Crime and Race in Detroit

A cold night wind chilled the 125 white demonstrators, mostly youngsters whose parents had driven them in from such affluent suburbs as Grosse Pointe and Bloomfield Hills. The rain snuffed out the lighted candles they carried as they marched toward the offices of the Detroit News. At the building, only police were present to hear Sheila Ann Murphy, the 21 -year-old leader of the marchers, read a statement accusing the News of becoming "a diabolical menace because of its racially inflammatory editorials, features and distorted reportings." The Rev. Joseph McHale, a Catholic priest, ignited a trash can full of copies of the newspaper. He called the act a "symbol of purification" and urged a public boycott of the News.

That low-key demonstration last week was the latest incident in a persistent controversy over the News' insistence that the race of those who commit crimes is a proper matter for public print. In a crusade against street crime, the News runs a daily box score of such attacks and provides details of the worst of them in adjoining stories that identify the race of the assailants. Most of them are Negroes. The paper's critics contend that the crusade overplays black crime and feeds racial hatreds. The protesters cite front-page stories that appeared in the News for six days about a policeman's son fatally stabbed by a Negro; only one inside story appeared when a black man was killed defending his wife against a gang of white youths bent on rape.

Fortress Face. Across the U.S., the trend is against newspapers citing the race of suspects unless the crime is racially motivated (Black Panthers assaulting whites, for example). But the editor of the News, Martin Hayden, argues that most crimes are committed by "underprivileged, undereducated and deprived youngsters from the slum ghetto." Pointing that out, he contends, may persuade whites to support programs to help black youth and cause "reasonable black people to realize that there is a racial aspect to the current crime problem."

Yet Editor Hayden's crusade angers a significant part of the community.

The atmosphere is so ominous that the News now presents a fortress face to its public. Windows in the pressroom have been sealed off by brick and steel.

Bulletproof glass and riot shutters guard the main entrance. A tunnel enables employees to enter the building from a parking lot, and all must carry cards to gain admittance. Even so, last week a militant black leader managed to slip in and appear in the city room to berate an editor. Simultaneously, the editor's phone rang. It was a proud guard, calling to report that he had stopped two men trying to get by. They turned out to be FBI agents.

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