The second map shows a changing pattern of precinct station violence based on the racial geography of the 1970 census. The mid-to-late 1960s and early 1970s were a time of black power mobilization in the city of Detroit, and the police responded with politically targeted violence and extreme brutality in segregated Black neighborhoods against political activists in the downtown business district. The cluster of incidents on the West Side, where the 1967 Uprising began, was a key site of police violence in the second half of the 1960s. The East Side of Detroit includes the police precinct station where the DPD harassed and brutalized civil rights and black power activists in the Adult Community Movement for Equality/Afro American Youth Movement during the mid-1960s. The downtown DPD headquarters includes the First Precinct, where police often brought in political activists, such as the targeted campaign against the Detroit chapter of the Black Panther Party. These incidents expanded beyond racial profiling encounters during street and traffic stops to politically motivated incidents that began inside private homes, in downtown protest zones, or inside the precincts themselves. Many of the home incidents reveal illegal targeted action against not only political activists but also the family members of victims who reported police misconduct, and in some cases the victims themselves.

Precinct Violence