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 the Renaissance Center that has gone unchecked for years.
At least two dozen reported incidents that date back to as early as 2011 have been documented in those court filings.
In one of those incidents, officers are accused of targeting Black hotel guest Demarko Brown, who stayed at the center for his birthday in 2020. A lawsuit states that during his stay, a group of guards allegedly harassed and antagonized him, then detained him for hours in a holding cell in the building’s basement for hours before assaulting him so violently that he was left with brain damage.
Brown’s attorney, Danielle Safran, recounted another alleged incident from a different lawsuit filed earlier this year in which a Black woman claimed officers illegally held her in the center’s basement for so long that she urinated on herself.
In 2017, Detroit-based rapper Obie Trice alleged five guards attacked him after he tried to find a bathroom for his girlfriend to use at the Renaissance Center’s Riverfront Marriot hotel. An arrest report cites him for disorderly conduct, but Trice filed a lawsuit that said officers were the ones who profiled him after he tried to book a hotel room, then violently escalated the encounter when they choked, beat and pepper sprayed him.
One of the more disturbing encounters took place in August 2022 when a security guard beat a homeless woman who was allowed inside the center to find refuge from a rainy night.
Local news outlets obtained video showing one security guard starting a violent confrontation with the 61-year-old woman. He slammed her to the ground and then punched her in the head multiple times. She was also detained in the building’s basement and then taken to the hospital. Neither the woman nor the guard were charged with any crime.
Barnes said his superiors never discussed nor did they discipline the officers involved in these incidents, even after he reported violations. He started preserving video evidence but claims he witnessed one supervisor deleting that evidence.
General Motors released a statement, saying it’s “disturbed” by the allegations and has “zero tolerance for harassment or discrimination.”
“We are taking the matter seriously and are reviewing the alleged incidents where bias and use of excessive force are claimed, Allied Universal’s practices and protocols, and our contractual relationship with the company,” General Motors wrote in its statement.
G4S Secure Solutions was acquired by Allied Universal in April 2021.
General Motors is also at the center of another lawsuit that involves one of its factories in Toledo, Ohio, where racial harassment is reportedly an ongoing issue. A lawyer representing a group of Black workers filed a complaint in 2018 after factory employees discovered nooses and “whites-only” bathroom signs at the plant in 2017.
