Violence in Detroit: A Bleaker View
Violence in Detroit: A Bleaker View The police unit called STRESS (Stop the Robberies and Enjoy Safe Streets) came into existence in Detroit in 1971, and in two short years had twenty-two killings...
...The city of Detroit had a majority -black population and the mayor was deter-mined that the Police Department would reflect that ratio...
...With a black officer on the scene of an arrest, especially the arrest of a black suspect, the likelihood of ex-cessive force and brutality was mini-mized...
...This article was adopted from a longer version in The Black Scholar, January-February 1981...
...However, through June of 1981 there had been only one serious breach of conduct by a white police officer against a member of the black community...
...Later, just before a massive layoff of 700 officers, the figure was put at 35 to 40 per cent minority...
...Early last year a young black man died after being tortured by a white officer using a cattle-prod...
...Even with the creation of a five-member Board of Police Commissioners, in-stalled in 1973 to review all Citizen com-plaints against police officers, or the vigi-lance of the Guardians of Michigan, a 500-member statewide black police officers association founded to counter the racist policy of the DPOA, there are still not enough eyes to watch and curtail the abusive, improper, and brutal be-havior of Detroit's white policemen...
...In January 1973, Hayward Brown was captured...
...This time STRESS officers were involved in a shoot-out with three young, well-armed black men: John Percy Boyd, Hayward Brown, and Mark Bethune...
...After the smoke had cleared from the shoot-out, which began with a case of "mis-taken identity," it was discovered that forty-four shots had been fired—forty-one of them by STRESS officers...
...This meant dras-tic change would have to occur, since women and minorities had never accounted for more than a token 10 per cent of the department...
...And in May of that year three female relatives of the mayor were illegally harassed and strip-searched after being arrested by white officers...
...The new ratio vastly improved police-community relations and definitely reduced the number of civilian com-plaints brought against the police...
...Enter Coleman Young...
...Boyd, Brown, and Bethune had been waging a private war against heroin dealers in their neighborhood when they apparently stumbled upon a pay-off between dealers and undercover officers of STRESS...
...Violence in Detroit: A Bleaker View The police unit called STRESS (Stop the Robberies and Enjoy Safe Streets) came into existence in Detroit in 1971, and in two short years had twenty-two killings to its credit...
...The presence of minority officers also put a check on the racist demeanor of white officers...
...Boyd, Brown, and Bethune escaped...
...In one terrible week in the summer of 1980, for instance, white police officers fired on seven suspects, critically wounding three...
...Similar to SWAT in Los Angeles and Atlanta and BOSS in New York City, STRESS accounted for only 1 per cent of the more than 5,500 Detroit police officers, but it soon had the highest per capita number of civilian killings by any urban police department in the country...
...Jurors, acquitting Brown of all charges, expressed the sentiments of the community: STRESS had to go...
...Before the winter of 1972 was over, STRESS was once more in the news...
...It's a good guess that the new detente will last for a while...
...this time one officer was slain and one was wounded...
...Young promised to "turn Detroit around"—to put an end to STRESS and impose tighter controls on the police...
...And as for the relationship between the mayor and the police department, the DPOA did throw its lastminute support to the mayor's recent re-quest for an increase of the city income tax, which voters approved...
...Unlike the slaughter of black youths by STRESS, the shoot-out between law enforcement officers could not be ig-nored or buried in the back pages of the paper...
...Brown, brought to trial, became the fulcrum of the drive to abolish STRESS...
...Three weeks later, the three would have another encounter with STRESS...
...After his narrow victory, Young im-mediately set about changing the racial composition of the city's police force...
...For years a meaningful force as a State Senator in Lansing, in 1973 he re-turned to Detroit to mount a mayoral campaign to keep the city out of Nichols's hands...
...While the issue stewed in court, Young went ahead with his plans and by 1977 it was esti-mated that between 26 and 28 per cent of the department's officers were either black or female...
...Herb Boyd (Herb Boyd is a contributing editor ofthe Detroit Metro Times...
...In the shoot-out that followed, four STRESS officers were wounded...
...STRESS officers themselves were responsible for 2.5 per cent of Detroit's homicide rate in 1971...
...Quite naturally, the racist DPOA was angered by these plans and chal-lenged the legality of the mayor's affirmative action program...
...But to monitor or eradicate police brutality and misconduct completely re-quires far more than the addition of a few minority officers to the police force...
...To quiet the growing criticism, the Police Department gradually trans-formed STRESS, renaming it the Felony Prevention Squad...
...But in general things remained the same and much of the energy from the Detroit Police Officers Association (DPOA) was given over to Detroit Police C?mmissioner John Ni-chols and his bid for the mayoralty...
...Despite railies, demonstrations, and community meetings held in protest of STRESS's bloodshed and repression, it was not until a shoot-out between STRESS and off-duty deputies from the Wayne County Sheriff's Department that public indignation over STRESS's gory activities was fully aroused...
...Boyd and Bethune were later killed in a shoot-out with Atlanta police...
Vol. 45 • September 1981 • No. 9
