The Policing and Social Justice HistoryLab is a student-faculty research collaboration to document the history of police violence, misconduct, and criminalization in the city of Detroit during the 20th and 21st centuries. Professor Lassiter is the founder and director of the Policing and Social Justice HistoryLab, which launched in 2018 as a pilot initiative of the U-M HistoryLabs program and in 2019 became a component of the U-M Carceral State Project’s Documenting Criminalization, Confinement, and Resistance research initiative.
The Policing and Social Justice HistoryLab has produced two major digital exhibits, Detroit Under Fire: Police Violence, Crime Politics, and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Civil Rights Era (U-M Carceral State Project, 2021), covering the 1957-1973 time period; and Crackdown: Policing Detroit through the War on Crime, Drugs, and Youth, which covers the 1974-1993 period and will be published in summer 2024. A third exhibit is also in progress, Detroit Unaccountable: Police Brutality, Community Activism, and the Limited Impact of Federal Oversight, covering the period since 1994. The Detroit Under Fire team has published ten additional multimedia reports drawn from the website exhibit and is finalizing a curriculum for high school classrooms. Please visit the Policing and Social Justice HistoryLab link at the U-M Carceral State Project’s website for full details.
Undergraduate teams conducted the research and built these digital exhibits and accompanying maps through enrollment in Lassiter’s HistoryLab seminar “Cold Cases: Police Violence, Crime, and Social Justice in Michigan.” Nicole Navarro, a Ph.D. student in History, served as the lab supervisor for the first two “Cold Cases” seminars in Fall 2018 and Fall 2019 and is the coeditor of the digital exhibits above. After the semester, many undergraduates have continued to work as research interns with the Policing and Social Justice HistoryLab, and/or the Documenting Criminalization and Confinement project. For more, visit the Policing and Social Justice HistoryLab site.
“Detroit Under Fire” Research Team (2018-2019)
“Detroit Under Fire” Team (from left): Casey Jong, Brendan Bernardo, Austyn Marks, Jamie Murray, Allison Tuohy, Sahil Patel, Dominic Coschino, Aidan Traynor, Matt Lassiter, Khadija Williams, Hannah Thoms, Robert Joseph, Jesse Blumberg, John Kistler, Jack Mahon, Nicole Navarro, Kori Thomas. Visit the About page of the exhibit to learn more about student researchers.
“Crackdown” Research Team (2019-2020)
“Crackdown” Team (from left): Nicole Navarro, Dwyer Loughran, Isabella Little, Annie O’Connor, Lucas Cole, Bernie Velasquez, Matt Lassiter, Lily Johnston, Zev Miklethun, Isabella Young, Samantha Lauren, Daniel Bramhall, Sarah Payne, Martha Abrams, Brianna Wells. Seated: Anya Satywadi, Izzie Kenhard. Visit the About page of the exhibit to learn more about student researchers.