Michigan Daily on DRG4P
Washtenaw County Prosecutor Brian Mackie will face a challenge at the ballots this November from a grassroots activist who aims to bring police accountability and voter engagement to the forefront of county politics.
Mackie’s challenger is D’Real Graham, program coordinator for 826michigan—a volunteer educational organization. Graham said he wants the role of county prosecutor to be more visible to the public so voters will make informed decisions and not blindly vote along party lines.
“When you think about corrections and who is making decisions, when you identify leadership, the county prosecutor is high on the list,” Graham said. “If we are hoping to have local officials ready to amplify our values we have to know them, we have to talk to them, we have to challenge them.”
A teacher professionally, Graham hopes to increase civic engagement at the local level and greater transparency overall.
“If we don’t understand how the current system operates, we won’t understand how we are losing a workforce every 10 years,” Graham said. “We have more people entering the county jail than we have graduating from Eastern Michigan University. That should register as a problem for … anyone in this community.”
Mackie could not be reached for comment …
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Radical Washtenaw 
I’m not going to “like” D’Real’s campaign for prosecutor mainly because I think the whole CJ system needs to be abolished, not just reformed or run by the “right” people. It works just the way it was designed, is the problem, while what the majority of us want for our world is better than the white supremacy our justice system was created to support now, though. Our new dreams of America call for a whole new type of institution to replace the prison industrial complex, one designed to address and ameliorate real harm in the community, not just control the masses being harmed the most (lest we all rise up and overthrow the power elite)…Still, I dig what he’s trying to do here. And yeah, it’s high time for Mackie to go and someone who’s more oriented towards social justice to show more leadership in the county prosecutor’s office. This community is so stuck in the 1980’s sometimes, we still think South African apartheid is worse than our own…like there’s no blood on American-mined jewels, you know?