Analysis Of The Detroit Police Department In Kevin Boyle's Arc Of Justice

The issue of police treatment of African-Americans in the United States often focuses on police brutality directed towards the unfortunate members of the African-American community. Often forgotten is a subtler, more nuanced form of discrimination of the kind that is experienced by the Sweets and their friends documented by Kevin Boyle in his work, Arc of Justice. The Detroit police department displays a shocking lack of empathy for the Sweet family and the danger they face, along with a failure (possibly intentional) to protect them from the mob-enforced segregation of neighborhoods in Detroit. In the book Arc of Justice, the Detroit police department displays a pattern of racially motivated actions that ultimately leads to unfair treatment

The Detroit Police Department (by way of its inspector Schuknecht), changes and manipulates information to make it seem as if the Sweets and their friends fired upon a small group of white neighbors without provocation. The congregation of whites is claimed to have been very small (which it was not), and the police stated that the mob had not attempted to throw rocks until after being fired upon (blatantly untrue, as the reporter himself noticed). This pattern of lying not only is an attempt to paint the Sweets and company as cold blooded killers, but also exonerates the police department and the mob of any wrongdoing. The reporter investigating the crime relates in his piece, “Schuknecht said, and he knew the truth: there hadn’t been any mob threatening the Negroes, no one surrounding the house, no one throwing stones” (182). The flagrantly untrue details related by the Detroit police department would pop up again during the criminal trial shows how little the truth matters to a police force infested by Klan members, racists, and

Sweet and his wife, to choose where they live was the catalyst for everything that unfolded following the attack by the mob of neighbors. The Sweets and their friends armed themselves, knowing they could not rely on the police; the police themselves did only the minimum required to keep it from being glaringly obvious how little they cared to extend protection to the African-American community of Detroit. Additionally the court system showed its own biased face, sitting twelve white men in the jury box to pass judgement on the Sweets and their friends. With this kind of treatment by the police and court system, it’s easy to understand why the African-American community of Detroit felt they were better off taking care of themselves than expecting to be treated fairly by a corrupt and racist judicial system. In the end, they were proven right, as no one was found guilty, the courts returning the correct verdicts and decisions that showed the Sweets and friends were well within their rights as American citizens to defend themselves and their property, regardless of the race of those