By George Hunter, ghunter@detroitnews.com
Mayor Robert McCraight grinned when he reported the status of the former Rodeway Inn on Wickham Road in Romulus, where police once averaged more than a dozen calls for service per week.
“It’s a hole in the ground,” McCraight said.
City and police officials hailed the ongoing demolition of the former trouble spot as an example of how their three-year push to root out crime in the Wayne County community’s hotel district is working. Romulus has 26 hotels, the most of any community in Michigan, and city and police officials said high crime in the area was preventing investment from developers.
That has started to change, they said, with multiple projects involving tens of millions of dollars, including the $60 million redevelopment of the Rodeway site by Tennessee-based Cooper Hotels.
With the hotel razed, a construction crew recently toppled the towering “Rodeway Inn” sign, which kicked up debris when it hit the ground.
Good riddance, McCraight said.
“It was a blighted hotel — there were drugs, prostitution, all kinds of crime there,” said McCraight, who was elected mayor in 2021. “(The Rodeway) is the first hotel we went after when we started this.”
Cooper Hotels, which owns three other hotels in Romulus, didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.
There are about 46,000 hotel rooms in Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties, according to the Michigan Economic Development Corp. Police and elected officials in communities throughout the region are vexed by the same problems that once permeated the Romulus Rodeway Inn, said Ron Wiles, director of the Michigan Association of Chiefs of Police.
“Communities with a large number of hotels and motels can face unique public safety challenges,” Wiles said. “Frequent guest turnover and a high volume of short-term visitors can result in higher calls for service and increased risk of issues such as drug activity, human trafficking and quality of life complaints.
“At the same time, hotels and motels are an important part of many communities, and law enforcement continues to work closely with property owners, local governments and partner agencies through targeted patrols, staff training and proactive problem-solving to help keep guests, employees, and communities safe,” Wiles said.
Hotels tend to draw crime, according to the University of Arizona’s Center for Problem-Oriented Policing.
“The very nature of overnight lodging makes it conducive to crime and disorder,” said a 2005 guide titled “Disorder at Budget Motels.”
“Motels and hotels house people only temporarily, often in commercial areas with high crime rates,” the guide said. “Because budget motels offer low rates, accept cash, and often have a relatively unrestricted environment, local residents with illicit or antisocial intentions find them particularly attractive.
“Drug sales, prostitution, loud parties, and other activities can often be undertaken at motels with less risk than at private residences,” the guide said. “Motel guests have little motivation to report drug dealing and prostitution because they have no long-term stake in the motel.”
The crime problem got worse during the COVID pandemic, McCraight said.
“When COVID happened, people weren’t travelling, and some of the hotels chose a business model where they filled their rooms up with whoever they could,” he said. “That brought nefarious activity, which drove the increased need for public safety in the hotel district.”
McCraight said he launched the effort to clean up Romulus’s hotel district by holding “carrot and stick meetings” with hotel managers and other employees.
“We told them if they shared our vision, we’d work with them to attract more business,” he said. “But if not, we’d use the stick of code enforcement and start allowing police who were going on these runs to use the tools of City Hall to ensure these places were in compliance with our city codes, and, if not, issue violations.
“Some of the hotel managers would come to these meetings and say, ‘Hey, call off your dogs, they’re being too aggressive with enforcing all these city codes,’” McCraight said.
“I told them: Who do you think sent them out there? We’re not backing down. You need to clean up your hotel.”
Southfield shootings
Some of the most notorious crimes in Metro Detroit history have been committed in or around hotels or motels. Cases include the still-unsolved assassination of anti-bootlegger radio firebrand Jerry Buckley, who was gunned down July 23, 1930, in the lobby of Detroit’s LaSalle Hotel, and the July 9, 1987, shooting deaths of three Inkster police officers at the Bungalow Motel on Michigan Avenue.
A more recent problem establishment was the now-razed Victory Inn on Michigan Avenue in Detroit near the Dearborn border. Federal agents raided the 42-room motel in 2017 and rescued 14 women who were confined to the rooms as sex slaves. Rampant drug-dealing also went on at the motel, federal authorities said. The building was demolished in 2018.
Multiple high-profile crimes have been committed in and around Southfield hotels in the past two years, including the Dec. 1 homicide of 40-year-old Detroit resident Taron Fitzpatrick. Police found the victim, who’d been shot, in the parking lot of the Radisson Hotel on Telegraph Road near the Lodge Freeway. He later died from his injuries.
In September, Oakland County prosecutors accused a man of running a prostitution operation out of the Sonesta Simply Suites in Southfield, with the aid of a hotel employee. Three defendants face charges of running a human trafficking enterprise, accepting money from prostitution and other offenses, marking the first time Oakland County prosecutors have filed such charges against a hotel clerk.
On Feb. 11, 2025, Southfield police said 15-year-old Tyler Johnson was shot and wounded a year earlier at about 8:42 a.m. on Feb. 11, 2024, in a room at The Westin at 1500 Town Center in Southfield. Johnson, who was among a group of teenage friends who had gathered in the room and were unsupervised, later died from his wounds. Police said the investigation stalled due to a lack of cooperation from witnesses.
While the shootings make headlines, most crimes in and around the city’s hotels are nonviolent, Southfield Police Deputy Chief Aaron Huguley said.
“There are a number of different types of crimes that happen at the hotels,” Huguley said. “You have large, open complexes with a lot of cars parked there, so there are auto thefts. Prostitution and domestic violence find their way into hotels as well.”
Southfield’s deputy chief said his department tries to be proactive about curbing crime in the city’s hotels.
“Understanding that human trafficking and prostitution happen at transient locations, we’ve assigned two detectives to human trafficking task forces, one through Oakland County that was created last year, and at the federal level, we have a detective assigned to the Southeast Michigan Trafficking and Exploitation Task Force,” Huguley said.
The detectives scour dating sites and set up “pretend dates” with prostitutes, he said.
“Another big part of what we do is educate hotel staff and management,” Huguley said. “In early 2025, a detective made contact with all hotels to talk to them about what to recognize. These pimps check into the hotels, and then you’ll see a bunch of people coming in and out. We want them to notify us when they see that.”
Huguley said he expects the police department to submit a draft ordinance for the City Council’s approval that would require hotels in Southfield to post signage in their lobbies with a number to a human trafficking hotline, “so people will readily have that information. We expect it to be approved and implemented in the next month or so.”
Moving forward
Prior to Detroit’s hosting the 2024 NFL Draft, city officials collaborated with local nonprofits and federal authorities to launch human trafficking awareness campaigns, increase surveillance in high-risk areas, and train hotel staff and transportation workers.
Romulus Director of Community Safety & Development Kevin Krause said city officials worked with the NFL prior to the draft and are in contact with National Collegiate Athletic Association officials ahead of the scheduled Men’s Final Four basketball tournament next year at Ford Field in Detroit.
“The NCAA has a contract with (the nonprofit Visit Detroit) that only addresses the hotel rooms for the teams, coaches and people associated with the NCAA, but the visitors, guests and fans will be pushed out to our district,” Krause said. “We’ll work with the NCAA like we did with the NFL before the draft.”
McCraight said he met with Safe Detroit officials to discuss their mutual interests.
“We agreed that our hotel district could be an awesome tool for Detroit and all of southeast Michigan,” he said. “But we had to clean up some things first. We started at the Rodeway.”
Romulus Police Chief Robert Pfannes said there were more than 700 calls for police service at the Rodeway when the effort began in 2022. That dwindled to 155 in 2025, when the establishment closed, and the property was sold to Cooper Hotels, which city officials said is planning to build two hotels after it razes the old facility.
The problems weren’t confined to the Rodeway, according to police data. In 2022, when the cleanup initiative started, there were 1,565 calls for service at the city’s 26 hotels. In 2025, there were 624 calls for service, a 59% decline, police statistics show.
“Most of the problems come from the older hotels that can’t compete with the Sheraton or Radisson,” McCraight said. “Those places can’t charge $150 a night for a room, so they charge $50 and take whoever they can get.
“That obviously brings problems, but we took a hard stance and told the hotels if they didn’t clean their businesses up, we’d continue to use the tools of City Hall to put pressure on them until they did,” the mayor said. “And the numbers show us that’s working.”
