit political strategist for Democrats and Republicans, as well as a former city spokesperson, said Fox News was a natural fit for Craig, who he said has never been shy before cameras.

But while Craig’s talking points might be a hit for the Fox News crowd, Mongo said he believes they’re falling on deaf ears in Detroit.

Al Bartell, the owner of a Detroit clothing store that counts Craig as a longtime customer, defended the former chief.

Bartell said he believed the police department’s force over the summer was helpful for small business leaders in the city.

In addition to heightened crime and his brutal protest crackdowns, Craig has drawn criticism for integrating controversial facial-recognition technology into the police department that led to the wrongful arrests of at least three Black men during his tenure.

Craig called the arrest “sloppy investigative work” in an interview with 60 Minutes this year, but Korobkin said the chief continued to use the software despite the wrongful arrests and calls from lawmakers to pause the program.

Despite this disconnect, Mongo said Craig wasn’t a candidate that should be written off?

“The truth is, I’ve been a Republican for many years,” Craig said in the speech earlier this month, adding that he had to remain non-partisan as a police chief

While the jury is still out on whether Craig can actually attract the Black voters who make up nearly 80 percent of Detroit’s citizenry, Wallace said she was more concerned that his style might go over well elsewhere in the state, where Republicans are more dominant

“It’s a very dangerous situation to have a chief who is pandering to and aiding these kinds of violent hysterics,” Wallace said