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...