Cops and Capitalism go hand in hand: GRPD says they will need more cops when the Amphitheater opens

Last week WOODTV8 posted a story with the headline, GRPD: Each amphitheater event will require entire shift of officers.

The WOODTV8 story quoted a GRPD cop who stated:

“It is going to put a strain on our staffing. It will take at least 24 cops initially. That is a significant number of officers. That’s an entire patrol shift. We are dedicated and committed to doing that, but it will be really difficult to do 50 times in six months.”

This is not a new sentiment on the part of the GRPD. In October of 2024, WOODTV8 also interviewed a GRPD Captain who was quoted as saying:

“We want to expand our numbers in the next couple years quite a bit. So I would say in the next couple of years — without speaking for the city commission, they’d have to approve it — but we would like to be in that 330 or 340 range. There’s a lot going on downtown with the amphitheater coming in, the soccer stadium. There’s excitement with the river transformation. There is a lot of great restaurants and nightlife down here.”

This is just one more justification for the GRPD and the City of Grand Rapids to increase the number of cops.

At last Tuesday’s Public Safety Committee meeting, which you can watch here, there was a GRPD officer saying that the department is talking about dedicating 20 or more cops per event at the Amphitheater. At 20:45 into the video Mayor LaGrand – with a smile on his face – talking about public safety and special events saying, “in plain English that means what are we going to do about the Amphitheater and the Soccer Stadium.”

Someone from the city then talks about parking issues, but at about 32:50 into the video, where a GRPD officer is talking about crosswalks, he then says “it’s going to take at least 24 officers to police those intersections.” The cop was specifically referring to just the Amphitheater events and the need to have at least 24 cops for so-called safety.

In the fall of 2025, I reported that the Amphitheater had already used $80 million in public funding for that Grand Action 2.0-led project. Thus, the public – without public consent – has been fleeced of $80 million for the Amphitheater and will be paying for at least 24 GRPD cops to work the Amphitheater events, to make sure that tourists and people with money will be protected from unhoused people or political dissidents who might interrupt their plans to have dinner & drinks before attending live concerts with overpriced tickets.

This is the natural outcomes within the system of Capitalism, where the public pays a large portion of the bill, while private business reap the rewards and get protect by the cops so their profits aren’t interrupted. As Brian Bean says in his important book, Their End is Our Beginning: Cops, Capitalism and Abolition:

“Cops patrol, maintain, recreate, enforce, and repress resistance to a racist capitalist system. Thus, the abolition of the police requires a breaking with capitalism. Abolitionist politics have always been a contested field, with anticapitalist politics a prominent, if not dominant, tendency. Angela Davis, one of the more prominent abolitionist figures, explains, “Ultimately we are going to have to dismantle this system and move in a socialist direction.” Mariame Kaba states, “We’re not going to abolish the police, if we don’t abolish capitalism by the way! It ain’t going to happen.”

Cops and Capitalism go hand in hand. The Capitalist Class creates laws that allows them to expand their wealth, then uses cops to protect their assets and their ability to expand their profits and the expense of others. In Grand Rapids the Capitalist Class is made up of the DeVos, Meijer and Van Andel families, who will ultimately reap the benefits of the ongoing push to add add more cops to the GR Police Department, which also means that BIPOC communities will be at an even greater risk of being brutalized by the GRPD.