The City: The City

Guerrilla Summer?

After five years of urban disturbances, the U.S. has become inured to grim box scores: the number of people killed, injured and arrested, the dollars lost from looting and arson. Recently, however, there has been a shift toward a different pattern of violence. The old-style, spontaneous and omnidirectional ghetto riots—such as those in Watts, Detroit and Newark—have been declining since 1967. Instead, city after city has seen a series of small-scale, sometimes premeditated and often fatal armed clashes. "Race-related disorders," reports Brandeis University's Lemberg Center for the Study of Violence, rose from 249 in 1967 to 671 in 1968.

As another summer has arrived, the most ominous fact is that many attacks are now consciously directed against people, not property. Sometimes it is a case of ambushes on police by small groups of black tenement tireurs. It is more likely to be a quick-draw response by blacks to what they consider—often with some justice—to be police oppression. Or else it is a shoot-out among militants or street gangs competing for primacy. A few years ago, the latter type of dispute was typically settled by fists and switchblade knives; now firearms are ubiquitous and fashionable.

Mystic Murderer. The pattern began to crystallize last summer, when Cleveland police were lured into an ambush led by Fred (Ahmed) Evans, a black mystic. Last month he was sentenced to death for the murder of three policemen and one civilian killed in the gunfight. In recent weeks, there have been shooting incidents involving police and snipers in Cairo, Ill., Portland, Ore., and Sacramento, Calif. Police were attacked by black snipers outside a Detroit church this spring and at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. In Chicago, two white policemen were fired on after another cop shot a black youth. White toughs who fancy themselves vigilantes add to the unrest by threatening Negroes.

The increased number of attacks have made the police more nervous and more watchful. Police and FBI agents have also counterattacked by raiding militants' headquarters, ostensibly to look for weapons and sometimes to harass the members. Recently there have been forays against Black Panther haunts in Chicago, Denver, Salt Lake City and St. Louis. Sacramento police last week stormed Panther offices during a disturbance in which more than 100 shots were fired, wounding 12 cops and at least three other persons.

In Chicago, police relations with the ghetto are extremely tense. Patrol cars roam slum streets with shotgun muzzles visible. As hostility to them rises, police become more prone to overreact, as they did in the Detroit incident, when they invaded the crowded Detroit church, guns blazing, in search of the snipers.