McDuffie Riots



Every story has a beginning. For the people of Miami and Dade County the murder of former Marine Arthur McDuffie was their story beginning. The police department began an investigation of the officers involved in the murder of McDuffie. Upon their research they found a very different story than the one mentioned in the officers’ reports. After the internal inquiry was over, it became apparent that what happened to McDuffie was no accident. He had been handcuffed, pulled off his bike, and beaten severely. In an attempt to cover up their wrongdoings, the police went to great lengths to make the scene look like an accident. They drove over McDuffie’s bike with a squad car to make it look accident damaged. The gouged the road with a tire iron to look like bike tracks and threw the victims watch down a gutter. But these small acts could not cover up what they had done. The city, and especially its Black community, became outraged. Citizens marched in front of the Dade County justice building carrying a black coffin. The NAACP sent letters to the federal justice department asking them to monitor the trial. Miami’s Black residents had long complained about police brutality, but as it does in most places their voice fell on deaf ears. But the McDuffie case was different. This was no drug-peddling street thug or common ghetto criminal, this was a man who had served his country as a military police officer, worked in the white-collar world and was senselessly killed by a group of deranged police. Police who, combined, had 47 citizen complaints and 13 internal review probes in the past seven years. The combination of a sympathetic victim and extremely unsympathetic attackers made this situation especially dangerous. The situation was considered so dangerous, in fact, that Judge Nesbitt granted the defendants’ request for a change of venue to Tampa. She called the case “a time bomb I don’t want to go off in my courtroom or this community.” What the judge failed to realize, however, was that no matter where the fuse was lit, it would eventually burn all the way back to Miami.