Nation: RIOT CONTROL

FOR long hours last week, Detroit's police hung back from the Twelfth Street riot area. Apparently, one resident quipped, they were hoping that "if they left, the crowd would leave too." But if there is one point that has been proved repeatedly over four summers of ghetto riots, it is that when the police abandon the street, the crowd takes it over, and the crowd can swiftly become a mob. It happened in Watts, in Boston's Roxbury district, in Newark and in blood and fire in Detroit.

Some civil rights leaders would agree, as does Chicago's Chester Robinson, director of the West Side Organization, that the appearance of police only makes mobs more belligerent than ever. But it is clear that their absence eventually causes even more violence.

Says Harvard Urbanologist James Q. Wilson, who is conducting a comprehensive study of the nation's police: "There is no evidence that anything but an immediate and large show of force will stop a riot." In Detroit, said the Michigan Chronicle, the city's biggest Negro newspaper, "a firm hand would have chased those people away. You can be firm without shooting." Nor is it true, as Chester Robinson insists, that "in the initial stages of a disturbance we [i.e., Negro leaders] can handle the people ourselves." Says Wilson: "Negro leaders have tried to stop riots in the early stages and got shot."

When Detroit's police finally were ordered to quell the rioters and to use their weapons when necessary, their initial restraint gave way to near abandon. As in Newark, where overexcited police and state troopers engaged in a brief shoot-out with one another by mistake, fire discipline was lethally lax.

On the Spot. That was also true of the National Guardsmen. The crack of a sniper's bullet—and sometimes simply the bang of a firecracker or the pop of a light bulb—brought forth fantastic fusillades from police and National Guard rifles, shotguns, machine guns and pistols. Four-year-old Tonia Blanding was shot dead in an apartment when lawmen saw her uncle strike a match to light a cigarette, mistook the flare for a sniper's muzzle flash, and poured bullets through the window.

By any measure, the Guard's performance was appalling. National Guard armored personnel carriers rumbled through the streets blasting out street lights with .50-cal. machine guns and spraying down suspect buildings. Seeing a Negro man walk by, one Guardsman, rifle at the ready, ordered: "You get out of here, boy. Faster, boy. You run out of here." The man had no choice but to accept the humiliation and jog off. A couple and their three friends were ordered to lie on the ground, and then were threatened by more than a dozen Guardsmen armed with automatic weapons. Lieut. General John L. Throckmorton, the Army paratroop commander who took control of the Guardsmen when they were federalized, was asked what he thought of them. "Look," he pleaded, "don't put me on a spot like that."