They nevertheless considered their brutal intervention justified, because it had shown the residents that the police would not be pushed around. They believed they had been victims of an "ambush," a term increasingly used at the time to describe confrontations with youth in the projects, with the assumption of premeditation and criminal intention. In the face of what they saw as a sort of urban guerrilla war, these punitive raids seemed to them the only way to bring rebellious groups "to heel.