The new film “Detroit” recounts one of the many injustices that contributed to the uprising by the city’s African-American community in 1967. It’s based on the infamous police shooting deaths of three young Black men at the Algiers Motel during citywide unrest, which ended with 43 deaths and more than 1,100 people injured over a five-day span.
Mary Jarrett Jackson, Detroit’s first Black female deputy police chief, told the Huffington Post that she has no plans to see the film.
Jackson, 86, joined the Detroit Police Department in 1958, and recalled vividly that the mostly White department didn’t hide its racist attitude.
During the riot, Jackson, a former Detroit police crime lab chief, did lab work on the Algiers Motel case. She remembered seeing the bodies of 17-year-old Carl Cooper, 19-year-old Aubrey Pollard and 18-year-old Fred Temple.
“The way they brutalized those Black men, I did the forensic work on that. There was lots of evidence, but they didn’t want that brought out,” she told The Post, adding that she doesn’t want to relive the experience.
Johnson stated that the White officers brutalized two White women who were with the Black men at the motel.
“They (the women) were willingly there. That upset the police,” Jackson told the outlet. “The officers divided those kids up and took them in different rooms, beat them up and did some awful things to their bodies by ramming things into their genitalia, up their anus.”
The officers—Ronald August, Robert Paille and David Senak—were charged with murder, conspiracy and federal civil rights violations, according to NPR. However, prosecutors never won convictions, leaving the families of the teen to search in vain for justice.
SOURCE: Huffington Post, NPR
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Here’s Why Detroit’s First Black Female Deputy Police Chief Won’t Be Seeing ‘Detroit’ was originally published on newsone.com
