From xxxxxx <[email protected]>
Subject Police and the License to Kill
Date May 9, 2021 12:05 AM
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[ Detroit police killed hundreds of unarmed Blacks in response to
the civil rights movement. Their ability to get away with it reveals
why most of today’s proposals to make police more accountable are
bound to fail, and how we can do better. ] [[link removed]]

POLICE AND THE LICENSE TO KILL  
[[link removed]]

 

MATTHEW D. LASSITER
April 29, 2021
The Boston Review
[[link removed]]


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[[link removed]]
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_ Detroit police killed hundreds of unarmed Blacks in response to the
civil rights movement. Their ability to get away with it reveals why
most of today’s proposals to make police more accountable are bound
to fail, and how we can do better. _

Rally against police brutality, by Fibonacci Blue is licensed under
CC BY 2.0

 

Clifford “Chucky” Howell, a thirteen-year-old Black male, was
walking home from playing at a friend’s house when a white Detroit
police officer shot him near his own backyard on the evening of Sept.
13, 1969. The patrol team did not summon medical assistance for at
least forty minutes, and Chucky died later at the hospital. Officers
on the scene claimed that he had been fleeing the burglary of a white
family’s home, a felony, and that it was therefore appropriate to
shoot him. Numerous eyewitness accounts, however, insisted Chucky had
been an oblivious bystander. His parents and local Black organizations
protested, but law enforcement agencies refused their requests to
examine the evidence. Through a secretive internal investigative
process, the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office found that “all
facts and circumstances indicate justifiable action” in the
officer’s use of fatal force.

Chucky was one of more than a hundred unarmed people killed by Detroit
law enforcement officers between 1967 and 1973, the majority of whom
were young Black males allegedly fleeing property crimes or robberies,
all declared justifiable homicides by Wayne County prosecutor William
Cahalan. At the time, the Detroit Police Department’s (DPD) use of
firearms policy
[[link removed]] empowered
officers to prevent the escape of “fleeing felons” with deadly
force and located this power in officers’ own “sound
discretion,” which effectively provided a license to kill insulated
from legal consequences. This policy facilitated an extraordinary
degree of police impunity, which the DPD used to commit violence
against Black youth alleged to have committed low-level property
crimes. It also provided an advance script for law enforcement
officers to self-exonerate any murders or otherwise wrongful shootings
they committed by framing the victims: all they had to do was say that
they knew that the person had committed a burglary and that—in their
split-second judgment—opening fire was necessary to apprehend the
suspect.

Still, the degree to which the DPD availed themselves of this license
to kill is astounding. Fatal force against unarmed and fleeing Black
teenagers and young adults represented the largest category of law
enforcement homicides in Detroit in the late 1960s and early 1970s,
when the DPD was the deadliest police department per capita in the
nation. Civil rights and Black Power groups in the city organized
sustained protests against this policy, and many other urban police
departments nationwide began banning use of firearms in the unarmed
“fleeing felon” scenario during the 1970s, especially against
juveniles. In 1984 the U.S. Supreme Court finally ruled in _Tennessee
v. Garner_ [[link removed]] that state laws
authorizing law enforcement to use deadly force against unarmed and
fleeing suspects who posed no direct threat were unconstitutional.

However, while _Tennessee v. Garner _significantly reduced the
number of fatal force incidents in such circumstances nationwide, the
pattern of questionable police homicides just shifted to other
situations still dubiously permissible under state and local laws and
police regulations: home invasions during drug raids, armed responses
to mental health crises, and, most common of all, escalation of
low-level traffic stops based on racial profiling. This is
largely thanks to a 1989 Supreme Court ruling, _Graham v. Connor
[[link removed]]_, which
effectively insulated these and other scenarios from legal
accountability. The case established a subjective use-of-force
standard based on the “perspective of a reasonable officer on the
scene” and made it almost impossible to second-guess “split-second
decisions” that resulted in fatal shootings by law enforcement.

Yet the history of police violence in Detroit shows that this problem
cannot be solved simply by tightening use-of-force regulations or
prosecuting individual officers whose actions most clearly violate the
laws. Despite decades of trying to end police killings through
precisely such reforms, there remains a fundamental continuity between
the 1960s and ’70s and our current moment: racially targeted and
discretionary policing continues to be excused by deliberate, and
deliberately secretive, internal processes under which law enforcement
agencies self-investigate their own violence and cover their tracks.

Anyone seeking to give a complete accounting of the history of Detroit
police violence faces significant hurdles. We know that DPD officers
killed at least 219 civilians between 1957 and 1973, but this
is definitely an undercount
[[link removed]].
The real number is unknown and ultimately unknowable. There is not
even an official public tally of killings by on-duty officers, and the
identities of their victims can only be uncovered through fortunate
discoveries in non-police archives, including newspapers.

In the present day and nationally, we do not do much better. The
federal government does not publish the names or even thoroughly track
the number of people killed annually by police officers. Scholars of
state violence [[link removed]] estimate that
the thousand or so police homicides reported per year since Congress
mandated recordkeeping in the early 2000s represent only about half of
the actual total.

To correct for this absence of complete documentation, projects by
the _Guardian_
[[link removed]] and
the _Washington Post_
[[link removed]] have
painstakingly mined publicly available records, especially newspaper
reports, to create (admittedly still incomplete) archives of
individuals killed since 2015. And activist groups and crowdsourced
websites have gone back still further: Mapping Police Violence
[[link removed]] and Fatal Encounters
[[link removed]], for example, have conducted their own
investigations to chronicle the lack of accountability and racial bias
in police killings going back a couple decades. But because they rely
mainly on online public records, they have not been able to extend
their scope prior to the year 2000.

The challenges involved in documenting police violence and fatal-force
incidents—and of critically assessing official law enforcement
accounts—are formidable even when considering events from recent
decades. They are harder still for the more distant past. Newspaper
archives are incomplete and usually behind paywalls in digital
databases not easily accessed by the most impacted communities.
Moreover, coverage is almost always biased in favor of the police.
Other archives, such as those that document contemporary
investigations by civil rights groups, are full of their own silences.
Most have yet to be digitized, are time-consuming to navigate, offer
few aids to nonprofessional researchers, and often have limited hours
and none outside of the normal workweek. A massive amount of evidence
is held in the sealed records of police departments and prosecutors,
subject to expensive, protracted, and often insurmountable Freedom of
Information Act (FOIA) obstacles.

Making the content of these archives, including closed state archives,
available to the general public is essential to proving continuities
in how and why the police deploy racialized violence and then evade
accountability. Having a full account of how the state has
historically devised ways of excusing its own violence against Black
people is a crucial step in demanding accountability and change.

Revisiting the civil rights era in the urban North is a good place to
start because activists went to extraordinary lengths to document
police violence and to demand community control over the systems
designed to disguise and justify it. Toward that end, the Policing
and Social Justice HistoryLab at the University of Michigan
[[link removed]],
which I direct, has identified 151 homicides by on-duty Detroit police
officers between 1957 and 1973, plus an additional 18 fatal shootings
by off-duty DPD officers and 19 more by other law enforcement agencies
operating in the city. Between 2018 and 2020, a 22-person research
team consisting largely of undergraduates documented these police
killings through extensive research in multiple archives, laborious
searching of newspaper databases, and targeted FOIA requests. The
results are presented through a book-length multimedia exhibit
[[link removed]], _Detroit
Under Fire: Police Violence, Crime Politics, and the Struggle for
Racial Justice in the Civil Rights Era_, and a five-part map series
[[link removed]], _Detroit
Under Fire: Mapping Police Violence and Misconduct (1957–1973)_.

_Detroit Under Fire_ provides the most comprehensive accounting of
fatal-force incidents
[[link removed]] by
law enforcement that currently exists for any U.S. city during the
civil rights era and during the twentieth century more broadly. The
start and end dates of the project were selected to coincide on the
one end with the emergence of an organized NAACP campaign against
police brutality in the late 1950s; and on the other end with the
election of the city’s first African American mayor. In addition to
killings, the website documents and maps more than 400 nonfatal police
brutality and misconduct complaints, primarily filed by African
American citizens. This data represents only the tip of the iceberg,
because the vast majority of police brutality encounters never
resulted in official complaints, and the relevant law enforcement
archives remain closed.

Our research reveals a clear pattern: around 80 percent of police
homicides during the civil rights era involved African American
victims; at least two-thirds, and probably more, were of unarmed
people who posed no direct threat to police or anyone else. The
largest category of fatalities is of unarmed Black males shot in the
back while allegedly fleeing the scene of low-level property crimes. A
fifth of police homicides were of teenagers and preteens; almost all
were African American, and more than 90 percent were unarmed.

These trends escalated dramatically after the 1967 Detroit Uprising,
when the DPD made its use-of-firearms policy
[[link removed]] more
permissive in order to insulate police officers from legal culpability
by locating the justification to use deadly force in officers’ own
“sound discretion.” The DPD hierarchy encouraged and even rewarded
officers for killing unarmed “suspects” during the notorious
STRESS (Stop the Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets) era of the early
1970s, when the police department was the most deadly per capita in
the nation, prompting mass protests by Black community groups that
demanded civilian control.

The DPD Homicide Bureau and the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office
exonerated police officers in almost every fatal shooting regardless
of the circumstances. The closed nature of law enforcement archives
poses a difficult challenge in assessing these decisions, but our
research team still uncovered a wealth of countervailing evidence from
the independent investigations of civil rights groups and agencies
(and occasionally of newspapers), civil litigation filed by families
of the victims, correspondences and affidavits from witnesses to
police violence, and internal law enforcement records provided to
Detroit mayors after community protests. Through FOIA requests, our
project also obtained the investigative files of three of the most
controversial exonerations during this era: the fatal shootings of
Cynthia Scott in 1963 and of teenagers Ricardo Buck and Craig Mitchell
in 1971.

Based on these archival discoveries, our project concludes that a
substantial majority of the 188 identified law enforcement homicides
represented excessive and unnecessary force (a civil litigation
standard), even if technically “justifiable” under the
discretionary guidelines, and that at least 25 percent involved police
department and/or prosecutorial coverups and likely met the legal
standard for murder or manslaughter charges. Such unaccountable and
systemic police violence in Detroit and other northern cities during
the civil rights era was—as in the Jim Crow South—part of a
political and legal system of racial criminalization
and segregationist state violence
[[link removed]],
not crime control itself.

The silences in the archive are systemic and deliberate, but the
evidence that is available makes a powerful case that the general
public and impacted communities should have the right to know about
all brutality and misconduct complaints filed against police officers
and law enforcement agencies, as well as the right to examine all
internal investigative files by police departments and prosecutors.
This is particularly true for police-involved homicides, where all of
the evidence should be in the public domain, both historically and
contemporaneously.

In recent years, Black Lives Matter protests have led to the passage
of “right to know” legislation in states such as California and
New York, unsealing some records of police violence and internal
disciplinary procedures and marking a partial and important first step
in this historical reckoning. The submerged history of police violence
excavated in _Detroit Under Fire_ demonstrates why even stronger
open-records and full public accountability measures are urgent and
essential, both in the state of Michigan and as a new national policy.

In what follows, I offer a brief narrative accounting of some of the
project’s most crucial discoveries and how, placed together, they
tell a story of escalating violence and systematic coverup by the DPD.

The history of police violence in civil rights era Detroit unfolds in
two stages, with the deadly 1967 Uprising as the hinge.

During the decade prior, white officers in the DPD routinely
brutalized Black citizens without fear of any consequences, but the
department only fatally shot an average of six civilians per year.
Between 1957 and 1966, around two-fifths of those killed by police
were definitely or probably armed, and white males engaged in serious
criminal activity made up most of this total. The DPD and the
prosecutor exonerated all officers who fatally shot unarmed and/or
fleeing suspects, often through pro forma investigations, but the
police department did not actively promote this policy as a crime
control strategy.

Between 1967 and 1973, law enforcement officers in Detroit killed at
least 171 people, an average of almost 25 per year, as the DPD
liberalized its use of firearms policies and openly encouraged fatal
force against unarmed and fleeing suspects. This escalation
represented a political response to the demographic growth of the
city’s African American population, the demands for tough-on-crime
crackdowns by white residents seeking to defend their segregated
neighborhoods, a revanchist challenge to civil rights and Black Power
organizations, and the national war on “street crime” advanced by
the Johnson and Nixon administrations.

During the 1950s and early 1960s, the DPD was an openly
segregationist, 96 percent white institution in a Jim Crow northern
city. The DPD policed and upheld the color line through the systematic
racial profiling and harassment of African American pedestrians and
motorists when they ventured downtown or beyond defined Black areas.
More than a third of all non-traffic arrests were illegal
“investigative” detentions without probable cause, allegedly of
crime “suspects” and primarily of Black residents, leaving many
innocent people with formal police records.

Arthur Johnson, head of the Detroit chapter of the NAACP, labeled
police brutality and racist abuse during such encounters an urgent
civil rights issue and called police officers “willing
instrumentalities in the racial segregation aims of the dominant white
community.” The NAACP and the ACLU launched a campaign for a
civilian review board with investigative and disciplinary powers over
the police department in response to high-profile incidents involving
prominent Black citizens.

In 1957 two white police officers brutally beat Robert Mitchell, an
African American business owner, because he asked not to be searched
on the street without cause. The DPD’s internal investigation
ignored the testimony of multiple Black witnesses and exonerated the
officers based on their claim that the victim had attacked them. The
DPD denied that any racial discrimination at all existed in law
enforcement and adamantly opposed the civil rights campaign for
civilian review board oversight—a position shared by every white
Detroit mayor, whether conservative or liberal, throughout the civil
rights era.

Police violence occurred inside precinct stations as well as out on
the street. In the “crash” crackdown of December 1960 through
January 1961, the DPD illegally arrested 1,500 African American men on
suspicion of murder after the downtown slayings of two white women. An
affidavit from a thirty-one-year-old Black man described harrowing
scenes of torture in precinct lockup, where the police held hundreds
of “suspects” for days at a time. During the manhunt, a white
officer shot a twenty-one-year-old Black male in the back on suspicion
of misdemeanor theft from a parked car, and the prosecutor ruled the
homicide to be justified after a cursory investigation that involved
taking the officer’s statement. The outraged Black community
responded to the crackdown by electing a white liberal mayor, Jerome
Cavanagh, who refused to endorse a civilian review board but promised
reform through human relations training, hiring more Black officers,
and the approach now called “community policing.”

In 1962 Cavanagh’s promise of “color-blind law enforcement”
faced a major test after two white officers shot David Carson, an
unarmed fourteen-year-old Black male, in the back of the head during a
car chase for a traffic violation. The killing violated the new, and
slightly more restrictive, use-of-force policy implemented by the
liberal administration, which stated that officers should not fire on
fleeing suspects unless there was objectively no other way to capture
a “known felon.” The NAACP demanded criminal charges, but the
Wayne County prosecutor exonerated the officers based on their claim
that they thought the boy was a “dangerous adult felon.” George
Edwards, the liberal white police commissioner selected to implement
the mayor’s reform agenda, expressed regret but also cleared the
officers in the internal investigation by stating that the youth was
guilty of “felonious” reckless driving, justifying his death.

Radical Black organizations moved to the forefront of the anti-police
brutality movement in 1963, after a white officer shot and killed
Cynthia Scott, a twenty-four-year-old Black woman, as she walked away
after refusing to submit to an illegal arrest. The prosecutor and the
liberal police commissioner exonerated the officer, who fabricated a
story that Scott attacked him and his partner with a knife. The
Homicide Bureau file obtained by our project
[[link removed]] through
a FOIA request includes sworn statements from six African American
witnesses who saw the officer shoot the unarmed woman without
justification and then plant a knife on her body. These internal DPD
records also reveal an undeniable coverup: the Homicide Bureau coached
the officers on the scene to amend their accounts to reconcile
contradictions with each other and with the forensic evidence. The
Detroit chapter of the National Lawyers Guild found prosecutor Samuel
Olsen to have conducted a “biased investigation” designed “to
obtain an exoneration from the very outset.” Thousands of
working-class Black citizens protested in the streets, led by radical
groups that rejected the NAACP’s middle-class reform strategy of
cooperation with the white liberal administration. Cynthia Scott’s
mother filed a civil lawsuit, and the city responded by enacting an
ordinance shielding officers from personal liability in “good faith
performance of their official duties”—a key reason that fatal
force incidents escalated in subsequent years.

A coalition of civil rights groups filed a formal complaint in 1965
with the Michigan Civil Rights Commission charging Prosecutor Olsen
with a pattern of racial discrimination against the Black population
of Detroit based on the automatic exoneration of all police officers
who killed African American citizens. In addition to the Scott
coverup, the complaint cited the fatal shootings of Clifton Allen, an
unarmed seventeen-year-old male, and Nathaniel Williams, an unarmed
fifteen-year-old male. Both were shot in the back while fleeing from
minor alleged burglaries—Allen had been reported to the police for
stealing $1.83 from a store. The civil rights coalition demanded a new
policy banning use of firearms against unarmed and fleeing suspects,
to no avail. Civil rights groups also protested the murder of James
Sabra, a fifty-three-year-old Black male, in his own backyard by a
white officer who shot the unarmed man, unprovoked, in front of a
large group of witnesses. The prosecutor declared the shooting
“justifiable” after the policemen on the scene concocted a cover
story that Sabra had attacked the officer with a knife.

DPD violence was often politically motivated, especially against
groups and individuals who protested police brutality. In 1965 the
Cavanagh administration created the militarized Tactical Mobile Unit
with a mission to crack down on Black “street crime” and to
control “demonstrations of various types,” meaning civil rights
protests. The white liberal regime also resolved the problem of the
DPD’s longstanding policy of making illegal investigative arrests by
passing an anti-loitering law, giving police the discretion to arrest
anyone in public for any reason, and proposing a “stop and frisk”
ordinance to codify that common police practice as well (this was
enacted over civil rights opposition in 1968). During the mid-1960s,
the Tactical Mobile Unit and other DPD officers used the
anti-loitering law to launch a campaign of harassment and wrongful
arrests against members of the city’s leading anti–police
brutality organization, the Adult Community Movement for
Equality/Afro-American Youth Movement. In 1966 the DPD and Wayne
County Prosecutor joined forces to crush this organization on false
charges of inciting a riot and advocating violence, which at least one
and possibly several undercover FBI–DPD agents provocateurs had
actually instigated.

The transitional event in this story of escalation came in July 1967,
when DPD officers shot and killed at least twenty-two African
Americans
[[link removed]] during
the Detroit Uprising that started with protests against police
brutality. The deadliest event during the so-called Long, Hot Summer,
the Uprising began when police arrested everyone in attendance at a
party celebrating the homecoming of Black GIs. In an attempt to
prevent the arrests, community members blocked police transport and
then began looting nearby stores. By its end, the Uprising had claimed
at least forty-three lives. Fifteen were unarmed males classified by
police as “looters,” with most shot in the back for what was at
most a low-level property offense. The circumstances of many of these
killings are murky, and at least seven were clearly suspicious based
on witness testimony and forensic evidence that contradicted the DPD
version of events. In three of these cases—Ronald Evans, William
Jones, and William Dalton—multiple witnesses accused DPD officers of
executing unarmed youth who were already in custody by forcing them to
flee at gunpoint and then shooting them from behind. The DPD Homicide
Bureau and the new county prosecutor, William Cahalan, found all
shootings of people classified as “looters” to be justified,
regardless of the actual evidence, based on the provision in state law
allowing fatal force against a “fleeing felon.” Three white DPD
officers did face criminal charges after their coverup of the murders
of three Black teenagers at the Algiers Motel unraveled. None was
convicted.

The Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office also exonerated white members
of the Michigan National Guard in the fatal shootings of eleven
civilians during the Uprising. Based on the evidence available in
multiple archives
[[link removed]],
most of the National Guard killings were unjustified and involved
coverups and framing of the victims. In one case, a guardsman fired
without cause on George Talbert, a twenty-year-old Black male, as he
walked down the street and then fabricated a scenario in which Talbert
had threatened to kill him. The prosecutor ignored multiple witness
accounts and exonerated the guardsman “because of the tenseness and
the situation.” A guardsman also shot Albert Robinson, a
thirty-eight-year-old Black male, as he lay on the ground in custody,
and the DPD Homicide Bureau participated in covering up the damning
autopsy report. In a third case, the prosecutor blamed alleged sniper
fire in exonerating a National Guard tank gunner who fired wildly into
a residential building and killed Tonia Blanding, a four-year-old
African American girl, in the middle of the night.

Racialized violence and use of fatal force by the DPD escalated
dramatically in the aftermath of the Uprising, including at least
forty-two civilians
[[link removed]] killed
by police officers between 1968 and 1970 and then the stunning
official total of ninety-four homicides
[[link removed]] between
1971 and 1973. (Again, these are undercounts
[[link removed]]:
the numbers only include police-involved fatalities as determined by
the Homicide Bureau and do not capture killings where the coverup
prevented an investigation.)

The DPD relaxed its “Use of Firearms in Police Action” policy in
September 1967 in recognition that many of the fatal shootings of
“looters” during the Uprising violated the previous, already quite
lax standard that disallowed firing at a fleeing person “upon mere
suspicion” or if “any other means” of apprehension was possible.
The new policy allowed fatal force to prevent the escape of a felony
suspect based on the subjective standard of the officer’s “sound
discretion,” part of the nationwide trend during this era to
insulate law enforcement from oversight by locating legal authority in
the “reasonable” discretion of the individual cop on the street.

The exponential increase in police violence was part of a broader
political confrontation
[[link removed]] between
the DPD and the Black community during the racially polarized era of
the late 1960s and early 1970s. The DPD and the city government came
under the control of a reactionary white leadership that, in
combination with the increasingly powerful Detroit Police Officers
Association union, engaged in the full-scale repression of Black Power
and left-wing organizations, obstructing all attempts by civil rights
agencies to investigate brutality, misconduct, and unconstitutional
law enforcement activities. Large groups of white DPD officers
brutally and illegally assaulted and harassed Black Power activists in
high schools, Black teenagers in racially transitional neighborhoods,
Black youth at a church dance, nonviolent marchers from the Poor
People’s Campaign, a Black church hosting a Black nationalist
conference, the local chapter of the Black Panther Party, and also
white New Left activists and countercultural youth. The DPD hierarchy
and the police union stonewalled all investigations by the city and
state civil rights agencies into these events.

The DPD also systematically whitewashed internal investigations into
the everyday misconduct complaints filed by Black citizens, and
although most of these records are sealed, an internal assessment
acknowledged that no police officer was fired for brutality against a
civilian during the 1960s. Very few were ever disciplined, much less
prosecuted. The Michigan Civil Rights Commission repeatedly accused
the DPD of an official policy of covering up brutality and misconduct
by its officers through the “Blue Curtain” of collective silence.
The commission also found that DPD officers illegally arrested and
violently retaliated against numerous civilians who filed brutality
complaints (a longstanding practice documented by the NAACP in the
1950s as well). In one 1972 incident, between fifteen and twenty white
officers beat three wrongfully arrested Black males inside a precinct
parking garage and then assaulted two Black officers who tried to stop
the attack. The DPD denied that the incident had occurred, sought to
discipline the Black officers for interfering with police operations,
and forced the resignation of a white officer who violated the Blue
Curtain to report the assault.

Almost half of the fatal police shootings documented in _Detroit
Under Fire_ during 1968–73 involved unarmed Black males in their
teens and twenties shot while fleeing from the scene of an alleged
burglary or robbery. These police homicides were disproportionately
located in major commercial corridors or in transitional zones between
Black and white neighborhoods, indicating a DPD deployment policy to
protect white-owned businesses and residences through fatal
force—not an intensified crackdown in the poorest and most
segregated, allegedly “high-crime” areas of the city. Prosecutor
Cahalan found every on-duty police homicide during this period to be
justified except for a young white man shot in a rage incident by a
white officer (the grand jury declined to indict, and the DPD cleared
him) and a Black officer charged with manslaughter for a shooting
linked to narcotics corruption (which was extensive in the DPD
[[link removed]],
and also usually covered up by the hierarchy).

The formation of the DPD STRESS initiative in the spring of 1971
accelerated fatal police shootings in Detroit to a per capita level
unsurpassed by any large urban department during the era and probably
ever since. STRESS focused on decoy operations (in which an undercover
officer poses as an easy crime target), with the aim of surprising
would-be muggers with fatal force. Its commander opined that “what
is at stake here is whether we can effectively police the black
community.” STRESS officers shot and killed at least twenty-two
people
[[link removed]] in
under three years, including fourteen during decoy operations. One
white officer, Raymond Peterson, fired his weapon in at least nine
homicides and was hailed by the DPD as a crime-fighting hero until
forensic evidence proved he planted a knife on a dead Black male in
1973 (Peterson was acquitted of second-degree murder by a mostly white
jury). The archival evidence—unusually extensive because activists
filed a civil lawsuit against the DPD and Wayne County Prosecutor for
conspiracy to cover up STRESS murders—reveals that most if not all
of the decoy shootings were unjustified, that a majority of those
killed were not muggers or engaged in any other criminal activity, and
that white officers routinely planted knives on the victims whom they
shot without cause.

The fatal shootings of fifteen-year-old Ricardo Buck and
sixteen-year-old Craig Mitchell in September 1971 was the turning
point in the STRESS operation and inaugurated a two-year campaign by
civil rights, Black Power, and left organizations for abolition of the
unit and full community control of the DPD. The Homicide Bureau
investigative file of the Buck and Mitchell fatalities
[[link removed]],
which our project obtained through a FOIA request, reveals a
broad-based coverup to support the police story that an undercover
white decoy officer shot the two Black teenagers as they fled after
attacking him with a weapon. The Homicide Bureau and the Wayne County
prosecutor discounted the eyewitness accounts of other Black youth on
the scene, were complicit in obvious collusion with the officers
present, ignored the forensic evidence and autopsy report making clear
that the shootings could not have happened as claimed, and then
criminalized the dead youth as dangerous felons terrorizing the
streets of Detroit. Five years later, the city settled a civil lawsuit
filed by the Buck and Mitchell families in recognition that the STRESS
team had used excessive force and then covered up evidence.

How many similar stories would emerge if the DPD and the
prosecutor’s office had to make all police homicide files available
to researchers and impacted communities? At least seven other STRESS
fatalities led to wrongful death civil litigation judgments or
settlements. The partial archival trail accessible to our project team
indicates that more than a quarter of the eighty-four police-involved
fatalities during 1971–73 were likely murder or manslaughter
scenarios covered up by law enforcement agencies, including at least
fourteen by the STRESS unit.

The protest movement against STRESS, and changing demographics as
Detroit became a majority-Black city, led to the election of an
African American mayor in 1973. Coleman Young abolished STRESS soon
after taking office, but his “community policing” reforms did not
fundamentally change the patterns of police violence and brutality in
Detroit, especially because he simultaneously launched a get-tough
crackdown on crime, drugs, and gangs. The city adopted affirmative
action policies to integrate the police force and established a
mayor-appointed board of police commissioners that lacked real
oversight authority. The police union also fought efforts to hold
individual officers accountable, in the rare cases when the DPD and
the Young administration actually tried. Radical groups continued to
demand demilitarization of the police, an elected civilian board, and
full community control over the DPD—never-enacted policies that
Detroit Black Lives Matter activists continue to fight for to this
day.

Police violence and brutality against African Americans is a
fundamental feature of U.S. urban governance and racial control of
segregated neighborhoods. The findings
[[link removed]] of _Detroit
Under Fire_ reinforce the overwhelming scholarly and activist
consensus that the problem of police violence is not caused by a few
“bad apples” or by individual racism, and therefore the solution
cannot be found in prosecuting and convicting officers in the most
egregious videotaped incidents. Nonetheless, both to inform our
current debate about how to address police violence and transform law
enforcement—and to seek accountability and justice—it is long past
time for all of these law enforcement records to be open to public
scrutiny.

The systems of concealment, unaccountability, and preemptive
authorization of discretionary deadly force, put in place in response
to civil rights activism of the 1960s and ’70s, are the foundation
of the policing systems that continue to operate to this day. While
the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act
[[link removed]] passed
by the U.S. House of Representatives is a start, more far-reaching
Black Lives Matter proposals such as the BREATHE Act
[[link removed]] recognize that the only comprehensive
solution requires defunding and disarming law enforcement, in
combination with nonpunitive community-based approaches to public
health and reinvestment in our most marginalized, heavily policed
communities. As part of any justice-informed transformation, it is
also essential to bring about community control of public safety
agencies and end the inherently corrupt processes through which police
departments and prosecutors investigate and exonerate themselves.

From The Boston Review ([link removed]
[[link removed]])

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