If your police department is having a difficult stretch, one option available to you, as a city, is to hire an outside academic to read all of the department’s use-of-force reports and tell you what they say. East Lansing, Michigan, did that. The city’s Police Oversight Commission commissioned Cedrick Heraux, a professor at Adrian College, to go through the written narratives and raw data for every 2025 incident in which an East Lansing officer used force — a category that runs from grabbing someone’s shoulder to keep them from walking away, up to pointing a handgun at them or pepper-spraying them. Heraux presented a 25-page draft analysis to the commission on Wednesday. It says some awkward things.
Start with the topline. Officers used force in 198 incidents, against 274 people, in 2025 — up from 131 incidents and 171 people in 2024, a jump of more than 50% that confirms earlier reporting by East Lansing Info. The mix shifted too: about 54% of the people force was used against were Black and 31% were white, where in 2024 the split was roughly 46% Black and 49% white. So there was more force overall, and it landed very differently than it had a year earlier.
Raw percentages can mislead, which is why the interesting part of the report is what happens when you control for behavior. Heraux sorted force into three tiers: Level 1, empty-hand techniques, from a hand on an arm to tackles and strikes; Level 2, less-than-lethal weapons like pepper spray or Tasers; Level 3, the display or use of firearms. Then he modeled the severity of force against factors like resisting arrest and combative behavior. “When you take into consideration all the different behaviors and categories, Black subjects are 173% more likely to have more severe force be used against them,” Heraux said at the meeting. “For subjects in the ‘all other race category’ that is 265% … when we hold those things constant, race still matters.”
Other findings fill out the picture. Force rose across all three levels, but the largest growth came in the least severe category — more grabbing and tackling, not more guns drawn. About 36% of incidents involved what the report categorizes as “large fights” with multiple people. And officers were much more likely to use severe force when they believed the person in front of them was armed. On its face, that sounds like the system working as intended: armed person, higher stakes. The complication is that it is legal to carry guns in Michigan, the narratives did not explain why officers believed someone was armed, and police are given broad discretion to stop people they think are carrying weapons. Commissioner Simon Perazza put the concern bluntly.
I’m seeing this idea that if you’re armed you’re dangerous and in this country that’s crazy. We’re all dangerous, we’re all armed, so why are they [Black men] getting singled out?
Then there is the strangest data point in the report. More than 40% of the people force was used against were not arrested and never had charges sought against them. Forty-eight people were charged only with resisting and obstructing arrest — and in four of those cases, the department’s own use-of-force data said the person did not resist. “I’m not sure how that happened,” Heraux said, allowing that the four may be data entry errors. He noted that passive resistance can be as minimal as failing to walk over when ordered. “These four individuals apparently didn’t even meet that minimum threshold, but they have been charged.”
It is worth pausing on the structure of that, because a resisting-only charge is an unusual species: it is a charge that only exists because of the encounter itself. If the underlying data says there was no resistance, then what is left, in those four cases, is a person who was subjected to force and then charged over the subjection. Maybe it really is data entry. Heraux’s broader point is that East Lansing’s data collection has been inconsistent across both 2024 and 2025, with narratives written in multiple formats and varying detail, which makes exactly this kind of question hard to answer. That is one of his three recommendations: collect clearer, consistent data.
The report also found that white officers used higher levels of force than Black officers when encountering similar subjects. And it flagged a staffing quirk: the department has plenty of new officers and plenty of veterans, but a hollow middle — very few officers with two to five years of experience — which, Heraux told the commission, can leave barely experienced officers training brand-new ones. His other two recommendations follow from the findings: figure out why Level 1, empty-hand force spiked, including whether training is responsible (he noted research-based, free training options are widely available), and protect policy language emphasizing the preservation of human life.
That last one is doing some work. Earlier this year, at the request of the commission’s policy committee, the department shared proposed revisions to its use-of-force policy — revisions that remove all mentions of preserving the sanctity of human life. Heraux argued for keeping the phrase.
[It’s] not just about the use of lethal force, sanctity of life as a policy decision … is really about approaching encounters with individuals as human beings rather than a subject or suspect. That is a point worth fighting for.
All of this lands in a politically charged moment. The report comes after a year of controversies involving ELPD officers that have drawn sharp criticism from the Lansing NAACP and other racial equity advocates; the NAACP branch has called for the resignation or removal of Chief Jennifer Brown, for whom 2025 was a first year running the department. Heraux’s document is still a draft, and the policy revision that would delete the sanctity-of-life language is still a proposal. The commission’s job now, presumably, is to decide which of the two gets rewritten.