Grand Rapids churches collaborate with the GRPD during the national Faith and Blue weekend

The enforcers of state violence, the cops, have been scrambling for years, especially after the creation of the Movement for Black Lives to present themselves as a social benefit.

When the massive uprising against policing happened in 2020, with calls to defund the police, even more groups emerged on the national and local scene to defend the institution of policing.

This past week there were groups all across the US and in Grand Rapids celebrating Faith and Blue week, a bizarre collaboration between faith communities and police departments. 

WXMI 17 first reported on this collaboration on Friday, with a story headlined, Faith-based discussion pushes for change, collaboration. The channel 17 story, included links to two specific events that were happening in the community.

One event was a Pray and Play basketball game, where the GRPD played youth members of the GR Alternative Correctional Experience. The second event, held on Saturday, was a Crime Awareness and Law Enforcement Community Resource Fair.

The world is truly a strange and contradictory place, where you have pastors collaborating with cops with the intent of promoting community safety. The clear contradiction is in the clergy’s failure to understand the history of policing (See Kristian Williams’ book – Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America), along with the fact that cops have been disproportionately killing Black people at a very high rate. (See https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/) 

At another level, this all makes complete sense, especially in Grand Rapids, where the GRPD has had a program for several years called Clergy on Patrol. Clergy on Patrol is where local clergy do ride alongs with the GRPD and participate in various training exercises, in an attempt to humanize cops.

The Faith and Blue campaign was begun in 2020 as a direct response to the massive uprisings in the US after George Floyd was killed by a cop, coupled with the demands to defund the police. The Faith and Blue campaign was created by the group Movement Forward, which was founded by Reverend Markel Hutchins.

The Faith and Blue mission, “was launched to facilitate safer, stronger, more just and unified communities by directly enabling local partnerships among law enforcement professionals, residents, businesses and community groups through the connections of local faith-based organizations.” The partners involved in the Faith and Blue campaign are a few Christian groups, but mostly state, regional and national law enforcement agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security.

We should see the Faith and Blue campaign simply as a desperate attempt by cops to win over public support and as an opportunity for some clergy to cash in on the funding that is being offered by such programs.