DETROIT, Mich. — Investigators who handle complaints against Detroit officers can no longer pull police body camera video on their own, and one of the city’s police commissioners says the workaround is breaking down.
Commissioner Victoria Camille said the board’s Office of the Chief Investigator lost its direct logins in May. Since then the Detroit Police Department has supplied requested clips, but in recent weeks the investigators have faced slow turnaround, been handed the wrong segments of video and received footage that was blurred.
The board’s own public statement dates the cutoff to May 15, 2026, when the FBI, acting in concert with the state law enforcement standards commission, ended the office’s direct access to federal criminal justice information systems. That closed a practice going back 52 years. The board notes its investigators are fingerprinted, background-checked and certified on those systems, the same vetting civilian staff inside the department get.
The department says the FBI told both it and the board that the office could no longer reach databases holding that federal data. The FBI says it did not strip the access and points to the Michigan State Police, which says it does not control how agencies share camera video.
The board wants access restored through a Management Control Agreement or a memorandum of understanding. Camille has launched a petition asking residents to back the effort.
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