Copaganda: Deconstructing the GRPD TV series on HBO/MAX – Episode #3

Episode #1 affirmed stereotypes about Black people, thus perpetuating structural racism. The episode also demonstrated that this TV series will be a highly constructed show with the GRPD dictating the narrative about who they are and what they do.

Episode #2 once again centered on a criminal case involving Black people, where Police Chief Winstrom said people who don’t want to talk with cops suffer from “generational mistrust.”

Episode #3 begins with dramatic music and a 911 call from someone who hear shots fired near the corner of Broadway and 7th Street in northwest Grand Rapids. A white vehicle was spotted leaving the scene, which ended up going to the ER. This is the context of the episode.

The episode continues with cops getting access to commercial exterior cameras, where they see the white vehicle and a female appearing person running from the scene. Earlier that day, it was discovered that there was a domestic disturbance between the man who owned the white vehicle and a woman that the man was in a relationship with. Both the man and the woman were African American. The GRPD believes that this is the same couple that had a dispute, where gun shots were fired and the man drives to the ER.

The episode then cuts to another GRPD officer talking about how often they receive calls for domestic dispute. This comment was a set up for the next scene, where the GRPD responds to a domestic dispute, with a gun involved. In this case no one ends up injured and the boyfriend is taken into custody. One GRPD cops is heard on camera say that he doesn’t understand how any father could put his children in that kind of danger. A minute after we hear this comment, Chief Winstrom talks about both cases in the episode, stating, “This is unacceptable and we need to make it stop.” 

Winstrom then announced that the GRPD was invited to be part of the Domestic Violence Specialty Court through Kent County. Viewers are meant to believe that the GRPD is in favor of all this and that they are against Domestic Violence.

The fact is that police and domestic violence cases are problematic, as cops don’t know how to deal with domestic violence, plus they often perpetrate more harm in domestic violence cases. Here is an except from an INCITE! toolkit, entitled, Police Violence and Domestic Violence.

Mandatory arrest policies — which require police to make an arrest when they respond to domestic violence calls — have led to arbitrary arrests of survivors of domestic violence, rather than their abusers, in many cases. Such arrests subject women to further violence from the criminal justice system, including use of force during arrest, threats to remove and removal of children into state custody,8 strip searches, and other violent and degrading conditions of confinement. As one survivor who was subject to a mandatory arrest described it: “[I] [g]ot arrested like two times… That’s traumatizing…the police officer…He pushed me inside the car! He pushed me inside, ‘Tell that to the judge!’ He sees me crying and trembling and stuff. He just pushed me … ‘Shut up back there!!’ And I was crying, I said, ‘it’s not fair’… ‘Shut up!!’…He pulled me out of the car…he pushed me against [a desk].”9 Such re-traumatization of survivors, immediately following an incident of domestic violence so severe as to prompt someone to seek law enforcement intervention, is unfortunately commonplace across jurisdictions. 

The rest of Episode #3 brings viewers back to the original case, where they find the woman they believe shot her boyfriend. What makes matters worse in this episode is to have the camera crew on site where the GRPD is outside of the home of this Black woman. The GRPD compels her to come out and the camera zooms into her walking out of the house and towards the cops with her hands up.

The last 8 minutes of the episode, the Black woman is being interrogated in a room with two cops, where they keep working to get her to tell them what happened and if she shot her boyfriend or not. The GRPD then put cuffs on this woman and brings her to a holding cell until she is ready to talk more about what happened. 

As the credits are rolling, one GRPD detective is talking to the camera, acting like he is sympathetic with this woman who is likely to be charged with murder. This is really some bullshit, since it is so damn performative. The last scene then cuts to the Black woman being led out of a court room, with text on the screen saying that she is now facing 17 years in prison for shooting her boyfriend.

Like the first two episodes, Episode #3 follows the case of a Black person charged with a shooting, which further normalizes the white supremacist belief that Black people are inherently deviant and violent. This HBO/MAX TV series with the GRPD is presenting Grand Rapids as a city with a bunch of violent Black people who prey on other Black people. This narrative is nothing more than a white supremacist’s wet dream.