Ugly Aftermath

For evidence that most city police and National Guardsmen are woefully ill-prepared to deal with riots, Congress had no need to look beyond Detroit.

Last week, in the wake of the violence that took 43 lives in the city, 23 of the deaths were under investigation for possible prosecution of police and Guards men on homicide charges. Among other tales of brutal reprisals, investigators learned, were those of a factory worker who was reportedly kicked and beaten to death after taking two bullets as a suspected sniper; a 19-year-old Job Corps trainee who was yanked off his milk truck, told to run, then shot dead when he did; a four-year-old girl killed when a tank commander sprayed her home's windows with machine-gun fire; and a man shot down for "carrying a gun," though witnesses swear it was only a broomstick.

45 Minute Orgy. The best-authenticated--and most shocking--incident involved three young Negroes who were listed on the police blotter as "apparently shot to death in an exchange of gunfire." According to rumors buzzing through the Negro community, they had been murdered in cold blood. After a thoroughgoing investigation of the killings by Detroit News Reporter Joseph Strickland, city officials reluctantly rounded up a covey of witnesses who agreed that the trio had been shot without provocation.

The Negroes had been staying at Algiers Manor, a tacky three-story annex behind a Woodward Avenue motel. Police records show that the place had been a haven for prostitution, narcotics and stolen ammunition; one night at the height of the riots, police hauled out a man with a rifle. Next night, after getting reports of sniping in the area, 16 police and National Guardsmen, guns blazing, burst into a ground-floor room in Algiers Manor, and manhandled its occupants--at least seven Negro men and two white girls--into spread-eagled positions against a wall. Then, said witnesses, Detroit police and a Guard unit led by a warrant officer indulged in an orgy of beating and bashing that lasted 45 minutes.

"Where's the Sniper?" Smashing gun butts and barrels into hapless suspects, the officers kept asking: "Where's the sniper?" One by one, the room's terrified occupants were ordered into adjoining rooms for more intensive interrogation. While no witness claimed to have seen the actual killings, survivors agree that at least two of the dead youths were taken away and that subsequently shots were heard. Later, the sprawled bodies of the three youths were found lying in blood from buckshot wounds. At week's end, two policemen were formally charged with first-degree murder. Also under arrest as suspects in the killing of a white policeman were two young Negroes, jailed after the shooting of an officer in a scuffle over a gun.

The Newark cab driver whose arrest last month on a traffic charge ignited a five-day riot there sued police for $700,000, claiming that they beat him with fists and nightsticks. Cabbie John Smith (TIME cover, July 21) filed suit against the two arresting officers and, for good measure, Police Director Dominick Spina and Chief Oliver Kelly, charging "they failed to properly train and supervise" the Newark force.

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