By: Kellan

An unprecedented situation among Grand Rapids city officials occurred on Tuesday, November 17th, 2020, when the Committee of the Whole voted on a 3-3 split decision to refuse $500,000 in CARES act money offered to the city by Kent County Commission for “violence prevention.” Was this situation unprecedented? Was the refusal of the money just another event in an almost decade-long Grand Rapids Police Department driven saga of surveillance? Was the money really for violence prevention?

To find out why the Commissioners of Grand Rapids refused the $500,000, we have to understand how this sum of cash was first offered to them. This tale begins with ShotSpotter, a seldom known company, and their surveillance-based technology.

The Case Against ShotSpotter

ShotSpotter is a publicly-traded company (NASDAQ: SSTI) that provides gunshot detection technology to both private and public consumers, the latter of which are mostly police departments. Aside from the implications of furthering the prison industrial complex in Michigan—that is, transferring large sums of state funds into a private company’s bank accounts to “prevent violence” and put more people in jail—ShotSpotter has another secret: the technology doesn’t work as good as they say it does.

Machine learning is a software development concept that can do great things, but it is understood that error in a statistical model is natural. ShotSpotter proudly advertises that it uses machine learning to differentiate between sounds like a gunshot and sounds like a vehicle’s exhaust backfire. In practice, ShotSpotter’s tech is shamefully inaccurate.

Take the case of Silvon Simmons: an unarmed Black gentleman in Rochester, New York, who was ambushed by police in his friend’s driveway after getting beer and cigarettes. Silvon ran for his life and was shot in the back three times by Officer Joseph Ferrigno. With his partner’s help, Ferrigno fraudulently charged Silvon with Attempted Murder of a Police Officer, saying that Silvon shot back at Ferrigno. Silvon then spent 18 months in a corrections facility.

In court, the prosecution used ShotSpotter gunshot tapings as evidence that Silvon shot back. “Compelling” audio-based recordings were incredibly effective at getting the jury’s attention. Silvon’s defenders found that ShotSpotter tech originally registered the shots as helicopter noise. It was not until the Rochester Police Department contacted ShotSpotter and alerted that there should be gunshots in the area that ShotSpotter initially registered three shots. Subsequent calls between ShotSpotter and RPD miraculously registered five shots! When brought this evidence, the Judge saw how subjective ShotSpotter data was and called it a mistrial. Silvon Simmons was able to go back home but not before RPD Officers berated Silvon as they left the courtroom.

Silvon is now suing the Rochester Police Department and ShotSpotter for making a mockery of his civil liberties. A singular case reveals that ShotSpotter is just another tool used by police to commit malpractice. The marketing lies ShotSpotter utilizes to sell its capital to customers are the only thing keeping ShotSpotter’s $377 million market cap artificially inflated.

A Coalition Formed

When the City of Grand Rapids announced that Chief Payne of the Grand Rapids Police Department would be holding two town halls on November 2nd and November 5th, the Grand Rapids DSA Political Action working group went into action. Before showing up to the town halls, the Political Action working group researched ShotSpotter, drafted scripts for its members (and others) to use when they called in, and organized with other groups to educate and build a powerful political force. People of all types were able to make educated opinions about ShotSpotter. This allowed everybody who called in to express their distaste for the idea or even provide alternative solutions. 

At the November 10th Grand Rapids City Commission meeting, a coalition was formed between Justice for Black Lives, Defund the GRPD, Grand Rapids United Progressives, People’s Budget GR, Socialist Alternative, the GRDSA Political Action working group, and other allies. Callers expressed their opposition to the using relief money to fund a billion-dollar company. The Commissioners then responded with their statements, and some even made attacks, noting that they heard from “a lot of white people, very few Black people.” This was even said as a legitimate statement to the Black leaders of some of the groups mentioned above. Public comments were taken by phone!

In the span of a week, culminating in the decision by the Committee of the Whole to reject the $500,000 on November 17th, City Manager Mark Washington negotiated with the Kent County Commission to apply other uses of the money. The county stayed firm in its decision. They did not let the money have a chance at being applied to any other “service” than the GRPD.

While the money is not in the GRPD’s hands, ShotSpotter’s ambitions have not ended in Grand Rapids. The item up for vote had a letter to the Commission from Chief Payne, who informed the public that ShotSpotter would try to run a pilot program in willing neighborhoods and, from that program, report the findings. This pilot program could change the minds of the Commission and enable ShotSpotter to transact real business in the months ahead.

What’s Ahead in the Landscape?

Capitalists run the city of Grand Rapids and, as such, they will shape the future of how it operates and interacts with other capitalists. The police are a service provided by the government and are especially favored by the capitalists because they force “law and order” on working-class citizens to keep them in line. So it is no surprise that new investments into the GRPD are being planned or already in place.

As of this writing, the Grand Rapids City Commissioners voted on amendments to the FY2021 budget that gives $1.3M more to the GRPD. $1.1M of the sum value will go to extend the Homeless Outreach Team’s shift schedule until June-July 2021 during an unprecedented rise in unhoused individuals in Grand Rapids. The rest will go to Operation Safe Neighborhoods for GRPD to patrol more in the street in areas affected by gun violence.

An influx of new money to the GRPD will allow cops to start buying items on their oppression wishlist. Documents from the GRPD show that police will spend the money on aerial drones to create a mechanized “first-response system.” While that sounds good on paper, it is really hard to ignore the distinctive surveillance advantage that drones could bring to the oppressing force of the ruling class state.

A true people’s state would not ignore the demands of its citizens. Money being spent on tools of oppression should instead be spent on addressing the city’s imminent needs. Issues stemming from lack of housing, food insecurity, and a health crisis could be greatly alleviated for Grand Rapids citizens. The city must redirect its priorities away from dismal money sinks such as the police department and attracting foreign industry through tax breaks. As tax-paying citizens of Grand Rapids, we deserve the right to direct these funds and receive relief as we see fit. To create a socialist society, we must rigorously organize together to wrest control of all the money and power of the oppressors in the communities we live in.

The post Grand Rapids, ShotSpotter, and the GRPD appeared first on Grand Rapids Democratic Socialists of America.

This blog originally appeared in the November 2020 edition of What’s Left; the GRDSA newsletter

A concept has been inserting itself into national conversation. This concept aims to combat the ever growing, violent police state that some of us are only beginning to find ourselves in. It is presented as one of the vital answers to dealing with the overt militarization, and thoughtless—unneeded—spending of U.S. workers’ tax dollars. The concept is simply this: defund the police.

The idea of police defunding has been around for a while. And its underlying message is simple. Take money away from the police departments and use it to create or improve specialized services that specifically help the local community. Constituents of cities such as Los Angeles, CA and New York City, NY have been trying to put a rein on yearly increases in police spending (the latter of which is now up to ~$6 billion in police budget).

Grand Rapids has also had a large community coalition formed on the stance of defunding the GRPD and using those funds for community development. Groups such as Defund the GRPD, Justice For Black Lives, Family Over Everything (FOE), Bimose Ode, Together We Are Safe, I Am Deeply Rooted Inc. and more have been on the front lines of making change. The People’s Budget GR is another organization that seeks to change the way public money is being spent in our city.

Currently, the Grand Rapids city commission created a budget for the 2020 fiscal year that allowed for a ~39% share of the city’s General Fund to go to law enforcement. Community personnel such as The People’s Budget GR have been fighting to take the police’s share of the fund down to 32% by FY 2021, which is codified in the Grand Rapids City Charter as the minimum share of the General Fund that can be spent on law enforcement.

On the night of July 7th, 2020, a city commission meeting went underway to bring up a vote on whether to defund the Grand Rapids Police Department (GRPD) from 39% to 32% for fiscal year 2020. The vote to defund $9 million from police to our communities almost advanced until the Grand Rapids legal department, in extensive language, had two main points of contention. The first is that a change to the budget on that level would need to be approved by the city manager; involving specifics of where the money would be coming from as well as where it would be going. The second is that it was also suggested to not be “a legally sound decision” to put the issue of defunding the police to a vote when the Grand Rapids city manager does not agree with the item to be cut from the budget. Since our city manager, Mark Washington, does not have solidarity with the movement, our police have yet-again been given the people’s taxes to oppress and harass the public instead of helping to build the local communities.

Some people balk at the concept of defunding the police. They fear that if the police were defunded, their safety would be compromised! Thousands of gunshots would ring through the air and beloved local businesses would be broken into and looted all day and night! All this because the police would not have the resources needed to actually prevent a crime. This is false for many reasons. One of which is the fact that the police are not a method of crime prevention. They are a resource that can only mitigate crime and its effects. Their argument is a bad faith reduction of the concept of defunding the police. Not only would the aforementioned level of chaos not occur; actual crime prevention measures that stem from economic and social investment in local communities would flourish. Incidents involving mental health distress would be moved from the responsibility of the police to groups that are trained to deal with people in these highly specialized situations!

The city of Austin, Texas has one of the most recent success stories of defunding their local law enforcement and, in turn, creating new opportunities for their community through public services. Citizens set out to organize and educate effectively enough to cut their local police force’s budget by one third, roughly $150 million dollars. This isn’t happening without a fight from opposing forces. Texas Governor Greg Abbot has since threatened to freeze increases to property taxes in Texas cities that defund the police. A reactionary group local to the Austin area even put up a billboard warning incoming traffic of the fact that police were defunded. The dramatic measures taken by the opposition show that their ideologies are being effectively challenged. Their actions are a direct retaliation to the national attention that the campaign continues to achieve.

Individuals who feel that the national problems concerning police can go away through reformative measures are mistaken, and usually hold these views in order to directly oppose any form of defunding the police. Reformism is the political philosophy of change that tries to improve or amend an existing political structure. Defunding the police, on the other hand, is a form of abolition that seeks to replace major portions of the policing system with a new system that is more passionate, and more economically viable. Reformists will always find new ways of spending money on the police that never reach the intended results of progress. These individuals find the act of training or even hiring more officers to be an acceptable response to the unaccountable violence that affects minorities and poor people every day. “An officer on every street corner, no matter the cost!”, they say. Ignoring the devastating toll such police budget increases would take on our already struggling community.

These funds almost always come out of the budgets of community development projects in poorer neighborhoods, or our public schools. Systemic racism has guaranteed that Grand Rapids’ third ward, which has the highest percentage of African American population within the city, is consistently given an order of magnitude less funding than other city wards. Corruption and hard-headedness in our governing body has allowed Grand Rapids Public Schools (GRPS) to revise their FY 2020-2021 budget and cut an extra $10.6 million dollars from their operating costs. These cuts include a $300 per pupil reduction in the budget in addition to the $350 per pupil budget reduction of the year before. Did GRPS even think to cut the police officers they use in public schools? No. They would rather use their busses to shuttle loads of police to protests. Reformative measures applied to the policing system will not work, and have created the violent state-sanctioned gangs that the working class deals with to this day. We must take the route of abolition.

Of course there are reasons to apply the same amount of pressure to the GRPD as much as other cities have done to theirs. The GRPD are like every other police department, in that they retaliate with judicial force anything that is different from what they consider as “illegal”. That sentiment was undoubtedly shown during the most recent string of protests in Grand Rapids, as officers have riled up crowds by showing up in militarized riot gear, and performed overt methods of force on the public such as shooting a peaceful protestor in the face with a smoke canister.

Policing in the United States of America is simply a system designed to uphold the inequalities that are considered as hot-button issues in public sentiment. Household inequality, wealth inequality, and civil inequality will never see improvement when we, as a country, try and fix it with violent forces that are trained to treat each one of us as enemies. We will never see progress in trying to reform a policing system that, from the start, was built on racial and economic oppression. Defunding the police is the abolitionists path towards liberation from the oppressive state regime and the abhorrent violence and suffering it causes on our communities.

Editors Note (11/27/2020): Updated to add Black and Indigenous led organizations that are working towards defunding the GRPD

The post An Address on Defunding the Police appeared first on Grand Rapids Democratic Socialists of America.

COVID-19 Response on Mailchimp.

The post GRDSA Emergency Mutual Aid Response To COVID-19 appeared first on Grand Rapids Democratic Socialists of America.

February 2020 Newsletter on Mailchimp.

The newsletter has been renamed to What’s Left for upcoming publications.

The post Newsletter – February 2020 (Last issue titled “The Calder Manifesto”) appeared first on Grand Rapids Democratic Socialists of America.