Hamtramck, the first Muslim-majority city in the United States, is a city with many white women in positions of power, including the mayor, city manager and police chief. 

But this leadership doesn’t represent the population of the town, whose biggest ethnic group is Bangladeshi. Hamtramck’s police force is mainly white with the exception of two Black officers.

In an interview, Hamtramck Mayor Karen Majewski confirmed that “there are no officers with Bangladeshi names on the police roster.” No Bangladeshi officers, in a city that has signs that say “Welcome to Banglatown.”

When asked why there are no Bangladeshi or Pakistani or Yemeni or even Muslim officers on the force, the Hamtramck City Manager Kathy Angerer skirted around the topic.  

“We have diversity in the department and are bi-lingual,” she said, adding “there is no requirement that officers live in Hamtramck.” 



Like most police departments in the United States, Hamtramck has a legacy of police brutality. Lawsuits alleging police brutality in Hamtramck date from 1925 to 2015 and include racial slurs directed at Arab Americans, pistol-whipping, tasing, kicking, and other abuses.

“The police” in the United States has been a white supremacist task force since its inception, rooted in practices used by runaway slave patrols. In the Texas Penal Code of 1857, murder of an enslaved person was justifiable “when a slave forcibly resists any lawful order of his master, overseer, or other person having legal charge of him, in such a manner as to give reasonable fear of loss of life, or great bodily harm, in enforcing obedience to such order.” 

This defense, that the patroller (now officer) was scared for their life, is commonly used today to justify police killings of Black and brown people. The usage of a star-shaped identification badge is another commonality between slave patrollers and the police and even the words we use to describe both groups share history: slave patrols were called “paddyrollers” and today police vans are called “paddywagons”.

The small amount of crime that occurs in Hamtramck is usually nonviolent. According to the HPD crime log, police calls include: stray dog, the door of the house left open, a kid threw a rock, watch stolen. Much of the Muslim population of the city does not smoke or drink alcohol which cuts down on drunk and under the influence driving.

According to a February 2021 FOIA request, the Hamtramck Police Department made more than 1,300 arrests between Jan. 1, 2019 and Dec. 31, 2020. Chief of Police Anne Moise did not respond when asked about the cause of the majority of arrests. In 2018 there was one murder in the city and in 2017 there were none. 

Although Hamtramck has a low crime and is operating on a budget deficit, the bill for the city’s police force in 2019-2020 was the biggest of any department. The city of only 22,000 people spent over $4 million on the police department.

Historically, the police department has been prioritized even over public health. The building that the HPD currently operates out of was never meant to be a police station. Constructed in 1927, it was a hospital for decades but converted to a police department in 1968, one year after the 1967 Detroit Rebellion. 

Hamtramck is the most densely populated city in Michigan and has a strong sense of community. Replacing police officers with community activists and violence interrupters who speak the same language as residents should be our focus. 

In an interview with Michigan Radio in October 2019, Hamtramck community organizer and now state representative Abraham Aiyash spoke about the language barrier in Hamtramck: “The city has a lot of folks that speak English as a second language, yet some people feel that English is the only language in city hall.” This experience from residents is embarrassing in a town whose slogan is “the world in two square miles.” 

As the push to abolish and defund the police grows stronger, many cities are using different strategies to create public safety systems that actually make people feel safe. 

In Ithaca, New York, the mayor is calling for abolishing the police force and instating a civilian-led organization with unarmed first responders trained in de-escalation (community solutions workers). And for the past 31 years in Eugene, Oregon, the city has been using a nonprofit crisis intervention program, CAHOOTS, which dispatches social workers to crisis calls instead of police officers. CAHOOTS’ yearly budget is around $2 million (half of the Hamtramck police department’s) and saves the city of Eugene an estimated $22.5 million a year in public safety, ambulance, and emergency room costs.

Mayor Majewski seems to be open to hearing ideas about reimagining public safety but so far hasn’t implemented any: “I think what everyone wants is a system that keeps them safe, that guarantees that their rights are not violated, that treats everyone with respect and fairness, and that is community-focused—a system that functions from a philosophy of justice rather than power. 

Certainly, that should involve scaling down the militarization of local police departments; focusing on de-escalation (whether that comes from “violence interrupters” within or working in tandem with the police department); building on community policing efforts—which can take a number of forms but which prioritize building relationships with local residents and which might include a community-led review panel; hiring where possible from within the community itself; requiring ongoing training, and enforcing strict accountability for violations of standards of conduct. That may well require rethinking what we term “policing” and a “police department.”

Let’s start that process of rethinking and strict accountability. I am calling for the abolishment of the Hamtramck Police Department.  If white people want racial justice we have to destroy the white supremacist systems our ancestors created. And as we ideate and implement a new form of community safety, let’s make sure it reflects the people that actually live in Hamtramck today.