Manistee Public Extortion Director Tim Kozal Resists and Obstructs Records Release

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When Manistee resident Lee Milks was shot by Manistee Public Safety (MPS) Officer Doug Vansickle back on March 28th, 2017 in an incident that the City has taken great lengths to cover up over the last 31 months, the MPS Director was Dave Bachman who had already been scheduled to retire at the end of March.

The incident was therefore mostly out of the old director's hands (the investigation had properly been turned over to the state police) although he was quoted often enough describing what happened in the international media attention the case received, relating a subtly-changing version of events that would adapt itself over time.  When the new MPS director, Tim Kozal, took over and eventually delivered the findings of the state police investigation and explained why he thought the county prosecutor had found no impropriety, they still kept the records from going public.

              Seven days before the Milks homicide, retiring Chief Dave Bachman shows his replacement, Tim Kozal, around the department

The press conference was strategically held 93 days after, late on the Friday afternoon just before an extended holiday weekend with Fourth of July falling on Tuesday. The timing was enough to bury anything of importance that may have arisen from the investigation's conclusion if there had been anything that significantly was different than what was claimed by the MPS' early releases. The City's blockading of releasing any part of the incident (or use of force report) was being challenged at that point in a lawsuit, and had to eventually go to the court of appeals before they were released over two years later.

The Ludington Torch now has those records along with the in-car camera (dashcam) video of the two MPS cars involved at the incident. We currently have enough to explain why MPS Director Tim Kozal's statement:

"I have determined that officer Vansickle acted in compliance with Manistee Police department policy, acted appropriately in his use of deadly force and was completely justified in his actions."

Is an incorrect assessment from everything given to me so far; furthermore, there are parts of the written record that do not match the recorded version and then there's the nagging mystery of why does Vansickle's recording equipment (activated by remote by Vansickle) only start working more than eight minutes after he calmly reported that he would need backup, more than six minutes after Milks was shot. Is that policy? Is it Manistee policy to make a use of force report immediately or wait nearly three months, like it was done, apparently so it would take the MSP's investigations findings into account?

The story has mutated since day one with Chief Bachman's secondhand accounts of what happened being rather inconsistent among the media, the city manager actively blocking FOIA requests for what turned out to be completely non-exempt records according to Manistee Judge James Batzer after he finally took a look at them with instructions from the Michigan Court of Appeals.

The city through its manager and civil attorney maintained for over two years that the incident report was properly withheld from public viewing, they also did so when it became available and assigned an unexplained $246 fee for what turned out to be 15 pages of reports and two CDs with dashcam footage.

So I recently made a follow-up FOIA request so that I can give an accurate report on how the City of Manistee seems to have thrown Lee Milks under his own bus to save one of their own from a fair and transparent evaluation and violated accepted police protocols to do so. At the press conference, MPS Director Kozal acknowledged reviewing the MSP's investigation conclusion and the prosecutor's opinion on why charges would not be leveled against Vansickle, which makes those items 'public records' used by the City of Manistee, so my request was, simply put, to inspect or receive electronic copies of:

"Prosecutor Haag's opinion and the full MSP investigation of the Milk's shooting"

I had sent it to the city manager of Manistee, Thad Taylor, who has answered my FOIA requests in the past with unreasonable exemptions and/or fees in every single one. This vile person violated his share of city and state FOIA policies in doing so, lying, extorting, defrauding and doing just about everything that a public servant should be fired for doing if the Manistee city council actually provided oversight for what he does.

Thad's lack of any redeeming character traits probably left him unable to deal with his usual job of answering this request, being that the court of appeals and his own county's circuit court effectively showed he was a no good liar that had no business handling FOIA requests. So he let his police chief handle the task, and not surprisingly, Tim Kozal gave a Thad Taylor type of response complete with the usual public extortion, fraud, and violation of the city's FOIA policy.

Having used the records in making his own determination, Kozal could not deny the public's right to have them, nor could he create a credible excuse for exemptions that would go through the courts unchallenged. What he did do in his reply, however, was assign unlawful charges in an attempt to block the release.

Kozal does not claim any exemptions, so there was no reason to make hard copies, which isn't part of my request (to inspect or get e-copies), therefore charging me for 150 hard copies at 10 cents each is a means of fraudulently keeping the records away from viewing them under my terms, as per my right under the FOIA.

But where his response gets extremely silly is when he charges for three hours of office worker time (including fringe benefits) for the simple task of retrieving the MSP investigation and prosecutor opinion of this one incident. Wouldn't this all be found in one place either on-line or in a file folder?

This was probably the biggest incident that happened since 2017, and yet this poor, incompetent city worker has to take three hours of their time to find two items associated with it. Frankly, I have had the Mason County clerk, Ludington City clerk, and LPD clerk look up more esoteric things for me over the years and it has taken either a few seconds of key strokes or a quick trip to a filing cabinet to find what I needed. Mission accomplished in under a minute. Did Chief Kozal ever explain why it would take this inept lackey so long to find something that should be easily retrieved. No.

Perhaps had he read his own FOIA policy, he would understand that the City of Manistee cannot charge labor costs unless they explain it's relevance, nature, and necessity:

So perhaps had he created a strained narrative telling how it takes a trained and experienced office worker three hours to look up one file dealing with a recent major incident, the charge might have some merit. But he didn't, and there isn't any reason why a judicial officer, or anybody with any common sense, would think that this action could take over 15 minutes, nor that the cost of the search was unreasonably high to perform.

Frankly, it's terrifying seeing a person that leads a law enforcement agency engage in fraud and public extortion in order to sublimate revelation of records that will likely further show irregularities in the Milks incident due to the inability of seven-shots-to-a-septuagenarian Officer Doug Vansickle and other responding Manistee officers to follow standard, accepted, or expected police protocols.

It should make one less likely to believe Kozal portrayed the Milks incident in a fair and honest manner, and should indicate that there is an endemic problem in the City of Manistee and its police in doing things honorably, competently, and transparently.  That will be explained in some detail when I eventually  inspect or receive these records for free.