Rodney King, Malice Green, and Abner Louima are among the best known victims. Stacey Koon, Walter Budzyn, and Justin Volpe are some of the most infamous villains. The names and the archetypal struggle are familiar to every ghetto teen and, increasingly, to the larger public. Black males vs. police: The conflict traces back before Emancipation and remains one of the most formidable obstacles to improving race relations. Police brutality is still commonplace -- or far too common,anyway -- in many cities. And even when there are no gross infringements of rights, no beatings or gunplay or sadistic interrogations, black crime rates and the suspicion they engender have created intolerable tensions between blacks and white police officers -- to the point that it is hard to find a black man without a story of being stopped or questioned for no other reason than his color.

Conscientious police departments have been trying for decades to ease the friction. Civilian review panels, aggressive recruitment of minority officers, sensitivity training, residency requirements, psychological testing, and the introduction of "community policing" are among the most common reform strategies. In many cities some combination of these approaches has proved effective. Yet as with so many policy issues, particularly those involving race, the problem and its causes are more complicated than they first appear. And underestimating their complexity can give rise to disastrous "remedies" that if anything make things worse -- for black teenagers, cops, and other citizens.

Does changing the color of the force necessarily improve cop-community relations? What are the costs of affirmative action programs that erode standards for police recruits? How do concerned city officials clean up law enforcement without undermining the department's authority? How do we balance our concern for safe streets -- all the more pressing in impoverished inner-city neighborhoods -- with appropriate and effective oversight measures? Getting the answers wrong can prove deadly, as it did in Detroit in the mid-1970s under the late "Mayor for Life," Coleman Young. The consequences of misguided reforms are seldom as bad as they were in that instance, but the story of Detroit's mistakes is a stark cautionary tale that can help other cities strike a better balance.

"Offing the Pigs"

By the time Young was elected the first black mayor of Detroit in 1973, most of the city understood that police reform was in order. With middle-class whites moving to the suburbs, the percentage of blacks in the city was growing steadily. White liberals had begun to grasp the ghetto's historical fear and hatred of policemen, and the city establishment saw that an overwhelmingly white force probably could not police a black city.

Race relations had never been easy in the Motor City -- they began improving in the early '60s, then took a nosedive after the 1967 riot. But as far back as 1961, black and white voters together had been electing mayors who promised to integrate the police and stiffen civilian review procedures. By 1973, the number of blacks on the force had tripled to 16 percent, and recruitment in the ghetto was a top priority. But Mayor-elect Young's commitment to change was of a different order. Police accountability, he later maintained, "wasn't the main issue. It was the only issue."

Young took power in Detroit at a time when inner-city antagonism for police was reaching a historic high nationwide. The civil rights movement had all but disintegrated by the early '70s and its hopeful faith was giving way to the angry, separatist credo of Black Power. Activists such as Huey Newton, Angela Davis, and the Soledad Brothers had taken the struggle -- no longer committed to nonviolence -- into the streets. By 1973, more than two dozen Black Panthers and other militants were reported to have died in shootouts with legal au- thorities. Prison revolts, murder trials, guns, and underground cells were the hallmarks of the movement, and "offing the pigs" had been enshrined as a political ideal.

Young played no part in the bloody street politics of the early '70s, but he came into office eager for a showdown with the Detroit police. The mayor-elect was a former union organizer and far-left militant who delighted in assuming what he called "an adversary role toward society." From the time he entered mainstream politics in the early '60s, he put police matters at the top of his agenda. Outspoken, charismatic, larger than life, Young viewed his election as a mandate for radical reorganization of the police force, and he couldn't wait to get started.

He had been in office only a few weeks when he made his first move, a package of vigorous reforms welcomed by the city establishment. The mayor began by abolishing the undercover anti-theft unit, STRESS, seen by many blacks as a racist execution squad. To bring the department closer to the people, he announced plans for 50 police "mini-stations": storefront outposts that presaged today's community policing reforms. Most dramatic and important for the long term, one way or another he promised to deliver a 50 percent black police force.

The police entrance exam, revised just before Young's election to make it easier for black applicants, was simplified yet again. The test for promotion to sergeant and lieutenant was made less demanding. Then, when too few blacks scored high enough to meet the mayor's racial targets, Young simply divided the rank-ordered list of results into two lists -- one black, one white -- and promoted one black candidate for every white one. When critics complained that this was reverse discrimi- nation, the mayor replied, "You're damn right -- the only way to arrest discrimination is to reverse it." Finally, hoping to clear the way for more black officers, Young ordered the department to start enforcing its residency requirement, firing cops -- and they were all white -- whose primary homes were beyond the city line.

Young's initiative put Detroit on the frontline of the nation's new experiment with affirmative action. Preliminary results were encouraging: The number of black recruits began to climb, and morale among black officers improved perceptibly. Poor blacks and business leaders alike endorsed the mayor's reforms. "It had to be done," said white union leader Douglas Fraser. "The department had to change, and change fast. It was the only way to win the trust of the community." But what Fraser and other liberals did not see was Young's personal animus for the police department--an animus that eventually would drive his crusade in a direction few white backers anticipated.

From the start, Young threw himself into the reform effort with an intensity that surprised even his inner circle. City council members recalled later that he focused on virtually nothing else his first year in office, and some began to detect what struck them as an excess of zeal. Labeling the patrolmen's union "a bunch of out-and-out racists," the mayor seemed to get a thrill from opposing it and thwarting department brass. One day, talking off the cuff, he claimed that the force's senior-ranking white officers were involved "at the top" of the city's drug trade. He later dropped the accusation, but made no effort to repair the damage he had done to police authority.

In fact, Young made little secret of his animosity for law enforcement -- an animosity with a distinctly racial edge. He came into office not just seeking reform but girding for war with the police department. He saw the force less as an arm of the law than as an army of repression -- the paramilitary wing of a white society determined to crush black pride and autonomy. "As everyone knows," he told a group of black professionals, "law and order is a code word for 'Keep the niggers in their place.'" Everything else was secondary, even the crime rate in Detroit. "Crime is a problem," the mayor declared, "but not the problem. The police are the major threat...to the minority community." For Young, police issues had less to do with public safety than with a larger and, to him, far more important power struggle between black and white. "I have to decide," he said early in his mayoralty, "who is going to run the city the police or the people."

Different Kind of Culture

Violent crime was growing everywhere in America during this period, but Detroit's figures were in a class by themselves -- for some crimes, double the rates in other cities. No one really knew why things were so bad in Detroit. With the hard drug trade just taking off and gangs mushrooming in the ghetto, it made little sense to isolate one reason, and to the degree Young's crusade contributed, its effect was impossible to measure. Still, whatever the explanation, the fact was plain: A different kind of culture was taking root in Detroit's neighborhoods.

In Young's first year, there were 801 murders, up from 508 just three years before. Even as the numbers rose, the crimes themselves grew nastier: One-on-one sexual assaults became gang rapes, stabbings were replaced by shootings, and fights by execution-style slayings. Police investigators were shocked, as one put it, by "the way the public accepts the homicide rate." The department was baffled by a rash of inquiries from citizens about the number of slayings in a given week -- until it came out that the callers were organizing office betting pools.

Morale on the police force sank rapidly as Young's reforms took root. Though the mayor had promised that affirmative action would make the cops more effective, officers on the beat saw little evidence. Mistrustful of the criminal justice system, loathe to side with the authorities against a neighbor, many potential witnesses still refused to cooperate with police. Even successful black officers reported that fellow blacks saw them as traitors. "You join up and say to yourself, 'I'm going to try to help,'" recalled one young recruit. "But all of a sudden the black group you grew up with shuts you right out. You'd be surprised how you're not black any more."

If anything, Young's all-out war on the department seemed to fuel the community's mistrust and hostility for law enforcement. Everything he said and did encouraged the ghetto notion that the law was white and alien and that fighting racism was more important than public safety. "The typical [black] resident of the city," Young said proudly years later, "is naturally concerned about the safety issue but not preoccupied with it...[Black Detroiters] considered the local police to be every bit as dangerous and threatening to their welfare as crime."

The War Escalates

The summer of 1975 brought a major escalation in the mayor's war on the department. With the national recession dragging on, unemployment in Detroit rose into the 25 percent range, and among young black males it was roughly double that. Facing a budget deficit of nearly $50 million, Young announced the layoff of more than 800 officers, about 15 percent of the force. This was a losing proposition all around: for the crimeridden city, the beleaguered department, and the mayor himself -- his low-seniority affirmative action hires would be the first to go in any large-scale firing. It made sense only from the point of view of the mayor's spiteful crusade. Even when doing so undermined his own policies, he couldn't seem to help lashing out at the force.

By the time the firings were reported to the newspa- pers, Young blamed the police union for making the cuts necessary, deliberately sabotaging his affirmative action program. The city asked a local judge to override union seniority protections so that the mayor could avoid sacking black cops. The police rank-and-file responded with a rally, to be held in front of the courthouse where the case was being heard. By the time the rally started on May 9, 1975, the day had grown hot. Many of the picketing cops were drinking beer. One threw an empty can in the direction of the courthouse, and when a black officer, also in civilian clothes, reprimanded him, the white officer shot back with a profanity. A scuffle ensued, and before it was finished, 10 other whites were involved against the black man. Just when he drew his gun was never clear, but he was quickly outmanned by white officers who whipped out their revolvers. Surrounded and outnumbered, the black cop gave up his gun and was led away to the hospital to be treated for a broken nose.

As it happened, both The New York Times and The Washington Post had photographers on the scene and both played the story big. The photographs were unforgettable: the bewildered black man with his large Afro, the circle of hostile working-class whites in sunglasses, pointing their guns at the innocent black victim. The implied analogy was clear: In a city where the pie was shrinking, small-minded whites opposed racial justice -- in the form of affirmative action -- just as others like them had once opposed the end of Jim Crow. Like Detroit's civic-minded elite, no one from the national press asked any hard questions, either about the mayor's quota system or about what it might really take to ease tensions between blacks and the police department. In the liberal media, as in Detroit, it was assumed that the mayor's initiative was only fair, the cops' opposition unreasonable and racist.

Young all but gloated to the press. "Violence and racial problems in the police department don't really surprise me," he noted. "The officers who took part in last Friday's display of public drunkenness and beer-can throwing...aren't doing a bit of good, and they are a danger to the city." Whatever Detroit blacks had thought of the department before, now they were convinced of the worst.

Mayhem on the West Side

The first serious test of Young's police force came 10 weeks later, in midsummer 1975. Thousands of unemployed youths sat idle through the long summer days. No city in the country had had a major riot since 1968, but the combination of the heat and record joblessness sent tremors of fear through the Detroit establishment.

When it happened just after dark on July 28, the trouble followed the classic pattern. White bar owner Andrew Chinarian came out of his workingman's hang-out in the racially mixed Livernois neighborhood and noticed some black kids breaking into a car in the parking lot. When he approached the car, rifle in hand, one of the youths turned toward him. The shots the bar owner fired hit 18-year-old Obie Wynn in the back of the head in what would turn out to be a fatal wound.

Within a few hours, 300 people had gathered outside Chinarian's bar. They stormed and trashed the small wooden building. By midnight, the 300 had grown to 700 and split into small bands that roamed the streets, breaking windows, looting shops, overturning cars and torching them. One white man was dragged from his car and beaten close to death. The mob's main targets were police and firemen, and though Young told the force to deploy only black cops and ordered them to use the utmost restraint, the rampaging youths showed little mercy. Black or white, restrained or brutal, in the eyes of Detroit's blacks it hardly mattered; the police represented hated authority and the way to prove yourself was by defying them. Young and other black leaders wandered the streets through the night, trying to calm the mob, to little effect. Finally, after ducking a rain of bottles and stones, the mayor gave up and went home.

The next day, Young struggled to put the best face on what had happened, appealing as usual to black solidarity. "We had a great number of black commanders to help control the crowd," he boasted, "and not a single shot was fired." Also in the name of race, he took a jab at the judicial system. Passing quickly over the behavior of the "rip-off artists" responsible for the disturbance, he lambasted the judge who released the bar owner on $500 bail. Though Young plainly hoped his comments would calm the rage in the street, the looting and arson continued through a second night.

Finally on the third day, in a brilliant bit of spin control, the Young administration claimed victory. The city had had a minor riot that had spent itself. The black police had proved no more popular or trusted than their white counterparts. Young, as ever, had chosen to play the race card rather than stand up for the law and order his city desperately needed. Still, in Young's hands, the episode became a political triumph. The mayor took credit for keeping the peace, shoring up support for his police reforms among regional businessmen, even as he further undermined the rule of law. "To me," Young said later, "this was the turning point," the vindication of his campaign to transform the department. As for city whites who weren't so sure -- who worried that the civic order was collapsing around them -- no one with any power in Detroit was particularly interested in their opinions.

Complete Breakdown of Order

Young's final and worst assault on the police came in the spring of 1976: the laying off of close to 1,000 officers, a full one-fifth of the department. Crime figures for the first quarter of the year once again had put Detroit near the top of the list of America's most dangerous cities, and many in the business establishment urged the mayor to find some place else to cut -- anywhere but the police. But Young insisted there was no alternative. People complaining that Detroit was unsafe had "a racist perception of the city," he said. He began the lay-offs by dismantling the department's specialized units, including the one responsible for patrolling the city's expressways.

What little order remained broke down completely. Within days of the cutback in highway patrols, teenage bands descended on the roadways. Rocks and bricks rained down on passing cars from bridges above the expressways. Youths roamed the highways in jalopies, "accidentally" bumping better-looking cars. When the drivers pulled over, the kids robbed them. One man who stopped to change a tire was beaten senseless. A woman whose car broke down was abducted and raped repeatedly over several days. Cutbacks in transit police produced a rash of robberies on public buses. Reductions in security details led to violent incidents in city courtrooms, including one in which a lawyer pulled a gun and fired wildly at judge and jury. In August, half a dozen terrified judges announced that they could no longer take the risk of appearing in court to hear cases.

Just what lay behind the violence that erupted that summer was probably beyond explaining: some combination of rage, frustration and boredom in neighborhoods where unemployment reached the halfway mark. Still, there could be no denying the role Young had played -- not just in trimming the force but by undermining respect for it. The mayor openly encouraged the city's youth to see the law as the racist arm of a white system determined to crush and control them. Young set the example himself: Defying the cops was good sport and an important way to stand up for one's people. No wonder the city's teens saw the police -- and the law -- as worthy of their contempt.

Simple, Wanton Violence

The summer of 1976 was shocking even by Detroit standards. Looting became an everyday sport: In one neighborhood, shop owners reported replacing plate glass windows as often as twice a week. Against this background of daily robberies and muggings, a handful of grisly crimes stood out. A popular priest was robbed and brutally murdered in his rectory. A legal aid lawyer's leg was broken when an auto thief ran over him in his own car. But most terrifying were the teenage gangs that flourished that summer. Groups called the Errol Flynns, the Bishops, and the BKs (short for Black Killers) waged open warfare in the neighborhoods. They also ventured occasionally into the central business district to prey on shoppers and one evening rampaged through the posh Pontchartrain Hotel. Coming by chance on a private party, 20 youths tore through the opulent dining room, overturning tables, stealing purses, and screaming, "Black Killers! Black Killers! It's all about the Black Killers!"

The crime wave climaxed in mid-August with an incident at the Cobo Hall convention center. Close to 8,000 people, black and white, had gathered on a Sunday night for a rock concert. About halfway through, as if on signal, 150 black youths leaped from their seats and put what seemed to be a planned attack in motion. Members of the Black Killers and the Errol Flynns set upon concert- goers with canes and umbrellas. Dozens of people were robbed, one woman raped -- by 15 to 20 youths, in public. Many more, both black and white, were harassed and molested. "I don't care who you are," one gang-banger said to a black man. "Give us what you've got."

The mayhem continued for a full hour before police entered the hall. By then, the youths were pursuing concert- goers into the summer night. The bands roamed the streets for several hours, breaking windows, looting, and causing thousands of dollars in damage. Cops investigating the episode could find no apparent cause or precipitating incident. This was not a gang war, not a racially motivated attack -- just simple, wanton violence. The late-arriving police managed to arrest a handful of suspects but failed to find any victims willing to testify against their attackers. In a city where the rule of law meant so little, no one was interested in stepping forth to help prosecute the Black Killers or the Errol Flynns. All the youths arrested were eventually released.

"The City's Yours Now"

The incident caused an uproar throughout the region and beyond. Businessmen with millions of dollars at stake in the Renaissance Center shopping and office complex going up just blocks from Cobo Hall demanded that Young take the situation in hand. And under intense pressure from the suburbs and the state, he went into action. Nearly half of the laid-off cops were immediately recalled. Federal funds were found to begin rehiring others. Curfews were imposed for youths as young as 11, and a police anti-gang unit was created. The mayor went on television to address the city. "I want the pimps, prostitutes, gangs, and youth rovers off the streets," he proclaimed. "We're going to rid the city of them -- beginning tonight." Still, many Detroit residents, white and black, were skeptical that a show of force could now deter the city's lawless youths.

Whatever happened now, the damage had been done -- to Detroit's image, its hope for economic revival, its chances of sharing in the prosperity of an integrated region. White perceptions of the city, already soured by the riots of 1967, would take years to recover from the summer of 1976. As local people would say, it seemed as if the riots had never stopped -- and weren't going to.

"By attacking the police," anti-busing leader Irene McCabe of nearby Pontiac, Mich., explained, "Coleman Young undermined...the only people who could get a grip on what was killing the city -- the crime. It was as if he said to the criminals, 'The city's yours now.' That's why whites left. And many -- most of them -- never looked back." Wittingly or not, Young had nurtured the blossoming of what scholars would later call the city's "oppositional culture." And by encouraging that alienation, that anger and contempt for what was seen as the white man's law, he had all but guaranteed a permanent standoff between city and suburb.

Lessons for the Present

Coleman Young's Detroit is hardly typical. The city's past, the mayor, and the last bitter days of the black protest struggle all conspired to exacerbate tensions between the police and the black community. But the city's experience in the 1970s still holds lessons for anyone hoping to improve police performance in the ghetto.

Like most racial encounters, the relationship between the police and the minority community is overshadowed by the past -- driven as much by memories, usually bad, as by contemporary reality. Just as white cops often react to stereotypes -- assumptions that young black men are violent and likely to be hostile to law enforcement -- many blacks bring deep ambivalence to their encounters with the law: an ambivalence rooted in an ugly past and in surmises about white attitudes. Reformers trying to improve ghetto policing must demand strict accountability from beat officers and their superiors; cops sent out into inner-city streets should receive better training and be subject to more rigorous supervision. Yet no effort to enhance law enforcement in poor, black neighborhoods can succeed unless it also works the other side of the equation: easing black suspicion of police and black resentment of externally imposed legal authority.

Affirmative action is one way to address this alienation, though, as Detroit's experience shows, it is far from foolproof. Community policing is a better tool, but it may not be enough, either, particularly among those whose resentments run strongest -- youths who have had run-ins with the law, their parents, and those who have the least stake in the economic mainstream. Allaying blacks' age-old mistrust will not be easy; it may prove even harder than uprooting entrenched police culture. But there can be no excuse for leadership like Young's that makes the standoff worse. And until we find ways to change attitudes on both sides, there can be little hope of curbing the lawlessness that blights our cities, blocking the return of business life and choking race relations.

Adapted from the book Someone Else's House: America's Struggle for Integration. Reprinted by permission of The Free Press. Copyright 1998 by Tamar Jacoby. All rights reserved.