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Agencies Seek to Fund Study of Shooting Response

The law enforcement agencies that led the response to a mass shooting in Kalamazoo in February say they’d like to know what they did right and what they could have done better. The want to commission an independent study from a Washington, DC-based nonprofit called the Police Foundation.

It’s a group City of Kalamazoo police chief Jeff Hadley calls “uniquely qualified” to identify lessons from the shooting.

“Are there things we can improve as we go forward? Are there things that we can learn, do better – from individual agency perspective, from community perspective, from community readiness perspective? I think we owe it to ourselves to have that critical analysis,” Hadley said.

The study would cost about $65,000. Kalamazoo County Prosecutor Jeff Getting says he thinks it would be money well spent.

“We have a responsibility to law enforcement and to everyone else, to the citizens of this community and state to do this so that we can learn how to better respond to these kinds of situations should they ever happen again,” he said.

The City of Kalamazoo with some help from Portage says it’ll cover about half the amount. On Tuesday law enforcement asked the county to cover the rest. A majority of commissioners present appeared to support the idea.

A few said they’d rather a nonprofit pay for the study, to spare taxpayers the expense and to avoid what Commissioner Dale Shugars suggested could be an appearance of bias in favor of law enforcement.

The board plans to consider the funding issue at its next meeting.

Sehvilla Mann joined WMUK’s news team in 2014 as a reporter on the local government and education beats. She covered those topics and more in eight years of reporting for the Station, before becoming news director in 2022.
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