Police Officers, Youths Among Fatalities : Guns Exact Toll in Heavily Armed Detroit

Two police officers, mistaken for thieves, have died in Detroit recently at the hands of citizens shooting to protect their property.

The two tragedies, added to three other police killings in the line of duty this year, have caused turmoil on the force. Officers are jittery about answering calls on the city’s heavily armed streets.

The first killing took place Sept. 27, a day set aside as “No Crime Day” in Detroit. A homeowner told authorities he shot Officer Everett Williams Jr. because he mistook Williams, who was investigating a reported break-in, for the burglar and fired his shotgun.

On Oct. 6, police say, Officer Freddie Jackson was trying to thwart an apparent auto theft when he was shot by the car’s owner, again with a shotgun.

The car owner is charged with manslaughter, the homeowner with second-degree murder.

The city at times seems bristling with weapons. By Sept. 1, 2,059 people had been shot and 314 of them killed this year, excluding suicides and accidents. At least 286 youths under 17 have been shot to date, 33 of them fatally. An 11-year-old died this month because two slightly older youths coveted his purple silk shirt.

Police said the youth slain for his shirt was killed by a .38-caliber revolver bought on the streets by a 15-year-old for about $20, about the going price on the street for easily obtained stolen handguns.

But Executive Deputy Police Chief James Bannon, a recognized national authority on criminology, cautioned against drawing conclusions of hysteria among a nervous populace.

“We’d have to see . . . citizens killing other citizens in the mistaken belief they were felons, for me to believe there was mass hysteria,” said Bannon. “When you get mass hysterical reaction, you get husbands shot coming home late, brothers who were not expected to be in the home getting shot, killings of neighbors walking between houses. We haven’t seen that.”

Bannon calls the latest fatalities “just an incredible coincidence” in that they occurred within two weeks of each other. “What we’re talking about here are cruel, ironic bizarre twists of fate.”

“We’re not even talking about handguns,” Bannon said, because Officers Williams and Jackson were killed with shotguns.

Estimates of the number of handguns in Detroit vary wildly, and their role varies according to personal outlook.

“Do you realize that more than two-thirds of the households in this city have weapons?” a Wayne State University instructor noted to his criminology class recently. A colleague then told the same class that they should be aware that “nearly half the homes in Detroit have no conventional weapons for self-defense.”

Mayor Coleman Young’s orders to Detroit police have been to “rid the streets of this city of crime.”

The response from the 3,800-member Detroit Police Officers Assn. has been: not unless there is help to back up officers answering radio calls to the scene of potential violence, and even then, “exercise your right of discretion.”