Police Union Paints Grim Picture of Grand Rapids—and Why Defunding Should Not Occur

By Grand Rapids Anonymous
Thursday, June 18, 2020 at 6:24:00 P.M. EDT

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) — The Grand Rapids police officers unions are urging residents to tell city leaders not to cut some $9.4 million from the department’s funding.

Amid nationwide calls to cut police funding and redirect the cash to other community projects, a Grand Rapids commissioner has floated reducing the Grand Rapids Police Department’s share of the general fund from nearly 39% to the city charter-mandated 32% minimum. That would decrease GRPD’s current $55.1 million portion to $45.7 million.

During a Thursday afternoon press conference, the Grand Rapids Police Officers Association and Grand Rapids Police Command Officers Association said the move would lead to dozens of layoffs and negatively affect people who live in high-crime areas that the unions say already don’t have enough police presence.

“The residents … who continue to call the GRPD for help will be disparately affected if the GRPD is defunded,” a joint release from the unions read in part.

[GRA: They deserve to be the group most affected—the entire commotion is their doing—starting with the ever-increasing negro crime wave and continuing with black complaints against cops.]

The unions said if the $9.4 million cut happens, GRPD would lose 78 officers who “represent the most diverse segment of our department” and all its interns, who are part of a diverse hiring initiative.

[GRA: Maybe not a bad idea after all, (chuckle).]

They said the layoffs would necessitate broad reorganizing that would mean only the most serious crimes are investigated. They painted that as a grim situation, citing a number of statistics including 17 homicides in the city so far this year [GRA: Same as all of 2019] and about an 11% increase in violent crime and an about 32% increase in gun crime in the first quarter.

While the release didn’t explicitly address recent protests, it did note that “we have also been experiencing consistent incidents where large groups of individuals have unlawfully been interfering with traffic in major intersections,” adding that those incidents had involved reports of shots fired and delayed some emergency responses.

GRA: My bet is they cut the police budget by some amount less than 9.4 million—trying to please both the union AND BLM/NAACP.
--GR Anonymous—I’m a white survivalist

By Grand Rapids Anonymous
Thursday, June 18, 2020 at 10:10:00 P.M. EDT

Just one more thing about the proposed police budget cuts:
The police union described Grand Rapids as “a community in crisis.”
Of course that’s a description that fits any city with blacks being over 2-3% of the population—but especially of cities with 10-20% blacks—like I believe we are.
--GRA

Bad news, GRA, though I’m sure this won’t shock you. GR is over 20% black. The Census Bureau’s July 1, 2019 estimate has GR with 201,013 residents, of whom 19.2% are “Black or African American alone,” 5.0% are “Two or More Races,” 15.9% are “Hispanic or Latino,” and a mere 59.4% are “White alone, not Hispanic or Latino.”