“You hear a lot of times,” Auburey Pollard’s father said to me one night long after the killings, “some guy that went berserk over in this neighborhood, he’s got a shotgun. The police don’t do nothing, they stay outside, and that’s where they might shoot a little tear gas, and a lot of the time they don’t shoot tear gas, do they? Huh? They plead him out, don’t they? So then why would they want to kill three youngsters like that? It’s nuts! It’s nuts! And I’ll always say it’s nuts.”
Granting that the third night of the Detroit uprising might not have been thought by the exhausted policemen a suitable time to plead with men they believed to be snipers to come out of a building, Mr. Pollard’s outburst made me wonder exactly what the police had been trained to do under these circumstances.
The Riot Control Plan of the Detroit Police Department has this to say, under the heading “Attacking a Building”:
“1. When rioters or snipers are barricaded in a building, chemical agents should be used (either grenade or gas gun projector) through windows or doors.” On the same page, the instructions say, “The use of tear gas is an effective and humane method of riot control,” and a diagram is provided, entitled, “Driving Barricaded Persons Into the Open with Minimum Casualty Risks,” and suggesting, “Blocking the retreat with gas first, and then gassing the room where the resisting person, or persons, are located, is the surest way to safely accomplish the objective.”
“2. Troops should be instructed to avoid ‘bunching up’ if sniper fire from buildings or rooftops is encountered.
“3. Cover, if available, should be taken and a selected small group (5 to 7 men) should be detached as an assault force. These officers shall be equipped with automatic weapons, rifles, shotguns, and gas, and shall advance under cover of a support unit. Unnecessary or indiscriminate gunfire should be avoided and consideration should be given to employment of a police rifle marksman for counter fire if the location of the sniper is definitely established. This action should be closely controlled and supervised.
“4. Should armor vehicles be available, consideration may be given to their employment as a covering force in the assault phase of the operation.
“5. Maximum emphasis should be placed on all units involved in any disorder to closely observe all rooftops and windows from which sniper or fire bomb action might emanate.”