The next year, a mayoral election took place in Detroit after Mayor Roman Gribbs declined to seek office again.[10] Many whites saw Police Commissioner John Nichols as the “law-and-order man.”[11] Opposing him was Coleman Young, a black former Tuskegee airman, civil rights activist, and state senator whose campaign promise was “It’s time for a change.” Detroit was nearly half African American yet was policed mainly by whites. The Rochester Street Massacre was fresh on citizens’ minds and helped tip the scale. Coleman Young narrowly won the election, and in 1974, one of his first acts was to disband STRESS. He was Detroit’s first black mayor and served for twenty years, until 1994.

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My deepest thanks go out to retired Wayne County Sheriff Sgt. Bobby Hawkins for his help in this research, for providing newspaper articles, and for generously contributing his personal knowledge of the Rochester Street investigation. Thanks also to Wayne County Sheriff Benny Napoleon for providing photos. And to my wife, Cathy, the unseen editor of all my work; and my editor, Michael J. Carr, for tidying up.

* Having served in the Wayne County Sheriff’s Department and knowing the deputies involved, I found this story especially difficult to write. As a Detroit resident and cop at the time, I saw the sacrifices made by STRESS and members of our department, who fought some of the city’s toughest, most dangerous criminals. As with any controversial subject, there are many conflicting accounts of this event. I made every effort to capture the different perspectives of all involved.

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[1] During its three-year existence, STRESS killed twenty-two suspected criminals and wounded dozens of others. One white STRESS officer, Raymond Peterson, 40, was involved in twelve shootings, resulting in the deaths of five people. Peterson was highly decorated, but the last person he killed, Robert Hoyt, 24, a black man, took place during a traffic stop. Hoyt was unarmed, so Peterson planted a knife beside him. But DPD evidence technicians found hairs in the knife—hairs that came from Peterson’s cat. Peterson was fired and charged with second-degree murder but was acquitted when his attorney successfully convinced the jury that he was suffering from PTSD. He was awarded two years’ back pay and given a disability retirement.

[2] In the fall of 1972, Officer Richard Herold––the Tenth Precinct Big Four crew chief who saved Duvall and the other four from being killed––was charged by the RCMP in Toronto, Ontario (Canada), for trafficking cocaine. Herold was fired but was eventually acquitted of that charge and testified against DPD Deputy Chief George Bennett. Bennett was black, and Herold accused Bennett of using heavy-handed methods in trying to solicit his help to testify against a number of officers, most of them white, at the Tenth Precinct. Bennett knew that the Precinct Narcotics Unit and other well-positioned officers at the precinct were taking bribes from major heroin dealers, then seizing narcotics and cash from rival dealers and redistributing it back to the favored drug dealers. It became known as the “Tenth Precinct Conspiracy,” and Bennett’s methods were deemed necessary to weed out rotten apples. Nine officers were charged, and three were convicted of conspiracy to sell narcotics and conspiracy to obstruct justice. Among those convicted was Officer Richard Herold, 33, a six-year veteran. He was sentenced to three to five years in Jackson State Prison. Research for this story uncovered a seemingly bottomless pit of information about DPD corruption, ranging from appalling to hilarious. Incidentally, Herold was married with kids and was in Toronto taking a girlfriend for an abortion when the RCMP busted him. His whereabouts today are unknown. Cops who knew him think he is either dead or in witness protection.

[3] Deputy James Jenkins, 29, never returned to work, because of his wounds and the loss of sight in one eye. In Wayne County Probate Court, he received a one-million-dollar settlement from Detroit, and his wife received 150,000 dollars for loss of companionship and for caregiving.

[4] Cops shooting cops, referred to as “blue on blue,” happens rarely. But “friendly fire” in the military occurs far more frequently. (See “Four Second-Floor Narcotics Stories,” endnote 12).

[5] Our department had about twelve hundred sworn officers, and DPD had four thousand.

[6] In January 1987, Deputy Henry Duvall, a twenty-year veteran of the Wayne County Sheriff’s Department, was convicted of two counts of embezzling one thousand dollars in bail money that he received on two separate occasions while working the front desk at the county jail.

[7] In 1972, Michigan State Law stipulated: “In effecting a lawful arrest for a felony, a peace officer may use that degree of force reasonably necessary to effect that arrest including deadly force. A peace officer may use deadly force in defense of his own life, in defense of another, or in pursuit of a fleeing felon.”

[8] The four STRESS officers shot in the first ambush, on Monday, December 4, 1972, were Richard Grapp, 41, William Price, 32, Eugene Fuller, 24, and Robert Rosenow, 23.The officers stopped the trio driving a Volkswagen near the University of Detroit, but the gunmen leaped out first, firing at the officers as the officers struggled to get out of their vehicle. Each officer was hit multiple times but survived.