Exhibit appears to be like at police brutality in Detroit throughout the Civil Rights period

Stateside’s conversation with Matt Lassiter

Digital tools that allow people to show each other what is going on in their lives in real time have changed the way Americans talk about police brutality and other police misconduct. Members of the public can now record and share law enforcement abuse more often than they were before the advent of smartphones.

The pattern of police violence against black Americans existed long before the digital age, however, and now a new exhibition titled Detroit Under Fire: Police Violence, Criminal Policy, and the Fight for Racial Justice in the Era of Civil Rights documents part of that story in an online setting cataloging the abuses of the Detroit Police Department from 1957 to 1973.

Matt LassiterThe University of Michigan history professor is the founder and director of the Police and Social Justice History Laboratory and the lead author and editor of Detroit Under Fire. He says he and a team of students started the project after a police officer shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014.

“We decided to … try to find the answers to a question that was deliberately kept silent. How many people did the Detroit Police Department kill during the civil rights era?” Lassiter says. “Who were they? What happened? What are the larger patterns of police brutality, wrongdoing, just interactions with the black community in a northern city during this time? And what are his legacies?”

According to Lassiter, the newspapers of the day did not often document incidents of police misconduct in Detroit, and when they did, they only published a brief account of the police department’s version of what happened. Detroit Under Fire researchers searched archives from institutions such as Wayne State University’s Reuther Library and the Detroit Public Library for more evidence of police abuse. According to Lassiter, the work of historical activists and communities protesting police violence made the exhibition possible.

“Almost everything we have documented in our exhibition was documented in the 1960s and 1970s by civil rights and black power organizations, as well as by the people in the communities who are most affected,” he says. “We just tried to find the work that had already been done, to make it available to the public and to make it available to these communities as well.”

[Get Stateside on your phone: subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Google Podcasts today.]

Detroit Under Fire draws on more than 1,500 archival documents and presents evidence of police misconduct in Detroit over 100 pages that include interactive maps, photos, documents and clippings. Based on the information gathered, the researchers estimate that in just seven years – from 1967 to 1973 – more than 100 unarmed blacks were killed by police in Detroit. However, according to Lassiter, that number is likely even higher.

“There is a lot of evidence that people were framed. They should be armed when they weren’t, ”he says. “But even if you leave that aside, the police department has, as an official policy, encouraged officials to flee and flee unarmed, citing suspects, citing suspects.”

According to Lassiter, before 1967 the DPD only allowed officers to shoot and kill in extreme cases. But after the 1967 uprising, in which the Detroit police and other police officers shot at least 30 black people, the DPD changed its approach, says Lassiter.

“The police changed this policy, stating that the decision as to whether the shooting was justified would be at the discretion of the police officer,” he says. “This was part of a larger surge across the country in the late 1960s and beyond to transform the authority to use lethal force into a police officer’s discretionary judgment in a split second. And so the Detroit Police Department encouraged lethal violence against unarmed, fleeing, suspected robbers and burglars for the next five to six years. “

According to Lassiter, this change in policy for fatal incidents, misconduct, and pattern of action can be seen by Stop The Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets (STRESS), an undercover tactical DPD unit from the early 1970s. He says that while STRESS claimed to be protecting black citizens, its focus was actually on “monitoring the color line”.

“Many of the people who were shot and killed by STRESS were, as the civil rights and black power groups have proven, not even involved in a crime,” says Lassiter. “This was an active policy. The STRESS commander said the issue here is whether we can police the black community. “

Lassiter also notes that the exhibit compiles extensive evidence of police violence against black women in Detroit. He says officials targeted black women who sat in cars, spoke out against police abuse, or engaged in political activism. And he says the police have also targeted sex workers.

“During this time there was massive corruption among the police in the area of ​​sex trafficking and drug trafficking,” says Lassiter. “One of the most important incidents in Detroit history was the murder of Cynthia Scott, a young black sex worker who was shot in the back by a white police officer when she refused to submit to an illegal arrest. And then he planted a knife on her and was relieved. “

According to Lassiter, officers were almost never charged with violence during this period, especially because the investigation prioritized the perspectives of white officers and viewed black witnesses as biased because of their race. He says civil rights-era police brutality cases in Detroit point out ways law enforcement abuse continues in the present day.

“The discretionary procedures and cover-up processes that allow police violence to flourish today and are attacked by activists were introduced in the 1960s and 1970s largely in response to this activist challenge to uncontrolled police violence, the lifting of legal responsibility by individual officers with qualified Immunity through the publicly opaque and invisible investigative procedures to the application of violence guidelines that give the officer complete discretion – these were created for reasons of political and racial control in response to demands made in the 1960s and 1970s for control of the community and civil control of the police, ”he says.

This post was written by Nell Ovitt, Production Assistant at Stateside.