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The video for Day 4 of Deadline Detroit's Old-Time Film Fest is a 1951 documentary, "This Is Your Detroit Police Department."
Produced by Detroit's Jam Handy Organization, the 24-minute film puts the DPD on display in all of its post-war glory by following a recruit named Joe, a resident of a small Michigan town, through his training and introduction to the sometimes mean, sometimes pleasant streets of Detroit.
This is an era, the documentary would have the viewer believe, when cops picked newspapers off of the porches of vacationing residents to keep burglars away.
"It was his job to prevent crime whenever possible," the narrator proclaims.
But it's also a department whose officers, riding in "two-way radio cars," sometimes are shot by robbers.
The message is clear: The DPD is perhaps the world's greatest department.
In 1951, of course, the city's population is peaking, and the many shots of Detroit sidewalks and streets show them crowded with pedestrians and cars.
But there are virtually no African Americans in the film, and certainly none who are police officers, even though blacks made up close to 20 percent of the population in the era. That lack of representation in the ranks would become a huge socio-political issue by the 1960s and '70s.
The documentary maker, the Jam Handy Organization, was founded by Henry Jamison (Jam) Handy, a former Olympic swimmer from Chicago who was expelled from the University of Michigan in 1903 for writing an article for the Chicago Tribune that ridiculed a U-M professor.
Handy’s fledgling film-production company received a break after World War I when General Motors Corporation chose it to make short films for both training and marketing purposes. Jam Handy went on to produce films for other companies and organizations, and during World War II, it made an estimated 7,000 films for the U.S. armed forces.
Handy himself was eccentric, working at his headquarters without a permanent desk and wearing suits without pockets, which he considered a waste of time.
Come back to Deadline Detroit Friday for the final day of the online film festival.
Day 1: "Safety Patrol," a 1937 documentary about Detroit's patrol boys.
Day 2: Boomtown Detroit, a 1919 travelogue of the rapidly expanding city from the Ford Motor Co. archives.
Day 3: Home movie of Detroit's Monnier School.
