In August 2014, a White police officer in a St. Louis suburb fatally shot Michael Brown, an unarmed Black teenager who, according to some witnesses, had his arms raised in surrender. Seven months later, a 25-year-old Black man, Freddie Gray, suffered a broken neck after Baltimore police arrested him and placed him—shackled but not belted—in a van as the driver allegedly took a fast, sharp turn that tossed Gray about the vehicle. He died days later.

Both killings touched off uprisings in their overwhelmingly Black communities, with residents accusing Ferguson and Baltimore police of brutality and demanding accountability. 

These spasms of violence are where Derek Hyra, professor in the Department of Public Administration and Policy and founding director of AU’s Metropolitan Policy Center, opens his third book, Slow and Sudden Violence: Why and When Uprisings Occur. 

Released in August, the book delves into the real estate histories of St. Louis and Baltimore, revealing an “ongoing cycle of racial and spatial urban redevelopment repression” that has led to pockets of deep Black poverty in cities and suburbs. Formed over decades by housing and development policies that forced out thousands of poor Black residents, these communities are primed for civil unrest when police commit an act of alleged brutality.

“Police brutality is not new—but there are only particular moments when [it] triggers an uprising,” Hyra says. Myriad researchers have tackled issues of law enforcement misconduct. But Hyra—who was assisted with the fieldwork in Charm City by Lawrence Anderson, SPA/MA ’19, chief of staff to the Baltimore City Council—thought, “There weren’t enough books that took a step back to look at these pockets of poverty where police violence occurs.”

Hyra, who in 2017 authored Race, Class, and Politics in the Cappuccino City, an examination of the dramatic gentrification of DC’s Shaw–U Street neighborhood, says he decided to include Ferguson in his analysis because he wanted to understand “the suburbanization of poverty.” 

In Slow and Sudden Violence, Hyra argues that local, state, and federal housing policies and decisions to knock down public housing and spend hundreds of millions of federal dollars to develop luxury- and mixed-income housing, sports venues, breweries, coffee shops, and other businesses have created “chronic displacement trauma” for residents of color who are forced to leave. An unjust police killing can trigger “suppressed painful memories and anger” linked with that trauma, he writes. 

Hyra underscores that Black political representation doesn’t ensure enlightened housing policies. He writes that while Ferguson for decades was a majority-Black town with a White power structure, Baltimore has had generations of Black leadership. The city’s Black mayors and council members have, like their White counterparts in Ferguson and elsewhere, eliminated housing for poor Black residents in favor of business development.

To break the cycle of gentrified, slow-moving violence, government officials must stop supporting policies that “create chronic displacement trauma and invest in places and people so they have a home base and a place,” says Hyra, winner of the Urban Affairs Association’s 2024 Marilyn J. Gittell Activist Scholar Award. Mayors must think beyond their next election, he adds, and enact policies that invest in Black and underserved communities.“We can’t have gentrification and displacement policies. We need policies that invest in, uplift, and stabilize Black and brown communities.”