FOIA request took more than a year to get regarding GRPD surveillance and arrests of those protesting Patrick Lyoya’s murder
On May 4, 2023, I submitted a FOIA request to the GRPD to obtain documents and communication from the GRPD regarding their surveillance and arrests of people who were protesting the murder of Patrick Lyoya. The FOIA request covered the period of April 4, 2022 to April 4, 2023, which was the one year anniversary of Patrick’s death.
The GRPD has been receiving a substantial increase in FOIA requests, so I was told that it might take 8 – 12 months. In November of 2023, the GRPD requested more funding and more staffing to assist with the increase in FOIA requests, which Grand Rapids City Officials approved. I wrote about the city’s decision to provide more funding to the GRPD, but despite the additional staff I did not receive the final FOIA requested documents until late this summer. Therefore, even with the added staffing the GRPD did not released the requested FOIA documents until 14 months after my initial request. You can see a breakdown of the cost of the FOIA request here.
There were 2 main documents that I received, one that was called Additional Incident Reports – Redacted, which provides the GRPD version of what happened during the various protests of 2022. The second set of documents was entitled Combined Additional Documents – Redacted.
I’ll address the second set of documents, primarily because so much of these documents are redacted that it is difficult to address what took place. You can read headings like React Team One, or Operational Plans. In both cases everything but the heading is redacted, except for the maps, the City’s free speech policy, Dispersal Announcements and some of the flyers that the community made for the various protests demanding Justice for Patrick Lyoya. You can see on page 89 of this set of documents, that the GRPD had included a screenshot of the protest organized on May 4th by the Comrades Collective at the spot where Patrick Lyoya was murdered by the GRPD. There were also several pages with the heading Situational Awareness – Saturday Protest, with all details redacted.
The documents that read Additional Incident Reports – Redacted, only redacts names and license plate numbers. This set of documents is 66 pages long and is fundamentally what happened from the point of view of the GRPD. There are a couple of things worth pointing out here, that the GRPD demonstrate contempt for people who engage in disruptive protests, plus they continuously remark that the police officers felt threatened by the protesters and therefore had to arrest them. Many of these documents are also quite repetitive.
What this process tells me, as someone who has requested Freedom of Information Act documents on numerous occasions, is that the GRPD spend a tremendous amount of energy monitoring and harassing people who engage in public protests or forms of Direct Action. Secondly, there are likely documents that the GRPD didn’t release, precisely because of the fact that they can withhold whatever documents they want to, since the only way to try to obtain all documents is to take them to court. Going to court is extremely expensive, especially for those who do not shy away from protesting or disruptive actions.
A third important point to make here is that the GRPD will always redact details of the protests, along with whatever plans they have to contain and suppress organized resistance. This means that we will never know what their plans are ahead of time, which is exactly why much of these documents are redacted. The GRPD, with the backing of the City of Grand Rapids, has most of the power in these circumstances, and they don’t plan on giving up the power to contain and suppress social movements that are demanding justice.
Lastly, it is worth noting that when it comes to holding the GRPD accountable, it is a false notion. The GRPD gets to do what it wants, there is no real transparency and they can act with impunity on these matters. Think about the fact that Patrick Lyoya was murdered over 2 years and 5 months ago and still former cop Christopher Schurr is free and has note gone to trial for his decision to shoot Patrick Lyoya in the back of the head.
Additional sourcing: Below are numerous articles that GRIID posted regarding many of the protests that are cited in the GRPD FOIA’d documents. These post are chronological from the bottom up.
Grand Rapids Institute for Information Democracy 
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