The Historical Context Surrounding the 12th Street Riots is set Aside for the Brutality of the Moment in "Detroit."

Rating: 3/10 (13 August 2017)

(Mild Spoilers)
The Historical Context Surrounding the 12th Street Riots is set Aside for the Brutality of the Moment in "Detroit."
"Detroit" could have been a powerful allegory for police violence against African Americans using 1967 Detroit as a real life example of how police abuse minorities to protect white privilege. Instead, "Detroit" is an over-indulgent orgy of violence that barely addresses the historical context in which the riots arose.
The precipitating event for the Detroit riots of 1967 was the violent police raid on an unlicensed bar. The film reenacts this raid and shows the police overreacting and abusing the black revelers. The violence escalates and riots ensue. This is true to accounts of the time, however, the focus on that one event gives short shrift to the years of abuse blacks faced at the hands of a 97% majority white police department in a city that was 40% black in 1967.
By not giving enough historical context to police abuses and degradation of the black populations, the film works in a vacuum where a few police go rogue and the blacks should have just cooperated more. In fact, it was a whole system dominated by whites that allowed this abuse to occur by participating in, encouraging or ignoring the abuse.
The deeper, long-term causes of the riots barely appear in the film. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, "The deeper causes of the riot were high levels of frustration, resentment, and anger that had been created among African Americans by unemployment and underemployment, persistent and extreme poverty, racism and racial segregation, police brutality, and lack of economic and educational opportunities."
There was a brief mention of the white flight and the loss of industry in Detroit at the beginning of the film, but nothing about unemployment, a history of racism by the police, or racial segregation.
The plot doesn't stand scrutiny. There was a storyline about a gun, and the police who assumed that they were fired upon. The police used suspicion of violence coming from the Algiers based on flimsy information as an excuse to enter the hotel in Detroit and abuse its occupants. When those detainees were questioned by the racist police officers, none of them came forward with information about the gun that would have exonerated them. Their silence was illogical in the extreme, and the script makes no attempt to explain why they didn't mention the gun.
The nine black men (two who were later killed) and two white women who were detained could have also laid the blame on a man that had been earlier shot and was dead. Why they didn't do that is another mystery. Is this true to history? I found no information supporting this account of events.
What the film does discuss at the beginning is the Great Migration to the north of African American to Detroit after WWI. However, not enough emphasis was put on how that demographic change lead to an economic downturn of the city due to the money moving to the suburbs and the loss of jobs to other regions of the country.
"Detroit" uses historical footage and a cinéma vérité style reenactments. The mixture works seamlessly throughout the film. Too bad the writing didn't create a more coherent picture of the time period. Statistics of unemployment, arrests of African Americans, a rising black prison population, would have helped create the setting in which the riots occurred.
The film fails to show how the riots were a watershed moment in the history of Detroit, how everything afterward became worse economically for the city and where that left the city today. Near the end of the film, "Detroit" goes from civil rights drama to procedural drama and completely loses its way. Certainly, presenting what happened to the three white officers charged with murder was worthwhile, but that could have been done in a paragraph as an epilogue.
The film was way too long. Some of the elements distracted from the story of the collapse of a modern American city and harm it caused the inhabitants and some of it was played out too long after the point was made. The detention scene in the Algiers Hotel could have been half the length once the point was made about police brutality and racism. I wouldn't call it "torture porn" as other critics have, I would call it bad storytelling. Moreover, the court scene at the end could have been cut entirely.
Rating: Rental There is some great acting in the film. Too bad the directing and writing don't support the performances to make a film worthy of the theme.