Murder City: Crime, Crisis, and Community in Post-Industrial America

Abstract

This dissertation explores the relationship between crime control and community activism in Detroit, Michigan from the early 1970s to the mid-1990s. It does so by investigating how city officials and residents thought about, debated, and acted against the most pressing symptoms of the late twentieth century urban crisis. I ask how anti-crime organizing emerged and evolved, and how that evolution shaped and was shaped by the national and local politics of crime-fighting. How urban residents responded to the problems they faced reveals the ways in which metropolitan life and politics transformed during the last three decades of the century and how the politics of crime control was emblematic of that transformation. Struggles over safety and security were part of a nexus of ideas, policies, and social movements around assessing and improving urban life in a period of punitive state-building and social crisis. This dissertation demonstrates that anti-crime activism became a significant force in urban crime control. A neighborhood-based struggle for safety and security took place, resulting in the formation of coalitions of urban residents who demanded and sought solutions to escalating levels of violence and disorder. Anti-crime activists, the organizations they created, and the government officials they wrestled with for power played a crucial role in the public-private partnership-driven shape of crime control and urban governance that came to dominate American cities during the late twentieth century. In tracking the history of urban anti-crime activism, this dissertation reveals how police reform and crime control became one of the primary battlegrounds for politics, protest, and policymaking in American cities during the late twentieth century.