Word: zebra
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...Zebra Tactics...
...playing shorts, sweatshirt and tennis shoes, he leaned over the trunk of a car to make room for the rug, when three fatal pistol shots whizzed seemingly out of nowhere and hit him in the back. Shields' death was the twelfth in the series of bizarre, random "Zebra" attacks -apparently not linked with the S.L.A.-that have plagued the city for 21 terrifying weeks; six other people have been wounded. All the victims have been whites, and the Zebra killer is described as a black man who strikes in the early evening. Three days after the Shields slaying...
With only these clues, more than 100 policemen are patrolling the streets in cars and on foot, stopping all blacks who fit the rough description. Those checked out and cleared by police are issued identification cards to spare them repeated questioning in Operation Zebra. Zebra is the code for the police-radio band used in conducting the search...
...protests seem slightly overwrought. Police insist that they are stopping only those blacks who fit the composite picture of the Zebra attacker and that they are acting within the law. There is, of course, firm legal precedent for stopping a citizen who matches the description of a suspected criminal. The San Francisco police cite the 1969 search for the Zodiac killer, in which, similarly, any white man matching a specific description was stopped. Meanwhile, Mayor Joseph Alioto is sensibly urging residents to submit willingly to questioning...
...such as vehicles fitted out with secret compartments ("Only crude amateurs use the trunks"), fake uniforms and, for one highly imaginative venture, an electric minisubmarine of the type used occasionally by cigarette smugglers on the border lakes between Switzerland and Italy. Inside his villa office, which is adorned with zebra skins, African spears, various weapons and the hat of an East German policeman (Vopo) given him by a grateful client, Lenzlinger proudly produced for Kroon purported dossiers on some of his escape exploits...