Six years ago this week thousands of people were demanding that the City reduced the GRPD budget, and almost won!

There are plenty of people saying that we need the GRPD, or that not all of them are bad, or they have never really invested the time to consider what defunding and abolishing the police would really look like.

The most recent GRPD assault on a young man while sitting in his car and in a driveway because he refused to show any ID should make it clear that the GRPD does what it wants, especially to BIPOC community members.

What many of us have been saying for years it that we need to defund the GRPD and invest in community care. In fact, 6 years ago this week the group Defund the GRPD held it’s first Press Conference and laid out very clear demands.

• The GRPD has a long history of intimidation, harassment and violence against the Black community in Grand Rapids. Those of us who are part of this coalition have experienced this harm and have heard from countless others who have been victimized by the GRPD. There have been numerous efforts to reform the GRPD, but we know it is now time to DeFund the GRPD.
• We are demanding that the City of Grand Rapids hold an emergency meeting by June 30 to adopt a Defunding the GRPD position, wherein the police budget will be reduced to the 32% City Charter mandated level for the upcoming fiscal year.
• We are also demanding that the money from this budget cut should be refunded to the Black community and the Black community should have complete control over how this money will be used.
• DeFunding the GRPD and Refunding Black Communities must happen if there is to be any trust built with the Black community.  It is one of the few things that will work to actively promote equity in the Black community, which is so desperately needed.
• The DeFund the GRPD Campaign Coalition believes that there are better ways to practice community safety and that Grand Rapids needs to begin the process of having deep conversation about how to practice community safety that does not rely on policing.

Within a couple of weeks the Defund the GRPD group had generated some 6,000 letters to the Grand Rapids City Commission with these demands. In the summer of 2020, we were in the midst of a pandemic, so there were no in person Grand Rapids City Commission meetings, only virtual ones. However, this did not deter people from showing up online and voicing their support for defunding the GRPD during a public comment period that lasted nearly until midnight.

The Defund the GRPD group, which was led by BIPOC activists also had the support from several grassroots, autonomous community groups such as Together We Are Safe, the Grand Rapids Area Mutual Aid Network, The People’s Budget GR, Movimiento Cosecha GR and GR Rapid Response to ICE.

On Tuesday, July 7th of 2020, 2nd Ward Commissioner Ysasi proposed to cut the funding to the GRPD by bringing it down to the 1995 City Charter mandated 32% of the budget, which would have reduced the GRPD’s budget by $9 million. Two other Grand Rapids City Commissioners, Joe Jones and Kurt Reppart also endorsed this proposal, but at the last minute the City Attorney had made a ruling after the Committee of the Whole meeting that Tuesday morning, determining that the City Commission could not vote on defunding the GRPD by an additional $9 million.

Now, the public was unaware of the fact that three Grand Rapids City Commissioners were in favor of reducing the GRPD budget by $9 million, since this information was not reported on until Wednesday, July 8th in an MLive article. There were over 100 people who called in to comment on the proposal to defund the GRPD during the City Commission meeting on July 7th, with many more waiting to comment that the city cut off. What is instructive about that meeting was that the City Attorney, the City Manager and Mayor Bliss all knew that the Commission could not vote on this matter, but failed to reveal such information at the beginning of the public meeting. Such a display of subterfuge, once again demonstrated how the City of Grand Rapids is not interested in any meaningful notion of democracy.

Grand Rapids City Manager Mark Washington did say at the time that he thinks it would be better to revisit the proposal later in the year. Mark Washington never brought it up again, although Defund the GRPD and numerous other community-based groups continued to push the issue.

There was plenty of evidence showing that that those who were opposed to defunding the GRPD were scared that such an action could happen. The Grand Rapids Police Officers Association, the GRPD union, released a statement opposing the very idea of defunding the police.

In December of 2020, the Grand Rapids Police Officer’s Association (GRPOA) created an online campaign to undermine any calls for defunding of the GRPD. Just days later an anonymous entity paid for billboards throughout Grand Rapids that opposed defunding the police.

Since the end of 2020, the Grand Rapids Police Union and the Grand Rapids Chamber of Commerce made it a point to both discredit commissioners who supported any calls to defund the GRPD, plus they provided at least $10,000 to candidates running for Grand Rapids City Commission since.

However, the efforts of Defund the GRPD weren’t limited to demands to get the City to reduce the GRPD budget by $9 million. Some of the same BIPOC organizers involved with Defund the GRPD also pressured the Pride Center to no longer allow the GRPD to have a presence at the annual Pride event, plus the Defund the GRPD and a larger coalition prevented $500,000 in federal funds that the Kent County Commission had that was proposed for the GRPD to purchase technology known as ShotSpotter. This effort was defeated in November of 2020.

I just wanted to share a bit of this recent history to demonstrate that there has been significant public support for defunding the GRPD and that calling for the same thing now is not too idealistic or unreasonable.