Devil's Night

Devil's Night is a name associated with October 30, the night before Halloween, in Detroit, MI and the surrounding area. It is related to the "Mischief Night", an informal holiday involving pranks and minor vandalism. However, Devil's Night, especially from the late 1960s to the 1990s, involved widespread serious vandalism and arson in the Detroit area. The community responded by prompting "Angels' Night", a peaceful alternative to Devil's Night. Beginning in the 1990s, the rate of arson began to fall, thanks in part to these community programs. Description Devil's Night made its way to Detroit in the 1930s and 1940s. Traditionally, city youths engaged in a night of mischievous or petty criminal behavior, usually consisting of minor pranks or acts of mild vandalism (such as egging, soaping or waxing windows and doors, leaving rotten vegetables or flaming bags of canine feces on stoops, or toilet papering trees and shrubs) which caused little or no property damage. By the 1970s, the concept of Devil's Night as a phenomenon of a night of mischief and vandalism had spread, in a limited way, to cities around the state of Michigan, around the Midwest, and, in some instances, a few other cities around the country. However, in Detroit in the early 1970s, the vandalism escalated to more destructive acts such as arson. This primarily took place in the inner city, but surrounding suburbs were often affected as well. The crimes became more destructive in Detroit's inner-city neighborhoods, and included hundreds of acts of arson and vandalism every year. The destruction was worst in the mid- to late-1980s, with more than 800 fires set in 1984, and a number in the hundreds for each subsequent year until 2011. The damage was exacerbated by the severe population decline and widespread abandonment of buildings that occurred in Detroit during the 1970s and 1980s.