People should read John Buntin’s piece on how the LAPD is stopping gang violence and reducing violent crime without resorting to the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk insanity.
When we talk about crime, we tend to talk about victims and offenders, innocence and guilt, prey and predator. Gang violence clouds and warps this logic: victims and victimizers are often the same people, and neither side has any reason to talk to the police. This presents a conundrum to law enforcement, one that has developed contrasting strategies on either coast. New York City insists that hard-nosed, divisive tactics like its stop-and-frisk policy are necessary to reduce crime. But Los Angeles has pursued another way, an approach that has delivered lower crime rates and fostered police-community reconciliation.
Many police officers were skeptical, perhaps because so many gang-intervention workers were themselves ex-gang members. Some hadn’t really left the gangs. But during his time at Harbor division, [Capt. Pat] Gannon saw firsthand how gang interventionists could shut gang feuds down. With nothing to lose, he made some phone calls and asked for help. A week later, he found himself sitting down to talk with “30 hard-core gang guys” in a church basement in South L.A.
The first meeting was a grievance session. The second meeting, the same. At the third, Gannon finally spoke up. “We’ve had eight homicides in two weeks, four on the L.A. side, four in the city of Inglewood,” he said. “I just had a double murder the day before yesterday. I need help in stopping that. I have to stop that feud. Can you help me with this particular problem?”
Discussion ensued. The gang-intervention workers said there were people with whom they might talk. “That day it stopped,” Gannon says. “Not slowed down; it stopped.”
They should also read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ response to Richard Cohen’s endorsement of stop-and-frisk.
This year I am working at MIT where a disproportionate number of the students are Asian-Americans. It would be no more wise for me to take from that experience that individual Asian-Americans are good at math, then it would be for anyone to look at the NBA and assume I am good at basketball. And we would agree with this because generally hold that people deserve to be seen as individuals. But by Cohen’s logic, the fact of being an African-American is an exception to this.
A complete picture begins to emerge.
Stop demonizing people and talk to them. Treat people as individuals worthy of respect. Enlist people in solving the problem, even if they might seem to be part of the problem.
Now, turn this around and think about it for how we should approach the pro-Zimmerman, pro-profiling mentality.
I don’t take Zimmerman apologists any more seriously, or with any more respect, when they spin bizarre tales about how global warming is a communist hoax or when they claim that Sarah Palin is qualified to be Vice President (and yes, there’s a tremendous amount of overlap between those groups, thanks for asking). What makes their mythology of race and the magical power of “good men with guns” any more worthy of respect or careful consideration than their mythology that we need restrictive voter ID laws to curb an epidemic of in-person voter fraud?
It’s as if people are making a deliberate effort to NOT understand what respect means. Do you think the LAPD has a lot respect for the gangbanging lifestyle? Do you think gangbangers like cop culture? Do you think they see eye to eye on much?
Except, continually, you’re conflating respect with “listening to them”, and you’re advocating giving a validity to their perspectives and experiences that you wouldn’t for a second advocate if their perspectives and experiences told them we need to crack down on in-person voter fraud or that Barack Obama is secretly a Kenyan Muslim.
And just as many close relatives and decent-seeming Facebook friends thought Sarah Palin would make a good VP.
You listen to them so you can understand them and so they feel respected. You don’t listen to them because they are right or particularly deserving. There’s a reason I am comparing interactions with them to police interactions with gangs.
You still haven’t really answered my question. Why does someone who says, “I think George Zimmerman is a hero!” (something people are actually saying) deserve that sort of treatment when someone who says, “I think John Bolton should be Ambassador to the UN!” doesn’t?
You seem to be viewing all the support and apologism for Zimmerman as if it’s something other than the latest Culture War fad that has been periodically sweeping through movement conservatism for my entire adult life and then some. I don’t see a lick of evidence for that, but beyond the inherent strangeness of seeing Rick Perry going on TV to praise an acquittal–presumably because the law, in its infinite majesty, allows both dingbat Florida vigilantes and Texas Governors to kill innocent black people–I really don’t see what makes this time so different.
I’d forget about the loudmouths. I’d ignore the people that are trying to make a buck or a name for themselves or benefit politically. I’m talking about reaching people who are just reflexively taking Zimmerman’s side but who are doing so for casual reasons. People who aren’t hearing our side of the story because of where they live and the limitations of their experiences. They understand a guy like Zimmerman. They understand getting tough on crime. They like a guy who isn’t going to just sit back and watch punks commit crimes in his neighborhood.
Trayvon and Rachel? They aren’t fully human, yet. At a minimum, they’re exotic. They need to be contextualized. They need to become familiar. Their stories need to be known.
It’s not an easy task, but it goes on every day, a little more every day, and it has been for decades now.
How do you change these kinds of laws? You have to reach a lot of people who haven’t been reached. yet.
Trayvon is exotic? Really? Even in FL that’s a ridiculous statement. Black kids are exotic? Black kids with hoodies are exotic? Black kids with hoodies and Skittles are exotic? What on earth are you thinking?
what’s annoying about your endless chatter about “understanding” them is not that it’s wrong but that it’s misapplied and without a game plan. Understanding is of course a good thing, but you assume that your readers have never thought of that. You assume that none among us have family and friends whom we’ve tried, unsuccessfully, to understand for years or decades. You’re peddling a platitude as some kind of insight.
Of course in the broadest view, you’re right. The greatest of the many failures of the liberal/left is its refusal to try to communicate with the Fox/Limbaughignoranti, on a human basis instead of preaching policy. Using their own life experience to explain that, for instance, the tax-hater crowd is trying to destroy their way of life by transferring their resources, and their community’s resources, to the undeserving rich. It’s so much easier to send petitions about some Gopschlep who said mean things. The oligarchy has field offices in churches and businesses in every county. Our side would rather talk to ourselves. So ya got a plan? I await it with bated breath. But in the meantime, enough with he sappy platitudes awready.
To some of the people on that jury, the black dialect is exotic. They didn’t hear Trayvon’s voice and accent, but they heard Rachel’s. And they needed an interpreter.
Why would you give me a hard time about calling them exotic and less than fully human. Is there any doubt that that is how they were perceived?
From an anonymized friend of a friend in SC on FB.
Because these folks have never themselves experienced actual discrimination nor can they perceive it when it happens to others.
The conversation here was about why a named white youth killed by a black man did not get as much coverage as the Zimmerman case.
My first response was “Media expectations”
My second was to ask whether the perpetrator of the murder of the white youth walked. On the second, “crickets”.
And these are the folks who are otherwise good people. And generous, caring, and church-going. Not your stereotyped folks in a pickup truck with a gunrack and a Confederate flag in the window.
BTW, the friend quoted lists a high school in Minneapolis as where they graduated.
They are repeating the stereotypes that they were taught by the community as children. I can’t beleive that I am advocating this, but if they were drafted and thrown into combat with black, white, brown, yellow youth from all walks of life, they would realize, as I did when I first met real black men in the Air Force, that the community taught them lies.
Minnesota has the biggest racial achievement gap in schools between blacks and whites in the United States. Your friend grew up in a system that has very different outcomes for black kids vs white kids.
Overall, all kids are better off in MN than in many other states, but that gap is telling.
Yes, many of them are decent folks by conventional standards. They’ll help out a neighbor, maybe even sometimes a darkish one, they’re loyal to their towns and to their buddies, maybe a few of them even voted for Obama. We all know some of them close up. I had a stepmother who was one of the kindest people I’ve known — as long as it was personal and the right person — yet bought into the Gopline to the extent that she would flee weeping from the room if anyone tried to discuss the illogic of the Reaganites or the local trog congressperson.
She would have seen the Zimmerman trial exactly like the yapping juror did. A nice man trying to do the right thing vs a dubious Other. Had there been any discussion of Laws not Men or whether justice had been done, there would be weeping.
Or I could talk about the distant relative with a daughter whose mental/physical affliction has cost $millions in public money to care for, and which is the only thing standing between them and utter poverty. Yet they rave on obsessively about the evil of big government, of lazyasses getting support, the whole bag. If the contradiction is brought up, they simply change the subject and absolutely refuse to discuss it. So what to make of it, gods know. For mortals there is no understanding.
It makes too much sense, to treat people with respect, and call on them to meet with you to discuss issues and possible solutions.
And it also takes some work, and patience.
No, no.
Far better we antagonize every young black male who fits a predetermined profile by stopping and searching them, and get them hating the police and authority figures even more.
Especially the ones who did nothing wrong, and had nothing on them – either drugs or guns – and who before they were stopped, were not likely to be overtly anti-authority, but now will feel justified in
in the future, at wanting to “stick it to ‘THE MAN!'”
This will make the police see more like antagonists, and this will justify hassling and arresting still more young black males.
And, eventually, this increase in confrontations between the groups, cops and gang members, to the point where it’s justifiable for the police to walk around acting like they’re on patrol in Afghanistan, further making the people who live there feel like 2nd class citizens.
If there is a calming, due to respectful treatment, and there are no major busts, and gang violence, or violence against the police, what’ll happen to all of that SAAAAAAAAAAWEET SWAT money, equipment, and training? And the money from confiscating cars, and other things?
Nah! Why treat “those people” with any respect?
Yeeeeeesh…
All that touchie-feelie non-violent stuff takes sooooo long and costs soooo much money! We need a solution right away, right now, that makes us feel good about ourselves and teaches those other people a good lesson about the consequences of crossing us.
And when they cross us again, we’ll all have a quick chorus of “they hate us for our freedom” or “they’re all savages” (as the situation warrants), and it will be time for another round of violence. Then, while everyone is discussing whether the soldiers or the cops went too far in exacting our righteous retribution, the true authors of the violence can help themselves to another pile of cash from the government coffers.
This system works out very well for some people.
Here’s where I am on this. There are an impressive infrastructure of well-heeled institutions whose vested interest is to make sure that we do not have respect for one another and more importantly that certain folks are free to exclude, discriminate, and diss without consequences.
What was interesting about the late 1960s and 1970s were the areas where court-ordered school desegregation was met with the response of let’s try to build respect (like Charlotte NC or Georgetown GA) and those areas where it wasn’t (like St. Louis or Boston). In the former, community leaders down to the neighborhoods and PTAs and worked to deal with those who would have disrupted the process or reconciliation and things moved along well. The bigots were forced by circumstance to keep their thoughts to themselves and use circumlocutions to express their bigotry, which everyone got. But they were forced to work together. And in those interactions a lot of hearts got changed and a lot of mutual respect was generated to the point that by the 1980s Harvey Gantt was mayor of Charlotte. During the Reagan administration that changed for Charlotte. Reagan used Charlotte, then regarded as the most successful large-city de-segregation effort, as a platform for a speech against school busing. Well, of course it is clear that school busing is the result of historical and current racial discrimination in the housing market. And newcomers to Charlotte from suburban Cleveland or Chicago or Saint Louis or wherever were defining a “good” neighborhood as one that like the ones they left had few poor people and fewer blacks. That neighborhood was annexed through an automatic legal process into the City of Charlotte against their will and it tipped the next election so that Sue Myrick beat Harvey Gantt by 1500 votes.
Memo to the future; forced respect with appropriate facilitation does work. Respect depends on desegregation of settlement patterns. Respect is directly related to allocation of government resources. And the current cauldron of forced respect in the US is the workplace, and most fail because there is not the facilitation to get it done. Or the buy-in by all managers.
The jury is out on the LAPD experiment. The LAPD has had forty years of chances to reform itself and to date has failed every one of them. And without general economic prosperity reducing inter-gang violence will not necessarily bring security to the ordinary citizens of those neighborhoods. The informal economy, gangs, and the relationships of those with the other economic and political goings on in a city are very complex. This has the potential of being no more than the Christmas truce of World War I.
It’s an idea well worth implementing as well as a risky one. As you point out, it will take far more than the PD to make it work. That’s where similar plans have fallen flat. Large city schoolboards would rather shut down schools than admit to, much less deal with, their own indifference. The holy grail is privatization through charter schools. Without the good teachers the project falls.
The LA plan also risks the classic outcome: when you deal with the enemy (and I think that’s a reasonable description of the gang leaders) as facilitators, are you promoting long-term law and order or are you bringing in a Trojan Horse? I’m all for seeing where this experiment goes and hope it succeeds brilliantly, but between the self-obsessed pols and the “can’t we all just get along” crowd and those who see privatization as their future profit center, it won’t be easy. And yet if it proves doable over the longer term it will be the seed of revolutionary change. Here’s hoping.
Tarheel Dem, this is a great comment.
(Sorry for the following novella – but it’s an issue that demands detail and context.)
The Seattle PD is now under a federal court consent order after decades of moving away from community policing, and decades of escalating complaints in non-white parts of town of abusive practices. Last year, a Dept. of Justice investigation verified the abuse problems, but couldn’t definitively link them to racial discrimination – solely because SPD didn’t keep racial data that the DoJ could analyze. This lack of a finding, for SPD’s apologists, equaled “exoneration.”
SPD has been able to get away with their abuses for so long in this good liberal city, whose white people like to think of themselves as racially enlightened, because racism is hard-wired into our city’s institutions. Seattle is one of the most geographically segregated cities in the country; ditto its school system, which, after a court order ended busing in the ’90s, is so segregated now it would embarrass 1953 Topekans. The schools across the city get proportionate public money, but that money is so inadequate (thanks to federal and state cutbacks) that funds for a lot of essentials gets raised privately by PTSA groups – which raise up to $2000 per student per year in the wealthier north end. Many south end schools don’t even have PTSA groups.
And so it goes. Wealthy developers get huge city tax credits to tear down affordable housing and put up new market-rate (e.g., $2000/mo. for a studio) high-rises; the city’s program for requiring those developers to replace at least a little of the affordable housing they tear down is grossly underfunded, and the housing they do make available is pegged to 80-100% of annual median income (AMI), or close to $60k/year for a family of four. It’s useful housing, but hardly housing for the poor. The agency charged with that – Seattle Housing Authority – just announced plans to tear down the oldest and largest of its developments, which happens to be on prime real estate overlooking downtown and the Sound. They’re selling half the land to commercial developers, and of the 5000 new units they’re building on the remaining land (along with their own commercial development), only about ten percent will actually be set aside for the people they supposedly serve.
Meanwhile, a 16-year city council incumbent, a guy who once called himself a Green Party member, was complaining this year during the rezoning process for another huge development (owned by billionaire Paul Allen, who hardly needs all the city subsidies he’s getting) that there shouldn’t be any housing set side for the poor there because the city should be putting such units down south, “close to all the social services,” as though if you’re working poor there’s something inherently dysfunctional with you that needs public assistance. Since the new Allen development will mostly sell to wealthy white people, and the poor folks here mostly aren’t white, a lot of people took that as his advocating redlining. And neither he nor most of his colleagues are interested in exercising oversight of SPD – let alone reforming it or (now) making sure it complies with the court and the feds, let alone forcing SPD to try to actually build trust with the many communities that now mostly fear and hate it.
That council member (twice elected council president) will likely be elected to a fifth term this year, because a majority of Seattle voters don’t even know what “redlining” means, and never have to think about racial issues or poverty issues except to occasionally pat themselves on the back for being so enlightened. SPD’s abuses don’t affect them, and usually don’t affect anyone they know.
I mention all this to skim the surface of how deeply ingrained these attitudes, and the policies that flow from them, are.
Tl;dr version: It’s not just cities in the South where lack of communication and contact leads inexorably to abuses and us vs. them thinking. Having lived and organized here for many years, and before that in Washington DC and Houston, I would say unequivocally that Seattle is the most institutionally racist of the three cities, because for most white folks here it’s a conversation they never need to have. The best way we can reform not just police departments but almost any local civic institution is to get people to talk with each other. That doesn’t solve the problem – but the process of undoing institutional racism takes a long, long time, and that’s an essential first step.
I’m sure that Ray Kelly at the Department of Homeland Security will be thinking outside the box.
As I said, institutions preserve racism in being. Ray Kelly set the tone for the institution that he supervised.
The White House bubble is incredibly tone-deaf with this trial balloon.
Even floating the possibility of Kelly as DHS chief is so far beyond what the fuck I don’t even know what to say. I didn’t expect remotely good policy out of them on this, but this is also completely and pointlessly terrible politics.
The DHS has nothing to do with gang violence. The relevant department here is Justice.
I didn’t know this thread was exclusively about gang violence. There are elements of DHS and DHS Fusion centers that get involved in tracking gang violence. There are no silos anymore. Remember.
Nonetheless a police commissioner who shows no respect for various minority communities is not likely to bring successful administration to DHS.
This is a lovely program. It has absolutely nothing to do the zimmerman case, but it’s nice of you to post about it.
This is a good post Booman, thank you for posting and trying to clarify it in the comments.
Lowell had a big turnaround in gang violence, and it developed along similar lines. Some peacemakers started a group called the United Teen Equality Center, and they got the gangs together to talk. Their first big accomplishment was to negotiate an agreement that downtown, where the high school is located, was neutral territory. Imagine that: poof, there is no more turf to defend or fight over at Lowell High. What that also meant is that kids who had to keep their head on a swivel when they walked down the street could relax when they were in school, which changes how they think about going to school.
Excellent approach. I hope Lowell can continue down that path.
I’ve learned not to expect any level of critical thinking from Cohen, but this is shocking even for him.
His “78 percent of shooting suspects” statistic is fear-mongering at its worst. He’s apparently citing NYC crime statistics for 2012. During that year, 78 percent of shooting suspects were indeed black. But there were a total of ~1,350 shootings in a city of more than 8 million souls.
Of all non-black residents, 99.9944% were NOT shooting suspects. Of black residents, 99.974% were NOT shooting suspects.
Based on this, Cohen concludes that 5,999 out of 6,000 black men should tolerate race-based profiling?
Remember, Richard Cohen is proud that he doesn’t know anything about math.
There is a stark difference here – the LAPD actually has authority and can force the issue if push comes to shove (as well as a lengthy track record of forcing the issue). Also, the change that is being asked for is one of not killing – it’s not asking/challenging people to change their worldview, just temper their responses to conflict. In that specific situation that specific tactic has the potential to work. However, when you have people who deny the basic humanity (i.e. equal in dignity) of Teh Others then you can try to reason or cajole until you’re blue in the face and they’ll still look at you like like you have a tail.
For example:
Blue Guy: “Travon had a fundamental right to life and George Zimmerman violated Travon’s Creator-endowed right to life.”
Red Guy: “An unborn baby has a fundamental right to life and abortion violates each unborn baby’s Creator-endowed right to life.”
Tell me that they don’t look at each other like the other one is stupid/evil.
Whatever they did, they are still human and needs some respect!! http://linkapp.me/z0Y0s