BENTON HARBOR, Mich. — When they threw the bricks and smashed the windows, when they set the blazes that devoured a dozen buildings over the past two harrowing nights, the people of this depressed city by the lake were not just angry about the 28-year-old motorcyclist killed in a police chase early Monday.

They were still simmering, many said, over 7-year-old Trent Patterson, who died in similar circumstances a few years back, and Arthur Partee, who was strangled by cops only two months ago. They said they were yet seething over a teenager's mysterious drowning in the St. Joseph's River in 1991, and the man who was shot in the back by an officer the year before.

"We're just tired. We're sick of them killing us," Bonita Bulger, 28, said Wednesday as she stood at a corner near the spot where motorcyclist Terrance Shurn crashed to his death and where remnants of an apartment building burned in the riot still smoldered.

"Our backs are against the wall," Bulger added. "The jobs are low. Our kids have nothing to do. You know what's the highlight of our day? Standing on the four corners right here."

Wednesday night, 250 police officers from surrounding communities, in riot gear and armored vehicles, marched through this city of 11,000 people, nearly all African-American and poor.

As a light rain fell with the early evening darkness, the city was quiet.

City officials vowed to enforce an existing 10:30 p.m. curfew for children 16 years and under, but declined to extend the curfew to older teenagers or adults, or to ask the state to match their declaration of a state of emergency.

A "God Squad" of 50 ministers also patrolled the neighborhood, after a candlelight prayer in Shurn's memory.

Residents and some community leaders said the violence started Monday night after a tense City Hall session that was disbanded when an outraged resident used profanity. By Tuesday night, rioters were chanting, "no justice, no peace," as they overturned vehicles, tossed firebombs into houses, and shattered windows with bottles and rocks, injuring 12 people.

Capt. Roy Bell of the Benton Harbor Fire Department said 13 structures, four of them occupied, were burned, 11 of them to the ground. Twelve people were arrested for civil disobedience, said Joel Patterson, the city manager.

On Wednesday afternoon, some here shook their heads at the self-destructive nature of the rioting, while others applauded it for bringing national attention to festering complaints about the criminal justice system. Many warned of more violence whenever the outside officials leave.

"I hate to see this happen, but sometimes you have to get your message across," said the Rev. Edward Pinkney of the Bethel Christian Restoration Center. "I believe this: There's never change without conflict."

A resort town in the 1930s and 1940s, Benton Harbor is one of America's most dilapidated backwaters, often compared to East St. Louis, Ill., or Camden, N.J., with a median household income of $17,000, and a third earning below $10,000, according to the 2000 census.

It remains the headquarters for Whirlpool, but most of the factories that lured blacks from the South have long closed; census figures show that 17 percent of residents are unemployed, though Pinkney guessed that only one in three has a job. In the early 1990s, Benton Harbor had one of the highest per capita murder rates in the nation.

The city of four square miles — nestled among the Harbor Country villages where Chicago's wealthy and powerful, including Mayor Richard M. Daley, have weekend homes — is governed by a black city commission, mayor, city manager and police chief. But there has been racial strife for decades between residents of Benton Harbor and the authorities in rural Benton Township, and the 95 percent white beach community next door, St. Joseph.

The contrasts are abundant, crossing over from the waterfront mansions of St. Joseph to the boarded-up storefronts over the bridge in Benton Harbor. Newspapers fill the windows of the Main Street Cafe. The Kitchen Mart Home Center looks as if it has been shuttered for decades. The siding is peeling from a long-empty office building at No. 133 West Main.

"It's like two different Americas," said Alex Kotlowitz, whose 1998 book, "The Other Side of the River: A Story of Two Towns, a Death, and America's Dilemma," examined the 1991 drowning of a 16-year-boy from Benton Harbor, who was either running from the police after breaking into a car, or lynched for dating a white girl, depending on where you live.

"It's completely — economically, spiritually and geographically — isolated," Kotlowitz said of Benton Harbor. "I'm not surprised at the anger — I felt it. You could tell it had a lot more to it than one individual's death."

As with past incidents, details remain murky over the circumstances of Shurn's death, which is being examined by the Michigan State Police. City officials and residents say Shurn, who lacked a driver's license or registration for his motorcycle, was chased through a residential area at speeds of up to 100 mph by a white officer from the Benton Township police department.

A shrine of flowers and balloons sits by a tree where Shurn died, but it is dwarfed by the gaping hole where rioters destroyed a former beauty shop and two-story apartment building that had been empty for years. Down the block, only chimneys remain of two other torched houses.

"I'm trying to figure out why they tear up Benton Harbor — this is where they stay at," said Paul Cooper, 39, who toured the area on bicycle.

"They need to go kill that police," interjected Monique Sanders, 21.

"No, they don't," Cooper said.

"Leave them up there to kill more people?" Sanders asked. "Every time we try to say something, they look over us."

Bell, of the fire department, said the buildings were left burning because fire trucks were barraged with bricks as they entered the area, injuring a lieutenant. A man with a sawed-off shotgun also fired at one engine, he said.

City leaders, along with representatives of the NAACP who came from Detroit, begged for peace Wednesday afternoon.

"It doesn't do anybody one bit of good to keep tearing up where we live," said Mayor Charles Yarbrough.

"We, as a people, must stand up, but not in anger, not in violence," added Steven McCoy, a pastor who sits on the city commission. "We can march on the township. We can march on the courthouse. But let's not destroy our city."