STERLING HEIGHTS, Michigan — James Craig, the recently retired Detroit police chief who has served in law enforcement for the past four decades, will soon announce that he is seeking the Republican Party’s nomination to challenge Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in 2022.
Craig, who formed an exploratory committee in July, said he is spending his time traveling to all corners of the state, in particular to its forgotten poor urban neighborhoods and rural enclaves — places whose needs and problems are often overlooked.
“The people who are in charge of governing our state need to make decisions that are in the best interest of the state,” Craig said in an interview with the Washington Examiner. “They need to include the people who live in vulnerable communities, who, by the way, happened to be people of color, and nobody speaks to them. The same can be said of the isolated rural communities, both of which, by the way, share many of the same problems.”
Craig has been hosting small-business roundtables, talking to law enforcement, and meeting with ordinary people. He said he is finding that the rising crime rate and a variety of education issues have voters concerned, as do escalating inflation and an absent workforce.
Craig, who retired in June after eight years as Detroit’s police chief, served 30 years at the Los Angeles Police Department and also had stints as chief in Cincinnati, Ohio, and Portland, Maine. He said he came back home during a tough time. “I know what needs to happen when you talk about public safety,” he said. “It’s more than just reform and having police department understand how to work with community — the elephant in the room is the prosecutor in the court.”
Craig said police departments can go out and arrest the right people. “But it does nothing if you have a violent felon in custody, carrying a gun illegally, only to find out that that person’s released back into the community,” he said. “He or she is not going to be a Boy Scout or a Girl Scout.”
Craig said he has appointed a team of sheriffs, including both Republicans and Democrats, that he expects to grow in size, to recommend new laws to support law enforcement.
Craig, 65, said he takes issue with how Whitmer has affected small-businesses operations since she ordered coronavirus lockdowns last year, but he also has problems with her support for continuing the government unemployment payments long past the time they were needed.
Michigan is one of 24 states, 22 of them with Democratic governors, that have kept the extra $300 in weekly unemployment benefits on top of the federal unemployment benefits, which is roughly the same amount, giving those who are unemployed $600 a week in benefits.
Small businesses across the state and the country say that this discourages people from going back to work and is the main cause of a nationwide labor shortage that has disrupted services and the movement of commerce throughout the supply chain. The labor shortage has left many small-business owners, still reeling from last year’s shutdowns, now facing a different yet equally daunting problem.
Craig said that small businesses, as with poor isolated communities, have also felt frozen out by the Whitmer administration. “Who speaks for them?” he asked. “Big decisions are made to shut down. Big decisions are made to give out the handouts. Both are killing small-business shops. They’ve gone through the height of the pandemic — now they can’t get people to come to work.”
Craig expressed doubts that Whitmer has spent any time talking to small-business owners about this problem — or at least that she has listened to them.
“I have,” he said. “Getting people back into the workforce is a top priority that I’m hearing from small-business owners. If they can’t get people to come and work, they’re going to have to shut their businesses down.”
Craig said he cannot really sympathize with the idea of people not wanting to work. “We grew up with a strong work ethic,” he said. “I’ve been working since I was 14. When we think about generational poverty, we all know what government handouts have done in fostering generational problems. And so handouts don’t work. And I’m not suggesting that people don’t need help, and people should seek help. Then you give them a helping hand.”
On education, he said parents deserve school choice, particularly in vulnerable nonwhite neighborhoods. “They want to send their kids to a good school. And I think I draw my own personal experience. Fortunately, I had both parents growing up, and they both had significant influence on me. But even as a young man, I knew that there was a high school that I wanted to go to. It wasn’t choice. And it was a high school that you have to compete to get in. And I got in, and I know it made a big difference in me professionally over the years,” he said.
In fact, it was school choice he said that began his transformation to conservatism after living and working in Detroit and Los Angeles. “I really began to question why I was a Democrat,” he said. What solidified it for him was when he became the chief of police in Portland, Maine. “One of the responsibilities of the chief of police was to approve concealed pistol license,” he said. “And so, coming out of California, where it was really an act of God to get a concealed pistol license, I was conditioned. These conceal pistol licenses just didn’t happen.”
He started by simply denying all of the requests from the stack piled up on his desk. Then his staff asked him if he knew where he was.
“I’m in Portland, Maine,” he deadpanned.
His staff told him he may not know this, but people love their guns in Portland. And oh, by the way, there is also low crime here.
“So I went home that weekend and reflected on that one statement: ‘We love our guns, and we have low crime.’ And candidly, that really got me thinking that maybe I was a Republican,” he said. “I went back to work that following Monday. Approve, approve, approve, approve. Because it made so much sense.”
“I grew on the West Side of Detroit — very modest, middle class,” he said. “My mom was an influence back then. She read, read, read, and then after all my siblings grew up, she earned an undergraduate and a graduate degree in what I would consider record time. So she was an inspiration to me educationally.”
His father, who had been a military police officer in the Army, was unable to fulfill his dream of a civilian career. “He wanted to be a police officer,” said Craig. “But then it was not common as an African American to get hired into a police department that was then predominantly Caucasian, but the city was becoming predominantly African American.”
His father instead drove a bus, moved up in the ranks into a high-level management position, and eventually served as a reserve officer for the Detroit Police Department during the 1967 riot.
“I ended up serving at the same station when I went on to become a Detroit police officer at 19 years old,” he said.
“I know what struggle looks like,” Craig added. “And I know because I’ve worked in high-crime areas, whether it was in South L.A. or Detroit or Cincinnati, leading that department and understanding the neighborhoods that were most challenged.”
Craig said last year when cities around this country were on fire and people who sat in seats of influence did nothing, said nothing, and let their police officers become demonized and let their cities burn, he refused to let that happen in Detroit, saying, “As a leader of this police department, I was not going to retreat and let a mob come in and take over and ruin the city. I refused to let that happen.”
Craig said Whitmer’s lack of leadership is what drew him to this point. “It is more important today, both at the state and national level and at the local level, that there is a vision and leaders collaborate. That does not mean that we’re going to always agree on different sides of the aisle, but when it comes to big decisions, it has to be collaborative.”
Too many of Whitmer’s decisions were unilateral, he said. “And that leaves out too many voices.”
“I’ve always been passionate about public service, and I’m a lifelong public servant,” Craig said. “However, that means you serve the public and never forget that it is not about you. And that, I think, is where she lost her way.”
