The ruling by the Kent County Prosecutor to not charge the cops that killed Da’Quain Johnson was expected, because the carceral state always protects their own

“People have a right to use deadly force in the defense of others,” Becker said. “It doesn’t matter that the people who actually were maybe in the danger — as the person perceived it — didn’t fire. You still have a right to use immediately deadly force when you perceive that it may be necessary to protect the lives of others, and that’s what these three officers were doing. They thought their fellow officer (was) in danger. …. One of the officers said, ‘He’s pointing the gun at me.’ And so they reacted at that point in time.”

The above comments came from Kent County Prosecutor Chris Becker during a Press Conference he held in 2024, comments which resulted in not charging the GRPD with wrong doing in the death of Hank Wymer.

At Thursday’s Press Conference, Kent County Prosecutor Chris Becker essentially said the same thing regarding the two GRPD officers who were directly responsible for the death of Da’Quain Johnson. What is important to note is that Christopher Carlson, the GRPD cop that shot Da’Quain Johnson multiple times also shot and killed Hank Wymer. The GRPD cop who released the police dog was Austin Diekevers, a police dog that mauled Da’Quain Johnson, just before Christopher Carlson shot him.

One thing that we have to come to terms with is that the police can kill anyone they want to if they feel that their lives are in danger. This doesn’t mean that they are actually in danger, they just have to believe, feel, or perceive that their lives are in danger. This is how the laws around using deadly force are designed, which is to say they are designed to protect cops and to protect the carceral state. In other words, it is by design.

The mother of Da’Quain Johnson knew this, since she stated clearly in her reaction to the prosecutor’s decision that she knew that the cops would not be charged in the death of her son.

The system isn’t broken, it is designed this way

According to https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/, police in the US have already killed 268 people in 2026, and that only includes up to March 18th. The same day that the GRPD killed Da’Quain Johnson on February 18th, the police had killed three other people across the US. And let’s be painfully clear, Black people are nearly 3 times more likely to be killed by police than white people.

As I have written previously, the DeVos family alone contributed $89,600 to Chris Becker over the past 3 election cycles, which is small change for them, but it still makes their family the single largest contributor to Becker’s campaign. There is one point about the contributions in 2020 and 2024, which I believe to be relevant as well, as it speaks to the longterm interests of Billionaires like the DeVos family.

The DeVos family has all of their foundation offices, their financial investment firm, RDV Corp, Windquest and a slew of hotels they own, all of which are located in downtown Grand Rapids. The Capitalist Class has vested interests that must be protected by the state and Becker has not disappointed in the cases he presided over regarding property destruction during the riot/uprising of 2020.

It is deeply troubling that Chris Becker has relied on the DeVos family and other members of the Grand Rapids Power Structure to get elected to the Prosecutor’s Office, and that their contributions increased after their investments were threatened by protestors in 2020 and the continued resistance since then up until today.

I can’t help but believe that the DeVos family continues to have conversations with Grand Rapids and Kent County elected officials over the potential threat to their downtown interests in the aftermath of the GRPD murder of Patrick Lyoya and now Da’Quain Johnson.  After all, this is how systems of power function and we need to come to terms with this. The legal system in Kent County is not broken, it is doing exactly what it was designed to do – protect property and the financial interests of those with power. Once we understand this, we can develop more effective strategies of resistance.