Strongest of the riot's many causes was a sense of injustice
To some Negroes police have come to symbolize white power, white racism and white repression.
And the fact is that many police do reflect and express these white attitudes. The atmosphere of hostility and cynicism is reinforced by a widespread belief among Negroes in the existence of police brutality and in a double standard of justice and protection—one for Negroes and one for whites. —The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, 1968
The pages of the once celebrated report pinpointing the causes of America's worst race riots of the 1960s are yellowing now in public libraries and official files. The Kerner Commission's warning that "our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal" has faded, too, from public consciousness. But as firemen in riot-ravaged Miami quenched the last embers of blazes that had reduced scores of business buildings to charred shells, as street crews hosed off the blood of 14 people beaten or shot to death, and 3,800 National Guardsmen withdrew from patrolling a 40-block by 60-block area of the shaken city, the nation had been jolted anew into a realization that black outrage at "a double standard of justice" still remains near flash point in many U.S. cities.
As always there were multiple pressures that erupted into the Miami race riot —by far the worst since 43 people were killed (mostly black rioters shot by police) in a week of looting and burning in Detroit in 1967. High unemployment, the ruinous impact of inflation, resentment at all the public help given the still rising tide of refugees inundating southern Florida from Cuba—all fed the fury of the Miami area's 233,000 blacks. Yet perhaps more clearly than in any other recent race conflict, the rage in Miami focused on police, prosecutors and the courts. And when the three-day bloodletting was over, blacks had fresh cause to complain that some Miami and Dade County police had reacted with quick triggers and hot tempers. Most of the dead—and all of those killed after the first night of violence—were blacks.
On the other hand, the violence of the black mobs that roamed through such ghettos as Liberty City and Brownsville, wielding torches and firing shotguns and pistols, terrified not only the whites who had been accidentally caught in those neighborhoods but also the police who rushed into the area trying to restore order. Declared Marvin Dunn, a black psychologist at Florida International University: "I've never seen anything like it. In the 1960s people got hurt because they got in the way. But in this riot, people have set out to kill white people."