EAST LANSING, Mich. (WLNS) — The East Lansing Police Chief is below hearth for an announcement she made whereas discussing the disproportionate use of power in opposition to Black folks by the division.
Requested concerning the disproportionate use of power – or response to resistance – within the division’s official July “Response to Resistance Report,” coupled with a “disruptive” Welcome Week in late August, Chief Jennifer Brown advised 6 Information Investigates, “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.”
East Lansing Metropolis Council member Dana Watson says the assertion was “overt racism.” On the East Lansing Unbiased Police Oversight Fee Assembly Watson advised commissioners and the chief that Brown’s assertion implies East Lansing is a cop metropolis and a sunset city.
East Lansing Metropolis Councilwoman Dana Watson addressed the East Lansing Unbiased Police Oversight Fee Wednesday night time . (WLNS)
“For example, in Black and Brown people wouldn’t go into certain towns even though they had to use the bathroom because they were sundown towns,” she says. “And if the cops see you as a Black, Brown or Indigenous person in the community after sundown, then they’re going to help you understand that this isn’t where you should be. You’re not from around here. And so that’s that reference to sundown towns. And then my fear that a percentage of the community wants a cop city — and a cop city is harmful for us.”
The time period “sundown town” is outlined by Meriam Webster Dictionary as “a predominantly white community that prevents or has a history of preventing non-white and especially Black residence through some combination of policy, expulsion, intimidation, and violence.”
Brown declined to touch upon Watson’s statements.
Watson says Brown made comparable feedback at a latest Metropolis Council assembly. She characterised these feedback as “covert racism.”
Watson was not alone in difficult the chief’s feedback.
“It is very problematic,” Fee Vice Chair Kath Edsall stated throughout the assembly. Three different commissioners additionally expressed their issues concerning the feedback.
Screenshot of an e-mail despatched by Ernest Conerly, Chair of the East Lansing Unbiased Police Oversight Fee, to East Lansing Metropolis Supervisor Robert Belleman Oct. 1. (WLNS)
Late Wednesday night time, Ernest Conerly, chair of the fee, despatched an e-mail to East Lansing Metropolis Supervisor Robert Belleman.
“The racial undertones in this statement are impossible to ignore. The language used suggests a direct link between criminality and minority presence in East Lansing,” Conerly wrote. “By identifying minorities as the defining feature of the alleged problem, the Chief’s words frame race itself as the issue, rather than the individual acts committed. This reflects both overt and covert racial bias. It is overt in the explicit association of minorities with crime, and covert in the assumption that nonwhite visitors are outsiders who bring harm into the community.”
He wrote that he desires to know if the “statement is an accurate reflection of the department’s stance, and if not, how the city intends to confront the racial undertones and biases embedded within it.”
