“A New Partnership in the War on Drugs”: Detroit’s “Anti-Crackhouse Movement” and the Crime Politics of Community Development in the Black Power City

Abstract

The arrival of community development corporations in cities across the United States in the 1980s marked an important development in the history of cities. CDCs were particularly appealing to Black mayors elected on police reform agendas in the 1970s, combining the rhetoric of local control over economic development with a close working relationship with local police departments to create the Black Power city. In Detroit, the grassroots organization WE-PROS exemplified three currents shaping this city: grassroots neighborhood activism concerned with the effect of drugs and crime on property values, CDCs as an answer to the economic crisis of post-industrial cities, and the rise of community policing in response to the failure of police professionalism. However, WE-PROS’s focus on stabilizing property values also brought to bear on some of the city’s most precarious populations a police presence that criminalized daily life and displaced some of the city’s most vulnerable residents. These were the crime politics of community development. The implications of those politics became clear in November 1992, when police killed Malice Green in a neighborhood that had long been the focus of WE-PROS activism against the informal economy. Green’s death made public a knowledge about policing that had been submerged beneath the promise of community policing and its partnership with community development. That knowledge had remained active in the lives of people like Malice Greene even amid the rise of the Black Power city, with its promise of locally driven economic development and a changed police department.