Detroit and the political origins of ‘broken windows’ policing

Abstract

The authors argue that ‘broken windows’ policing strategies, promoted officially as a means of reducing crime, though criticised by liberals for the potentially discriminatory impact on non-whites, should rather be viewed as an integral component of the state’s attempts to coercively manage the contradictions of capitalism. Taking issue with Wacquant, they stress the need to situate policing strategies in terms of the resistances waged by racialised surplus populations. Examining Detroit, they provide a history, spanning the years between the Great Depression and the aftermath of the Great Rebellion in 1967, which was, at the time, the largest civil uprising in US history, to contextualise the introduction of stop-and-frisk in the mid-1960s. This policy, they argue, was predominantly part of an attempt to contain and repress the political threat emerging from the active and reserve sections of the black working class. They go on to analyse the ‘broken windows’ strategies in contemporary Detroit so as to situate them in relationship to other processes in the now bankrupt Motor City, such as home foreclosures, water shutoffs, and investment and gentrification in the greater downtown area.