Several security guards who worked at the General Motors Renaissance Center in downtown Detroit have been booted from the premises by the order of automaker executives following serious claims of harassment, assaults, and heinous crimes against Black guests and visitors.
The officers’ removal comes after one of the center’s longtime Black security officers, Robert Barnes, filed a lawsuit this week that disclosed vile acts of racial violence at the hands of white guards. Those officers worked for a security force that General Motors established to patrol its property that is majority-owned by G4S Secure Solutions, an international security company the automaker contracted.
The Renaissance Center, also known as RenCen, is a glass skyscraper complex on Detroit’s riverfront built in 1977. It houses smaller companies and has a Marriott hotel. Since GM bought it in 1996, it has been used as the automaker’s global headquarters.
Barnes, who has worked at the iconic downtown center for 32 years, claimed in his lawsuit that the security culture deteriorated when G4S employee Larry Payne became the center’s security director in 2017.
“My management went rogue,” Barnes told Fox 2 Detroit. “Then I called Larry Payne and explained the situation. I was like it happened again. That’s when he made the comment that General Motors wants us to be more aggressive with 211s,” Barnes recalled. “211 (is) our radio code for undesirables.”
That code is reportedly used to identify a person. When calls were made using the code, it directly led to seemingly unprompted, unprovoked and racist attacks.
The Detroit Free Press was the first outlet to report the allegations, which were included in multiple federal lawsuits naming GM, G4S, and the Renaissance Center Management Company. Those complaints recount numerous instances in which white officers assaulted, targeted, harassed, and even unlawfully detained Black people in a basement cell of…
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