Devil's Night by Ze'ev Chafets

“We’ve been over there time and time again,” he said. “We arrest these people but they beat us back to the parking lot. Usually they don’t even go to trial. Dope is a big problem. If we locked up every dealer in town, it would be going full blast again in five days. It’s that lucrative.”
    Guns are another problem. Everybody has them, from shopkeepers like John Aboud to the young criminals who drive around town in late-model Mercedes with Uzis under the seat. Even members of the clergy carry guns. A couple of years ago, a busload of nineteen Baptist ministers decided to cross the Ambassador Bridge for a Canadianexcursion. Border guards searched them—and uncovered nineteen pistols.
    My only personal brush with the law came when a suburban visitor had the hubcaps stolen off his new Cadillac while we were downtown eating. A few blocks from the scene of the crime we spotted a cop. “Officer,” said the visitor, “I’ve just had my hubcaps stolen. Should I report it or something?”
    The cop looked at him as if he had just driven into town from Mars. “Report it?” he said. “Are you kidding? You ought to be grateful that they didn’t take the car.”
    My friend, who was raised in Detroit and now lives in a town where hubcap theft is considered a major crime, was obviously upset by the cop’s reaction. I told him not be be naive—there isn’t a big city in the country where the police investigate petty larceny. “I know that,” he said. “And I don’t care about the hubcaps; they’re insured. What got me is the policeman’s attitude. He seemed so damn proud of the crime in this city.”
    Chief Hart knew all about the prevalent feeling that the police are too soft, but for him sensitive law enforcement is a matter of ideology. Like the mayor, he sees Detroit as a postcolonial city, liberated from oppressive white police occupation; to him, gentle law enforcement is an expression of black home rule.
    â€œI’d hate to turn the clock back to when we kicked ass and took names,” Hart said. “It’s unconstitutional and it leads to false imprisonment. Besides, you just can’t do that with the kind of officers we have. We recruit out of the neighborhoods. It’s hard to practice brutality and then go home and live among the same people. This city is just one big ghetto, all the way out to Eight Mile Road.”
    As we talked it became clear that Chief Hart had an answer for every question, a reasoned explanation for every grievance. He blamed the media for sensationalizing crime, the courts for handing down lenient sentences, the county for not providing enough jail cells, and most important, parents for not controlling their children. “We’re hired to arrest criminals, not raise people’s kids,” he said.
    Like the police chiefs of other big cities, Hart’s biggest problem was the spread of crack. Drugs, particularly cocaine, were a hot topic in Detroit while I was there. During my stay, a young drug lord, “Maserati Rick” Carter, was murdered in his hospital bed by a rival gang, and his friends treated the city to one of the gaudiest funerals since Prohibition. Sixteen Cadillacs ferried mourners to the cemetery, where they saw Rick buried in a casket made out of a Mercedes—headlights, grill and all.
    In the city, where cheap cocaine is sold more or less openly in houses and on street corners, blacks talked of it like a biblical plague. In the suburbs, it aroused less alarm than fascination. There was something about the word “crack,” redolent with the hard city sounds of cracking bullets and cracking bones, that tickled the suburban ear. And since more than one of these discussions took place with an expensive vial of white powder on the coffee table, calling it “crack” put some distance between upscale consumers and the dope-crazed blacks below