Michael Stauch, "Wildcat of the Streets: Detroit in the Age of Community Policing" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025)

Jul 28, 2025

In this engaging discussion, Michael Stauch, an Associate Professor at the University of Toledo, delves into the dark history of community policing in Detroit. He reveals how policing strategies during Coleman Young's era reshaped neighborhood dynamics, often perpetuating police brutality against Black youth. Stauch also highlights the resilience of young people who used grassroots activism to challenge systemic oppression. By centering their voices, he reexamines the narrative of police reform and connects it to broader struggles for Black liberation.

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ANECDOTE

Personal Roots Of The Project

Michael Stauch describes growing up near Detroit and being politicized through local activism and archival encounters with movement elders.
Those early personal experiences and contacts led him to archival sources like the Livernois Five that sparked the book.

INSIGHT

Wildcat Energy Moved From Factories To Streets

Detroit's 1970s wildcat factory culture spilled into street youth resistance and informal economies.
Coleman Young's simultaneous promise of reform and tough crime control produced that 'wildcat of the streets' dynamic.

INSIGHT

Wildcat Of The Streets

Stauch coins

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The criminalization of Black youth was central to policing in urban America during the civil rights era and continued in Detroit even after the rise of Black political control in the 1970s. Wildcat of the Streets documents how the “community policing” approach of Mayor Coleman Young (1974–1993)—including neighborhood police stations, affirmative action hiring policies, and public participation in law enforcement initiatives—transformed Detroit, long considered the nation’s symbol of racial inequality and urban crisis, into a crucial site of experimentation in policing while continuing to subject many Black Detroiters to police brutality and repression.

In response, young people in the 1970s and 1980s drew on the city’s storied history of labor radicalism as well as contemporary shopfloor struggles to wage a “wildcat of the streets,” consisting of street disturbances, decentralized gang activity, and complex organizations of the informal economy. In this revelatory new history of the social life of cities, Michael Stauch mines a series of evocative interviews conducted with the participants to trace how Black youth made claims for political equality over and against the new order of community policing.

Centering the perspective of criminalized and crime-committing young people, Wildcat of the Streets is an original interpretation of police reform, the long struggle for Black liberation, and the politics of cities in the age of community policing.

Guest: Michael Stauch (he/him) is an Associate Professor at the University of Toledo. He historian of the modern United States with a focus on policing, politics, and the intersection of race, labor, and youth in social movements.

Host: Jenna Pittman (she/her), a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Duke University. She studies modern European history, political economy, and Germany from 1945-1990.

Scholars@Duke: https://scholars.duke.edu/pers...

Linktree: https://linktr.ee/jennapittman

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