Tag Archives: Crime

Eyes on the Street

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I used to work near the big Family Court building in Brooklyn. One afternoon, as I was walking by, I saw a woman punch a little boy in the stomach. Presumably, it was her son and he’d made her angry. Maybe she had to go to court and was stressed out. I can’t remember if I said something, but I probably did, because I remember walking away and wondering if I’d made the little boy’s situation even worse by embarrassing his mother. Would she be even harder on him when they got home? Should I have done more or less?

Something that happened online this week made me remember that moment in Brooklyn. Somebody made a comment on a discussion board, claiming that supporting same-sex marriage means you probably aren’t a Christian. The comment wasn’t directed at me, but I thought I should respond and set the record straight. So I found a recent poll that says same-sex marriage is supported by most Catholics and white mainline Protestants. It’s evangelical Christians and black Protestants who are mostly opposed.

So I left my comment and hoped (but doubted) that would be the end of it. When I visited the site again later that night, it wasn’t a big surprise to see that the person I’d responded to had apparently responded to me. I don’t know for sure, since I didn’t read what he or she had to say. I didn’t want to get involved in one of those unpleasant “discussions”.

The next day, the whole thread was gone. Apparently, things had gotten ugly and the moderator had deleted my post and everyone else’s. Which was fine with me. I figured I’d done my bit and it was just as well the moderator had stepped in.

Online forums are like city streets. The moderators (the police) sometimes intervene when things get bad. But the rest of us (the people in the neighborhood or passersby) have a responsibility to keep an eye on things and sometimes get actively involved. It’s an idea called “eyes on the street”. Jane Jacobs wrote about it in her great book The Life and Death of American Cities:

… there must be eyes upon the street, eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors of the street. The buildings on a street equipped to handle strangers, to insure the safety of both residents and strangers, must be oriented to the street. They cannot turn their backs or blank sides on it and leave it blind…. the sidewalk must have users on it fairly continuously, both to add to the number of effective eyes on the street and to induce the people in buildings along the street to watch the sidewalks in sufficient numbers. Nobody enjoys sitting on a stoop or looking out a window at an empty street. Almost nobody does such a thing. Large numbers of people entertain themselves, off and on, by watching street activity.

Eyes on the street discourage bad behavior and sometimes lead people to speak up (or call the authorities). It’s the same on a discussion board, except for two differences. Nobody on a discussion board is in immediate danger of being robbed or physically assaulted. And the sole purpose of discussion boards, unlike city streets, is to allow people, even strangers, to speak up.

My tendency is to say something when I see a significant factual error. For example, claiming that support for same-sex marriage means a person isn’t a Christian. Of course, not every error (like being mistaken about when a TV show went on the air) needs to be corrected, but some deserve to be, even at the risk of getting into an argument. Preferring to avoid online warfare, I avoid getting personal in my response. I’ll say “X is Y”, but avoid “You are Z” (the third person is less personal than the second person).

And then I’ll usually go away. That means I may miss out on some fruitful discussion, or be corrected myself (unthinkable as that might be!), but reading further responses often leads to more of the same. It seems sufficient to make my point and then disappear, even though this allows someone else to get in the all-important Last Word! Will my silence suggest that I’ve given up? It probably will to some people, but you can’t have everything. And maybe the cops will show up.

Terrorists Like Us

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From President Obama’s statement regarding the terrorist attack in Charleston:

This is not the first time that black churches have been attacked.  And we know that hatred across races and faiths pose a particular threat to our democracy and our ideals.

The President could have used the active voice instead of the passive. He could have said “This is not the first time that racist white men have attacked black churches”. That would have been more descriptive.

But it would have sounded unnecessarily inflammatory. Unnecessary, because who else would murder nine black people while declaring that “You rape our women and you are taking over our country”. Inflammatory, because calling attention to the killer’s color would upset people who say or want to believe that white racism isn’t a problem anymore.

Britt Bennett’s brief article in the New York Times does an excellent job of explaining how and why white terrorism isn’t called that:

This is the privilege of whiteness: While a terrorist may be white, his violence is never based in his whiteness. A white terrorist has unique, complicated motives that we will never comprehend. He can be a disturbed loner or a monster. He is either mentally ill or pure evil…. Either way, he is never indicative of anything larger about whiteness, nor is he ever a garden-variety racist. He represents nothing but himself. A white terrorist is anything that frames him as an anomaly and separates him from the long, storied history of white terrorism.

I’m always struck by this hesitance not only to name white terrorism but to name whiteness itself during acts of racial violence. In a recent New York Times article on the history of lynching, the victims are repeatedly described as black. Not once, however, are the violent actors described as they are: white. Instead, the white lynch mobs are simply described as “a group of men” or “a mob”…. [Obama’s] passive language echoes this strange vagueness, a reluctance to even name white terrorism, as if black churches have been attacked by some disembodied force, not real people motivated by a racist ideology whose roots stretch past the founding of this country.

In America’s contemporary imagination, terrorism is foreign and brown. Those terrorists do not have complex motivations. We do not urge one another to reserve judgment until we search through their Facebook histories or interview their friends. We do not trot out psychologists to analyze their mental states. We know immediately why they kill. But a white terrorist is an enigma. A white terrorist has no history, no context, no origin. He is forever unknowable.

Like South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley said this week: 

While we do not yet know all of the details, we do know that we’ll never understand what motivates anyone to enter one of our places of worship and take the life of another.

But the thing is, in this case, we do know. 

The Riot, the Police and Some Music

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I spend a lot of time on a web forum devoted to a certain great musician. Because some of the site’s visitors have ties to Baltimore, the riots and the effect they’re having on the city are being discussed — in a thread supposedly devoted to something else. Emotions obviously run high in such situations, which partly explains why one person who says he lives in Baltimore called for “the police and National Guard to show no mercy”.

I didn’t want to get into this topic on a musician’s website, but it eventually seemed necessary to add another point of view:

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Since what’s been happening in Baltimore keeps being discussed, here’s something from The Atlantic:

Justice demands that participants in the riots are identified, arrested, and charged with whatever crimes they committed. Their unjustifiable violence endangered innocents, destroyed businesses, and harmed the economic future of largely black neighborhoods; they earned the frustrated contempt of Baltimore’s mayor and members of its clergy and strengthened the hand of the public-safety unions that are the biggest obstacles to vital policing reforms.

But a subset of Baltimore police officers has spent years engaged in lawbreaking every bit as flagrant as any teen jumping up and down on a squad car, however invisible it is to CNN. And their unpunished crimes have done more damage to Baltimore than Monday’s riots. Justice also requires that those cops be identified and charged, but few are demanding as much because their brutality mostly goes un-televised. Powerless folks are typically the only witnesses to their thuggery. For too long, the police have gotten away with assaults and even worse. The benefit of the doubt conferred by their uniforms is no longer defensible.

I didn’t realize until today that putting handcuffed suspects in the back of police vans without strapping them in and then driving with sudden stops and starts and making sharp turns so that the suspects get bounced around is common enough in cities like Baltimore and Philadelphia to have been given names like “rough ride” and “nickel ride”.

People have been paralyzed and otherwise injured in both cities and won millions of dollars in damages. The investigation isn’t over, but it’s reasonable to assume that this is how Freddie Grey had his spine and larynx destroyed while he was driven around the city in the back of a police van, before he fell into a coma and died.

The Atlantic article concludes:

I believe it is as necessary now as it was in 1968 [when Martin Luther King Jr. spoke about such things] to simultaneously insist upon the following: that riots are to be condemned; that they are inextricably bound up with injustices perpetrated by the state; and that it is a moral imperative for us to condemn both sorts of violence.

The whole article [by Conor Friedensdorf], which isn’t very long, is here.

The Soul Stirrers with Sam Cooke, “Stand By Me Father”, the early 60s
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=weYZt3FAqi4

Ben E. King, “Stand By Me”, 1961
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwZNL7QVJjE

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Well, it’s a music site so it seemed best to stay somewhat on topic.

How to Survive an Encounter with a Bear or a Police Officer

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Here’s a helpful guide for hikers and outdoor enthusiasts updated for black Americans.

A Neutral Observer Might Detect a Pattern Here

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Ijeoma Oluo, a Seattle writer, has been tweeting “Don’t Do That and They Won’t Kill You” advice since yesterday. New York Magazine helpfully provided an annotated list of the fatal encounters she’s described.

Much too often, the apparently dangerous and criminal behavior at issue seems to have been “Being in Public While Black”.

Do many cops really see black Americans as so much more lawless and threatening than the white Americans they meet up with?

Today I saw a link to the video below. It shows how unreliable direct perception can be. It’s called the McGurk Effect in honor of the scientist who discovered it. From Wikipedia:

The effect was discovered by accident when McGurk and his research assistant … asked a technician to dub a video…. while conducting a study on how infants perceive language at different developmental stages. When the video was played back, both researchers heard a third phoneme [a perceptually distinct unit of spoken language] rather than the one spoken or mouthed in the video.

A couple weeks ago, in Cleveland, two cops responded to a 911 call, which can be heard here. The person who called 911 said that someone in the park (“probably a juvenile”) was scaring people with a gun (“probably fake”). 

It isn’t clear yet what the 911 dispatcher told the two officers to look for, but the black 12-year-old with the authentic-looking pellet gun was shot as soon as they arrived on the scene. From the New York Times:

Tamir Rice was killed by a rookie Cleveland police officer who quit a suburban police force after his supervisors determined two years ago that he suffered a “dangerous loss of composure” during firearms training and was emotionally unprepared to cope with stresses of the job. The officer, Tim Loehmann, 26, shot the child within two seconds after his patrol car pulled up next to the boy.

The Cleveland police said the child, who had what turned out to be a replica gun that shoots small plastic pellets but looks like a semiautomatic pistol, was told to raise his hands, but instead reached to his waistband for the object. Surveillance video of the killing that was released last week showed, however, that the shooting happened so fast it was hard to know whether the officer issued any real warnings or whether the boy could have understood them if he did.

I wonder what the young cop who had been fired by another police department saw when he and his veteran partner drove into that park. I wonder what the more experienced officer saw. It’s possible, even likely, that they didn’t see the same thing. Whatever each of them saw, however, it’s clear that one of them shouldn’t have arrived in that park with a gun in his hand, ready to use it, given what he apparently perceived.