GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — The Michigan Department of Civil Rights wants to work with state and federal agencies to investigate whether the Grand Rapids Police Department engages in discriminatory patterns and practices.
Currently, the department is looking into 29 individual complaints against the police department. These are complaints they've received over the last several years, many since 2019.
"I don't want to get into the content of those because they are pending investigations, but some of them involve force, racial profiling, stops. So, they vary," said John Johnson, the Executive Director of the Michigan Dept. of Civil Rights.
As a whole, the department has received more than 60 complaints against GRPD.
Johnson says asking the Attorney General and Department of Justice to help investigate discriminatory patterns and practices is rare.
"I don't know if this has happened in the past, but because of the volume of complaints we've received in that area and the limited resources our department has, we felt it was necessary to collaborate with a larger law enforcement agency to investigate what we know already."
Johnson adds they're the smallest state department with 88 employees, 29 of whom are investigators with cases they're already handling.
Should the agencies get involved, Johnson says there could be several remedies.
"We hope there will be a realization on the department's part that perhaps there needs to be change from within," he said. "And they be agreeable to some training and more accountability of those officers whose actions may show their discriminatory intent or certainly that they have some racial disparity."
The department hasn't received a complaint related to the death of Patrick Lyoya, and Johnson says his death didn't prompt their request. It was the volume of complaints they received prior to the shooting, and the department was in contact with the Department of Justice in the past.
The department expects to hear back from the AG's office next week on whether they can collaborate on this effort.
There's no time frame yet on when they expect to hear back from the Department of Justice.
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