The Algiers Motel Incident

by John Hersey

  18. The Right Testimony?

  “I had a case with a queer,” Senak said, “with a judge from Dearborn. He was sitting in because we had a few of our judges die close together, and we couldn’t have an election, so they brought these judges in to take their places. And this queer I brought in, I read the testimony—to get a case on a queer, you need everything but the cost factor; it’s the same charge, Accosting and Soliciting—and in the testimony the man offered to fuck me, and I had ‘fuck me’ in quotes, and the judge looked up and said, ‘You sure you’re reading the right testimony?’ Because a lot of times these officers, a lot of their cases will be almost about the same, because it doesn’t vary that much, with prostitutes, and you get a general trend the way you work and you can usually write them up similarly, so the judge figured that I had got a prostitute the night before also and got the cases mixed up, see. I said, ‘No, your honor, this is what they call it. They usually refer to it either as a fuck or a brown.’ And when I said ‘brown’ he knew what I meant. The queer’s attorney was all hopped up about that, too, because he figured that there was going to be a mistrial, that I’d used the wrong wording—but the guy himself knew that it was true, because he used it!”

  19. Privilege in Court

  “You know,” he said, “you can’t send a policewoman out on the street and let her have a John accost her, because the John might be influential. And if you take him to court you may find out that the John is high in society, so they don’t want to step on anyone’s toes.”

  20. Prejudice and Fear

  “This,” David Senak said, “is a kind of a bad subject. I don’t know how you can take this. A lot of police officers aren’t really college-educated, and, you know, they haven’t the greatest vocabulary in the world. You couldn’t ask them to give you a definition of prejudice and expect a real dictionary definition. Over the years, see, after so many people say, ‘Well, you’re prejudiced because you believe in something,’ they don’t know that prejudice means ‘a prejudged conclusion.’ So right off, their definitions are wrong—policemen’s conclusions are anything but prejudged in the first place. But they use the word, because people say, ‘You’re prejudiced.’ Or ‘bigoted.’ If you could find a word in the middle that would express ‘drawing a conclusion based on fact and personal experience’—well, that is what police officers generally feel. But they would tell you that police are prejudiced.

  “Of course, these are dangerous grounds, and I’m giving you what I think. You take me. People say, without knowing me, they’ll say, ‘You’re prejudiced, you know, because you’re a police officer, so you’re prejudiced.’ Well, we’re not prejudiced, I’m sure of that. But we do have certain conclusions, but they’re based on fact, and they’re not conclusions singling out any race, or anything like that, even though police officers will say, as a general statement, ‘I don’t like coloreds,’ or, ‘I don’t trust coloreds’—because they happen to work in a colored area.

  “I talked with some New York police officers, and depending on the area you’re in, you’re going to get a different opinion of who he dislikes. Some police officers in New York that work in all–Puerto Rican areas are going to be all anti–Puerto Rican. Most police officers can’t realize that they’re not anti–Puerto Rican or anti-colored, or anti-any-group-in-specific. They’re anti-crime.

  “This is hard for a lot of people to believe, and I did a lot of thinking about it, and this is my conclusion. They are actually anti-crime. Because you deal with a certain people—and I’ve had a little psychology, and conditioned responses to me are the center of the whole problem. And if people can believe that police officers have no way of knowing that they’re being propagandized by their surroundings, they’d probably look at them in a little different light, a little better light. Policemen have no way of deciphering from just incidental things whether it’s right or wrong, or whether it’s going to lead to their being prejudiced or not.

  “A good instance is: A few weeks ago I read in the paper where the people in Brewster projects were saying that the police officers in the area—now this is a different precinct, the First Precinct—they were saying that police officers were shirking their duty and being prejudiced. And they use this ‘prejudice’ so loosely it’s pitiful. But they said they were being prejudiced because they weren’t coming to runs in Brewster projects as fast as they were in white areas.

  “Well, police officers, one, are colored as well as white, they work integrated crews, so what one police officer does another police officer does, regardless of color. [At the time of the riot, there were approximately 250 Negro police officers in Detroit out of a total of approximately 4,400.]

  “I happen to know, from personal experience, of one example of why police officers may not bust lights to get to a run in the Brewster projects. More examples of this could be evidenced if you wanted to talk to other police officers. This one instance was where we had a run over there, it was a Friday or Saturday night, it was real crowded out, a lot of people, and too many runs for just one precinct to cover, so we had to go in there from Thirteenth on a run. It was an Attempt Robbery in progress—I can’t remember whether it was Armed or Unarmed. So we got over there real fast, we just went down Mack, and we were there in a matter of seconds. Got over there and the guys were fighting in the middle of the grass of one of the houses. Jumped out of there. Got the guy—he had attacked an old man. They were two colored people. This old man backed off so we could deal with this guy. Well, we were wrestling all over that ground with him. After a little while we got him cuffed. We had five thousand people out there, screaming ‘Police brutality!’ and rocking our scout car. Wouldn’t let us leave with the guy. And this man, this colored man who was standing there, he couldn’t do a thing, the colored man who was being attacked. They didn’t care about him. It was police brutality against the robber! For subduing him. In a colored neighborhood.

  “Well, a lot of police officers, they’d just—it might not be evident, they might not say, ‘Well, next time, I’m going to slow down and I’m not going to go over there very fast. Maybe the guy’ll run away and I won’t have to take this abuse.’ But in the back of his mind he realizes this, whether conscious or otherwise, and the next time, if he’s a little ways away and there’s a red light, well, he’ll stop for it! And he’ll know that he’s stopping for it because he doesn’t want to go there. He may not realize the reason, and then when he tells someone else, ‘I don’t have any trouble there any more, because I don’t get there so fast. I wait till the trouble subsides.’ And then the people say, ‘Well, you’re shirking your duty.’ He’s not shirking his duty because he doesn’t know it.

  “We have colored neighborhoods in our precinct where men will respond just as fast as any other neighborhood in the city, and this is the truth. I wouldn’t lie at all, and I don’t have to, you can ask other police officers. The people never give you trouble, very seldom have a run there, but when you have an emergency there, you get there. There are other areas, on Third Street, that are full of white people that do nothing but give you trouble—not to the extent of the Brewster project, because they’re not as united in white areas as they are in the colored against the police officers, but they still do give you trouble, and police officers in that area will do the same thing they do in the Brewster projects. They’re afraid. They’re inwardly afraid.”

  22. I Came Close to Shooting Him

  “My other citation,” he told me, “was for an incident I had on Garfield and Brush. I was trolling for prostitutes at the time, and I turned the corner, and this prostitute waved to me, and so I was going to pull in to the curb, but it was all parked up, see, so I went slowly and motioned her to follow me around the block. So I turned the corner.

  “Apparently she had some other John that tried to pick her up, and she got detained. Then in the meantime I was waiting for her, and these two guys came walking down the street, toward Brush, going west, and they saw me, and it’s obvious, in a colo
red area like that, if a white man stops he’s looking for a prostitute, so they opened the door and got in, and said, ‘You want a girl?’ I said, ‘Yeah, that’s what I’m here for.’ They said, ‘How about that girl walking on the other side of the street?’ And I knew her, see? I said, ‘Okay sure.’ I could still get Accosting on them if I can’t get the girl. So I said, ‘All right, good.’ So they said, ‘Well, how much money do you have?’ ‘Five dollars.’ They said, ‘Well, give me the five dollars and I’ll go get you the girl.’ I said, Oh, no. Oh, no. I’ve had this before. You’ll just run off with my money.’ He said, ‘How do I know you have the money?’ So I kept my money in my left-hand pocket, wound up, so I pulled it out, and I had me ten or fifteen dollars there. I said, ‘Here, I got the money. You get me the girl and I’ll give you the money. I’ll give you five dollars, too, when you come back.’

  “I guess the guy got greedy, then. What I figured, their normal intent was just to get me a broad, or, if they could, get the money, and disappear. But he got shaky, and he pulled a knife and said, ‘I want all your money.’ And as he said that he hit me with his one hand in the face, and he went to grab for the money. The money was wadded up, see, and I could get a better grip than him. I had my hand on it. My left hand was occupied with him. And I was reaching back for my gun, so the first guy got out of the car, and this other one followed right behind him. The first guy, I imagine he had thought he was blameless in the Attempt Robbery Armed, see, because he tried to block me getting the guy that actually pulled the knife on me.

  “So I pushed him aside, and he started running into an apartment building. I took after this man, the first man, so he started running down Brush toward Canfield, and I pulled my gun, and I stopped, and I told him to halt, I was a police officer. It was real lucky for him that he halted when he did. I came close to shooting him. I was kind of shaken up there. I think I would have shot him if he wouldn’t have stopped.”

  22. A Girl from the Algiers

  “We were in the Seven Seas Bar, across from the Algiers,” he told me, “and my partners and I were drinking there separately. I must have been in a business suit, for a reason I’ll tell you in a minute. Sometimes I’d be in a suit, as a businessman, as a college student—I wore a beard at one time. I used to play the beatnik. A lot of the areas these girls work, a certain type of person comes through. And on Brush and John R they’re mostly colored girls, and you could be anything. You know, they’ll take on almost anything. If you go into some of the colored hotels, they have a clientele of businessmen; maybe there’s a big office building near the place, where these guys know about this hotel, and the only people that frequent this place are from this one business. So they pretty much know if I come in in a sweatshirt and a beard that I’m not from this business. So I got to dress accordingly, in some places. Some nights my partner will dress well and I’ll dress like a slob, and other times we’ll switch off, or we’ll be working together often, and we’ll dress alike.

  “So I bought this colored girl a drink, and she gave me the case in the bar, and I said, ‘Well, where are we going to go, then?’ And she said, ‘Well, we’re going to go into the Algiers Hotel. I got a room there.’ She wanted twenty dollars—because it was unusually high. I said, ‘Well, am I going to have to pay for the room, too?’ And she said, ‘Oh, no, I have my own room in the hotel, that’s included in the price.’ So I said, ‘Okay,’ so we walked over there, and as we were walking my partners came up, and we arrested her.

  “She mistook me for the sergeant, when we finally made the arrest on the girl, so I must have been dressed pretty good. My partners were both kind of perturbed. So that’s why, as I look back on it, I was probably wearing a suit and they were just wearing shabby clothes, so she just took me for the sergeant—and these other two fellows were older than I was, see.”

  23. It Takes a Special Guy

  At different times I asked Ronald August and Robert Paille what they thought of David Senak as a policeman.

  “Dave,” August said, “is a hell of a good police officer. They don’t come any better than Dave. It takes a special type of a man to be a policeman, I think. They don’t just come out of the thin air. If it was an easy job, which I think most people think it is an easy job, all you do is drink coffee, they tell me. But he has ambition to fight crime, so to speak. He was a good vice man, or a good clean-up man, so to speak. You put him in plain clothes and put him out there on the street, and he knew the tricks of the trade. Now when I talk about tricks of the trade, he knew how to mix in with the queers, with the homosexuals. Now me, to give me a job like that, I’d shrink down to this big”—a thumb and forefinger an inch apart. “I just don’t want nothing to do with it. But Dave was a—I worked a little clean-up myself, trying to make a sale on a Sunday, you can’t buy whiskey anytime on Sunday, but buying beer before noon is taboo, so I worked clean-up for a week. I don’t know, you go down there and you talk chummy-chummy to the bartender, and then you turn around and slap him on the back with a summons. I didn’t care for that kind of work. It takes a special guy—I’m trying to explain to you what it takes to be a good police officer, and then it takes something else to be a good vice man. It’s just a different experience altogether. But Dave Senak is—well, let me stack him up against myself. I think he’s a better police officer than I am, because he’s just got the knack, let’s say.”

  Paille said, “I can’t speak too much for David Senak there but I feel that he’s young and he could stand some more experience. He had been on the clean-up squad quite a bit. He was probably pretty good in that. But I don’t think he’s been out in the street too awfully much. In fact, I think he hasn’t almost as much time as I do. I don’t know, to me it seems that he could stand some more experience. I think every officer has to make a decision, you know, which could be deliberated for hours in court and everything else there, you know. But you’ve got to make the right decision. Something like that, when you get the riot and everything else there, you know, you know it’s imperative that you make the right decisions. But everything happened so fast, you know, it was hard to really keep track of things.”

  6

  THE SECOND DAY

  Monday, July 24

  1. Taking Them In

  “I went back in the next day,” Ronald August said. “Actually the schedule was set up for twelve noon to twelve midnight, but you had to be there at quarter to twelve for roll call, and you were lucky to get out of there by three o’clock in the morning, or maybe two o’clock. We put in a good fourteen, fifteen hours a day, easy.

  “In the daytime it was relatively quiet, except for looters. There was some fires that second day, I recall. They sent us over to what they called the Kiefer Command, which was set up over at the Herman Kiefer Hospital there. They picked a crew of us, twelve men, eleven men and one sergeant, twelve of us, and they picked out three scout cars, put us in the cars, and we were going along in a three-car unit consisting of twelve men. And we made runs, making arrests, and the arrests were actually all looters, in the daytime.

  “We didn’t know where to take them, there were so many of them. They had it set up so you took them where you were working in the locality; we were there at Number Ten, at Livernois, but we were taking them where we thought we could get in and out the fastest.”

  2. We Thought We Were Safe

  “We didn’t eat Sunday or all day Monday,” Roderick Davis said, speaking of the Dramatics and Fred Temple in their room at the Algiers.

  “The two youngest ones, Ronnie and Michael, they went swimming in the pool, and the rest of us just stood around watching. So that is how we ran into these girls that were living in the main motel part, these go-go girls from Chicago. We had met them there in Chicago when we did a show at the Regal Theater.” In court Rod was able to name three of them: Laroyce, Carol, and Bertha; he could not recall the fourth name. “We didn’t even want to know the other people there.

  “Most of the time we were just in the room. We a
ll called home to keep our families from worrying. The police never bothered us, not that day. We thought we were safe in there. We smoked cigarettes all day.”

  3. A Small Scratch of Paper

  At the first murder hearing a police officer named Edward Lalonde was questioned by Assistant Prosecutor Avery Weiswasser, for the People, as follows:

  Q. What is your assignment of duty?

  A. I am at the Thirteenth Precinct in charge of firearms at this time. . . .

  Q. What was the procedure of issuing guns to personnel during the riot, and various vehicles, when they were assigned to caravans, especially?

  A. I handed an officer a gun and wrote the name down on a small scratch of paper that I had. When the officer turned the gun in, I crossed the name off, and when the small paper got full I threw it away. . . .

  Q. What type of guns were they, riot guns?

  A. Both shotguns and rifles; and they were for the most part owned by civilians in our precinct. . . .

  Q. Now these shotguns, what gauges were they? Do you know?

  A. Mostly twelve-gauge.

  Q. What type of gun?

  A. All different types, sir.

  Q. Were they single-shot bores or magazine types?

  A. They were mainly pump shotguns and semi-automatic shotguns with four or five magazines.

  Q. And what type of ammunition was issued to any police officer?

  A. Twelve-gauge, double-O.