Cops or Robbers?

Note: this investigative report is a project of the Policing and Social Justice HistoryLab, a part of the U-M Carceral State Project, and is based on cases drawn from the website exhibits Detroit Under Fire: Police Violence, Crime Politics, and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Civil Rights Era (published 2021) and Crackdown: Policing Detroit through the War on Crime, Drugs, and Youth (to be published in 2023). 

Cover image above: Detroit Police Search Houses during STRESS Manhunt, January 2, 1973 ( source ).

In 1970 Gerald Ostrowski--Gerry as his family called him--was twenty-two years old and living in Detroit’s Cass Corridor, a neighborhood infamous at the time for its high rates of crime, poverty, and drug use. Although Ostrowski had a steady job as a cab driver, he was not completely satisfied. Living in such a dangerous area of the city, he dreamed of becoming a police officer and making a positive difference in his community. In fact, Ostrowski had applied to both the Detroit and Highland Park police departments and was second in line to become an officer in Highland Park.

Ostrowski never got the chance to fulfill his ambitions.

On July 22, just before midnight, Ostrowski was in his backyard with his soon-to-be mother-in-law who was visiting him and his fiancé. They would have been enjoying the sweet summer air blowing gently through the streets of the Cass Corridor. It was a Wednesday, and Gerry had probably had a long day driving people back and forth across town. Unfortunately, the otherwise quiet evening was soon interrupted by a crowd that was gathering around some type of commotion on the block behind Ostrowski’s house. Inclined to help a neighbor, Ostrowki made his way over to the group to break up whatever argument was causing the disturbance.

Approaching the crowd, Ostrowski saw two young men struggling with each other on the sidewalk. A third man was bleeding badly nearby, and a hunting knife lay on the ground at their feet. Ostrowski noticed that one of the men was holding a pistol, so he attempted to intervene and get the situation under control. The armed man yelled at Ostrowski to back off. He claimed that he was a police officer and that he was detaining the man he was struggling with.

Ostrowski was unconvinced. The armed assailant wasn’t wearing any type of police uniform or badge that marked him as an officer. According to his future mother in law, Ostrowski “wanted to make sure he was [an officer] before he let him take the men away at the point of a gun.” Ostrowski’s suspicion was only furthered when the armed man, who was still wrestling with his antagonist, refused to let Ostrowski hold the police identification that he produced. The man being detained used the distraction as an opportunity to try to get away. He pulled the other man to the ground and screamed “Get his gun!.” Ostrowski allegedly moved towards the pair, but his intervention was cut short as a single gunshot rang out. Ostrowski fell to the ground, dead from a bullet wound to his chest.

As the Detroit News reported the following day, the armed man who shot Ostrowski actually was an off-duty police officer from the Woodward precinct named Glenn Smith.

To treat the case of Gerald Ostrowski and Glenn Smith as a fluke incident would be to ignore the policies and systemic forces that produced many similar outcomes. At least 53 killings by police in Detroit between 1957 and 1994—nearly 15 percent of all killings by law enforcement during that time period—involved off-duty officers. During the 1960s and 1970s, Detroit Police Department (DPD) policy required off-duty officers to carry their firearms with them at all times. Being armed signaled to officers that they had a responsibility to enforce laws, even when off the clock. That understanding expressed itself frequently, as off-duty officers often intervened in dangerous situations, or even just everyday encounters, during those decades. In many cases, including a number where participants and bystanders did not realize the armed intervenor was a police officer, this involvement escalated the situation and resulted in deaths.

Killings by off-duty officers, however, are also just one part of a larger pattern of systemic police violence that emerged in the late 1960s and has continued, through various iterations, up to the present day. As detailed in the next section, on-duty DPD officers involved in undercover and plainclothes operations were more likely to shoot and kill civilians than their counterparts in uniform. Overall, plainclothes on-duty and off-duty officers combined were responsible for at least 96 homicides, or more than one-fourth of all police killings in Detroit, between the late 1950s and the early 1990s. Plainclothes operations were also disproportionately dangerous for police officers themselves--around half of all DPD officers killed in the line of duty during this time period were not in uniform, and a significant number were shot by civilians or other police officers who mistook them for criminals.

Ostrowski’s death, like so many others in Detroit, occurred as a result of the dangers associated with low-visibility policing.

"Low-visibility policing" or “invisible policing” refers to law enforcement activities in which an officer's purpose, location, or identity is obscured from public view. Ostrowski’s fatal confusion about whether or not Glenn Smith was a real police officer exemplifies how police activities conducted in plainclothes, a form of low-visibility policing, can create unnecessary confusion, conflict, and violence. Between 1970 and 1993 alone, at least eighteen people died in incidents that started when civilians mistakenly thought the plainclothes DPD officers were criminals.

Far from isolated tragedies, these killings represent a significant portion of all deaths resulting from law enforcement activity during this era. The circumstances that led to these incidents of police-related violence were directly shaped by concrete policies and official practices. Detroit's requirement that off-duty police always be armed gave officers cause to engage in law enforcement activities even when they were without their uniforms (and also led to multiple situations where inebriated or angry off-duty officers shot and killed people during bar fights or after traffic accidents).

Federal policy also played a crucial role. During the mid-to-late 1960s, President Lyndon Johnson's administration responded fearfully to large-scale urban uprisings against police violence and racism,  investing millions of federal grant dollars  into the development of new police tactics. That initiative, the War on Crime, provided municipal police departments across the country with funds for the creation of plainclothes and undercover police units. Those units employed tactics that centered around hiding a police officer's identity in order to allow them to better apprehend suspects. As was the case with off-duty officers, the lack of clear police signifiers in those plainclothes units also created confusion and unnecessary violence.

Detroit was one of the many major cities that put federal grant money towards low-visibility policing. In 1971 the Detroit Police Department (DPD) formed a plainclothes decoy unit called STRESS (Stop the Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets). In its first year of operation, members of the STRESS unit were responsible for the killings of 14 citizens, including 3 juveniles under the age of 17 ( read the full Detroit Under Fire investigation of STRESS here ). Though STRESS was disbanded in 1974 following massive Black community protests, low-visibility policing remained an important tactic in the DPD's arsenal. In the 1980s, invisible policing took the form of undercover operations and plainclothes no-knock raids and became an essential part of the deadly fight against drugs in Detroit.

Despite its violent history, low-visibility policing is still practiced by police departments in every major U.S. city, including Detroit. Breonna Taylor, one of the victims of police violence whose death inspired massive racial justice protests during the summer of 2020, was shot by Louisville police officers who did not identify themselves during a no-knock raid, a form of low-visibility policing. Because of its continued human cost, it is essential that low-visibility policing is included in the current national conversation about criminal justice. This investigative report contributes to this discussion by examining the problems caused by obscuring police activity from public view and by placing the use of low-visibility tactics in historical context through a case study of Detroit.

To understand how law enforcement policy and tactics can blur the line between police and criminals—and how that lack of distinction can put both officers and the public in danger—it is useful to look at the rise of plainclothes policing as a law enforcement strategy. The city of Detroit offers an informative case study in the implementation of low visibility policing and its consequences. 

During the 1960s, Detroit started gaining a reputation as a high-crime city. Official crime rates were on the rise nationally and Detroit, suffering from economic problems due to the decline of the auto industry, was hit especially hard.  Militarized policing  in Detroit's segregated Black neighborhoods, as well as widespread use of discretionary tactics such as  "stop and frisk"  racial profiling through stop-and-frisk, also inflated the crime rate. These policies of racial criminalization resulted in many arrests of low-income Black people for low-level offenses or public order violations such as loitering. By the end of the decade, the number of reported crimes in Detroit had increased significantly--a product of the "war on crime" police crackdown as much as crime itself.

As a result, the issue of law enforcement became central to municipal politics. An  urban uprising in 1967 , which began due to discontent about police violence and discrimination within Detroit’s African-American communities, shook the city and inspired further debates about policing. While civil rights and black power groups called for police reform and civilian oversight of the DPD, white mayors and voters supported a  get-tough crackdown  targeting low-income Black neighborhoods. The city of Detroit was deeply polarized along racial lines and experienced a wave of violence during this era, including at least  136 police killings of civilians  between 1968 and 1973, the highest per capita in the nation.

In 1970, a conservative new mayor, Roman Gribbs, and his hardline police chief, John Nichols, came to power with an agenda to wage a targeted war on crime in Detroit's Black communities. Facing public pressure to halt the rising crime rate, especially robberies and muggings, the DPD began looking for new crime control strategies. One of the solutions they found was zero-visibility policing.

In January 1971, the DPD launched a new plainclothes police unit called STRESS, an acronym for Stop The Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets. The STRESS unit was premised on using zero-visibility policing to identify and intervene in street robberies as they occurred. Decoy teams of police officers deployed undercover, usually disguised as "drunks or derelicts," in order to catch would-be muggers in the act or even stop them before they could commit a crime.

The STRESS unit  killed at least 22 people  between 1971 and 1973, almost all of them African American. The undercover decoy teams were responsible for two-thirds of these fatal force encounters, including the deaths of nine people in the initial rollout during the spring and summer of 1971. Many of these deaths occurred during suspicious circumstances, with evidence indicating that the undercover officers generally initiated the encounter, shot as a first rather than a last resort, and covered up what really happened. STRESS's deadly operations led to a  wave of protests  by Black community organizations that labeled the unit a racist "murder squad" and demanded its abolition. Opponents of STRESS also questioned law enforcement claims that "zero visibility policing" had succeeded in lowering the crime rate and accused the DPD of manipulating the crime data in service of its political agenda. In 1973, this protest campaign resulted in the election of a Black mayor who soon abolished the STRESS unit. 

The legacy of STRESS and its philosophy of "zero visibility" policing long outlasted the decoy unit's deadly three-year history. STRESS in Detroit was only one of many similar experiments in plainclothes policing that proliferated in major cities across the country during the 1960s and 1970s. In fact, the STRESS program was initiated as part of a national shift in law enforcement tactics, inspired in part by federal initiatives and the grant-based funding that came with them. For federal policy makers and law enforcement officials alike, rising crime rates and continued urban unrest throughout the second half of the 1960s showed that the government was losing the “War on Crime'' that President Lyndon Johnson had first declared in 1965. The federal government, through the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA), along with private organizations such as the Police Foundation, channeled millions of dollars into municipal law enforcement budgets in order to help develop new tactical approaches to crime control. Prominent among those new strategies was the extensive use of foot patrols and plainclothes officers to deter street crime.

The DPD had utilized undercover and plainclothes officers before STRESS, and the department actually expanded these low visibility policing strategies after the decoy program ended in 1974, especially with the escalation of the law enforcement wars on drugs, street crime, and gangs. While STRESS generated controversy because of the unit’s frequent use of preemptive violence and extraordinarily high number of civilian casualties, the dangers associated with plainclothes policing did not begin or end with the DPD's most notorious undercover operation.

In the city of Detroit, plainclothes officers either on-duty or off-duty committed more than one-fourth of the total number of police homicides--96 out of 365 identified--between 1957 and 1993. This statistical estimate is possible because of the archival and newspaper research conducted by the Policing and Social Justice HistoryLab at the University of Michigan, which has compiled the most comprehensive accounting of police killings available for any American city during the second half of the twentieth century as part of its  Detroit Under Fire  and Crackdown (forthcoming) website exhibits. Police departments rarely publicize the aggregate data, and almost never release the detailed accounts, of homicides committed by their officers. This makes it very difficult to analyze patterns in police police violence and evaluate the role of law enforcement policies, priorities, and tactics. The maps below are possible because of the large data set created by a team of more than thirty researchers in the  Policing and Social Justice HistoryLab , although it is essential to acknowledge that because of deliberate archival silences and the refusal of law enforcement to make most internal records public, these statistics are still incomplete and the total number of people killed by police officers is  unknown and unknowable .

The raw data on plainclothes policing in Detroit makes it clear that a causal relationship exists between the use of low-visibility tactics and police violence. Data alone, however, cannot fully communicate the vast human costs of that violence. Nor can it fully explain how that relationship works or how it came to be. The real story of invisible policing and its costs can only be revealed through an examination of the policies that created these police tactics and descriptions of the individual lives that were needlessly cut short. The remainder of this investigation tells some of these stories by uncovering the history of low-visibility policing in Detroit and highlighting several case studies that demonstrate how low-visibility tactics often lead to unnecessary violence. 

The story of plainclothes policing in Detroit is, in many ways, the story of STRESS. Stop The Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets was a plainclothes police unit  created by the Detroit Police Department in 1971  in response to increasing numbers of reported robberies in the city, and as part of the militarized crackdown on Black residents and neighborhoods during this racially polarized era. STRESS operated by sending teams of plainclothes decoy officers out on the streets to pose as potential robbery victims. In theory those officers would lure criminals to confront them, allowing the officers to arrest would-be muggers before they could target a real victim. As the following documents show, STRESS was explicitly conceived of as a zero-visibility policing strategy.

DPD Inspector James Bannon, the main architect of the STRESS initiative, labeled the decoy operation a new form of "proactive policing" based on "the idea of invisible, zero visibility, policemen who would be present to interdict crime." ( Click here  to read the full four-page article by Inspector Bannon and Commissioner Nichols, "STRESS: Zero Visibility Policing," in a 1972 issue of Police Chief magazine).

"We came up with the idea of invisible, zero visibility, policemen who would be present to interdict crime. . . . What is at stake here is whether we can effectively police the black community" -- DPD Inspector James Bannon

As noted by STRESS architects John Nichols and James Bannon, using plainclothes officers as decoy robbery targets in a crackdown aimed at young Black males did “predictably” lead to violence. By the end of 1971, the unit’s first year, STRESS officers had killed fourteen citizens. Among those killed, all but two Black (one a Latino juvenile). The victims included three boys aged sixteen or younger. The high rate of killings associated with STRESS and the drastically disproportionate number of Black victims quickly led to community protests against the new police unit. The Sept. 1971 killing of two Black youth,  Ricardo Buck and Craig Mitchell , transformed these protests into  an all-out effort  by local activists to eliminate the STRESS program.

Despite massive protests from within the African American community in Detroit, the  overwhelmingly white  DPD leadership refused to eliminate the unit. Nichols, Bannon, and others in the DPD claimed that STRESS had led to a reduction in the number of reported robberies. Although police manipulation of crime statistics provide  reasons to be skeptical  of that purported decrease, as well as its relation to STRESS, most white Detroiters at the time believed that STRESS was making a positive change in the city. General support for STRESS among whites, and marginal support among African Americans, allowed DPD leadership to resist calls for its abolition.

Then in March 1972, a shocking incident involving STRESS officers shook that base of support and pushed the top brass at the DPD to reform and eventually disband the unit.

It was just a few minutes past midnight on March 9, 1972, when Wayne County Sheriff's Deputy James Jenkins climbed the steps up to the second story apartment of his friend and fellow deputy, Aaron Vincent.

As he entered the modest dwelling, Jenkins was greeted by three other colleagues from the Sheriff’s department: Henry Henderson, Henry Duvall, and David Davis. The three men were also joined by Vincent’s neighbor, Richard Sain. Most of the Black men were sitting around a card table, having already started the game of poker that occasioned the gathering. Aaron Vincent, who rented the apartment, was in his bedroom talking on the phone with his girlfriend.

Jenkins left the door to the apartment propped open to help ventilate the small living room. As he removed his jacket he was unaware that a plainclothes STRESS officer had been following him ever since he left his parked car in the lot behind the building. 

The STRESS officer tailing Deputy Jenkins that night was James Harris, one of three members of the only all-Black team within the STRESS unit. One of his partners, Officer Ronald Martin, was following close behind, while the other, Virgil Starkey, waited in their unmarked patrol car. All three of the STRESS officers were in plainclothes. They had noticed Jenkins—fresh off his shift at the county jail and no longer wearing his uniform—just as he was getting out of his car. Officer Harris would later claim that he had seen Deputy Jenkins carrying a gun in his hand. It is true that Jenkins was armed at the time, as was required by Sheriff's Department policy even when he was off duty.  An investigation by the Sheriff's Department  determined that from Harris’s stated position at the rear of the building, it would have been impossible for him to have seen Jenkins’s hands.

Whatever the real reason, Officer Harris and his partner Ronald Martin followed Deputy Jenkins up the steps to the apartment, located at 3210 Rochester Street in the Northwest side of Detroit. The STRESS officers positioned themselves at either side of the door, preparing to confront Deputy Jenkins and the other men they could see gathered inside the apartment. 

The series of events that followed are both confusing and contested. All parties agree that the encounter started when STRESS officer Harris stuck his gun into the apartment through the open door and yelled something. Deputy Jenkins, who had just removed his coat, responded to the sudden intrusion by drawing his weapon. A series of shots were exchanged before the STRESS officers temporarily retreated.

Although both groups of officers later recalled having clearly identified themselves as police, they all were equally adamant that the other group had not done so.

In the Rochester Street Massacre, both groups of law enforcement officers initially believed the other to be criminals.

The Sheriff's Deputies inside the apartment ran for cover after the initial shots were fired, periodically yelling that they were police officers. The group of STRESS officers, however, did not let up and started firing into the apartment once again. The STRESS officers continued to shoot for several minutes after the initial exchange of bullets. When they finally stopped, three of the deputies had been shot. One of them, Henry Henderson, died from his wounds, and another, James Jenkins, was left permanently blind by a bullet to the head. Even after the gunfire had ceased, the STRESS officers reportedly continued to assault the deputies as they lay on the ground until reinforcements arrived and eventually stopped them.

Following the incident, the Detroit Free Press created a series of images—based on police reports and the statements of the deputies inside the apartment—depicting the events that by then had been labeled the Rochester Street Massacre. Those images, shown below, contain a few inaccuracies. The third illustration, for example, shows Deputy Jenkins stepping out of the apartment to fire at the STRESS officers, something forensic evidence later proved was unlikely. Despite getting a few details wrong, the images provide a clear outline of how the events of that day unfolded.

The Rochester Street Massacre was politically explosive for the DPD and led directly to a new  escalation of protests  against the STRESS unit by Black community organizations and other radical groups. In order to salvage the STRESS operation, the DPD hierarchy agreed to institute some modest reforms, including psychological screening of its officers and a reduction in the deployment of the deadly decoy units. While the anti-STRESS movement had repeatedly emphasized the dangers of invisible policing for the civilians shot by undercover units, the Rochester Street Massacre also revealed the deadly risks of plainclothes policing and the potential for mistaken identity to escalate into gunfire for law enforcement officers as well. (Visit the Detroit Under Fire exhibit for a more detailed account of the  Rochester Street Massacre  and its fallout).

Though STRESS continued to operate until 1974, the Rochester Street incident began sounding the death knell for the low-visibility unit. Whereas defenders of the war on crime excused other STRESS killings through the “necessity” of combating street crime and muggers, the fact that everyone involved in the Rochester Massacre was a law enforcement officer made it hard to dehumanize the victims through racially coded accusations of inherent criminality. The result was a broader discontent with the brutality of Detroit police as a whole, especially among Black residents who had initially supported STRESS because of their fear of crime. A survey in the summer of 1973 found a 37 percent increase in the number of Black Detroiters who opposed STRESS compared to the previous year.

In 1974 Coleman Young, formerly an African American state senator, became the first Black mayor of Detroit. Young campaigned on the promise to abolish the STRESS unit and reform the police department by eliminating brutality against Black citizens. At the same time, Young remained committed to a program that he called “ law and order, with justice. ” During his five terms as mayor, from 1974 to 1993, Young supported militarized policing in Detroit's low-income Black neighborhoods as part of the broader national war on crime, drugs, and gangs. Despite the elimination of STRESS, the legacies of plainclothes policing lived on in the DPD's escalation of crime control crackdowns during the Coleman Young era, especially through the tactics of the war on drugs.

Despite the STRESS unit’s demise, low-visibility policing remained an ascendant tactic within the Detroit Police Department and in other large cities across the country. During the 1970s and 1980s, the federal War on Drugs funneled millions of dollars into the creation of new law enforcement programs, including plainclothes patrols, decoys operations, and undercover stings. 

The War on Drugs reached its fever pitch in the mid-1980s with the arrival of crack cocaine in American cities. By the mid-1980s Detroit, like many other cities across the nation, launched a full-scale war on crack cocaine markets. In 1986, the U.S. Congress passed the Anti Drug-Abuse Act, which raised mandatory-minimum penalties for drug crimes and provided cities with a massive increase in funding to combat the drug problem. In 1987 alone, the Michigan Office of Criminal Justice received over 6 million dollars in federal funds, much of which it distributed to cities like Detroit. Federal law enforcement agencies also worked directly with state and local police agencies in street-level drug was operations. 

With the influx of cash and intense public pressure to act on the drug crisis, the Detroit Police Department created new enforcement programs designed to target both street dealers and consumers. The DPD also increased the use of low-visibility tactics, many of which were reminiscent of the strategies devised by STRESS during the early 1970s. Most notably, the DPD stepped up its use of undercover operations and no-knock police raids, often conducted by officers dressed in plainclothes. Just like STRESS, these operations often ended in violence and created significant danger for civilians and police officers and civilians.

A 1986 incident involving Detroit police highlights the similarities between STRESS and the low-visibility drug enforcement tactics of the 1980s. Nearly 14 years after the infamous Rochester Street Massacre, two groups of Detroit law enforcement officers once again mistook each other for criminals. The result was a violent shootout that left two young officers dead.

The lead-up to the 1986 incident started in the late afternoon of February 5. A team of undercover police with the DPD’s Narcotics Division were preparing for a raid on a suspected drug house on the north side of Detroit. Around 5:30 p.m. an informant working for the narcotics team purchased drugs at the house, located at 537 E. Euclid Street. After the successful buy, the team, which included five undercover narcotics officers and a uniformed officer from the Tactical Service Section, parked their unmarked vehicle down the street from the house to plan out the details of their raid. 

At 6:01 p.m., unbeknownst to the narcotics crew, a police dispatcher received a call reporting shots fired in the area of the Euclid St. house that was about to be raided. Three marked patrol cars responded to the call. After speaking with people in the neighborhood, the officers came to the conclusion that no shots had actually been fired. At that point one of the marked cars left the area, while four officers remained inside a small house, taking the statements of five of its residents. The lights in the house were out and the winter sun had just set over Detroit’s horizon, so the remaining officers relied on their flashlights as they jotted down what the occupants were telling them. At least one of the officers would have written down the address of the home they were in: 537 E. Euclid.

As the four uniformed officers finished their work inside the house, the narcotics team was getting into position for the raid. During their preparation, the undercover officers did not inquire about the two marked police vehicles that were parked nearby, nor did their command notify central dispatch of the plan’s imminent execution. Additionally, in a breach of protocol, the uniformed Tactical Service officer failed to accompany the narcotics team to the front door, instead heading behind the house to cover the back entrance.

It did not take long for the operation to descend into chaos. Though the plainclothes officers had planned to use a battering ram to knock the door in and take the residents by surprise, they found that the door was already ajar. One of the officers, an experienced undercover cop named Giacomo “Jack” Buffa, slammed the door open and rushed through the entrance with his shotgun drawn. At the same time, the unit’s leader tripped and fell as he lost his grip on the battering ram he was carrying. As Buffa entered the dark house, he reportedly yelled out that he was police. Overlapping screams of “police!” followed as the uniformed officers inside reacted to the sudden intrusion. In the mess of screams and waving flashlights, one of the officers opened fire and a series of five shots followed. By the time the two groups of police realized what had happened, it was too late. Two officers, Jack Buffa and 25-year-old Mark Radden, who had been with the uniformed officers responding to the shots-fired call, lay fatally wounded by the bullets of their fellow officers. According to the Detroit Free Press, the leader of the undercover crew, Sgt. Dennis Kitchen, soon stumbled out of the house and collapsed on the ground.

“I think I shot a policeman,” he lamented. “He was shooting.”

There are several clear parallels between the deaths of Mark Radden and Jack Buffa in 1986 and the Rochester Street Massacre of 1972. In both cases, plainclothes police officers barged into private residences with little to no warning; in both cases, other law enforcement officers were inside and initially mistook their police counterparts for civilian law-breakers; in both cases, a shootout ensued that left officers dead or injured.

Low-visibility policing continually created the same type of dangerous situation: one in which it was unclear who was police and who was a criminal.

The two episodes reveal important parallels about the continuity of low-visibility policing from the 1970s to the 1980s. Although the purposes of the plainclothes units involved in each incident were different, their tactics and outcomes were quite similar. The fact that more than a decade had passed between the two tragedies, and that crime control priorities had shifted from street crime to drug enforcement, is evidence of the remarkable staying power of low-visibility policing as a policing strategy. The similar nature of the two outcomes suggests that even when applied to quite distinct law enforcement contexts, low-visibility policing continually created the same type of dangerous situation: one in which it was unclear who was police and who was a criminal.

The case of Radden and Buffa, like the Rochester St. Massacre, was not an isolated event. Both incidents were part of a larger pattern of police violence that expressed itself fairly consistently as long as low-visibility policing remained a central facet of crime control strategy in Detroit. To the extent that the two incidents were exceptional, it is not because of their violence but because their victims were law enforcement officers. Though low-visibility policing certainly did increase risks for police, its number of civilian victims was much higher. In fact, a year before his own death, Jack Buffa himself was involved in another narcotics raid in which police being mistaken for criminals led to a fatality. In that instance, the victim was a civilian.

In January 1985, Officer Buffa went undercover to purchase a small amount of narcotics from a suspected dealer inside a private residence belonging to Augusta Gnich, an elderly woman who was not able to care for herself. After purchasing drugs from the fiancé of Gnich’s caretaker, Buffa and his squad of narcotics officers planned a raid on the house. Buffa warned his fellow officers that there was an elderly woman inside and that the man he had bought drugs from had a pistol. Despite those circumstances the group decided to proceed with the raid instead of waiting for the dealer to leave the home. According to the officers, all but one of whom were in plainclothes at the time, the raiding group announced that they were police with a warrant and received no response from inside the residence. When they tried to force entry they were met with gunfire. In the exchange of bullets that followed, the police shot and killed 89-year-old Augusta Gnich. 

A lawsuit later filed on behalf of Augusta Gnich’s estate contradicted the police version of events. According to that suit, the undercover officers failed to clearly identify themselves as police when they first came up to the door of the home. Dennis Frazee, the man who sold Buffa drugs, had been robbed before and believed the plainclothes officers to be burglars. In the lawsuit's version of the story it was the officers, not Frazee, who fired the first shots. The facts alleges by the suit were credible enough that Gnich’s grandson ultimately received a $23,000 settlement from the city of Detroit.

Despite Officer Buffa’s involvement in both of these raids, the problems involved in undercover drug enforcement operations were not simply the result of the actions of individual officers or narcotics crews. They were also the product of a variety of policy decisions stretching from the federal to the municipal levels. The federal War on Drugs funneled massive resources to states and cities for narcotics enforcement during the crack cocaine era. Jumping on those federal dollars, large urban police departments such as the DPD were quick to expand their low-visibility policing strategies. Importantly, majority-white suburban areas often invested those dollars into preventative programs such as drug education and rehabilitation instead of punitive law enforcement programs.

As a result of these policy decisions drug raids became increasingly common in cities such as Detroit. A DPD map from 1989 (below) shows the extent of these raids in the city over the course of just nine months. The map shows three different types of drug enforcement activities: warrant raids, buy and bust raids, and street enforcement. While buy and bust operations were the only type that required low-visibility policing, it was not uncommon for warrant raids (inside private homes) and street enforcement to also involve plainclothes or undercover officers. In Detroit, with a population more than 75 percent Black by the end of the 1980s, the DPD launched drug enforcement operations frequently and across a wide range of the city.

"Police are the opposite of criminals."

That seemingly simple statement is the underlying assumption behind many people's understanding of law enforcement. From children’s games like cops and robbers, to the portrayal of police in movies and television, to political symbols such as the thin blue line flag, common representations of law enforcement tend to take for granted the idea that police officers are antithetical to, and thus clearly distinguishable from, the criminals they are tasked with confronting.

That idea is a vast oversimplification. As this report has already demonstrated, the line between police officers and criminals is not always as fixed or as obvious as many assume. In further deconstructing that assumption, it is important to recognize that police, like any other large group of people, sometimes commit crimes themselves. Unlike other groups, however, law enforcement officers have the unique ability to use the authority provided by their jobs to facilitate their criminal conduct.

 Recent research  on police crime suggests that many officers who violate the law do so while on the job. Out of the approximately one thousand police officers arrested and charged with crimes every year, almost half are arrested while actively on duty. That figure, although telling on its own, fails to take into account the presumably much larger number of cases in which police officers violate the law but, for various reasons, are never arrested.

One of the most egregious instances of police crime ever to be made public in Detroit took place during the early 1970s.  The Pingree Street Conspiracy , as the case came to be known, revealed a network of police corruption and criminal activity in heroin markets that went back years. The organized narcotics corruption implicated a large number of officers at various levels of authority within the DPD. Low-visibility policing in the form of drug raids and undercover tactics were central aspects of the Pingree Street Conspiracy, named for a cluster of "dope houses" that operated under the protection and through bribery of a group of officers in the 10th Precinct in an overwhelmingly Black part of Northwest Detroit.

Evidence of the Pingree Street Conspiracy first became public in April 1973 as the culmination of a two-year investigation conducted by the Detroit Free Press. The investigation focused on just one of Detroit’s thirteen police precincts, but it revealed an expansive network of police corruption in narcotics enforcement that seemed to have connections throughout the DPD, including to higher-ups in the downtown headquarters. The corrupt officers had formed a close relationship with several narcotics dealers and performed a variety of services for them in exchange for bribe money. The activities of the conspirators included:

• Protecting dealers who paid bribes by providing warning of imminent police raids and destroying evidence.
• Supplying dealers with heroin that was confiscated from rival drug traffickers.
• Robbing rival dealers of cash and drugs, using threats of arrest and violence.

The internal investigation of the conspiracy, conducted by an independent task force based in the state attorney general's office because of doubts regarding the DPD's impartiality, called for the indictment of 22 police officers. All of those officers had worked in plainclothes or undercover narcotics units in the 10th Precinct. Although rumors in the press and among activists hinted that corruption may have been more widespread, a more extensive investigation of the DPD as a whole was never undertaken. Limited resources and repeated obstruction by high ranking officials within the police department forced the internal investigating team to limit their inquiry to officers within the 10th Precinct. 

Only ten officers were actually indicted and sent to trial by the grand jury. Reluctance among law enforcement officials to send policemen to prison and expose corruption within the DPD limited the scope of the indictments, as did the refusal of almost all police officers to report wrongdoing or testify against fellow cops. According to former Detroit Police Chief Isaiah McKinnon, who was a sergeant in the 10th Precinct in 1972 and who later worked in Internal Affairs,  police culture in Detroit  emphasized supporting one’s fellow officers, even if that meant concealing misconduct, a code of solidarity between officers widely known as the “ blue curtain ." Because of this “blue curtain,” the prosecution had to rely primarily on the testimony of drug dealers as opposed to police witnesses whose testimony would have been viewed as more trustworthy.

The prosecution itself may have also been reluctant to see officers indicted. Wayne County Prosecutor William Cahalan, who was in charge of the case, was accused by members of the internal investigation task force of interfering with its work. Cahalan was well known for declaring almost all fatal shootings by police officers, including the controversial killings by the STRESS decoy operation, to be " justifiable homicides " regardless of the circumstances. His office almost never prosecuted police officers and often appeared quite willing to stretch the law to avoid bringing charges against law enforcement personnel. In one 1978 case, Cahalan decided to charge an officer accused of an unprompted assault against two neighbors with a misdemeanor instead of a felony. Defending his decision to the media, the prosecutor stated that he simply “did not feel the [felony] statute was aimed at police officers.” 

Only three DPD officers, along with five of their civilian accomplices, were ultimately convicted in the Pingree Street Conspiracy trial. Because of the absence of a broad investigation, and the obstructing effects of the “blue curtain,” the full extent of police corruption and criminality in 1970s Detroit will never be known. To understand what a more thorough investigation might have revealed, it is useful to note what was uncovered when another major city did follow through on accusations of abundant police corruption in the illegal narcotics trade.

In April 1970 a New York Times exposé of police corruption in the New York Police Department (NYPD) prompted a city-wide investigation of the extent of the problem. A commission, named for its chairman Whitman Knapp, was tasked with conducting the inquiry. In 1973 the Knapp Commission released its conclusions in a  single report . “We found corruption to be widespread,” its first sentence proclaimed. More than just widespread, the Knapp Commission found that corrupt conduct was “a strikingly standardized pattern” within parts of the NYPD. Notably, the Commission pointed to plainclothes police units tasked with gambling enforcement as the biggest culprits. According to the Commission report, in their study of plainclothes units “almost every plainclothesman in the division, including supervisory lieutenants, was implicated.” Narcotics officers were also found to be committing wide-spread acts of corruption. Witnesses before the Commission alleged that three out of four raids conducted by plainclothes narcotics officers ended with the suspect being let go in exchange for money or drugs. Additionally, the Commission found that, like police in Detroit, NYPD officers had a culture of solidarity that prevented even clean cops from reporting the criminal activities of their corrupt counterparts.

Although it is by no means certain that Detroit had the same level of police corruption as New York, there are quite a few parallels between the Pingree Street Conspiracy and the criminal activities described by the Knapp Commission Report. Police investigators at the time believed that corruption in Detroit was indeed widespread. There is also strong evidence that systemic DPD corruption in drug markets continued long after the Pingree St. affair, including a series of scandals and arrests of police officers taking bribes and protecting cocaine dealers during the 1980s and 1990s. Corruption was also present even at the highest levels of the DPD’s leadership. In 1992 Detroit Police Chief William Hart was convicted of embezzlement. During the 1980s he had stolen over a million dollars from a police fund designed to finance undercover operations using assets seized from drug offenders. Clearly the limited scope of the Pingree Street convictions failed to completely root out corruption in the DPD.

Another key similarity between police corruption in Detroit and New York is that plainclothes and undercover officers were the central offenders in both cases. The concentration of police corruption in low-visibility units raises the question of whether low-visibility tactics create conditions that enable or even incentivize police criminality. There does certainly appear to be a connection between low-visibility tactics and police crime. One possible explanation is simply that the inconspicuous nature of plainclothes policing allows officers to engage in corrupt activities without the public attention that a uniformed officer usually commands. Actions that would be obviously corrupt if committed by a uniformed officer—receiving money from a drug dealer, for example—are less noticeable when carried out by someone who looks like a civilian. Plainclothes officers may simply undertake less risk than their uniformed counterparts when engaging in certain criminal activities.

A more complicated explanation for the close relationship between low-visibility police and criminal activities lies in the historical ties between plainclothes tactics and the policing of "vice" markets. As historians  Lisa McGirr  and  Eric Schneider  have pointed out in their respective studies on Prohibition of alcohol and heroin enforcement, the lucrative nature of vice markets has consistently prompted authorities tasked with regulating those markets to leverage their positions for personal profit. Throughout the 20th century corruption has been a persistent feature of vice policing. Unlike other crimes in which victims are likely to notify police, illegal drug exchanges and other vice offenses involve consenting buyers and sellers who, in most cases, are both breaking the law. Since lawbreakers rarely report their own crimes, the regulation of vice markets became one of the first areas of law enforcement where police routinely used low-visibility tactics. The correlation between low-visibility policing and police criminality may be a result of their shared connection to vice enforcement.

To further illustrate how low-visibility police work facilitates police criminality, it is worth examining the details of a case involving two officers alleged to have been involved in the Pingree Street Conspiracy. 

Officer Charles Brown was one of six DPD officers whose crimes were documented by the Free Press in their initial investigative report on corruption in the 10th Precinct. The allegations made against him in the Free Press and by police investigators were backed up by several independent witnesses and eventually led to his indictment. According to the Free Press, Brown used his position as a plainclothes officer to get information about drug dealers whom he would proceed to rob at gunpoint. The allegations detailed how Brown provided informants with drugs in exchange for information about which dealers were in possession of significant quantities of cash and drugs. Brown would then go to those dealers, rob them, and use a portion of what he took to pay whoever had notified him of the score.

Part of what made the allegations against Brown so sensational was the fact that three years earlier, his partner had died in a shootout with a civilian who at the time had claimed that he mistook the two policemen for robbers. 

It was late on the evening of March 11, 1970 when Charles Brown and his partner William Slappey arrived at the door of Alonzo Burford’s apartment located on the west side of Detroit. The two DPD officers were dressed in plainclothes as they approached the second floor apartment unit. They did not have a warrant.

The story that Brown told about what happened next differs significantly from what Burford claimed happened and what police investigators of the Pingree Street Conspiracy later alleged. According to Brown, he and Officer Slappey had received a tip that Burford’s apartment contained a stash of stolen goods. The two policemen apparently knocked on the door without having a warrant in order to question Burford. Brown reported that Burford opened the door when the officers knocked, but when they identified themselves as police Buford grabbed Slappey, forced him back into the apartment, and took out a gun. In the shooting that followed between Brown, Burford, and another man who was in the apartment, Slappey was killed.

From the moment of his arrest Burford stood by several claims that contradicted Brown’s story. Burford insisted that Officers Brown and Slappey had never identified themselves as police. Moreover, he denied that he had opened the door for the policemen, insisting instead that the two had broken into the apartment without a warrant. Burford had believed that the two men in civilian clothes who forced their way into his home were robbers. On that basis he pled not guilty when charged with the murder of William Slappey—he claimed that if he had shot the officer he had been acting in self defense. A jury later acquitted Burford after Brown admitted on the stand that it was possible the shot that killed his partner may have come from his own gun.

The Detroit Free Press uncovered information about Charles Brown in its investigation that, after being confirmed by police investigators, seemed to vindicate Burford. As many as seven different dealers reported having also been robbed by Brown, and several heroin addicts claimed that Brown had paid them with drugs to lead him to dealers he could rob. Assuming that those witnesses told the truth, the story of William Slappey’s death is recast in a very different light. Officers Brown and Slappey would have known that Burford had some amount of cash and narcotics in his apartment and decided to rob him while they were on the job. Burford then would have been correct in assuming that the strangers entering his apartment were attempting to rob him. Acting in self-defense, he would have struggled with Officer Slappey and eventually drawn his own weapon, with Slappey being hit and killed in the ensuing shootout.

Regardless of what is made of the allegations against William Slappey and Charles Brown, their case drives home the dangers of low-visibility policing. If the pair did not plan on robbing Burford, their lack of clear identification was the reason that Burford mistook them for burglars and shot at them. If they were acting out a criminal scheme, it was precisely that same lack of identification that gave them the confidence and opportunity to plan to take drugs and cash from Burford under the threat of violence and then leave without drawing attention. 

"Charles Brown is a cop and that means he has a license to do what he wants" -- Anonymous drug dealer robbed by Officer Charles Brown

While police being perceived as criminals led to William Slappey’s death, it was, ironically, the assumption that law enforcement officers are the opposite of the criminals that enabled the alleged misdeeds of Slappey and Brown in the first place. As a dealer who claimed to have been robbed by Brown told the Free Press: “Charles Brown is a cop and that means he has a license to do what he wants. If I snitch on him he could blow me away—and in Detroit that’s called justifiable homicide.” The powerful presumption of innocence afforded to police officers gave police criminality a shield that proved hard to break through. In Charles Brown’s case that assumption was part of the reason that two white members of a jury forced ten of their peers into a compromise verdict in which he was acquitted.

Another reason that the case of William Slappey and Charles Brown is noteworthy is its similarity to another famous event in Detroit police history. In December 1972, three African American men, Mark Bethune, John Percy Boyd, and Hayward Brown, became the center of  one of the biggest manhunts  in the city’s history. Witnessing the negative impact of narcotics in their community, and angry about lack of action by police, the three had decided to forcibly shut down drug houses around the city. The DPD would later would argue against the group’s purported altruism by claiming that they were simply robbing dealers for their own personal gain. Even if police assertions about Bethune, Boyd, and Hayward Brown were true, which is unlikely, their activities were no worse than those of the Pingree Street conspirators.

On December 4, Bethune, Boyd, and Brown got into a shootout with a squad of undercover STRESS officers while staking out the home of a major heroin dealer. Both the three men and the STRESS officers who were also parked outside the house claimed that they believed the members of the other group were criminals working for the dealer. Though the exact details are contested, the two groups got into a gunfight in which all four STRESS officers were wounded. Bethune, Boyd, and Brown escaped.

Under the command of Police Commissioner John Nichols, the DPD poured all its available resources into the search for the three self-styled vigilantes. The situation was further escalated when the fugitives had another run in with another group of undercover STRESS officers. The three escaped after an exchange of bullets, but this time one of the STRESS officers, Patrolman Robert Bradford, was left dead. Announcing the officer’s death, John Nichols made a statement calling the three suspects “mad dog killers."

The intense phase of the manhunt lasted until the capture of Hayward Brown on January 12, almost six weeks after the initial incident. Over the course of the search the DPD committed  numerous violations of civil rights  while invading private homes and conducting street stops in Black neighborhoods--including warrantless searches, racial harassment, illegal arrests, as well as physical violence and brutality. At a City Council hearing held in January 1973 to address allegations of police misconduct during the manhunt, around 1,200 Black citizens gathered to voice their complaints about the actions of DPD officers. 

One illustrative example of police conduct during the manhunt took place on Detroit’s north side just five days after the first shootout with STRESS officers. It was 2:00 a.m. when a group of at least 28 police officers, including nine plainclothes STRESS officers, gathered around the home where a 57-year-old man named Durwood Foshee had moved in just four days prior. Operating without a warrant, and relying on a faulty tip that Mark Bethune was hiding at the location, the officers stormed the house, waking Foshee who was asleep in his bed. During the raid the officers fired more than 90 shots throughout the house, leading a reporter for the Michigan Chronicle to compare the scene to the aftermath of the assassination of Black Panther Fred Hampton in Chicago, which had taken place three years prior. 

According to police, the raiding officers knocked and identified themselves, to which Foshee responded by shooting at them from his bedroom window. The officers then claimed to have moved into the home, encountering Foshee by his bedroom door, and shooting him when he failed to drop his gun. There was, however, significant evidence that cast doubt on that version of events. The bloodstain left behind by Foshee was concentrated on his bed, suggesting that he was still positioned there when he was shot. A shotgun belonging to Foshee was found at the scene but was never tested to see whether or not it had been fired, a forensic test readily available at the time. In fact, police failed to offer any physical evidence whatsoever to prove that Foshee had even been holding the gun. Even if it is true that Foshee fired at officers, it he almost certainly would have done so because he believed the armed men dressed in plainclothes who had broken into his house were robbers. But the most likely version is that the police contingent killed a completely innocent and sleeping man and then framed him.

Many African American residents of Detroit responded to the manhunt with an outpouring of protests, and a coalition of groups  formed United Against Stress  to demand the abolition of the unit. In addition to the violent harassment and abuse carried out by DPD officers, some community members and activists also alleged corruption on the part of the STRESS officers with whom Bethune, Boyd, and Brown had originally exchanged gunfire. The theory that STRESS had targeted the trio in order to protect the officers’ drug racket was bolstered the following April when the Free Press first published the details of the Pingree Street Conspiracy.  The parallels between what Bethune, Boyd, and Brown were accused of and the allegations facing police officers in the 10th Precinct was not lost on anti-police brutality activists at the time. Throughout the manhunt and its aftermath, Black community organizations frequently turned Commissioner Nichols's words against the DPD, insisting that Detroit police, especially STRESS, were the real "mad dog killers."

News of the widespread corruption among undercover officers in the 10th Precinct wasn’t all that surprising to Black radicals in Detroit. A sizable contingent of African American community members, many of whom were involved in organizing against STRESS, had been suspicious of corruption in the DPD ranks for a number of years. Failure to control the sale of drugs, coupled with police misconduct and brutality disproportionately directed towards Black citizens, gave residents plenty of reason to speculate that Detroit police were engaged in organized corruption. In addition to the confrontation between STRESS officers and Boyd, Bethune, and Brown, the Rochester Street Massacre of March 1972, in which the team of Black STRESS officers killed and wounded the Black sheriff's deputies in mysterious circumstances, also became a major point of suspicion among many radical activists and community members. According to the anti-Stress group  From the Ground Up , the Rochester St. incident generated significant speculation as to why two groups of police officers would have opened fire at each other. One explanation considered by activists at the time was that the STRESS officers and Sheriff’s Deputies involved in the shooting were competing for payoffs from drug dealers or even for drug turf. 

When the scope of corruption in the 10th Precinct became public, the idea that the Rochester St. Massacre was linked to drug corruption became a more concrete possibility. Anti-STRESS activists began drawing connections between STRESS and the corruption of officers in the 10th Precinct. 

One such connection emphasized by activist groups like From the Ground Up was the presence of a man named Richard Herold among the list of indicted police officers. According to police investigators, Herold stole narcotics in order to sell them and took payoffs from heroin kingpin Henry Marzette in exchange for information and making busts on rival dealers. In an interesting case of foreshadowing, Henry Marzette had been an undercover police officer in the DPD during the 1950s before quitting the force and becoming one of Detroit’s biggest drug traffickers by the end of the 1960s. In January 1972, months before the Pingree Street corruption was publicized, Officer Herold was arrested in Toronto and charged with trafficking cocaine. 

Richard Herold was tied to the events at Rochester St. because he was among the first responders to arrive at the scene after the shooting. Henry Duvall, one of the sheriff's deputies in the apartment on the night of the incident, told the Detroit News that he knew and was friends with Herold, though he stopped short of explaining where from. According to Deputy Duvall, after the shooting had ended the STRESS officers continued to beat him and the rest of the sheriff's deputies, with one officer threatening to kill him even after Duvall showed his badge. Duvall claimed that Herold’s intervention was the only reason he wasn’t killed. Herold himself testified in court that he had to pull his gun to get the STRESS officers to stop the beating. In 1973, as the Pingree Street saga unfolded, police investigators told the Detroit Free Press that they believed Herold’s actions during the Rochester Street Massacre were related to his corrupt activities. The investigators claimed that Herold was in conflict with at least one of the STRESS officers over a heroin dealer that both officers wanted to do business with.

In 1975, the Detroit News published an additional allegation tying STRESS to drug corruption and the Pingree Street Conspiracy. The reporting was based on a previously unreleased statement made by a drug dealer named Ronnie David McCullough to the lead police investigator in the 10th Precinct corruption case. McCullough claimed that he had paid a DPD lieutenant named either “Bannon” or “Bannion” $1500 a month for police protection. At the time of the alleged payments, Commander James Bannon, who later became the Deputy Chief of Police, was in charge of the STRESS unit.

According to McCullough the payments were made through intermediaries that included three STRESS officers and a 10th Precinct officer later indicted in the Pingree Street Conspiracy. Among the STRESS officers whom McCullough claimed helped facilitate the payments was Robert Dooley, one of the four undercover officers shot in the initial gunfight between Boyd, Bethune, Brown and police. Despite the sensational accusations made by McCullough, there was very little follow-up on the issue in the major Detroit newspapers. Commander Bannon vehemently denied the accusation.

To some radicals and activists at the time, the McCullough accusations must have seemed to present the final piece of the puzzle—connecting STRESS, Rochester Street, the 10th Precinct, and the manhunt for Boyd, Bethune, and Brown all to the fierce competition between different groups of corrupt DPD officers for control over the city’s profitable heroin trade. 

Nineteen year old George Ray had been robbed before and wasn’t about to make the same mistake that he had made the last time. 

It was August 1, 1972, and less than two weeks prior a group of four men had appeared at the door to Ray’s apartment. The men, dressed in street clothes, had claimed to be police officers and insisted that Ray let them inside. Perhaps thinking they were part of the STRESS unit, which by then had killed 17 people in Detroit, Ray decided to comply with the police orders and open the door. By the time that Ray realized the four men were not actually undercover DPD officers, it was too late for him to stop them from stealing whatever valuables they could find in his apartment.

Plainclothes policing places officers in danger from civilians who can easily mistake them for armed criminals. Half of the DPD officers killed between 1957 and 1996 were in plainclothes.

So when Ray was awoken from his sleep on August 1 by what sounded like several men trying to break into his apartment, he was determined not to once again become a victim. Rushing to the door, he looked through the peep-hole and what he saw seemed to confirm his fears. Outside the door stood three men, all of them dressed in plainclothes and all of them armed. Though the exact sequence of events is unclear, at some point Ray fired his weapon through the door, hitting two of the men before fleeing the scene. 

Unfortunately for Ray, the men outside his apartment that day actually were police officers. They had come to Ray’s apartment dressed in plainclothes in order to arrest another man who was allegedly staying there. One of the officers that Ray hit, 30-year-old Gilbert T. Stocker, died from his wounds a few hours after the incident. Ray was quickly arrested and charged with killing the officer. In the resulting trial Ray defended his actions, telling jurors that he had believed the plainclothes officers were criminals attempting to rob him. Despite his insistence that he was acting in self-defense, Ray was nevertheless found guilty of killing an officer and wounding another. He was sentenced to life in prison.

George Ray was not the only Detroiter who had been robbed by criminals claiming to be plainclothes police officers. By the beginning of 1973 the phenomena had become so pronounced that the Detroit Free Press felt compelled to run an exposé on the problem. “Plain Clothes Can Confuse Public,” the headline read; “Robbers Finding It Easier to Play Cops.”

The moment in January 1973 which the Free Press published this story was a high point for low-visibility policing in Detroit. The STRESS unit was still active, corrupt undercover narcotics teams in the 10th Precinct had yet to be exposed, and the manhunt for Boyd, Bethune, and Brown had been sweeping through the city for nearly two months. Any Detroit resident who kept up with the news would have been well aware of the city’s wide use of plainclothes and undercover officers. Because of that climate it became much easier for criminals to pose as police in order to commit robberies. According to the Free Press, reports of such crimes had been increasing for months. Between early December 1972 and late January 1973 there had been at least 15 reported incidents of criminals impersonating undercover or plainclothes officers. Additionally, police sources told the Free Press that the incidents were likely undercounted because narcotics dealers were known targets and often unwilling to file police reports. 

The article explained that STRESS, along with the hunt for Boyd, Bethune, and Brown, were both factors in the increasing number of robbers presenting themselves as police officers. The increased presence of plainclothes officers made citizens less suspicious of people in street clothes purporting to be police. The brutality and misconduct of STRESS and the manhunt had also made residents of Detroit, especially Black residents, wary of challenging anyone claiming to be a DPD officer. In the early 1970s, low-visibility policing had so thoroughly blurred the line between police and criminals in Detroit that robbers began routinely using the cover of law to commit crimes.

About the author:  Zev Miklethun  is a senior History major at the University of Michigan and a research associate with the  Policing and Social Justice HistoryLab  and the U-M Carceral State Project's  Documenting Criminalization and Confinement  initiative.

Full documents and citations for all materials used in this exhibit are linked from the document excerpts and captions. Most are archived in the Detroit Under Fire exhibit (covering 1957-1973) or in the forthcoming Crackdown exhibit (covering 1974-1993).

Additional Bibliography:

Hinton, Elizabeth. From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016.

McKinnon, Isaiah. Stand Tall. Chelsea, MI: Sleeping Bear Press, 2001.

McKinnon, Isaiah. In the Line of Duty: A Tribute to Fallen Law Enforcement Officers from the State of Michigan. Paducah, KY: Turner Publishing Co., 2003.

McGirr, Lisa. The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2016.

Schneider, Eric C. Smack: Heroin and the American City. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011.