GRPD Chief Winstrom just lied to a reporter from MLive

Yesterday, MLive posted an article entitled, Grand Rapids leaders face calls to drop charges after pro-Palestinian protesters arrested.

The article is pretty straight forward on what happened at a recent Palestine Solidarity protest in downtown Grand Rapids and why the group was calling on GR City officials to drop charges against people. However, the reporter included comments from Grand Rapids Police Chief Eric Winstrom about why they arrested four people during last week’s protest. In one part, the MLive article states:

Grand Rapids Police Chief Eric Winstrom said his department often uses discretion in enforcing that rule, giving more leniency to protests that are spontaneous, like the march that happened after the city released body camera footage of the killing of Patrick Lyoya in April 2022 by a now-former Grand Rapids police officer.

I’m sorry, the example that Winstrom gave here wasn’t discretion, it was because they knew that if the GRPD had tried to prevent people from marching the streets right after the public saw the footage of then officer Christopher Schurr shoot Patrick Lyoya in the back of the head while sitting on top of him, things would have escalated even further.

The MLive article then states:

He (Winstrom) mentioned an instance when protesters marched through a neighborhood near Martin Luther King Park, blocking off traffic and an ambulance that he said was attempting to get through.

This statement here, that the march to Rep. Scholten’s home because she is complicit in genocide, did NOT precent an ambulance from getting through, since at that point the ambulance had come from the north entrance of a side street next to MLK Park and the protest had stopped a few houses south of where the ambulance needed to go. I know, I was there doing crowd safety. Chief Winstrom didn’t show up until later, which means his comment is an outright lie!

In addition, what Chief Winstrom failed to acknowledge in his comments about what happened late last year at MLK Park, is that he sent 10 GRPD cruisers to that protest and at the very end they arrested the person who was driving a safety car behind the march in order to keep people safe and prevent a motorist from ramming into the marchers. This has been a standard tactic that marches have at least since what happened in Charlottesville in 2017, when a white supremacist drove into the crowd of people who were protesting the white supremacist rally, killing one person.

In fact, Chief Winstrom instructed his cops to do the same thing during a march to demand justice for Patrick Lyoya just last month, which also included targeting two BIPOC activists and charging them with misdemeanors and in one case a felony weeks after the march took place, which I wrote about in my recent article, The criminalization of dissent in Grand Rapids.

Near the end of the MLive article Winstrom states: “It’s not just about their First Amendment rights; just because you have a right to speak doesn’t mean you have the right to communicate your message in an illegal way to people who aren’t interested in hearing it. You don’t have a right to be heard that way.” How the hell does Winstrom know who wants to hear the message from people demanding justice? He doesn’t, so Winstrom should just shut the hell up.

Marching in the streets is not illegal, but the City of Grand Rapids and Chief Winstrom has decided it is. What is really at issue is that the City of Grand Rapids doesn’t want people disrupting business as usual, especially in downtown Grand Rapids. And lets be clear about who is putting pressure on the City of Grand Rapids and the GRPD for criminalizing dissent. The people who run this city, those who own most of the property downtown, the GR Chamber of Commerce and those who have family names on some of the buildings, are the ones who do not want any kind of disruption to take place, especially since it disrupts their ability to increase their profits.