Local news announces the Kent County Sheriff’s retirement, but fails to challenge her 8 years as Sheriff

Last week Kent County Sheriff Michelle LaJoye-Young announced that she was retiring in October of this year. LaJoye-Young became Sheriff in 2018 after Larry Stelma announced that he was retiring.

The local news media all reported on the Sheriff’s retirement announcement. MLive posted a short article with a few quotes from the soon to be retired Sheriff, but nothing notable about her career or her time as Sheriff since 2018.

The WOODTV8 story was longer, but also treated LaJoye-Young with kid gloves. This allowed the Sheriff space to talk about her father who was a Sheriff before her and the channel 8 reporter gave her space to talk about one memorable moment in her 8 years as Sheriff, specifically the 2020 riot in Grand Rapids. LaJoye-Young talked about how quickly her department responded to assist the GRPD and how emotional she got when talking about all the support they received the next day when they arrived in their parking lot. The Sheriff failed to mention that the GRPD initiated the violence by firing sped canisters into the crowds.

The WZZM 13 and the WXMI 17 coverage was similar to the MLive story in that it was brief with a lengthy quote from LaJoye-Young. All four of the major local commercial news agencies did report that Undersheriff Bryan Muir will seek the appointment to be the next sheriff.

What is instructive about the local news coverage on the retirement announcement from  LaJoye-Young is the consistency of how it was reported. All four of the stories treated the announcement as a personality story as opposed to providing some assessment of the Kent County Sheriff’s Office during LaJoye-Young’s tenure as Sheriff. There was little said about policy and there was certainly no desire to gauge public opinion on how they see the Kent County Sheriff’s Office.

I want to provide an overview of what GRIID has been reporting when it comes to the Kent County Sheriff’s Office and Sheriff Michelle LaJoye-Young since she took that position in 2018.

• When LaJoye-Young came on in later 2018, she inherited the contract that the Sheriff’s Office had with ICE since 2012, which you can read here. When Movimiento Cosecha learned about the contract in 2018 they began a campaign to end that contract with the Sheriff’s Office months before LaJoye-Young was elevated to that position.
• Because there was so much going on and the County was not being very transparent, the End the Contract campaign decided to submit a Freedom of Information Act request to the County regarding ICE and our campaign. You can read the 138 pages at this link, where you will see as Undersheriff LaJoye-Young was included in many of the Emails that county officials were sending out regarding Cosecha’s campaign to end the ICE contract.
• When the ICE liaison with the GRPD contacted ICE to arrest Jilmar Ramos Gomez, a former US Marine, Kent County made national news and it exposed the serious flaws with how the Kent County Sheriff was cooperating with ICE. Because of the fallout, Sheriff LaJoye-Young decided that moving forward Kent County would require signed judicial warrants in order to hold people at the Kent County Jail for ICE.
• In 2022, the Kent County Sheriff’s Office began a contract to place dozens of Flock cameras throughout Kent County, which provides additional state surveillance of the public.
• As I mentioned in yesterday’s post Cosecha and GR Rapid Response to ICE has been challenging Sheriff LaJoye-Young on sanctuary policies and specifically on the Kent County Jail holding immigrants for ICE. This is now confirmed because of a FOIA document signed by LaJoye-Young for ICE detainers.
• The news coverage of the Sheriff’s retirement announcement also fails to mention that in January and March there were two separate protests against the Kent County Jails holding immigrants for ICE.
• In addition, the news failed to mention that Rep. Scholten secured $750,000 of public funds for the Sheriff’s Office. According to the Kent Safety Network site the Kent County Sheriff’s Office already has 182 registered cameras (residential cameras) and 2229 integrated cameras or business cameras participating in this program. This means there are an additional 2411 cameras that the Kent County Sheriff’s Office can access, which also includes the Flock Cameras they have been using since 2022.
• Lastly, the local news could have asked why is there a disproportionate number of Black and Brown residents in the Kent County Jail compared to what percentage of the population they make up in Kent County. See data collected from 2024 by Linc Up.