What's Happening in 'Murder City'

...More important, perhaps, Hart shifted the emphasis of departmental policies away from "reactive" or after-the-fact police action and toward actual pre-vention of crime...

...By municipal law, they must be Detroit residents...

...It was in search of an explanation for these astonishing statistics that I found my-self Walking the streets ?f that target area one day last spring...

...But this is where the crucial catch ap-plies...

...The idea is making a better place in as many ways as possible," says Preston...

...In the years which saw Detroit descend into its "Murder City" period, it was a metropolis almost en-tirely given over to transience...

...If crime was to be reduced at all, "the Citizens in the Community must be actively involved...

...We must have Citizens who accept responsibility and get involved," insists Chief Hart...

...By 1925, however, when Chandler Park was fully inhabited, Detroit was already pushing toward a population of 1.5 million...

...Detroit's like a big, big little town," says Fred Williams...

...Next stretched—almost endlessly it seemed—the two-story frame cottages and duplexes constructed by the auto magnates expressly for their assembly-line workers...

...When the training ends, large signs bearing the name of the Community Organization are erected at each end of the block...

...In a neat brick bungalow on Philip Street, eight blocks from the church, retired tire-plant worker John Petross teils the officers about the time he opened his front door one evening five years ago and found a rifle pointed at his belly...

...They indicate that the block is organized, that these people are not easy victims...

...And in the meantime, the crime rate kept rising...

...Yet something unprecedented has happened in recent years which makes this far from the worst of times for Detroiters...

...I just can't live with this," he remembers thinking...

...Petross decided it was time to leave Detroit...

...The sense of Community feeling is difficult to preserve in a forest of "for sale" signs...

...And in the eyes of many Detroiters, the police were demonstrably not the Solution...

...Race wasn't the problem any more...

...It really was that simple, and for the most part, it remained that simple for thirty years...

...Black and white families alike were victimized by gangs operating out of the neighborhood's hundreds of abandoned houses, despite a massive investment in police manpower and tactical mobile units, which only seemed to exacerbate the problem...

...Detroit may die yet...

...Police officials do take pains to emphasize that their program is designed to make it difficult to commit crimes—not to empower Citizens to solve or respond to them...

...In fact, Hart told the mayor, the police themselves could do very little once crimes had actually been committed...

...Neighborhood Watch" and the larger program built around it are meant to serve as much more than inducements for neighbors to watch out for suspicious strangers...

...We can throw every-thing we know into beating the crime problem around here, but we can't do it alone, and we can't really lead the way...

...And so, ironically, while the auto com-panies continue their descent into economic oblivion, taking the city's economy with them, life for Detroiters has in some ways improved visibly...

...Today Preston and Kaitz—one black, one white—operate from a quiet office in the basement of Emmanuel Lutheran Church, and they are most likely to be found in a backyard or living room somewhere in the neighborhood—not solving crimes but talking to people about their lives and needs...

...For the Chandler Park area, which until that year was racially divided by the park of the same name, the riots opened a truly unpleasant half-decade...

...Slowly, a con-sensus began to emerge out of the ashes as well...

...From 1970 to 1974, bjirglary, larceny, and auto theft increased by 61.6 per cent...

...As the postwar consumer age produced ever greater demands on the auto industry, Detroit's working population grew apace, reaching a high of just under 1.9 million in 1950—still packed into those blocks which half a million fewer people had called home twenty-five years earlier...

...Programs like Neighborhood Watch have been exported to other cities without achieving the same results, in part because the underlying intent of the program was not as clear as it appears to be in Detroit...

...Young had run on a specific promise to the black Community: He would get rid of Detroit's STRESS squad, the "SWAT"-like decoy unit which many blacks regarded as a legalized death squad, licensed to kill teen-aged blacks involved in petty property crimes...

...But what Hart had in mind wasn't a paper program that amounted to little more than a public rela-tions pitch for better Cooperation with the old police methods...

...Traditional police practices," he flatly states, "will not reduce crime...

...He was out to create a new way...

...But the more police had their way, the more they alienated the Community...

...Like much of Detroit, the 152-block neighborhood known as Chandler Park burst into existence almost overnight, in the sudden explosion of street-paving and house-building that accompanied this city's emergence as the Twentieth Century American dream factory...

...Over those years, a mute, common un-derstanding ruled Detroit—an understand-ing that certain residential barriers were not to be violated...

...Even two policemen...

...In one special target area, robbery has dropped by 56 per cent, breaking-and-entering by 61 per cent, rape by 60 per cent...

...Then the real changes began...

...Last, save for the sprawling mansions of Grosse Pointe beyond the city boundaries, rose the brick Cape Cods where the middle managers and Professionals of the auto industry raised their families...

...It has meant getting leaflets to every household, con-ducting 4,000 residential and business secu-rity surveys to advise on precautionary equipment—locks, bars, alarms—and speaking to 500,000 Detroiters in 7,000 dif-ferent Community meetings since 1976...

...The Detroit Police Officers' Association, which generally reflects the views of the department's white old guard, Supports the crime prevention efforts, for example, but opposes many of the racial hiring guidelines and the residential requirement which make Neighborhood Watch work...

...But the next day, Petross changed his mind...

...Commander James L. Humphrey, a specialist in prevention methods, was put in Charge of a massive ef-fort to implement the new policy...

...In 1966, the city had three sorts of neighborhood: black, becoming black, and all-white...

...The job Status and income of a Detroiter could be assessed simply by asking two questions: Where did she or he live, and in what style of house...

...Ulti-mately, in fact, it is a story of Community itself: how Detroit lost it and found it again, and what happened in between...

...An organized citizenry is pre-pared to do more than keep its eyes open for muggers and second-story artists...

...It is the story of a city government that takes the concepts of Community control and decentralization seriously...

...The fly was race, and in the years between 1950 and 1974 it made life in Detroit an unre-lieved nightmare...

...With the 1974 election of Coleman -Young, the city's first black mayor, came the first important Steps toward a different approach...

...Hart reached some drastic conclusions about his department: Even with the improved racial climate, nothing seemed to work...

...We became Community Organizers...

...Late in 1976, Young named William L. Hart police chief, with a mandate to study the problem of crime in Detroit and make whatever changes were necessary to meet it...

...Detroit did have the benefit of addi-tional changes in its police force—changes which might have made other Neighborhood Watch programs function more effec-tively...

...Frank Viviano is an associate editor at Pacific News Service in San Francisco...

...Detroit was all of a piece in 1925, constructed so rapidly that its respective neighborhoods showed virtually no architec-tural Variation, just as their respective inhabitants showed virtually no so-cioeconomic divergence...

...And in Detroit, police are literally part of the Community...

...Again and again, police repre-sentatives make the point at these meetings that neighbors, not cops, are the only effec-tive crime preventers...

...In June, Detroiters even voted to raise their own municipal taxes at the mayor's request...

...Police Department spokesman Fred Williams, a twenty-five-year veteran of the force, quickly agrees that there was something wrong with the police—and with police policy—in those years...

...Los Angeles, for example, has not succeeded in allayfng some Citizens' fears that its own Neighborhood Watch will serve as a means for police to proselytize for law-and-order political issues and candi-dates...

...The signs are "psychological barriers against crime," says Lieutenant Norbert Kozlowski, assistant director of the Crime Prevention Program...

...Block residents and police meet from time to time to discuss other measures con-tributing to personal safety...

...Hundreds of people line up outside drugstores for a look at the fat classified sections of newspapers im-ported from Houston and Los Angeles, the great magnets for the growing exodus of Michigan's unemployed...

...A few blocks to the south, Alice Sza-wicz, a beautician, says she once came home from work and discovered a burglar in her living room...

...The present physical limits of the city had taken shape, and with them a symbolic landscape: Perhaps more than anywhere eise in America, Detroit's configuration summed up social and economic realities that gave the lie to famili?r assertions that the United States was a classless society...

...My wife and I were driving down Philip when it hit me: We panic and give our homes away...

...Suburban development could relieve the crowding in white neighborhoods, but for blacks the crowding created greater pressures with each passing year, It was, in short, an intolerable Situation, which the subsequent history of Detroit re-vealed in brutal fashion, pitting working-class whites against working-class blacks in a neighborhood-by-neighborhood battle for living space...

...Basically, we used to just teil people what was wrong, and how we're going to take care of it," he says...

...In the city's two target areas, senior Citizens were given equipment necessary to effect such changes, and the equipment was installed by local merchants, neighbors, and the area's crime prevention unit policemen...

...That's exactly what's wrong...

...On each block, the program functions as a general clearing-house for information relating to "safe Urban living./' At regul?r intervals, the police make free "security surveys" of individual homes, on appointment, and provide coun-sel on changes in locks, Windows, or shrub-bery...

...Whatever the egalitarian rhetoric of the culture at large, Detroiters were born and raised in an atmosphere in which class consciousness was a palpable thing...

...Young kept his promise and improved on it, establishing an aggressive affirmative action program to re-cruit black officers into the predominantly white police force...

...In one target area, every break-in involved a home not part of the Neighborhood Watch For the city's 112 crime-prevention officers, that job has meant canvassing door to door on foot in search of neighborhood leaders to host block meetings...

...After the first meeting, which is primar-ily social, the officers begin a detailed dis-cussion of prevention strategies ranging from ways to frustrate burglary to self-protection in the street...

...It is also much more likely to complain about in-adequate public Services, agitate for expen-sive improvements, and vote to toss the bums out if the will of the electorate is too blithely ignored...

...First came tight ranks of shabby apartment buildings where the tran-sient newcomers to Motown passed their initial months...

...later, white flight slowed, and the staggering difference between housing costs in the inner city and the suburbs began to draw some young whites into neighborhoods that had once been entirely black...

...In the east-side target area where Preston and Kaitz work, some 100 blocks have failed to meet the 50 per cent involvement require-ment...

...And when a follow-up team looked into the area's burglary total for the last year, it discovered an even more remarkable fact: Every break-in involved a home that was not actively participating in Neighborhood Watch...

...In effect, the riots broke down the bar-riers which had once kept Detroit's classes—and later its races—separate...

...The key here seems to be that they take the city's commitment to Community controls at face value...

...La Verne Jones of the Institute for Labor Research estimates that almost 350,000 workers in the Detroit area face permanent joblessness because of plummeting car sales and structural changes in the auto industry...

...When it finally emerged from the ashes of that year's riots a decade later, it was perhaps the most fully inte-grated of the nation's cities...

...Everyone on our block—absolutely everyone— was robbed one year, even two policemen' That brings us to the bottom of the abyss—the bloody 1967 riots that killed at least forty-three Detroiters and left much of the city a smoking ruin...

...Today, they are more likely to be regarded with sympathy and ac-corded Cooperation...

...Everyone on our block—absolutely everyone—was robbed one year," remembers Alice Szawicz, one Chandler Park resident...

...Around the old commercial core of the city, the new neighborhoods spread in con-centric rings...

...And that, says George Preston, is what makes the difference between urban devas-tation and renewal...

...With national paranoia over lawlessness soaring, Detroit seems to have beaten its own crime problem, which was once the nation's most acute...

...Consequently, crime—omnipresent, terrifying street crime of the sort that characterizes American life today— remained under control, as it does in most societies where people know their place and where Community feeling (for better or for worse) runs deep in every neighborhood...

...Over the long term, of course, that is a rather sad irony: A fierce class division held the Motor City in its grip for decades, before evolving into a race division, which was, if anything, even more traumatic, which in turn has eased just as the economic inducements for living in Detroit have crumbled...

...In the long unemployment lines and on the sluggish assembly lines, most understand, as Mayor Coleman Young puts it, "that we will never return to the glory days of the past in terms of automotive production...

...In 1910, Detroit had been a relatively sleepy commercial town that drew its living from the timber, agriculture, and manufacturing trade of the Great Lakes, a transshipment point con-veniently located halfway between the iron ore of the Mesabi r?nge and the steel mills of Pittsburgh and Cleveland...

...It wasn't 'them' any more...

...But for those which do participate, the benefits often far exceed improved security...

...That is not to say that all cops are in-clined, like George Preston and Herb Kaitz, to move out of their patrol cars into neighborhood organizing...

...It's up to Citizens to take responsibility for themselves, and up to police to help them do it wisely and safely...

...What I discovered there suggests much from which other American cities can learn...

...Detroit had entered 1967 as one of the most thoroughly segregated cities in the United States...

...Nevertheless, the general response to the changes in policing among police is en-thusiasm, for an obvious reason: Cops in Detroit were roundly despised by many Detroiters a decade ago...

...she doesn't give up easily...

...You could say that we decided to be revolutionaries," says Williams...

...But it won't die by its own collective hand—and for those who lived here, as I did, through the long drift of the 1950s into the terrible violehce of the 1960s and the "Murder City" days of the early 1970s, that is something to be pro-foundly thankful for...

...The Detroit News, which serves a metropolitan population of four million, carries just one and one-half columns of "help wanted" ads—many of them for jobs elsewhere...

...crime was...

...There are, of course, risks in all of this—for city officials and for less carefully organized constituents...

...That law, in combination with Mayor Young's achievements in inte-grating the police force, is a crucial element in the success of Detroit's community-based fight against crime...

...By 1978 there was not a Single all-white neighborhood...

...Community involvement, of course, is not a new phrase in the vocabulary of American crime-fighting...

...The thing to do was clean the neighborhood up, not leave it...

...So far, 3,500 Neighborhood Watch or-ganizations have been incorporated in the city, and police have strong evidence in Support of their effectiveness...

...it was 'us.' " But that still wasn't enough...

...In the first two and one-half years of the program in another special target area on the west side, crime feil overall by 65 per cent...

...The process started with a decentralizing scheme that saw fifty police "mini-stations" open all over town, staffed not only with police but also with some 2,000 trained volun-teers, residents of the neighborhood who acted as links between the police and the local population...

...In recent months, for example, meetings have been held or brochures distributed to provide tips on preventing rape, avoiding muggings, reporting crime, and Spotting confidence Operations...

...But also like Petross, Szawicz is a fighter...

...But there was a fly in the ointment of strict class analysis in Detroit, the same fly that buzzes through every assessment of social and economic conflict in America...

...Like Petross, she thought about leaving...

...Our job is to make it possible for them to take responsibility for their own Situation...

...At rush hour, the four expressways feeding workers into downtown are almost free of traffic...

...And the lot of the 400,000 of those cramped Citizens who were black was by far the worst, as they were forced to remain in the tiny ghetto near downtown which had already been dubbed "black bottom" long before World War II labor needs had doubled and then tripled the black population...

...The by-products of Community Organization in Preston's district r?nge from a neighborhood van service for senior Citizens to a noticeable reduction of "for sale" signs on front lawns...

...The old days would have found Preston, a former narcotics officer, and Kaitz, who worked the tactical mobile unit, patrolling these blocks in a squad car...

...It is a testament to Coleman Young's skill that he has weathered the political storm thus far, despite the debacle which has brought down other Democrats too closely associated with the fortunes of Jimmy Carter...

...Nevertheless, the bottom had been reached, for the simple reason that Chandler Park, like the city that sur-rounded it, was no longer racially divided...

...Once the racial makeup of the police force reflected the reality of the population, nearly everybody had a friend or a relative in law enforce-ment...

...He was out, in effect, to throw away the old police book on crime—and to let the people of Detroit's neighborhoods rewrite it...

...But the lessons may well re-quire changes that few municipal governments or police forces are Willing to entertain, for the real story of Detroit's new peace is considerably more complicated than the Solutions to crime undertakeri in most places...

...Neighborhood Watch only goes past the second meeting if 50 per cent of the block's residents actively participate...

...Its overall crime rate is down 30 per cent from three years ago...

...The word you hear everywhere in Detroit is "community," from police and residents alike: It is what Neighborhood Watch is really all about there...

...Those changes are evident in the way police officers George Preston and Herbert Kaitz spend their workday in Chandler Park, where I joined them last spring...

...The riots had accelerated white flight to the suburbs and blacks had moved into disintegrating white neighborhoods...

...There were two discernible m results: white flight, which reduced the 8 white population from more than 1.5 mil- 3 lion to 350,000 by 1978, and a phenomenal level of crime—not because the city had be-come black, but because its neighborhood stability had been shattered...

...The program soon began to pay off in improved trust between the department and the entire Community...

...It's up to folks like Alice and John, the natural leaders on the block...