Monday, Sep. 06, 1976 A Long, Hot Summer for Detroit

[The Streets Don't Love You Back]

Armed with shotguns, Magnums, carbines and clubs, teams of men sweep the streets, enforcing a 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew for everyone under 18. Citizens cower behind the barricaded doors of their own homes, listening to the shots and shouts that punctuate the night air. The city is not Beirut or Belfast but Detroit, whose agonies are every bit as real and whose conflicts seem equally impossible to eradicate.

After weeks of gang terrorism that included killings, a near riot, robberies, pillaging and rape, Detroit's black mayor, Coleman Young, belatedly rushed back from vacation and vowed last week, "We will not tolerate lawlessness in the streets. We will stand for it no longer." Detroit's police needed no further encouragement. Minutes after the curfew went into effect, plainclothesmen and uniformed cops were out in force, and anything that moved was fair game. At one point, a two-man team sighted three black youths on a dark street corner. "What are you doing out now?" demanded one cop as his partner covered the trio with a lethal-looking 12-gauge shotgun. "We were just coming home from skating, man," said one youth. "You're skating," barked the cop, "right to jail." And off they went.

Mere Rhetoric. Still, the malaise that grips the decaying motor capital is unlikely to yield to short-term measures like a curfew—and even less to mere rhetoric and good intentions. As John Cardinal Dearden, the Archbishop of Detroit, put it last week, "We are called upon to rebuild the structure."

The problems that plague Detroit (pop. 1.4 million) differ only in magnitude from those that afflict other large cities in the U.S.: an eroding tax base as affluent whites abandon the core city; reduced services, including police protection; widespread unemployment, particularly among black youths; neighborhoods where housing and other buildings have been allowed to deteriorate; and low-quality schools. Perhaps more debilitating than any of these is a growing feeling that nothing will—or can—be done to reverse the trend.

Detroit resorted to near martial law after roving gangs of young toughs with names like the Black Killers, the Errol Flynns, the Sheridan Strips and the Bishops virtually took over the streets of the city's scrubby east side. Perhaps as many as 500 of the gang members are concentrated in the impoverished Fifth Precinct, a 6-sq.-mi. moonscape of abandoned storefronts, crumbling homes and schools, littered streets and sidewalks. Once a quiet white community, the precinct is nearly all black, its various sections divided into territories controlled by one or another of the gangs. THINK