Controversey for ELPD as video shows officer punching restrained woman

East Lansing Info’s Deputy Editor Anna Liz Nichols and Managing Editor Lucas Day discuss what the city and community members are saying after a video surfaced of an East Lansing Police Officer repeatedly striking a woman who was restrained on the ground with her arms behind her back

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Anna Liz Nichols: 00:20

Hello, everyone. I'm East Lansing Info's deputy editor, Anna Liz Nichols. And today, for this episode of East Lansing Insider, we're talking about a recent incident with East Lansing police that has the public raising yet again concerns about the department's use of force. A video posted to social media runs about fourteen minutes long and shows an incident in front of Harper's Bar and Restaurant in the early morning hours of last Sunday where an officer repeatedly punches a 20 year old black woman who has her arms restrained behind her back as she screams for help. For East Lansing info's coverage of this incident, which has drawn controversy in the city, I talked to city leaders and the person who took this video, a Macomb County resident, Taylor Drzdowski, who said she was visiting the city for the first time when, by happenstance, she started recording the incident.

Anna Liz Nichols: 01:07

She said by the time Collins was repeatedly struck by the officer, handcuffs behind her back, she was not resisting, and it's and it's utterly unclear what prompted the officer's actions. I'm joined by East Lansing Info's managing editor, Day, today to talk about this incident and where we're at. So since this video has surfaced, the city of East Lansing has issued a response saying that the video, which is nearly fourteen minutes long, does not paint a full picture of what happened and that there will be an investigation, and they ask for the public to submit video and and and share whatever information they have with East Lansing police. I will say when I talked to Taylor, I asked her if the police had reached out to her, and she said no. But she's reached out to them, and they have not responded to her as of as of Tuesday.

Anna Liz Nichols: 01:58

But given, you know, a lot of the things we've seen over the last year in terms of incidents that have drawn controversy for East Lansing police departments, interactions with people of color, questions about use of force. There's a lot of eyes on this process right now, and I wouldn't say in terms of city leaders a lot of confidence in this process.

Lucas Day: 02:23

Yeah. And I I mean, I think I think it's important to read the entire city statement about this incident, which isn't gonna take long because it's not a very long statement. No. So what the city the city wrote, I think this was two days after the video came out late on Monday. The title of this is city response to partial video of arrest circulating on social media.

Lucas Day: 02:44

It says this morning, the city of Lee East Lansing was made aware of a video circulating on social media of an arrest occurred over the weekend in downtown East Lansing. The video is circuit the video circulating does not capture the entire incident. The East Lansing Police Department has opened an internal investigation of this incident and will be reviewing body worn camera footage and any other material related to the incident. Once the investigation has been concluded, ELPD will will work with the city attorney to determine what can be released to the public. And then this is the statement or the quote from the interim city manager in that Irwin that was included.

Lucas Day: 03:16

She said, we take issues of safety very seriously, and we'll be thoroughly reviewing what happened early Sunday morning. At this time, one officer has been placed on paid administrative leave as part of the ongoing investigation, And then there's a sentence about, urging people with information to contact, captain Adrian Adrian O'Herio of the police department.

Anna Liz Nichols: 03:37

And that was from interim city manager, Annette Irwin, you said. Right?

Lucas Day: 03:42

Yeah. I I mean, the quote is, but, like, I I I wanna highlight you know, I don't I don't wanna miss, like, the forest for looking at the trees or whatever that, you know, analogy is. Like, what this is is this is a video of a man that is hitting a woman who is being held to the ground and screaming. Like, that that's that's what this is. You know, if you strip away, you know, the policing elements of it, that will make this worse to some people, that will justify it to others.

Lucas Day: 04:07

But this is a video that troubled a lot of people because it is a video of a man who is hitting a woman who is being held held down.

Anna Liz Nichols: 04:15

A 20 year old black woman.

Lucas Day: 04:18

And in this statement, there is nothing about that. There there's nothing in this statement about what people are seeing. If you didn't watch the video yourself, you would not know what this statement is about. No. I'm not a policing expert.

Lucas Day: 04:31

I'm not a police officer. I don't know what goes into it. I do write headlines as part of my job. The headline of press release is city response to partial video of arrest circulating on social media. What they want you to know is that it is a partial video that is of an arrest that is circulating on social media.

Lucas Day: 04:47

When we see the police officer hit the woman, it is she has been on camera for about four minutes at that point. So you see about four minutes leading up to it. Now maybe body cameras or whatever else will show a closer look that you know? I I I don't exactly know what it would show that would justify what you see, but maybe maybe it shows something different. But but but the city highlighting this is a partial video kind of implies that there's some sort of justification to this.

Lucas Day: 05:12

And what you're justifying is, again, like, I don't wanna I don't wanna lose the point of what what people saw on tape. Like, what you're going to be trying to justify is a man hitting a woman. And and so this response was just, like, really eye opening to me after the year of issues in policing that the city has had and that the city has not been transparent about, and in some cases, even addressed at all, not said anything about, that they put out the statement that does not say what people saw. Like, it ignores that. It centers on this is a partial video.

Lucas Day: 05:49

Even the statement from the interim city manager as we take, matters of public safety serious. Like, what's what's the public safety concern here? Is it the woman that was being hit? Because if I didn't see the video, I think that's what you're referring to is the thing that the police officers were responding to, not, you know, who appears to actually be inflicting harm in this video, which is the police officer. So the city's response was concerning to me.

Lucas Day: 06:12

I also think it's it's important to highlight that, you know, when this video came out, I reached out to the interim city manager. She initially called me and said she'd be talking to me later that night. She later, just pushed me over to the city's press release, so we haven't had a conversation about this. I also reached out to all five members of the East Lansing City Council. The only one who has responded is, city council member, Kerry Ebersole Singh, who gave us a statement, which has been included in some of our reporting about this.

Lucas Day: 06:41

So, about a year and a half ago, two years ago, the city council passed new ordinance changes that prevents the the police oversight commission from talking about active investigations. So because there's a com complaint that's been opened into this, the Oversight Commission can't talk about this. And that's what that was one of the core reasons why the Oversight Commission was created. Former mayor Aaron Stevens has told me, who was mayor at the time that was created, was so that people would have a space to talk about policing. And for this incident specifically, like, residents went to the meeting this week.

Lucas Day: 07:16

So at the oversight commission meeting this week, you saw some people go up and speak, including this woman's mother, But the the commission itself wasn't allowed to respond. Like, they weren't allowed to say anything about it. They had to talk about other things being

Anna Liz Nichols: 07:31

And they commented about that. They didn't want individuals in the audience or, frankly, people in the city because there were there were media outlets there. This is incident of of great interest in the city. A few of them commented almost from what I saw, like, beseeching the public to understand that it's not because they don't care that they are not commenting directly on this, but because their hands are tied.

Lucas Day: 07:58

Right. Right. And and and I think that they've gotta make that statement because the public isn't gonna understand the rule changes regarding the commission, that that have taken place over the year, last year and a half. What they're going to see is a party that was created to oversee the police that isn't talking about a video of a police officer hitting a woman who was pinned to the ground. So

Anna Liz Nichols: 08:17

And right now, it's it's set up to that being the system. That's the system right now.

Lucas Day: 08:22

Right.

Anna Liz Nichols: 08:23

In terms of what is the focus of this video and also what we focused on in our own headline was the portion of the video that shows the officer punching the woman, Mayana Collins, Mayana Collins in the back as she's laying, you know, face down with her her arms restrained amidst her pleading for her life, screaming, please help me. They're being racist. There's, again, fourteen minutes of this recording. This happens just before the five minute mark. There are the family is saying she was tased perhaps multiple times, but, again, we don't have information from the police.

Anna Liz Nichols: 09:11

One of the most punnion things here just focused on the the officer striking her is we haven't received an answer from the city at what prompted the interaction with police. My Anna is 20. She is outside of Harper's bar in in East Lansing. Throughout the video, there are a lot there's a lot of commentary from the people in the bar line, from people outside, from the witness that took the video. At no point do you hear that she started a fight or some sort of disturbance.

Anna Liz Nichols: 09:46

You hear that she had spent a certain amount of time, slumped outside. That's also what the the the witness, Taylor, said. She said initially when she saw My Anna, she was sitting on that kind of stoop where the trees are outside of Harper's with her head between her legs, visibly intoxicated to the point where she had labored breathing. There is a question that East Lansing will have to answer as its residents demand of why this interaction with police took place in the first place and what could have prompted an officer to repeatedly punch a 20 year old black woman in the back as she is restrained?

Lucas Day: 10:33

Oh, I mean, will they have to answer it? They didn't answer anything about the pepper spray incident. They could just

Anna Liz Nichols: 10:41

That's true.

Lucas Day: 10:42

They could just say nothing, which, again, is is what happened previously with a high profile incident of a police officer using force in a way that the public didn't understand was that there was no response to it. And I think it's important to highlight the backdrop of all of this, which is that the NAACP has been calling for the East Lansing police chief, Ken Brown, to to resign for, you know, close to a year now since that first video came out. She hasn't been in that position for very long. She took over either December 2024 or January 2025. And during that first year, police East Lansing police used force a lot more frequently than they had in past years.

Lucas Day: 11:25

I think there's four years of data that was available to us. And we could see that, in 2025, East Lansing police used force 50% more often than the year before. That's not data that was given to us by the police department. It's data that I manually went through reports and previous years reports that the oversight commission made, and I added up the the data that was in the reports, and this what showed is that they're just using force more frequently. Now there's a further data analysis being done right now by an, what is he, Adrian College professor who knows a lot more about this kind of thing than I do that could show that maybe it's lower levels of force being used.

Lucas Day: 12:08

Maybe it's a data collection thing that changed it. But 50% is not an it's not a normal fluctuation in data from year to year. Like, something's something's going on unless, again, something with the collection method happened, which hopefully we'll know soon from doctor Cedric Rowe's review. But the where where you've seen, like, the city council have leverage because of force used to be a priority in the city around 2020 in the George after the George Floyd murder. You you heard about it a lot at city meetings about the need to emphasize deescalation and reduce use of force and close racial racial gaps in in our our in our police data.

Lucas Day: 12:48

And you just don't hear about it very much anymore. We used to hear about it was during the budget season. They they they'd look at the data, and they'd ask about it. I can remember. I watched it one year, and Lisa Babcock, who's now the judge of the 54, was asking about money spent on ammunition.

Lucas Day: 13:05

That was her that was her big thing. It was, you know, x amount of dollars more was spent on ammunition than was budgeted to. And she said, why are we spending so much on ammo? I asked you or we're a priority was, deescalation, not using more ammunition. And this year, even with, you know, a host of policing controversies going on in the city, you just did not see that during budget season.

Lucas Day: 13:27

So so it does leave questions about what the city's current priorities are, involving policing and if, this is something that they even try to address.

Anna Liz Nichols: 13:36

Because I know one of your early focuses in this situation, something that you thought of, was that there is the potential that this incident is yet another incident that it kind of creates a level of fear for people to call the police. And it made me think of freshman orientation. When you come to MSU campus and they're telling you about medical amnesty

Lucas Day: 14:04

Mhmm.

Anna Liz Nichols: 14:05

Which inherently is a process that, you know, circumvents law of of the drinking age in the interest of preserving a person's health, safety, and life that you can call, that you can seek out medical attention. And even if you're, you know, 18, 19 on MSU campus or or or you don't have to be on MSU campus. You can go and seek medical attention, and you're not going to be penalized for the act for the act of underage drinking. And the person during freshman orientation that gives that speech is a police officer. So this is probably a throwaway point, but I just thought it was interest to me.

Anna Liz Nichols: 14:57

It made me think of this, of there is already with local police and understanding that when individuals interact with first responders in a very in a very similar situation to this one, a underage drinker, the first priority is preserving their life. That's so I don't understand why this scenario was different. And there's a lot of sorry. Like, I'll I'll get to an actual point, but, like, there's a lot of conversations in policing about what police can do if someone is resisting arrest or x y z. But there's already a precedent with medical amnesty that it is the priority to make sure someone makes it home alive.

Anna Liz Nichols: 15:50

But that just made me think of that. And it's a police officer giving that speech every semester for thousands and thousands of MSU students.

Lucas Day: 15:59

Right. And, I mean, Taylor, on the video, what she's saying over she says it several times is she's upset with the bar staff for calling the police instead of the ambulance. She keeps saying you should have called the ambulance. I just think that's a bad place to be where, your thought isn't, you know, what the police could do to have not, you know, hit this woman. It's I should have done something that would have prevented the police from coming.

Lucas Day: 16:27

I I I I think that's that's that's troubling because, you know, if there are escalating situations like the police, ideally, is the is the are are the people that you'd call to prevent something bad from happening. And so now if there's this thought in the corner of of your mind that, you know, maybe there's a there's there's something happening and you're not sure if you should call the police and it's escalating, that you have to be worried that calling the police is going to be what causes something bad to happen. I I just think that's dangerous. I think that can set a dangerous dangerous put a dangerous idea in some people's minds because there's a lot of situations where you do need police there to to de to deescalate whatever is going on. And so if those calls aren't coming in, I just don't know.

Lucas Day: 17:08

I I just worry if these videos continue to come out, and we've seen so many of them over the last year between the pepper spray incident and now the Kirby incident. There's the incident, with Asia Mora, which was another woman that police were handling pretty roughly, that people are going to be hesitant to call the police because they think that they're going to cause more harm than whatever situation is going on in front of them.

Anna Liz Nichols: 17:29

And that's a reality we already face, and it's a parallel issue that we've talked about on the podcast, the issue of the the homeless ordinances for which it was a camping ordinance and a loitering or ordinance that

Lucas Day: 17:43

They passed the one that you can't loiter in parking garages

Anna Liz Nichols: 17:47

Yeah. While leaving the the camping ordinance as a debt issue. It didn't get passed. Mhmm. Throughout that process and since that process with our with our conversations with housing advocates, several times, individuals have said that they're not unhoused individuals aren't even coming to East Lansing where, you know, access to to drinks and food from students is abundant.

Anna Liz Nichols: 18:17

It's a it's a great place to get free food and drinks. And they're still not coming to East Lansing because the police are frightening them. There's several organizations that say, like, their biggest concern for the people they serve is that the police will be called on them, that the police will interact with with the individuals they serve, and the situation will simply turn lethal.

Lucas Day: 18:46

Yeah. And, I mean, that home that whole saga of homelessness is another good example of, like, the dual role that the city police play in East Lansing. The makeup of East Lansing, I guess, is a good way to put it because, like, it's not just the public safety role. Like, the police in the city is particularly police administration, play a very important role in policymaking, which which can be long standing. Those ordinances with the homeless that you just, highlighted were recommended by committee that was headed by police chief, Jen Brown.

Lucas Day: 19:19

And while the primary concern, it seemed to me, was the camping ordinance, which people were a little bit confused about because East Lansing doesn't really have a camping problem. Like, the I mean, you'll see people every now and then in downtown East Lansing with maybe a sleeping bag, but we don't have, like, tent cities. It's not like Austin or Los Angeles or something like that. And so the the people were wondering why exactly is this ordinance proposed proposed in the first place, and is it it just supposed to be a blanket ordinance that allows you to police homeless people however you'd like to? Because there are things that were in the initial draft of the ordinance, which was later revised a few times that would that said that, like, bedding would have qualified as camping.

Lucas Day: 20:01

And, you know, a lot of homeless people carry their things with them, and one of those things is a blanket. And it's not just the homeless ordinance where you see this where the police, play an important part policy making. Alberta Alfresco is another good example. The committee recommended that that be shut down. There's just a number of different things where the police, their voice is instrumental in what the city council designs.

Lucas Day: 20:26

And those those, I mean, those decisions are long standing.

Anna Liz Nichols: 20:29

And as you said earlier, there is concern that we're just gonna keep seeing videos and incidents like this over and over and over again. And there's questions of of why this keeps happening and what's being done about it. I talked to Ernest Connerly earlier this week. He's the chair of the city's police oversight commission about I talked to him about the video. He said it was as a person of color, it was devastating to watch.

Anna Liz Nichols: 20:55

It was just a really difficult watch. And he said it's clear that East Lansing police are impatient and and unconcerned with really providing clear directions to people before before they enact violence. We saw that, with the Lani incident, with the the pepper spray incident. There was a question of were clear and cons and understandable instructions given to these two, young men of color before they were pepper sprayed, An incident for which East Lansing police released body cam footage, but the business it was in front of, Dave's Hot Chicken, released later their security footage, which painted a vastly different of the the situation. It was a longer video that was released that showed that one of the the young men charged, his interaction with this was holding someone back from from a conflict.

Lucas Day: 21:55

Right. And I I I mean, when you don't respond like, I feel like they're in a place where in order to get any sort of goodwill from the public, they need to respond quickly to this because with that incident a year ago, which is still unaddressed. And with, you know, the Kirby shooting more recently, they urged patients, and they just haven't earned trust from the public that something is going to happen when this thing happened a year ago, and now you say you can't talk about it at all. And I I understand that there's legal reasons for it. I still wonder if there's even if you can't speak about that incident specifically, I promise you that you can speak about the 50% use of force increase within your police department.

Lucas Day: 22:38

And, like, you haven't talked about those things.

Anna Liz Nichols: 22:40

And, again, with my conversation with Connerly, and and this is, you know, not a sentiment that is sequestered to him. This is a question a lot of people in the city and beyond. This video has gotten a lot of views of the officer punching, Mayana. It's got a lot of of circulation. There's a question of what could possibly be the rationale to for that officer after she's been, I believe, on the ground for about two minutes.

Anna Liz Nichols: 23:15

His hands before he punches her, she's she's screaming. His hands aren't even restraining her. There are other officers restraining her lower body, putting knees on her. He at time the officer that punches her, he puts his his knee on her at times. He has removed his hands from her.

Anna Liz Nichols: 23:35

The witness, Taylor, says at that point, she's not resisting. My Anna continues to scream, please help me. And at that time, the officer reengages with her and punches her. According to Taylor, it it seemed to be in an effort to make her shut up. Those are her words.

Anna Liz Nichols: 23:55

One important thing I gleaned from the conversation with Taylor is I asked her, you know, there's going to be a lot of interest in the question of did did my Anna resist arrest? The idea that the actions taken by officers will fall in line with with use of force. And her answer was early in the interaction, she did resist because the interaction began with police officers scaring her. Prior, My Anna, again, had been, according to Taylor and according to other people in the background of the video, that she had been sitting with her head between her knees heavily intoxicated. She, according to Taylor, goes back up the stairs of the of the front of Harper's and at that point has the interaction with police that immediately has her falling down falling down to the ground.

Anna Liz Nichols: 24:50

And so according to Taylor, immediately, the interaction went poorly, and and My Anna seemed terrified. I mean, you can listen to the screams and come to your own conclusions.

Lucas Day: 25:00

So one of the the oversight commission meeting, even though the commission members aren't weren't allowed to talk about what happened, it was still, like, a very charged meeting predominantly because of a different incident that we have not seen video of, but, some members of the Oversight Commission have where and this was described by both the police and members of the Oversight Commission, but it appears that there was a man that was downtown who was having some sort of a mental health crisis. And an officer had checked in on him about twenty minutes prior and then left, and then somebody called in and said that he had a gun that he was brandishing downtown. And police responded. He ended up being shot by one of the non or the less lethal guns and arrested. They said, you know, kind of thrown around harshly, and it turned out he didn't have a gun.

Lucas Day: 25:43

He had a lighter. This was a black man. And members of the oversight commission were concerned because the initial officer that that arrived, they said, seemed to be talking to him in a calm way. And they, what these commissioners said is that he'd initially raised his hand and seemed compliant. And then other officers came in, and they started yelling at him and swearing.

Lucas Day: 26:03

And this is where things escalated, where he was making statements. Like, I I think one of the officers said I mentioned with the 40, which is a reference to, the last lethal weapon that they used, and he said, I've got a 42 or something along those lines, and that's where they perceived the threat that led to this, you know, escalation of use of force. But the oversight commission was wondering how it how it ended up that a man who, you know, wasn't any apparent threat to the public, you know, an officer had just been there and left, ended up being shot by the last lethal gun, which doesn't feel good and thrown down and arrested. And

Anna Liz Nichols: 26:42

Also, I will note rubber bullets. I know that they've largely been labeled as a a nondeadly use of force. 101100% they can be deadly.

Lucas Day: 26:54

Right. Right. And and what ended up happening, and, again, I haven't seen this footage. It's not available publicly, was the second, third officers and this is this is where the meeting got tense was the oversight commit captain Adrian O'Hara with the police department said he was noncompliant, and that's what that was what the issue was. And one of the oversight commissioners told him to go to the middle of the room, and she said, I want you to put your hands on the ground, and I want you and then I want you to get on your knees and put your, you know, face in the ground.

Lucas Day: 27:27

And they gave him, like, three different commands. And, you know, you can't put your hands on the ground and get on your knees and then on the ground with it. But that's a hard thing to do, which was at the point that they were making. And, O'Harrios said something along the lines of, I don't know if you guys are mocking me, but then the police department acknowledged that communication is an issue and, with their officers and that it's something that they're working on. And when they acknowledge that, it just seemed like that's such an essential part of what you have to do as as a police officer is give someone commands because, otherwise, it seems like your alternative action is force.

Lucas Day: 28:00

And so if you're not giving clear commands, especially when there's multiple officers in an in instance, like, it it it just seems like people won't know what to do, and then you can lean or they seem noncompliant, I guess. And you've seen this play out in almost all the other bad incidents or questionable incidents from the police department. Like, the issue that a lot of people had with the pepper spray incident was that they just yelled stop once or twice, really gave them no time at all to respond and then sprayed. With the Kirby incident, you saw Isaiah Kirby, the 21 year old Michigan State student that was shot and killed by police in April. They they shot him initially while he was running down the side of the road in their direction.

Lucas Day: 28:38

But then after he'd initially been shot, he's on his he's on his knees, and they shoot him in two more volleys. And in that time frame between the initial shots and the other volleys, there's some officers yelling less lethal. And so people are wondering if this kid's life could have been saved had he not been shot in the second and third volley. And, again, that seems like a communication concern because you hear some officers yelling less lethal and other officers shooting lethal rounds. And so that that was what stood out to me from the oversight commission meeting is that, police leaders seem to acknowledge that communication amongst officers in these, you know, high stress situations, although I don't know that the video that we saw was necessarily high stress.

Lucas Day: 29:18

It was just a, you know, drunk college student. They're gonna be dealing with hundreds of those this year. But if communication between our officers and incidents were forced to use it as an issue, that seems like it could be a enormous problem for the police department.

Anna Liz Nichols: 29:31

It's not a throwaway statement that East Lansing Police Department is saying, you know, we have a problem with the the the verbal commands. Considering any time there is a question of police brutality about the appropriateness of use of force. We've seen nationally instances where simply resisting arrest has led to someone's death, whether they struck police or they struggled against police. We've seen this in the George Floyd case in Minneapolis. We saw this with the Patrick Lioya case in Grand Rapids just just a few years later.

Anna Liz Nichols: 30:13

Both ended with the death of the person receiving instructions from police.

Lucas Day: 30:19

So these instances in East Lansing, like, everyone in the city isn't going to city council meetings. I think that if you're somebody who casually pays attention to city politics, you might think that, you know, it might be an outsider fringe group that's taking issues with it. If you look at the results of Tuesday's elections and you look at who was elected, Harold Pope is the former MAACP, director that went to East Lansing city council meetings for months calling for the police chief to be, fired or removed after that fall incident. He was just elected to state house in the district in Lansing. Will Lawrence came to East Lansing City Council meetings in in the winter to protest against the homeless ordinance that the city was con considering.

Lucas Day: 31:06

He just won the democratic and these are nominations. He just won the democratic nominee for for congress. Rashida Harrison has been at East Lansing city council meetings talking about policing issues in the city. She was just she just won the democratic nomination to replace Sam Singh for state congress. So there there have been several people who, if they win their general elections, are going to be community leaders that we have seen in East Lansing City Council meetings, you know, really just imploring the the council to address these problems over the last year.

Lucas Day: 31:41

And, these people are going to be elevated, I guess. They're going to have formal roles in larger governments. And I I I wonder if that, plays a role in communication further, and I wonder if these are issues that they continue to speak about because it will elevate the issues of East Lansing to a broader set of eyes if these are things that they continue to talk about.