A note on the title
The phrase “police riot” is a label some writers applied to other events of the 1960s, and it is not an established description of the Detroit disturbance as a whole. The riot of July 1967 began with a police raid and involved looting, arson, sniper reports and heavy gunfire by law enforcement and troops. The better supported claim is narrower: that police practices and the relationship between the police and Black residents were central causes of the unrest and that officers were responsible for some of its worst killings. That is what this article examines.
Police and Black Detroit before 1967
In the 1960s the Detroit Police Department was overwhelmingly white, in a city whose Black population was roughly a third of the total or more. The Kerner Commission put the share of Black officers at about five percent. Complaints from Black residents, repeated in studies and hearings of the time, included the use of force, harassment on the street, aggressive stops and a lack of accountability. Mayor Jerome Cavanagh had tried to improve relations, and the department’s leadership had defended its record, but many residents saw the department as an occupying force in their neighborhoods.
Raids on unlicensed after-hours clubs, called blind pigs, were a regular part of police activity, and on the night of 22-23 July 1967 one such raid on 12th Street was the spark. The operation took longer than the officers expected, because they found dozens of people inside, and a crowd gathered during the wait. That the arrest began the riot is generally accepted; it is the police’s response in the following days that is more contested.
The Algiers Motel
Early on Wednesday 26 July, Detroit police, state police and National Guard soldiers converged on the Algiers Motel on Woodward Avenue after reports of sniper fire from the annex. Inside were a group of young people, mostly Black men, along with some women. Several of the men were lined up and interrogated roughly, and three of them, Carl Cooper, Aubrey Pollard and Fred Temple, were shot dead. Survivors described beatings and threats during the questioning. A Black private security guard was also present when the officers arrived.
The killings later became known as the Algiers Motel incident. Details of exactly who fired and why were disputed then, and the officers’ accounts differed sharply from those of survivors.
John Hersey and the written record
Journalist and novelist John Hersey, already well known for Hiroshima, spent months interviewing survivors, relatives, officers and others, and published The Algiers Motel Incident in 1968. His account, which was based on interviews and trial material, argued that the three deaths had been unjustified killings and was a lasting source on the case. As with any single narrative, it reflects the sources available to him, and readers have debated some of its conclusions and its method. It remains the best known popular treatment of the episode.
Trials and outcomes
The legal outcome was a source of lasting bitterness. One officer, Ronald August, was tried for the murder of Aubrey Pollard, in a case in which he claimed self-defense, and was acquitted by an all-white jury. Other charges against officers, including later conspiracy charges, also ended without convictions. Attorneys and community leaders pointed to the verdicts as proof that Black victims could not expect justice from the courts. The reported outcome in these cases was a major reason the Algiers Motel became a symbol far beyond Detroit.
The Kerner findings on policing
The Kerner Commission’s 1968 report said that police actions were a common trigger of the disorders it studied and that hostility toward the police was widespread in Black communities. It described a pattern in which routine incidents, frequently involving police, set off larger outbursts. It was equally clear that no single cause explained the riots, listing housing, employment and education alongside policing. The Detroit riot and the Newark riot, both of which began with a police action, were central cases, and the Harlem riot of 1964, which followed a police shooting of a teenager, was an earlier example. This is why many residents and some scholars hold police practices responsible for much of what happened, while the department and its supporters stressed the dangers officers faced from gunfire and arson.
Weighing the evidence
The accurate position falls between slogans, and it is worth remembering that the long hot summer of 1967 produced disturbances in many cities with very different police departments. Police were not the only actors, since looting and arson were widespread and officers and firefighters were shot at and in some cases killed. But the pattern of the raid, the force used by police and troops in the following days, and the lack of accountability for the Algiers Motel deaths support the view that policing was a main grievance. Later reforms in Detroit, including recruitment of more Black officers and the election of Coleman Young as mayor in 1973, grew partly from the memory of these events.