Free Man with an Axe by Jon A. Jackson Page A

defection of white officers, not much was said when a white officer moved to Warren or Royal Oak, or, in my case, back to my original home in Saint Clair Flats, which is in Macomb County. But it was expected that the officer would maintain at least an accommodation address—i.e, an “official” address in the city. After a while, though, quite a few of the officers neglected even this, including, I confess, me. Nothing was said, but it had been in the back of my mind, and I knew that one day it would become an issue.
    I agreed with the basic principle here: a police officer should reside in the community where he or she has power and responsibility; to do otherwise is to court disaster. The citizenry are always skeptical (to say the least) about the responsiveness and empathy of the police power. A healthy community cannot afford a police force that is not resident in the community where it hopes to function. I knew this and understood it, but I wasn't easy with the popular notion that this problem was a consequence of simple racism: i.e, that the whites (including the police) had left Detroit out of racial hatred. There is no denying that race was a huge factor; it's just that I thought there were other, not unrelated, economic and psychological aspects. It's not worth splitting hairs about, however: it was race.
    My excuse—or really, not an excuse, but merely a reason—was that I was only temporarily absent and, anyway, it was merely a matter of convenience. I expected to return to the city, oh, just about any time now.
    I'd had an apartment in the city, years before. It had been fun, for a while. But then other guys had begun to exploit the situation, asking me to list them as roommates and so on. And then they had taken to using the place as a trysting site. I finally got fed up with it and, since my mother didn't seem to mind. . . . Well, let'sbe ckar about this: at one time I thought my mother was happy to have me move back home.
    In those days, not so long after the death of my father, she was still in a conventional-widow mode. She wore black dresses and pinned a hat with a veil to her gray hair when she went to teas, where she conspired with her Eastern Star cronies about marrying their daughters and granddaughters to me. When I recollect this, it's shocking. I wonder if it shocks her.
    She had never been very impressed with my police career, to say the least. It had quite stunned her, I gather. But then she began to develop new and compelling interests. Bird-watching was the key. She became obsessed with birds, which led to a more serious concern with the environment, and travel. Soon, she was hardly ever at home. And she began to get younger as I grew older, curiously enough, transforming herself from a conventionally maternal woman, a widow in corsets, into a slender, somewhat unisex athlete who traipsed about in Gokey brogans when she wasn't dashing about in spandex. She bought a mountain bike, and rode it! Correspondingly, she lost any interest, it seemed, in my marital status or career aspirations. She didn't have the time.
    For my part, I had become conscious of the racial implications of Detroit's transformation but, as I say, not totally convinced of a racist character. On the surface, I felt, it had an overwhelmingly racist quality, but I'd always been a little suspicious of the conventional view of racism. I had a gut feeling that many seemingly racist behaviors might be more accurately attributed to a variety of other, more complex, factors. For instance, leaving aside the racial composition of Wayne County, there was the fact was that there had been a considerable decline in the earning power and income of all Detroit residents, generally. When people are poor things get dangerous. It wasn't safe, no matter who you were. In short, it had become an increasingly less attractive place, and as aconsequence, the nearby suburbs, particularly just north of the city, in Oakland and Macomb Counties, seemed