Two ‘Top Cops’ to Apply to be ELPD Chief

Both Chad Pride and Jennifer Brown, the highest ranking employees of the East Lansing Police Department, will apply to become the department’s new chief, ELi has learned.

Pride was appointed interim chief by City Manager Robert Belleman after the May 20 resignation of Kim Johnson. Johnson had been on paid administrative leave while being investigated for an internal complaint. 

Both Brown and Pride have lengthy law enforcement careers under their belts. Pride spent short stints in South Haven and DeWitt, but has been with ELPD since January 2000. Brown spent 15 years with the Michigan State University Police Department and another 10 years in private industry. She started at ELPD in December of last year.

Coincidentally, both officers graduated from Lansing’s Everett High School and they live in the same neighborhood today.

ELi sat down with Pride and Brown to discuss the power vacuum left by Johnson’s departure, and in the course of those conversations learned both aspired to lead the department.

As the interim chief, Pride said his duties actually haven’t changed much.

“I oversee different divisions, whether it’s patrol or support services,” he said. “I’ve overseen those in the capacity of being deputy chief and as a captain. This position now, even being an interim, is pretty much the same. There are a couple more responsibilities that need to be done but for the most part, I was doing those as deputy chief as well.”

Brown has served as a deputy chief since joining ELPD. Her journey back to the blue was inspired in part by her daughter.

“I had a daughter go into law enforcement about a year ago,” she said, “and I just watched how happy and fulfilled she was and it really just gave me that itch to get back into it. Both of my kids are now adults so they moved out of the house and really, my purpose the last 22 years was being a mom. I really needed something to give me fulfillment in what I was doing. So to come to an organization where I had an opportunity to make things better for the officers and the community was really a challenge I was up for.”

One of Brown’s top goals with ELPD is to improve the city’s emergency management program.

“I have an emergency management background,” she said. “I am a PEM, which is a professional emergency manager. It is a certification offered here in the state of Michigan. [Since December] I’ve partnered with Michigan State University and with Ingham County’s emergency management teams, and we are working together to accomplish that goal. We have recently hosted the first table top exercise here in the city of East Lansing that we’ve had in almost a decade. So I’m already starting to accomplish portions of that goal.”

Brown has been a familiar face at city meetings the last six months, popping up at meetings of both the City Council and the East Lansing Independent Police Oversight Commission (ELIPOC), a body Pride served as liaison to during its first two years of existence.

Brown has made it her mission to improve relations with ELIPOC, a group that has frequently been at odds with the police department.

“We, first and foremost, are trying to improve communication,” she said. “I think the goals of the police commission and the police department are similar; we always want to do what’s best for the community, but it’s just how we’re going about that is the difficult part. One of my goals is to allow the commission members to really get to know our officers. It was evident from day one, the very first commission meeting I attended, that they simply saw these officers as police and have no information about why they joined law enforcement, what is their passion, what drives them to be police officers. These police officers have a very difficult job in today’s society, especially with the number of mental health calls they’re responding to. And I want our commission members to understand the difficulty with that job, but also to understand what drives these officers. These officers, their hearts are in the right place. They’re out there for 12 hours each day, trying to make the city a better place to live in, to work, and I want them [ELIPOC] to see that. We did start with officer introductions in this public meeting forum. Our officers have five minutes during the public [comment] section of the meeting to just simply introduce themselves and let the commission know that they’re not just a police officer. They’re more than a number. There’s a human behind these uniforms.”

Pride also expressed hope for a more cooperative relationship with ELIPOC.

“I think it’s just being open and honest with each other,” he said. “And listening. They may not like something that’s said or how it’s done, but we have to be, we have to listen to each other. When somebody has an idea, you actually take some thought to it, and not just, ‘I’m not going to do that.’ Actually listening to each other. And it goes both ways. I was on that as a liaison to that commission since it started. I think there were times when I built that relationship and what they were requesting, what they were asking for, it was working really well. But, yes, there were other times when it didn’t work really well. As long as we can just be on the same page and listen to each other and hear each other out, I think we’ll just build that relationship better.”

ELIPOC is one of many changes Pride has seen in his time at ELPD, including an evolution of the ethos of policing.

“It’s been a huge change,” he said. “You think about back in the early 2000s how policing, even though there was a community policing philosophy at the time, especially in East Lansing, over time that community policing philosophy kind of [started] dwindling; instead of being a whole department doing community policing, we started going down to more of the certain bureaus and certain individuals who are really focused on the community policing. Where we were in the early 2000s, compared to where we are now, it dwindled and then it pretty much came back. But there’s been a lot of changes, too. We’ve had changes with geography and stuff with that, annexing land and how much more growth there is in the northern end, the technology piece again is huge, is a huge change compared to what we used to have. It’s pretty impressive compared to where we started, or where I started in 2000.”

Looking ahead, Pride said his priorities for the department are using technology to “streamline processes and assist in investigations” and putting more “boots on the ground.” In 2000, he said, there were 67 sworn officers compared to just 42 now.

“The recruitment in the staffing has been a struggle,” he said. “We’ve been doing a lot of good things when it comes to trying to get more folks in the door, more qualified people within the door. We’ve been doing a lot of recruitment at recruiting fairs, reaching out to different communities, different groups to try to help spread the word for us, as well. We are putting together a recruitment video. 

“But there’s also got to be a balance of not just sworn staff, but civilian staff as well. I think we’re pretty understaffed when it comes to our civilian employees. We’re asking our civilian employees, as well as our sworn officers to do a lot more these days with less people. Our folks are doing an amazing job, doing those things that we’re asking, and I wouldn’t expect anything less from the type of people we have here in our department.”

During her time with the department, Brown has also found ELPD to be an outstanding team. She said she is working “to make the department a better place to work.”

“The specific goal is to improve the health and wellness of our team members,” she said. “I have a passion for both health and wellness, I’m a certified yoga instructor. I just love fitness and improving mental health. So it’s a strategy and goal that will be in place for years to come because I think it’s a goal that will never be complete. There’s always something better that we can do to improve the culture of health and wellness here in the City of East Lansing Police Department.”

Brown said she’s already seen the culture of the department improve in the short amount of time she’s been there. She makes it a practice to go on weekly ride-alongs with officers.

“I will jump in the car and I have an opportunity to get to know the officers,” she said, “let them get to know me, and really hear firsthand what concerns, what feedback they have, things that we as administrators can do better for the department. That has been a great opportunity to hear firsthand from the officers.”

Brown has also worked to implement a mental health awareness program through the International Association of Chiefs of Police One Mind Pledge. 

“We currently have one instructor trained to teach Mental Health Awareness training and will be putting three more through instructor training this summer,” she said. “Once trained, our goal is to have everyone in our department complete the training. We then plan to host this training for other City of East Lansing departments. We also plan to offer this training to businesses and community members in the future.”

This training, Brown said, will teach participants to recognize and respond to signs of substance abuse and mental health issues in both crisis and noncrisis situations.

“It’s important for our officers and I think the police [oversight] commission understands that we are doing everything we can to improve the relationship with them by training our officers and I think that’s really important,” she said.

Pride and Brown both appear eager to prove their cases to the community as they strive for the chief position. City Manager Robert Belleman told ELi via email that he plans to issue a job announcement in early July.  

When asked what she thought the city needed in a new chief, Brown had three points.

“[We need] somebody who supports the department’s team members, first and foremost,” she said. “If you’re taking care of your employees, they are driven to go out and do the best they can for our community. Second is our community. Our next police chief should be engaged with the community and hearing what the concerns are with that community so we can tailor our policing and drive our police goals to fit the needs of the community. Third is to work within the city, [with] our departments here, for example Communication and Parks and Rec, as well as organizations and other businesses within the community. I think the chief needs to recognize the importance of all three of those things.”

ELi asked Pride about the state of the department and his response focused on the larger community.

“This department is a great organization,” he said. “I actually interned here before I went to the police academy, so I knew where I wanted to work. I knew the type of community I wanted to work in and I knew the type of department I wanted to work for. And it was this one here. This community is a great community. We have great people here who are willing to do anything they can to help people out, to make sure everybody’s safe in this community.”