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By Root 746 0

racial problem that made New York City look like the New Jerusalem. In Detroit, a predominantly white police force clamped down hard on an inner-city population that was mostly black and poor, in the interests of a white upper middle class that had long since moved out to the suburbs. Girardin became something of a hero—everywhere but in Detroit, needless to say—by rolling up his sleeves and forcing change on the Detroit police department. Many of those changes—“community policing,” a civilian review board to examine charges of police brutality, nondiscrimination within the department—remain major and controversial issues in other American cities more than thirty years later. It was Girardin, largely forgotten, who first tried to put them into effect.

As it happened, Girardin’s reforms were swept away by an unexpected event—although perhaps not entirely unexpected by Girardin, since he had predicted it—the Detroit riots of 1967.

Affable and soft-spoken, Girardin promised to have me picked up at the airport by a police car and taken straight to meet him, which sounded a lot better than a taxi. When I arrived, two cops were waiting for me. In keeping with the Detroit police department’s well-earned reputation for macho policing, they carried huge amounts of extra ammunition on their belts, leather “slappers,” weighted nightsticks, the kind of old-fashioned policeman’s gloves that had strips of flexible lead sewn into the leather over the knuckles, and not one but two pairs of handcuffs. They looked at me stonily through dark Ray-Ban aviator sunglasses—anybody coming to visit Commissioner Girardin from New York was potentially the enemy, a liberal, a do-gooder, a bleeding heart, perhaps even a journalist. Wordlessly, they led me outside, as if they had just arrested me.

Inside their police car, two twelve-gauge Winchester riot guns were fixed in clamps to the dashboard and the floor, a sight not often seen in the Big Apple. I did not listen to the chatter on the radio as we drove into town from the airport, but I noticed a certain uneasiness in my two escorts, who were whispering to each other in the front seat. I asked if there was a problem. No, I was told, everything was OK, but they needed to make a slight detour, if I didn’t mind. I said I didn’t mind at all, at which point the siren and the flashing lights were turned on, and with a screech of tires we set off through the endless suburbs of Detroit, ignoring red lights and stop signs.

By now, the radio chatter had a certain hysterical tone to it, and even I could make out the word shootings and the phrase officer in need of assistance. We were driving through poorer neighborhoods now, and a number of black men in the streets looked at the police car with undisguised anger. From time to time I heard what seemed to me the sound of shots. At last the police car pulled to a sudden stop, my two escorts unclipped their shotguns, and they got out of the car. “Just stay put,” one of them said. “We’ll lock the doors. You’ll be OK.” I didn’t much fancy sitting in a locked police car for who knew how long, while angry crowds roamed the streets, but the two cops didn’t pause long enough to debate the point—besides, better inside the car than out on the pavement as possibly the only white civilian for miles around. From time to time, somebody threw a rock or a bottle at the police car, and a couple of kids spat on the windshield. It was not exactly comfortable, but I told myself that for somebody who had lived through the Hungarian Revolution, this was small potatoes. Soon, there was an odor of burning. Through the windshield, I could make out fires. From somewhere behind me came the noise of breaking glass. I hunkered down in the backseat and hoped for the best.

What seemed like hours passed, though it was probably not more than fifteen or twenty minutes. Eventually, my two escorts reappeared, unlocked the door, and got in. They brought with them an aroma that I recognized instantly from Budapest: a pungent combination of spent gunpowder, sweat, and soot. They were clearly in