It was 1 a.m. on April 2 when Detroit police surrounded a house on Wormer Street.
Officers — who allegedly never identified themselves — had already partially pushed open the front door. One officer allegedly had his gun drawn and “became belligerent,” ordering a man named Isaiah Daniels to open the “f—ing door” without explanation.
Inside: Carnell Givens; his sister, Cara Givens; a 17-year-old, and three small children, including a 2-year-old. “We got babies,” Daniels told officers. “Kids here.” They holstered.
Carnell Givens and Daniels said they opened the door — but told the officers they weren’t coming in without a warrant. That’s when, according to a federal lawsuit filed Tuesday, April 28, officers from the Detroit Police Department’s Special Operations Unit stormed the house and beat them anyway.
“I thought I was cool, calm, and collected. I thought I did everything I was supposed to do,” Daniels said during a news conference on April 29 announcing the lawsuit.
The complaint accuses officers from its Special Operations Unit of warrantless home invasion, beating unarmed and handcuffed residents in front of children, and then filing false reports to cover it up. It names 12 officers by name, plus “John/Jane Doe” officers and the city of Detroit. The suit seeks $10 million in damages.
The case is part of a larger, “systemic crisis” of warrantless home entries by police in Detroit and beyond, according to attorneys Todd Perkins and Joel Sklar, who filed the complaint on behalf of the Givenses and Daniels family.
The Detroit Police Department and the city of Detroit both declined to comment during ongoing litigation.
What the complaint alleges
A teenager was allegedly out past curfew. That’s what got officers to make their initial stop on April 2, according to the lawsuit. But then police alleged they saw a gun on the teen, chased him to the Givens house, and called for back-up.
When officers reached the front door, partially opening it and demanding entry, they hadn’t announced themselves as police or explained why they were there, the complaint states. But without a warrant or explanation, and with the officers’ guns drawn, Carnell Givens and Daniels wouldn’t let the officers in.
The complaint states they weren’t unreasonable about it: They asked who the officers were and why they were demanding warrantless entry into a private home at 1 a.m. where there were children inside.
They weren’t given any answers, according to the complaint: Instead: “All hell broke loose.”
Several officers stormed the home, the complaint details. Officers pushed Carnell Givens against a wall and struck him with knees and closed fists, the complaint says. One officer placed him in headlock. And once he was handcuffed and “restrained and defenseless,” two officers delivered uppercuts, body blows, and knee strikes, the complaint details.
Meanwhile, the complaint says Daniel was handcuffed, escorted to a squad car and beaten in the backseat. He was detained but released later that day without charges. Cara Givens, still in her bathrobe, was also handcuffed and assaulted, the complaint says. Her 2-year-old child was also left bleeding from wounds caused by the officers, according to the complaint.
And as for the 17-year-old inside the home who was filming everything? An officer grabbed him and threw him across a table, the complaint states.
The lawsuit doesn’t’ stop at the beatings and unlawful entry. It accuses the Detroit Police Department of a deliberate attempt to bury what happened.
According to the complaint, an officer reviewed both the police reports and the video footage from the scene and recognized the reports were “false and at odds” with what the footage showed. Despite this, Detroit police submitted a warrant to the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office seeking to charge Carnell Givens with felony assault and resisting police.
Those charges against Givens were soon dismissed by a judge “who viewed the entire encounter and was horrified,” the complaint states.
‘Systemic crisis’
The lawsuit goes beyond the events of a single night. It paints Detroit’s Special Operations Unit as a unit with a documented pattern of constitutional abuse. The complaint describes the unit as “notorious for its use of overzealous aggressive police tactics” that have produced “countless citizen grievances, official misconduct, the filing of civil rights cases, infirm warrant requests, and constitutional injuries inflicted exclusively upon Black residents in the City of Detroit.”
And unlawful entry and unconstitutional beatings go beyond Detroit, too, Perkins and Sklar said during their April 29 news conference. They pointed to a September 2024 case out of Warren.
According to a lawsuit the attorneys also filed in federal court on April 28, Warren police officers forced their way into the home of Willie and Sandra Hall — a married Black couple — without a warrant, without knocking, and without explanation, after two unrelated suspects fled a traffic stop and ran inside.
The complaint says officers pepper-sprayed the Halls, used painful physical restraint tactics, and made threats laced with profanity, all in front of their minor daughter. They thought they were going to be killed, the lawsuit states.
Despite just having undergone surgery on both her knees, “they’re throwing me on the ground. They maced me, literally, like, it felt like a whole bottle of mace. I couldn’t see. I wasn’t even fighting … and I’m screaming and telling them this the whole time,” Sandra Hall said during the April 29 news conference.
“They have to do better, because for our kids to have to grow up and see this … they’re not going to like the police.”
The couple was charged with resisting and obstructing police based on false reports, the lawsuit says. Two months later, their charges were dropped.
In response to the federal lawsuit, Warren police said it’s “without merit and disregards the facts of the incident,” alleging that the couple tried to prevent officers from arresting the suspects.
Andrea Sahouri covers criminal justice for the Detroit Free Press. Contact her at asahouri@freepress.com.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Federal suits filed against Detroit, Warren cops cite abuse of power
Reporting by Andrea May Sahouri, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press
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