East Lansing Officials Can’t Talk About the City’s Biggest Policing Controversy in Years Without Risking Insurance Coverage

Speaking with East Lansing Info following Tuesday’s City Council meeting, City Manager Robert Belleman explained the city’s silence surrounding East Lansing’s biggest policing controversy in years: City officials can’t talk about the incident without risking East Lansing’s insurance coverage. 

For five months, residents have routinely come to City Council meetings saying ELPD officers used excessive force during Michigan State University’s welcome weekend and called for the resignation of Police Chief Jen Brown. 

On Aug. 24, an officer pepper-sprayed two young Black men downtown. About a month after the incident, ELPD issued a press release defending officers’ actions during the interaction and named two men who were charged with crimes related to fighting. The attorney for the men subsequently released security camera footage of the incident that paints a much different picture than the press release.

Charges against both men were dropped and the incident is now the subject of civil lawsuits filed in federal court. But city leaders have not condemned police actions and have rarely directly acknowledged the incident happened. Instead, the City Council hired an independent investigator to conduct a review of police policies and actions, focusing on actions around MSU’s welcome weekend. That review will be kept confidential, unless council votes to release it. 

Most City Council meetings in recent months have featured several speakers asking for answers about the pepper-spray incident and police accountability. Near the end of Tuesday’s meeting, Mayor Pro Tem Chuck Grigsby asked if he could speak, saying he had forgotten to say something during council communications. 

Grigsby said he had a meeting with city leaders including Brown, Belleman and Mayor Erik Altmann where they discussed what the city can do around “the federal litigation.” He asked Belleman to explain where the city is at. 

“The current federal lawsuit prevents the city from directly addressing concerns residents and visitors have raised before this body [City Council],” Belleman said, going on to lay out steps the city would take to address general concerns around policing.

In a conversation with ELi after the meeting, Belleman said not speaking about the pepper-spray incident is advice from the attorneys handling the litigation. Attorneys from Cummings, McClorey, Davis & Acho, PLC are representing the city, and were hired through the city’s insurance company. Not following this recommendation could put the city at risk of violating its agreement with its insurance provider, Michigan Municipal Risk Management Authority, Belleman said.

Belleman acknowledged there are members of City Council who would like to talk about the incident, but can’t without jeopardizing the city’s insurance coverage. 

At Tuesday’s meeting, Belleman said Brown will be at the Feb. 10 discussion-only City Council meeting to speak about how the department is working to address community concerns. He also said the city is working to improve the process body camera footage is shared with the city’s Police Oversight Commission and developing a spreadsheet to track follow-through on motions filed by the oversight commission. 

Since last year, members of the Police Oversight Commission have said their ability to do their work has been hurt by changes to the rules governing the commission. New rules limit what commissioners can say publicly and reduce the amount of information in reports produced by ELPD, commissioners say.

Risks to the city’s insurance raise fresh questions about ELPD officer’s social media usage. 

While council members have thanked speakers at meetings and some members have encouraged the public to reach out to them directly, they have been reluctant to comment on the pepper-spray incident or ELPD’s misleading press release, even when directly asked to. 

“All I’m asking is, [Mayor] Erik Altmann, as a leader of the community, just speak up and say something, address your constituents, be a human being,” Human Rights Commissioner Joshua Hewitt said at the Jan. 6 City Council meeting. 

Outside of the city’s commissions – which are made up of unpaid volunteers – almost everyone on the city’s end is not talking about the pepper-spray incident and ongoing litigation. The exception is ELPD Officer Andrew Lyon, the officer who deployed the pepper-spray and is squarely at the center of the controversy.

Lyon argued with a commenter on his public bodybuilding Instagram page lyonlifts_98 about the incident and boasted of his arrest record.

Under a since-deleted post, Lyon responded to a comment that brings up the lawsuit. He wrote that if an officer isn’t being sued, they probably aren’t doing their job right.

In a video Lyon posted Jan. 12, the words “Sir, is your body cam on?” flash on the screen before Lyon, in his police uniform, takes the body camera off and drops it. 

In another since-deleted post Lyon wrote that he leads ELPD in arrests, warrant arrests and is “arguably the most proactive street cop among a department full of outstanding proactive cops.”

Belleman declined to comment when asked about Lyon’s social media posts and if they could jeopardize the city’s insurance coverage. 

Lyon did not respond to a direct message seeking comment. 

City commissions are continuing to speak about the incident, as community organizers call for the police chief’s resignation. 

Since the August incident, there has been a wave of negative attention directed at ELPD, as community advocates have asked for answers at city meetings and videos circulating on YouTube and TikTok about the incident have gathered tens of thousands of views. 

In January, a community group started by the mother of one of the men pepper-sprayed paid for a billboard that highlights a statement Brown made in a news interview that has been broadly characterized as racist. 

Members of the city’s police oversight and human rights commissions have each condemned the incident and called for Brown’s resignation. In the aftermath, commissioners say they have struggled to get information or seen procedural changes.

Going against advice from a city attorney, the Police Oversight Commission filed complaints related to the incident. At Tuesday’s council meeting, Belleman said the complaints pertain to the same issues as the lawsuit, and will therefore be sorted out in court.

However, Police Oversight Commissioner Chris Root said in a phone call with ELi today that this approach doesn’t make sense, because a judge hearing a civil lawsuit would weigh different factors than an internal review.

The city’s Human Rights Commission has pushed forward with an investigation into the officers involved in the incident, but earlier this week members of the commission said a nearly $900 fee for the city to complete a records request is hampering that investigation. 

“[Since] I’ve been on the commission, we’ve had a working relationship with council,” Human Rights Commissioner Karen Hoene said at Monday’s commission meeting. “If we have wanted funding to do things, they’d given it to us, but that doesn’t seem to be the case now. They want to charge us that kind of money, and we don’t have that kind of money.”