A Community Watch Group is Monitoring ELPD as MSU Students Return to East Lansing

If elected officials, police officers and local bars in East Lansing’s downtown won’t keep students safe, then community members will, Tashmica Torok of the Coalition for Justice told East Lansing Info ahead of Michigan State University’s welcome week.

This past weekend, members of the coalition, a civil rights-focused citizen group formed in reaction to policing controversies in East Lansing, stayed in the downtown area late at night to observe police behavior towards students and engaged the students in conversations about how to stay safe.

The group aims to foster positive interactions with young people downtown, aid those who have had too much to drink and document the actions of a police department that used force much more often last year. 

Volunteers started keeping watch over students on weekend evenings last fall after East Lansing Police officers pepper sprayed and arrested two young Black men in the downtown area. The city publicized their arrest and sought criminal charges for the men accused of fighting, only for security footage to reveal one of the men had stepped in to deescalate an altercation.

Since that incident, there have been a barrage of policing controversies in East Lansing, including police shooting and killing Isaiah Kirby, a 21-year-old Black man in April, raising questions about the department’s deescalation efforts. And most recently, local residents have decried the East Lansing Police Department, or ELPD, after a video earlier this month showed an officer repeatedly punching Myana Collins, a 20-year-old Black woman as she lay on the ground with her arms restrained behind her back.

Torok and other residents have spoken publicly condemning ELPD and calling for the removal of ELPD Chief Jennifer Brown, often citing a comment she made last year and has since apologized for, where she told WLNS, “We have a very transient population, and over the last month, starting with Welcome Weekend, we have had a disproportionate number of minorities come into the community and commit crimes, and as police officers we are simply responding to those crimes.”

Local residents and the Lansing NAACP have denounced ELPD for disproportionately using excessive force towards residents of color and the video of Collins getting punched has amplified additional concerns about local bars serving underage individuals and over serving students.

“Who protects the young people that are in downtown East Lansing? Because it’s not going to be the businesses, it’s not going to be the police,” Torok said. “How are we engineering a situation where business owners are allowed to over serve students to the point that they’re falling down in the street … the police are standing right there … it is not an OK thing to just let them go and act like we don’t know that they are in a dangerous situation. That the police in East Lansing are dangerous to young people, particularly young people who are Black and brown.”

From her observations of policing in the downtown and observations from the several other volunteers in the Coalition for Justice, Torok said police are visibly uninterested in deescalation when it comes to preventing violence in the downtown, often standing by and waiting for a situation where they then exert greater force against students of color than white students.

For many students, fall marks their first time on a college campus and during a time where officers should be focused on establishing a relationship with the community, building relationships so students seek them for help, Torok said ELPD officers are not engaging with the community.

So the adults are stepping in, Police Oversight Commission Vice Chair Kath Edsall told ELi ahead of her plans to monitor the downtown with the Coalition for Justice last weekend. She said she joined other community members outside the bars last year when city officials and business owners made the downtown sound like a war zone. 

There is not a war zone to be seen in East Lansing, Edsall said, but there is a police department that seems to be acting outrageously.

As a parent and an East Lansing resident, Edsall said she feels a level of responsibility to protect the young people coming to town from the “insane” police department. So whether it’s handing out water bottles, condoms, or chips to young adults downtown, Edsall said it’s important for the students to know there’s an adult who is invested in them getting them home safely.

“Just that kind of caring, that somebody is looking out for you when you probably are making stupid decisions,” Edsall said. “Their moms and dads aren’t here. They sent them away here. They’re trusting the university. They trust the city, and we fail them again and again and again. We fail them.”

Students will know there’s people looking out for them, but the city will also know its community is watching how the police department acts, Josh Hewitt, former member of the city’s Human Rights Commission told ELi ahead of last weekend.

Hewitt, who observed the downtown with other people from the Coalition for Justice last fall, recalled an incident from last Halloween where he said it was clear that ELPD is noticeably more aggressive towards young Black people than their white counterparts.

He said that night, former ELPD Officer Andrew Lyon responded to a group of about eight young white kids roughhousing and wrestling in the downtown area where they repeatedly ignored his verbal commands from the speaker in the police car to stop fighting. He waited about 20 seconds between verbal commands and eventually got out of the police car, reiterating his commands and the situation dispersed

That same night, Hewitt said there were two young Black kids who started dancing in the street. Lyon and another officer immediately instructed them to disperse, with a demeanor that Hewitt said showed a hastiness and a lack of patience that was afforded the white kids who ignored previous commands.

Lyon was the officer who deployed the pepper spray on two young Black men during MSU’s welcome weekend, an incident that has been heavily criticized by residents and is now the subject of lawsuits against the city. Lyon has since resigned from the department.

These are just his observations, Hewitt said, but vigilance is important and there may be members of the watch group who find themselves in a position to be an important witness to police actions.

Hewitt pointed at the person who recorded the video of an officer striking Collins on Aug. 2, making the public aware of the incident, as well as the pepper spray incident where the city painted a very different, more violent picture of the events than later-released security footage of the incident showed.

“You can actually have all the video footage, it shows the truth, but then it doesn’t really matter … if we give testimony, we provide video proof of something that happened, it could be completely disregarded,” Hewitt said. “I hope what we’re doing leads to some sort of positive outcome. … I have no idea if what we could be doing could be completely useless. But I feel at the same time, it’s good to be out there.”