Jesse Williams (Hari Rhodes) to investigate a theft of $400,000 at a fund-raiser for Representative Aubrey Hale Clayton (Rudy Challenger).

[5] Actor Alex Rocco was cast as a result of director Arthur Marks' positive experience working with him on their 1972 film Bonnie's Kids.

Championed by Quentin Tarantino, the film was given a limited re-release theatrically by his short-lived Rolling Thunder Pictures distribution company in October 1998.

[9] During the film's original theatrical run, Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave it two stars out of four and called it "a tough, cynical, big-city cop movie that occasionally tries to rise above its genre but doesn't quite make it.

"[10] Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune awarded an identical two-star grade and wrote that Alex Rocco "turns in another excellent performance", but the film needed "a strong rewrite of its script, a revision that would remove the tedious black-and-white insults that pepper its principal characters' speech.

But editing and cutting is jerky and the one flashback, an important part of the denouement, is so abrupt that it takes several moments to realize that a dying girl didn't suddenly get up and start walking around in the street.

The New York Times critic Lawrence Van Gelder claimed "In general release, Detroit 9000 illustrates the wisdom of the adage "better late than never", and praised the film's complex racial politics,[5] while The A.V.

"[14] Reviewing the film's 2013 re-issue by Lionsgate Films as part of a Rolling Thunder Picture triple-pack (with The Mighty Peking Man and Switchblade Sisters), DVD Talk's Ian Jane called it a "top notch cops and robbers urban crime thriller" which is "Not content to just titillate the audience with the more exploitative elements inherent in the genre... [the] film addresses head on the issues of racial tension, marital infidelity, and the difficulties of trying to make ends meet while still playing the part of an honest cop.