In New York, more than anyplace else, the looting quickly took on distinctive social patterns. Up in Harlem, and down in the slums, the break-ins were usually violent, indiscriminate, and often ended in fire. Reports that reached the Police Commissioner’s desk by early Monday morning showed that most of the break-ins in poorer districts netted less than half of the available loot. The rest was smashed, abandoned, or burned. In the better-off parts of the city, however – in the east 80s and around Gramercy Square – the looting was systematic, and efficient, and effected with far less violence. Police surprised eight residents of Olympic Tower working as a co-ordinated looting team, with six station wagons, all legally rented from Hertz, and a truck. They had broken into a Safeway depot on 10th Street, breaking open the gates with bolt-cutters, and by the time a police patrol car came by, they had already loaded their vehicles with a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of foodstuffs. The officers counted two hundred cans of pâté de foie gras, at forty-five dollars a can, and a New York Post reporter remarked, ‘People aren’t taking what they think they’re going to need. They’re taking what they think they’re entitled to.’

By dawn, Detroit was burning. A heavy pall of white smoke hung over Hamtramck and Harper Woods, and they could smell destruction out at St Clair Shores. The night had been wild with helicopters and police patrols and shooting, and when the grimy sun rose over Lake St Clair, there were burned-out vans littering the Detroit Industrial Freeway and the Renaissance Centre was encircled by Michigan National Guard.

The Mayor of Detroit told the newspapers, ‘This was the worst night of my life. Black Sunday. And that isn’t any kind of a joke. This was the night the black people of Detroit let me down.’

The looting and the destruction had been so widespread that the news media hardly knew how to deal with them. From midnight, when the first horrified bulletins began to pour into CBS and NBC and ABC, each television channel had made the decision to stay on the air all night, with almost hysterical first-hand reports from San Francisco, New Orleans, Denver, Chicago, Washington, and New York.

It was easier to tell the individual stories. From Florida, Harold Kane Kaufman-Vorbrüggen of the Cordon Bleu restaurant in Dania, Broward County, hesitantly explained to newsmen how looters had broken into the kitchens and ransacked the larders and refrigerators. They had taken only the steak and the fish, and left thousands of dollars’ worth of truffles and escargots. One of the diners told the news cameras, ‘I guess we have to count ourselves lucky that looters have very little taste.’