Up in Arms Over Crime

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Inhabitants of big U.S. cities are also assaulted by what Fred DuBow, a visiting scholar at the American Bar Foundation, calls "incivilities." These range from blasting radios and graffiti-marred walls to harassment by panhandlers. "A lot of us feel uncomfortable and threatened in those situations, and it's not just imagination," DuBow says. The sheer population mass of the largest cities, coupled with sensational news coverage of brutal crimes, contributes to the climate of fear. People in Portland feel safer than do inhabitants of Chicago, even though crime rates are higher in the . smaller city. Most Americans do not become crime victims, but most know someone who has. Many become quite rational prisoners of their fears, living behind triple locks and avoiding ominous places.

Sometimes, like Goetz, these potential victims make headlines by lashing out at their tormentors. When Laird Roy Roberson, 29, looked out of his Houston apartment window at 11:30 p.m. on Jan. 23 and saw two men and a woman trying to break into his car, he picked up a .22-cal. rifle and fired seven shots, killing Darrel York, 18, and wounding Jerome Marshall, 19. A grand jury decided that Roberson had committed no crime.

Residents of Detroit have added to their city's reputation as a rough place. So far this year three burglars have been shot and killed by angry homeowners. Marie Morrison, 78, shot a 16-year-old youth who tried to force his way into her house. Detroit Mayor Coleman Young praised her action, declaring, "Every person has a right and an obligation to defend their own home." Daniel Kindred, 41, killed Ronnie Trapp, 19, when he saw Trapp climbing out of a basement window of the Kindred house. Last week Wayne County Chief Assistant Prosecutor Elliott Hall decided not to seek charges against Kindred, contending that the homeowner's retaliation was "perfectly justified." In the third episode, Ernest Leflore, 50, heard a man breaking into his home and shot him with a .357 magnum pistol. While critical of the trend, Hall conceded that "the Bernhard Goetz affair has had an impact. People are thinking more readily of using a firearm than in the past."

In Atlanta, Arthur Davis, 46, a 6-ft. 1-in., 230-lb. truck driver, felt a gun in his back as he drew cash from an automatic banking machine early on Jan. 30. He instinctively wheeled around, knocked the gunman down, grabbed his pistol, put it to the prone man's head and pulled the trigger several times. The gun would not fire. "I wasn't going to stand there and let him kill me without doing anything," Davis explained. In another New York subway clash, Andrew Frederick, 25, saw two men trying to steal candy from an underground newsstand and intervened. When they turned on him, he pulled out a pocketknife and stabbed one of them, Felix McCord, 28, to death. After deliberating last week, a grand jury in Manhattan decided not to indict Frederick.