RIOT CONTROL Hold The Street & Seize "The High Ground

FOR long hours last week, Detroit's police hung back from the Twelfth Street riot area. Apparently, one resident quipped, they were hoping that "if they left, the crowd would leave too." But if there is one point that has been proved repeatedly over four summers of ghetto riots, it is that when the police abandon the street, the crowd takes it over, and the crowd can swiftly become a mob. It happened in Watts, in Boston's Roxbury district, in Newark and in blood and fire in Detroit.

Some civil rights leaders would agree, as does Chicago's Chester Robinson, director of the West Side Organization, that the appearance of police only makes mobs more belligerent than ever. But it is clear that their absence eventually causes even more violence.

Says Harvard Urbanologist James Q. Wilson, who is conducting a comprehensive study of the nation's police: "There is no evidence that anything but an immediate and large show of force will stop a riot." In Detroit, said the Michigan Chronicle, the city's biggest Negro newspaper, "a firm hand would have chased those people away. You can be firm without shooting." Nor is it true, as Chester Robinson insists, that "in the initial stages of a disturbance we [i.e., Negro leaders] can handle the people ourselves." Says Wilson: "Negro leaders have tried to stop riots in the early stages and got shot."

When Detroit's police finally were ordered to quell the rioters and to use their weapons when necessary, their initial restraint gave way to near abandon. As in Newark, where overexcited police and state troopers engaged in a brief shoot-out with one another by mistake, fire discipline was lethally lax.

On the Spot. That was also true of the National Guardsmen. The crack of a sniper's bullet--and sometimes simply the bang of a firecracker or the pop of a light bulb--brought forth fantastic fusillades from police and National Guard rifles, shotguns, machine guns and pistols. Four-year-old Tonia Blanding was shot dead in an apartment when lawmen saw her uncle strike a match to light a cigarette, mistook the flare for a sniper's muzzle flash, and poured bullets through the window.

By any measure, the Guard's performance was appalling. National Guard armored personnel carriers rumbled through the streets blasting out street lights with .50-cal. machine guns and spraying down suspect buildings. Seeing a Negro man walk by, one Guardsman, rifle at the ready, ordered: "You get out of here, boy. Faster, boy. You run out of here." The man had no choice but to accept the humiliation and jog off. A couple and their three friends were ordered to lie on the ground, and then were threatened by more than a dozen Guardsmen armed with automatic weapons. Lieut. General John L. Throckmorton, the Army paratroop commander who took control of the Guardsmen when they were federalized, was asked what he thought of them. "Look," he pleaded, "don't put me on a spot like that."

Governor Romney was even more to the point. "We knew we couldn't depend on the National Guard," he admitted. "That's why we asked for the Army." The paratroopers, some 40% of them Viet Nam veterans and more than one-fourth of them Negroes, displayed stern fire discipline and did an excellent job. "Our policy is to use an absolute minimum of force," explained a paratroop colonel. "I'd rather miss 100 snipers than hit a single innocent person."

The Guardsmen, of course, were not wholly to blame. Most are young, inexperienced "weekend warriors," incapable of handling what some officials are now calling "urban guerrilla warfare." Riot-control training barely exists; even military policemen in the Guard receive only one day of it. In New Jersey, where the Guardsmen's rough behavior brought a barrage of protests from Negroes, National Guard Major General James F. Cantwell conceded that the time had come for special training. "It is apparent," he wrote in a letter to the Secretary of the Army, "that there is a need for an immediate re-examination of the currently prescribed training, tactics and techniques." At week's end, President Johnson had ordered the Guard to do just that.

Without Violence. Such training is essential, not only for Guardsmen but police officers too, who in most cases, are ill-prepared to handle the riots that threaten practically every U.S. city. Some departments simply decline the responsibility. "There's a big difference between an angry crowd," says Houston's Police Chief Herman Short, "and anarchy, fire bombing, sacking of buildings, looting and sniping. No police department is equipped to conduct military operations in the street."

With the proper training and planning, however, some police departments have shown that they can be an effective force against all but the biggest riots--especially in the early stages. New York's 690-man Tactical Patrol Force, created in 1959 to deal with Negro and Puerto Rican youth gangs, and later converted to riot control, is perhaps the best unit of its kind in the country. The elite T.P.F. members are all volunteers and average a vigorous 26 years in age; many of them have served in the Marines and paratroopers. Though most are experts at judo or karate, they are drilled to work in teams.

Without a Blow. Last week, during the riot in Spanish Harlem, the T.P.F. formed a 36-man wedge and, night sticks held low, advanced silently on scores of rioters gathered on Third Avenue. Without striking a blow, they broke through the mob's ranks and stopped it cold. Then the T.P.F.s split into small teams, scattering the mob down side streets. Other T.P.F.s took the "high ground," the rooftops, in search of snipers. "When we have the rooftops and can see all windows on both sides of the street," says the force's commander, Assistant Chief Inspector Charles E. McCarthy, "then we can decide what we want to do next." In three nights of rioting, New York's cops fired only 50 to 75 rounds, in return had 150 to 200 directed at them. One reason for such economy is that Police Commissioner Howard Leary requires a report on every bullet used by one of his men.

Even without the resources of New York's 27,952-man police force, there remains much that smaller forces can do. Philadelphia has a quick-reaction force of patrolmen on duty during the critical hours from 8 p.m. to 2 a.m. With on-call buses, the department can pour 500 men--plus four-man anti-sniper teams--into any trouble area in minutes. Within half an hour, 2,000 men can be dispatched, many with bulletproof vests and shotguns. Because of coordinated planning, 500 state patrolmen are on call to move into the city on two hours' notice, and 4,000 National Guardsmen within five hours. According to one police official, Commissioner Frank Rizzo feels that "what happened in Detroit happened because the police didn't move in quickly enough. He's not going to let that happen here."

City Garrisons. Urbanologist Wilson notes that most European countries have special national riot-control police to cope with such violent disorders as Detroit's--most notably France's Compa-gnies Republicaines de Securite, which usually lurk a block or two from the scene of the anticipated action, and move in if the local flics, who are pretty rough customers themselves, with their 6-ft. batons and leaded capes, prove unable to manage. Wilson suggests that the U.S. may soon find that it needs similar professional forces--possibly organized by the states, but more probably a federal force deployed in various urban areas--able to move swiftly and break up riots with minimal violence. "Americans have never liked to garrison troops in the central city," warned Wilson, "but we may have to reassess this position."

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