The law enforcement war on crack cocaine, and the public pressure to stop the violence, led to extensive police corruption and brutality against Black youth during the 1980s. The Detroit Police Department, in its quest to solve an overwhelming number of homicides, adopted illegal practices that produced a high volume of false confessions and wrongful convictions. By 1989, arrests for drug violations in the United States spiked to 1.362 million, and in Michigan that year, more than 10,000 individuals were convicted for drug offenses. Across the nation, 42 percent of all drug arrestees were Black, even though African Americans only made up 13 percent of the population, and even though white Americans bought and sold illegal drugs at comparable rates. During this time, as law enforcement adopted extreme and often illegal tactics in the war on crack, the longstanding "Blue Code of Silence" among police officers allowed abusive cops to remain in power. According to this unofficial but pervasive policy, police officers almost never reported other officers for misconduct or brutality, and police departments minimized corruption by claiming the problem was caused by just a few 'bad apples.'