In January of 1974, Coleman Young took office as Detroit’s first Black mayor. His platform focused on police reform in a campaign that saw him defeat former Police Commissioner John Nichols.  The election followed what was arguably one of the most tumultuous eras in the city’s history. Before Young took office, public trust in police was markedly low, fueled by the abuses of STRESS — the decoy cop unit dubbed the “execution squad." From 1971 to 1974, STRESS officers unleashed a massive surge of police violence against Black people, scarring the local community and eviscerating police-coummnity relations. 

Young's slogan in the '74 campaign — “law and order, with justice” — served as an answer to the former white moderate Mayor Jerome Cavanaugh’s appeal to “law and order.” Young critiqued that slogan as, at best, an empty promise — a moral veneer for the racist reality. He argued that “law and order” alone was simply a smokescreen to attack the Black community with police units such as STRESS, prioritizing the image of an aggressive crime-fighting policy over the safety of the Black population. Without justice, law and order was indistinguishable from oppression. Young's politics acknowleded the importance of stability, but with the caveat that stability could no longer come at the cost of Black lives. Upon taking office, Young moved to immediately abolish STRESS.

Polarized Reactions

Excitement or concern were the dominant reactions to Young’s victory. The public largely mapped the polarized response to his victory along the racial divide — Black people supporting Young and the white population against him. Young’s supporters were excited at the prospect of genuine reform – while the same prospect struck fear in the Detroit Police Department's officer corps. The campaign was bitter and largely divided along racial lines. John Nichols's campaign manager admits that his entire agenda focused on "securing the white vote." Due to the continuation of "white flight," the city's racial demographics were in flux. [DATA VISUALIZATION] Yet, while Detroit was nearly half Black at this point, the city was still patrolled by a majority-white police department – one that Young would lead. 

Young's victory followed a the national pattern of Black mayors taking command of largely white police forces. The failure of the department to align its personnel with the city's demographic shift was believed to contribute to the level of police brutality and misconduct. As such, one of Coleman Young's contested reform proposals was an increase in affirmative action efforts to diversity the force. [For more on this policy click here].  While former Mayor Gribbs began the process, it was heavily expanded under Young. His adamance on its implementation led to further backlash from the Detroit Police Officers Association (DPOA). The DPOA was gaining strength, grounding their anger in Coleman Young's promised reforms to the department. Racist, white officers felt they were losing power as rights and opportunities were expanded to Black officers.  Any and all liberal reformers and administrators were presetned as enemies of officer autonomy and power.

In his 1994 autobiography, Coleman Young challenged the polarized perception of Detroit's politics in those years. He wrote that any law-abiding citizen, Black or wrhite, hoped to see a drastic reduction in crime in the city, and that they welcomed the aggressive reforms that such a result would require. Yet Mayor Young also observed that, even in the present day, police were equally, if not more, terrifying for Detroit’s Black population than the crime rate.

Michigan Chronicle Reactions 

Within the Michigan Chronicle, an upper-middle class moderate Black newspaper, several pages of the January 1974 issue were dedicated to the community's reactions to and commentary on Young’s election. The pages were full of impassioned poetry and op-ed pieces on the personal meaning of Young’s victory. The excerpts below are emblematic of the hope of the time, especially among Black Detroiters. Even then, some opposed Young and doubted that he would fulfill his goal of achieving “unity," but the mood in the Chronicle was still overwhelmingly positive. Still, it would be a mistake to extend that conclusion to the entirety of Detroit; we do not have access to all the newspapers published at the time, and even then, not all voices would have been considered fit for publication. The Michigan Chronicle offers an upper-middle-class moderate perspective; its readers and writers represent a subsect of the Black population, one that was often not among those most affected by police misconduct. As such,  the more radical left Black papers were less optimistic. This is a small sample of the reactions that Mayor Young sparked – dedication and excitement along with skepticism. 

The Horizons of Liberation

Coleman Young promised that "law and order" and "justice" could coexist – indeed, that they required each other. Yet many thinkers and scholars, both in Mayor Young's time and in ours, have seen these ideas as inherently antagonistic. It is instructive to view this dissonance as a framework for Mayor Young’s first term and the attempted reforms pursued by his administration.

In the eyes of more radical thinkers, the limits of Mayor Young's approach prove that justice for Black communities is incompatible with the politics and reality of “law and order.” In practice, both were firmly embedded in the carceral model. Justice, in the mind of Coleman Young and others at the time, meant that both criminals and police should be punished when they acted violently, and that only through punishment could criminals, even criminal officers, serve their “debt to society.” John Wesley Donn and others have asserted, to the contrary, that punishment is an ineffective mechanism to change human behavior.

Viewed through the lenses of prison abolition and restorative justice, “Law and Order, with Justice” was a broken promise from the beginning. The carceral model can only perpetuate racial violence; hence, to rely on it as a mode of reform is self-defeating. To be “tough on crime” does nothing to address the root causes of crime or challenge our notions of criminality. Far too often the “criminal” is merely coded language for an impoverished, young Black or Brown man. The work of scholars and activists such as Angela Davis, Mariame Kaba, and Ruth Gilmore Wilson continues to enrich our analysis of the limits of reform in 1970s Detroit.

No one should have understood this better, perhaps, than Coleman Young himself. Mayor Young was a former radical activist who became swept up in the system, and as such he partnered with moderate white elites and attempted to work within a system that gave him power. Yet justice, in the deeper sense of Black Liberation and the end of the carceral model, only exists outside of the system. It required and continues to require radical change in how we work through conflict, support our communities, and perceive criminality.

Sources:

Domm, John Wesley. “Police Performance in the Use of Deadly Force: An Analysis and a Program to Change Decision Premises in the Detroit Police Department.” PhD diss., Wayne State University, 1981.

Davis, Angela Y. Are prisons obsolete?. Seven Stories Press, 2011.

Edward J. Littlejohn, "The Civilian Police Commission: A Deterrent of Police Misconduct," University of Detroit Journal of Urban Law 59, no. 1 (Fall 1981): 5-62

The Michigan Chronicle, January 1974

Young, Coleman, and Lonnie Wheeler. Hard Stuff: The Autobiography of Mayor Coleman Young. Viking Books, 1994.

Letter to Dr. Mel Ravitz from Frank Little, May 30, 1973, Correspondence on Police Board of Commissioners, Mel Ravitz Papers Folder 6, Box 50, Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University

Letter to Frank Little from Dr. Mel Ravitz, June 6, 1973, Correspondence on Police Board of Commissioners, Mel Ravitz Papers Folder 6, Box 50, Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University

Memo to City Council from Mayor Gribbs, February 20, 1973,  Correspondence on Police Board of Commissioners, Mel Ravitz Papers Folder 6, Box 50, Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University

Gail Starr, "Police and Civilian Review" sent to Police Community Relations Committee by Joseph Schore, Director, August 25, 1969,  Correspondence on Police Board of Commissioners, Mel Ravitz Papers Folder 6, Box 50, Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University