DETROIT (Michigan News Source) – What began in 2021 with Detroit voters overwhelmingly approving a ballot proposal for a Task Force to study reparations has finally produced a long-awaited report. After four years that included resignations and delays, the City of Detroit Reparations Task Force finally released their 558-page “2025 City of Detroit Reparations Recommendations Report.” The report is expected to be formally presented to the Detroit City Council in January 2026.
The recommendations: the bold, the expensive, and the bizarre.
The report includes a hodgepodge of recommendations and explanations for them. Buried in the document are some ideas that sound workable such as home repair grants, small-business support, and fixing aging DPSCD (Detroit Public Schools Community District) buildings.
MORE NEWS: Houghton County Votes Down Resolution Recognizing Only Two Sexes
But there are also some head-scratchers in the report that include the construction of 10 new strip malls for Black-owned businesses to occupy rent free for five years in an era when malls are disappearing nationwide. Choosing to build new ones is an unusual strategy for “economic development.”
Another idea: to rename public sites and city streets to “recognize significant African American leaders and historic cultural contributions of African Americans in Detroit.”
Also tossed into the mix are cash payments to descendants of slaves, cheaper housing, frozen property taxes for overtaxed homeowners, waived fees, ending water shutoffs, free services, and more.
A permanent bureaucracy in the making.
The Task Force also proposes creating a new Reparations Administration Office tasked with “coordinating, monitoring, and sustaining reparations initiatives.” And the wording makes one thing clear: these programs aren’t meant to be temporary. The report explicitly references the “reclamation of city assets” and the “enactment of new programs” – language that suggests the efforts could have new targets and continue indefinitely. There is also a directive to “maintain a comprehensive database of systemic harms, reparations efforts, and program outcomes to guide ongoing initiatives” and other wording says that reparations must be “systemic and long-term.”
Zeroing in on the police.
The Task Force devotes an unusually large portion of its report to policing – and not by accident. Citing the 2022 findings of the Detroit Coalition for Police Transparency and Accountability, the Task Force argues that Detroit police have historically acted as “agents of repression” toward Black residents, documenting everything from illegal stops and harassment to killings described by some as “outright murder.” They frame this as a continuous pattern stretching from slavery to the present day, one that has persisted despite generations of Detroiters seeking redress.
Because of that framing, the Task Force’s recommendations take direct aim at reshaping how policing operates in the city. They call for restitution for victims of police abuse, major changes to court and oversight systems, expanded alternatives to policing, and stricter accountability measures – including firing officers deemed “high risk,” ending qualified immunity, demilitarizing the force, and making all use-of-force video public. They also push to dismantle surveillance programs, reduce racial profiling, and overhaul hiring to boost African American representation within DPD. In short, the Task Force views policing not as a side issue but as a core pillar of systemic harm – and therefore a central target of their proposed reparative action.
Four years later, Detroit gets a wishlist, not a plan.
MORE NEWS: Michigan Democrats Use Federal Vaccine Shake-Up to Push Sweeping Immunization Laws
After all the delays, the Task Force still skipped the basics: no cost estimates, no payment plan, no sustainability model, and no funding guarantees. Instead, Detroit got a sweeping, symbolic, and wildly expensive wishlist – and now it’s the City Council’s job to figure out which parts can exist in the real world.
And in classic Detroit fashion, the report issues a warning: economic conditions under the “Trump authoritarian government” and the “racist political environment” it claims is being fostered could generate opposition and wreak havoc on the entire plan. The authors argue that slashed federal budgets would trigger “draconian cuts at the state level and local levels of government,” ultimately resulting in a “downward spiraling economy that will take as its first prisoners marginalized Black people.”
Looks like the Task Force is pre-blaming Washington before the ink is even dry.
