The Algiers Motel Incident is a 1968 true crime

True crime

True crime is a non-fiction literary and film genre in which the author examines an actual crime and details the actions of real people.The crimes most commonly include murder, but true crime works have also touched on other legal cases. Depending on the writer, true crime can adhere strictly to...

 book by John Hersey

John Hersey

John Richard Hersey was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American writer and journalist considered one of the earliest practitioners of the so-called New Journalism, in which storytelling devices of the novel are fused with non-fiction reportage...

. The book describes an incident which occurred in 1967 in Detroit, Michigan

Detroit, Michigan

Detroit is the major city among the primary cultural, financial, and transportation centers in the Metro Detroit area, a region of 5.2 million people. As the seat of Wayne County, the city of Detroit is the largest city in the U.S. state of Michigan and serves as a major port on the Detroit River...

, at about the same time as the racially charged 12th Street Riot

12th Street riot

The 1967 Detroit riot, also known as the 12th Street riot, was a civil disturbance in Detroit, Michigan, that began in the early morning hours of Sunday, July 23, 1967. The precipitating event was a police raid of an unlicensed, after-hours bar then known as a blind pig, on the corner of 12th and...

. At the Algiers Motel, approximately one mile southeast of where the riots began, three young black men were killed, and two white women and seven other black men brutally beaten, either by Detroit police

Police

The police is a personification of the state designated to put in practice the enforced law, protect property and reduce civil disorder in civilian matters. Their powers include the legitimized use of force...

 or members of the United States National Guard

United States National Guard

The National Guard of the United States is a reserve military force composed of state National Guard militia members or units under federally recognized active or inactive armed force service for the United States. Militia members are citizen soldiers, meaning they work part time for the National...

after a report was received that a gunman or group of gunmen had been seen at or near the motel.

Hersey interviewed survivors, members of the victims' families, and some of the law enforcement personnel who participated in the raid, and also consulted forensic reports, in identifying the law enforcement personnel most likely to have been directly involved in the killings. However, none of those actually charged were convicted in subsequent state and federal trials.

Hersey's findings suggest that one of men was probably killed when law enforcement personnel were first entering the building, and may have been mistaken for an armed rioter in the confusion, but that the other two were selected after the building had been secured and then taken away from the group into separate rooms and murdered.

The now demolished Algiers Motel once stood at the intersection of Woodward Avenue and Virginia Park in the geographic center of Detroit.