For Xavier Johnson, a young black businessman in Detroit, $1,500 is the price he paid for riding his bike downtown. He can’t afford it.  Call it the cost of gentrification. Johnson, a rising star in Detroit’s startup community, is one of many residents paying the price for an aggressive style of policing that has overtaken the city as it cleans up its reputation. Current Detroit residents – mostly African-American – face an added cost of living as the city police pile on nuisance fines to crack down on smaller crimes. The effect is to make the city more appealing to successful, and mostly white, middle class professionals – while burdening the city’s poorest with more bills to pay.  The hotly contested police strategy is called “broken windows”, and Detroit police chief James “Hollywood” Craig has embraced it with fervour. The theory – popularised by New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s police chief William Bratton in the 1990s – means cracking down on smaller nuisance crimes in order to prevent those larger, more violent ones. Think of the crackdown on “squeegee men” who forcibly cleaned drivers’ windows for tips.  The deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown this summer at the hands of police officers in New York City and Ferguson, Missouri, are also examples of broken windows policing, spun out of control. While Eric Garner was placed in a fatal chokehold after being stopped for selling untaxed cigarettes, current information shows Michael Brown stopped just moments before he was shot for walking in the middle of the road, or jaywalking: both “quality of life” offences.  Still, Detroit’s police department, newly free from 11 years of enforced federal oversight after a history of trouble, is looking to the new technique to make over its reputation. Broken windows has been bumped up from being a top 10 priority in the Detroit police department to a top-five priority, spokesperson Sergeant Michael Woody says.  That’s no coincidence. The rise of Detroit’s “broken windows” era began after Detroit’s emergency manager, Kevyn Orr, appointed Craig in May 2013. Craig served under Bratton in the LAPD between 2002 and 2009. Bratton Consulting helped draft Craig’s action plan and serves as the historical link between Detroit and New York’s own experience with broken windows.  The road, however, has been rocky. The broken windows method brings up racial as well as economic rifts in the city.  While Detroit is 82% black, many residents in the more central areas in and around downtown are white newcomers – suburban children of the parents who fled decades ago, among widespread white flight.  Now desirable, college-educated professionals are being wooed into the city by cheap rents and an abundance of sexy lofts, as well as incentives like the Live Downtown and Live Midtown initiatives, which offer substantial monetary contributions and forgivable loans for new renters and homebuyers.  For Johnson, a routine traffic stop turned up the fact that he had a concealed pistol license – a legal permit to carry a gun – which resulted in police cordoning off an entire street and treating him like a criminal.  Johnson had been saving up for months to put the final touches to his made-from-scratch motorised tricycle. The 23-year-old software developer, known as the guy who turns up to events with a homemade flying robot or drone, wanted something special to ride at Slow Roll, Detroit’s happening monthly bicycle meet-up.  So when he landed a new Detroit-based contract this spring and had a bit of extra cash, Johnson could not wait to put the final touches to his latest creation and get it on the road.  This June, no more than 30 minutes after getting on his tricycle for the first time and setting off towards his downtown co-working space, Johnson was pulled over by a police officer. Minutes later, after handing over his ID and concealed pistol licence – something required by law – three police vehicles showed up for backup and the entire street was sectioned off.  After being treated in a “brutal” way, “like I was a criminal”, Johnson’s tricyle was impounded and he was given eight fines, amounting to around $1,500. Making the humiliation worse, while Johnson was being interrogated on the central Detroit street, he says friends and business associates passed by.  Detroit’s police chief may be encouraging “good” Detroiters to arm themselves in the city, but coming face-to-face with a legally armed citizen still makes some officers jittery, it seems.  Perhaps especially when, like in this case, the carrier is a young, black man.  “I’ve never seen anyone else on a bicycle or a moped get pulled over in downtown Detroit. There’s no way this was a coincidence,” Johnson says.  Meanwhile, Johnson says he has no idea how he is going to afford the fines.  “The crazy thing is I’m the kind of person you want in this city. I’m a mentor for school kids, I’m an entrepreneur. I kept on telling the cops: why are you doing this? I am the backbone of this economy.”  Over the last two and a half decades, two methods of policing have emerged, John Roman, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute who also lectures at the University of Pennsylvania, explains: broken windows policing, characterised by an adversarial relationship with the community and community policing, characterised by a collaborative, integrated relationship with the community.  The cities where crime declined the most in this recent period include New York City, Washington DC, Dallas and San Diego – all cities that have adopted this collaborative strategy, with New York being the exception. In places where crime didn’t decline much, like Philadelphia, Baltimore and Detroit, you see much more of an adversarial relationship between law enforcement and the community, Roman says.  “There’s no way to prove that one strategy is better than the other, but the evidence is pretty overwhelming that the [broken windows] law enforcement strategies of the 1980s and 1990s are less effective today than they were then,” Roman concludes.  Critics say the broken windows theory is outdated and have called it the de facto policing of black bodies.  Ron Scott, a spokesman for the Coalition Against Police Brutality in Detroit, says the city’s police department is still defined by a culture of excessive force, violence and racism – despite the 11 years of federal oversight and internal department policies, put in place as a result of historically tenuous police-community relations, which ensured a majority black police force to better reflect the city’s population.  In the last five years, 18 residents were fatally shot by on-duty police officers in Detroit, a figure that was three times that in the five years before the city entered into federal oversight.  “We get 2,000 cases a year and most of those are residents who have been the victim of excessive force or unlawful arrest at the hands of police officers,” Scott says.  Scott says there is an unaddressed and damaging disconnection between the city’s police and its black residents.  “When you have close to 40% of police officers living outside the city, when you see Detroit as this dangerous, dark situation – then it’s never going to be better until we have police officers who see themselves as part of the community.”  “The police, they are killing our youth,” Rochelle Young, a 26-year-old Detroiter, General Motors worker and part-time criminology student, confided at the end of August at a rally in north-east Detroit, organised in response to the shooting in the shoulder of a young black man at the hands of police officers after he and his car companion were allegedly involved in the illegal purchase of a gun.  Young brought her two sons six-year-old Victor and five-year-old Jayden to the rally. She says she is terrified for them, but wants them to know they have rights.  Chief Craig has promised better relations with the community together with the re-implementation of broken windows and data-based policing through the creation of a handful of neighbourhood outreach officers.  But Young says, if anything, things have gotten worse in the last year. Police took five hours to show up to a shooting she reported in her neighborhood of north-east Detroit this June. She says she called because she was concerned kids playing basketball outside had been caught in the middle of it.  When they did show up, she was met with insults and racist slurs, she says.  “That’s why we don’t like calling them in the first place,” she says.  Briant Anthony, a 26-year-old graphic designer and lifelong Detroit resident, says he was recently stopped by a Detroit policeman after hopping in the car from his grandmother’s house to drive to a nearby store.  Unfortunately, Anthony forgot to bring his ID for the short ride. The officer was unsympathetic, fining the graphic designer $257 for the violation.  Anthony says most of his black Detroiter friends are struggling to pay similar fines incurred after impromptu stops and searches – a variation on the “driving while black” treatment many have come to expect.  The fines place a heavy burden on Detroit residents, who already pay higher than national average bills to stay in the city. Detroit has higher average water bills, property taxes and resident income taxes – as well as a near-poverty median household income of $23,600 in 2012. Traffic stops are likely because residents favour cars and bikes. The city’s public transportation system functions poorly, and residents are often unable to pay the exorbitantly high car insurance rates, which in turn means letting driver’s licences expire.  Yet considering the cost and effort Detroit has already devoted to imposing broken windows, the city is unlikely to back off from the plan.  Between 2012 and 2013, one of the two original fathers of broken windows theory, criminologist George Kelling, made a number of trips to Detroit to create broken window pilot programmes in a couple of the city’s neighbourhoods.  Kelling, a Rutgers University professor and an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, was accompanied by the Institute’s vice-president for programmes, Michael Alegretti. The project was financed by the Detroit Public Safety Foundation, its executive director, Catherine Govan, confirmed.  The foundation was set up in 2003 to compensate for the police department’s crumbling budget – a welcome relief in the strapped-for-cash police department, which counts just 2,300 officers in its ranks.  “If the police department needs something they just let us know, and we try and make it happen,” Govan says. “We’d be happy to help provide more broken windows training in the future.”  But the foundation’s involvement is part of a phenomenon that has been developing over the last decade or so in the Motor City: foundations’ dollars are funding increasing amounts of city activities normally provided for by public money.  In a time of general panic around the bankruptcy and desperation to get the city going again, democratic decision-making and accountability processes have been brushed to the side.  The police chief is currently answerable to Detroit’s emergency manager, Kevyn Orr, not the mayor, and Orr has expressed concern for little apart from the balancing of the city’s budget.  Phillip Goff, a psychology professor at UCLA and visiting scholar at Harvard University, says policing is the racial justice issue of our time.  But Goff warns against being too cutting about theories: it is the application, not the theory that may be at fault.  “The worst-case scenario for broken windows is it’s about rounding up the people in the neighbourhood that police have always wanted to round up. The best case scenario is that police are responsive for community needs, and put value back on the lives of the community.”  Indeed, if broken windows is being actively re-implemented in the city, its side-effects seem to be as much about creating fear as preventing crime.  While walking home from school this winter, Veronica Cummings, a black 17-year-old One Direction fan whose hobbies include listening to music and being on Twitter, says she was followed by an unmarked police car containing two white police officers who wanted to know whether she was carrying any drugs.  After the teenager said no, the questions continued, Cummings says.  “Did I know anyone who sold drugs? I said no. They said ‘how come?’ They checked my purse. It was full of books. Then they continued following me home.”  “It was creepy,” Cummings says, but she is used to it. “They suspect anyone for no apparent reason.”  For Goff, the psychology professor, also a co-founder of the Consortium for Police Leadership Equity, inequality in law enforcement cannot be sectioned off from other forms of racial and economic inequalities in America, including housing, employment and education – all hot issues in Detroit.  Black lives tend to be valued less in America, Goff says.  “It’s not that black neighbourhoods are blighted with bad people, it’s that black neighbourhoods are vulnerable to increased violence. Because we can’t see the humanity of the people who live in those neighbourhoods, we have a hard time caring a lot and creating social policy that centres on them.”
Detroit’s gentrified makeover means more policing of nuisance crimes – but the fines fall disproportionately on black residents