CITIES: A Long, Hot Summer for Detroit

Armed with shotguns, Magnums, carbines and clubs, teams of men sweep the streets, enforcing a 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew for everyone under 18. Citizens cower behind the barricaded doors of their own homes, listening to the shots and shouts that punctuate the night air. The city is not Beirut or Belfast but Detroit, whose agonies are every bit as real and whose conflicts seem equally impossible to eradicate.

After weeks of gang terrorism that included killings, a near riot, robberies, pillaging and rape, Detroit’s black mayor, Coleman Young, belatedly rushed back from vacation and vowed last week, “We will not tolerate lawlessness in the streets. We will stand for it no longer.” Detroit’s police needed no further encouragement. Minutes after the curfew went into effect, plainclothesmen and uniformed cops were out in force, and anything that moved was fair game. At one point, a two-man team sighted three black youths on a dark street corner. “What are you doing out now?” demanded one cop as his partner covered the trio with a lethal-looking 12-gauge shotgun. “We were just coming home from skating, man,” said one youth. “You’re skating,” barked the cop, “right to jail.” And off they went.

Mere Rhetoric. Still, the malaise that grips the decaying motor capital is unlikely to yield to short-term measures like a curfew—and even less to mere rhetoric and good intentions. As John Cardinal Dearden, the Archbishop of Detroit, put it last week, “We are called upon to rebuild the structure.”

The problems that plague Detroit (pop. 1.4 million) differ only in magnitude from those that afflict other large cities in the U.S.: an eroding tax base as affluent whites abandon the core city; reduced services, including police protection; widespread unemployment, particularly among black youths; neighborhoods where housing and other buildings have been allowed to deteriorate; and low-quality schools. Perhaps more debilitating than any of these is a growing feeling that nothing will—or can—be done to reverse the trend.

Detroit resorted to near martial law after roving gangs of young toughs with names like the Black Killers, the Errol Flynns, the Sheridan Strips and the Bishops virtually took over the streets of the city’s scrubby east side. Perhaps as many as 500 of the gang members are concentrated in the impoverished Fifth Precinct, a 6-sq.-mi. moonscape of abandoned storefronts, crumbling homes and schools, littered streets and sidewalks. Once a quiet white community, the precinct is nearly all black, its various sections divided into territories controlled by one or another of the gangs.

In recent months gang members have blazed a trail of terror. They accosted one youth on the street, ordered him to run, then shot him in the buttocks for no reason. They boarded buses and relieved all passengers of their valuables. They branched out to the Edsel Ford and the Lodge freeways, descending on stalled cars like army ants to rob, beat and rape terrified motorists. They devised a game called “Russian,” in which one punk would knock on the door of a home while his confederates hid in the bushes; when the door opened, the whole mob would storm in, smashing furniture, beating the occupants and stealing. In late June, while partygoers at the Pontchartrain Hotel watched a fireworks display, 20 hoodlums swarmed in, snatching purses and overturning tables.

The crowning horror occurred at a Cobo Hall rock concert in downtown Detroit in mid-August. Some 125 black youths, apparently acting in unison, beat and robbed scores of patrons and gang-raped one woman. For a full hour, undermanned police outside the hall refused to intervene—on the incredible grounds that Cobo Hall had promised to provide its own security. When they finally did bestir themselves, they arrested 47 hoodlums; all have been released.

At that, the outraged citizenry could no longer be ignored. Though the city was not actually in flames, Mayor Young stoically cut short his vacation. Having laid off 1,000 policemen in July because of a fiscal squeeze, he rehired 675 of them and immediately assigned 200 to gang-busting patrols. The city council also ordered the curfew, which curtailed the gangs’ activities, at least for the moment. Aside from ordering a tightening of procedures, however, there was not much that Young could do about Detroit’s overburdened and overly lenient juvenile-court system, whose facilities are so inadequate that robbers and rapists under the age of 18 are sometimes back on the streets within hours.

Young’s actions did little to boost police morale, which had sunk to a disastrously low level in the first place because of the mayor’s earlier moves. Young won election in 1973 partly by campaigning against the alleged racist attitudes and “blackjack rule” of the cops. The force is also under a cloud because of a federal investigation of alleged payoffs from narcotics operators to some of its high-ranking officers. Some of the police still regard the mayor as a cop hater and Police Chief Philip Tannian as an inept lackey. But they have enforced the curfew and regained control of the streets—at least temporarily.

The situation obviously calls for more than palliatives—and it extends beyond Detroit. So far, neither President Ford nor Jimmy Carter has placed much emphasis on the plight of the large cities. The outbreak in Detroit—a chilling reminder of the violent riots that resulted in 43 deaths and more than $100 million in damage there in 1967—should signal to both candidates that the cities’ cries for help can go unheeded only at grave risk. Aside from America’s mayors, however, most politicians seem blithely willing to take that risk. Michigan’s Republican Governor William Milliken, for example, is pressing for a federally financed “Marshall Plan for the cities.” But Milliken is simultaneously opposing efforts in federal courts to force the state to pay part of the cost of Detroit’s school-integration plan.

Rid the City. Meanwhile, Mayor Young tried desperately to keep the situation from deteriorating. He announced that “strong young men and women from the schools, the churches, the union halls and the block clubs” will be recruited as a volunteer back-up force for the police. The city will seek more juvenile judges and a new county jail. It will request authority for judges, rather than state social workers, to incarcerate juvenile offenders. A 40-member economic-growth council will be formed to help ease “the crushing burden of unemployment.” Earlier, Young had declared, “I want the pimps, prostitutes, gangs and youth rovers off the streets. We’re going to rid the city of them.”

On the very day the mayor spoke, Detroit was mourning the death of a good Samaritan priest, Msgr. Thomas Jobs, who was gunned down in his rectory in a robbery that netted a few dollars. No charges have been filed.

In his eulogy, Cardinal Dearden noted that the city is in the grip of “a violence which comes from a profound and deep malaise . . . and a moral weakness that is reflected in a disrespect for human life.” As he spoke, a wailing police siren drowned out some of his words.