GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — Even before Grand Rapids Chief of Police Eric Winstrom was sworn into the role on March 7th this year, there was controversy.
During the search for a replacement for outgoing chief Eric Payne, several groups including the local NAACP chapter, LINC Up, and the Urban Core Collective demanded the city restart the search and include more minority candidates.
Eventually, through the city’s process of vetting and hiring, Winstrom – a white man – was chosen for the role. There was no denying that as a law enforcement official, his years of experience with the Chicago Police Department spoke for themselves; he was an executive on the CPD Leadership Team and led the Area 5 Detective Division where he oversaw a staff of 200, including 40 homicide detectives. He taught at the Chicago Police Academy, headed CPD's citywide child sex crimes investigation unit, served as a supervising attorney in the legal affairs division, and oversaw the department’s policy and procedure for a year. He also came to Grand Rapids with BS in Administration of Justice from Rutgers University and a Juris Doctor from Brooklyn Law School.
But in his first 90 days, Winstrom says he’s experienced the difficulties tied to policing a community with an historic mistrust of his department.
“When I got hired there was a lot of ‘what are you going to do to rebuild trust, what are you going to do to rebuild trust?’” he said. “What I’ve learned over the past three months is, I don’t think the trust was ever there.”
Winstrom faced an uphill battle on the trust front from the very beginning. He inherited a department marred in controversy; from alarming interactions with Black youth and a traffic study that showed Black motorists were twice as likely as White motorists to be stopped by GRPD officers, to the department’s handling of race related protests in 2020 and several use of force events that led to city payouts and policy reforms at the department.
Then, on April 4, just a few days into Winstrom’s tenure at GRPD, Officer Christopher Schurr shot and killed 26-year-old Congolese native Patrick Lyoya during a routine traffic stop. The incident got national attention and sparked a firestorm of anger and protest across the city, and marred Winstrom’s attempts to build trust in his first few weeks.
“I’ll just be blunt, until we get to the point where we start seeing some closure in this officer involved shooting, I don’t think true trust is really going to be able to appear,” he said, asked about the still ongoing investigation into Lyoya’s death. “Until we’re to the point where we have some closure…and we have a decision from the prosecutor and we can move forward, it’s going to be difficult to cross that barrier where we really are building trust.”
It will ultimately be up to Kent County Prosecutor Chris Becker to issue charges against Ofc. Schurr, and until a decision is reached, Winstrom has refrained from commenting on the shooting or the investigation.
“I’m going to withhold judgement; due process demands that. I don’t make a judgement until I have the investigation,” Winstrom said. “Justice looks like communication. When the investigation is revealed, the family is entitled to an explanation of everything that happened – the process of the investigation.”
Chief Winstrom said he came into the job with a vision for reform of the department’s use of force policy and plans to announce some of those changes at the upcoming July 26th City Commission meetings, which he’s bee a fixture at since arriving in Grand Rapids.
Last week, the commission approved a budget that saw GRPD’s funding shrink by 4.4%. At the same time, the budget for the Office of Oversight and Public Accountability, which is involved in civilian oversight and the handling of complaints against the department, more than doubled.
While the Civilian Appeals Board can make recommendations on disciplining officers, the police union’s contract with the city defaults to arbitration and gives the union immense power over disciplinary actions. That contract is being renegotiated right now and while Winstrom wouldn’t comment on any possible changes, he did say the department is moving towards more outside oversight.
“I’ve spoken to the union about it,” he said. “They’re okay with oversight, whatever it is. They just want it to be fair.”
The FY2023 budget did offer a glimmer of change that had long been asked for: co-response. The budget next year allocates $700,000 to have trained mental health clinicians from Network 180 respond to mental health distress or addiction calls with officers – in some cases only the clinicians will go and officers won’t respond to those calls at all.
“It’s making a lot of people happy,” said Winstrom. “It’s making a lot of police officers happy as well because police officers will be the first to acknowledge that we might not necessarily be the right person to respond to a call of a person in mental health crisis.”
In the wake of several mass shootings outside of Grand Rapids in his first 90-days, Chief Winstrom said GRPD is prepared to handle a tragic incident like the one that unfolded in Buffalo in May, Oklahoma and Wisconsin just this week, and Uvalde, Texas that left 19 school children dead. The investigation into the police response in Uvalde is still ongoing, after reports officers waited nearly an hour before entering the building to confront the alleged shooter.
“Our policies are to move in and stop the threat,” said Winstrom. “We’re not going to set up a perimeter, we’re not going to wait. We’re gonna move in when there’s kids to be saved, when there’s civilians to be saved, we will run towards the gunfire.”
Facing an uncertain next 90-days that could see a charging decision in the Lyoya case, Winstrom is taking each day one at a time.
“In my opinion, every incident, whether good or bad, is an opportunity for the police department to do better,” he said. “So I’ll commit to that. Anytime that something like this happens, we’re going to look at it, we’re going to communicate, we’re going to talk about it.”
