Below, Dan respectfully and appropriately asked for focus on the loss suffered by the Goode family. It is a loss that is both painfully particular--a family member--and horrifically general.
Horrifically general because it is one of several recent police shootings, one of all too many black men killed in our city, of people killed in our city, and of people lost to one part or another of an endlessly failing drug war.
Dan also pointed to Mayor Goode's careful moderation. But Mayor Goode also said:
"I don't know anything except that, when someone is shot in the back, it raises questions that need to be objectively looked at."
Stop there for a moment.
This, two weeks after police in another corner of the very same neighborhood--Germantown--shot another man who was fleeing, running away from them, fired into a house filled with 50 people celebrating New Year's Eve, killing one man and injuring two others, including the nine-year-old he was pushing up the stairs away from those bullets. A hardworking immigrant man is dead, the wrong man arrested, and no gun yet found.
This, the same weekend police shot and killed a man who, while having a gun, may or may not have pointed it at police. All we know is one of two officers saw him "slowly take his handgun out of his waistband and hold it down by his side."
I am not a police officer, I don't know if the shootings were 'justified', and I am not judging those officers, though I agree with the stark truth of what Mayor Goode said about how deep the questions are that are raised when someone is shot by the police in the back. There will be investigations for all of that. For now the mayor and police commissioner and DA have my trust.
But just stop and think about those lives that were lost, and for what.
The undercover officers who shot Timothy Goode were patrolling to make drug arrests. Maybe a person in that situation was selling, maybe he was buying and maybe he was doing nothing illegal, was just in one of the many corners of corners of our city where drugs and drug selling and people carrying guns are all around.
But this--being shot and killed in the course of some corner drug bust--it's an almost incomprehensibly huge cost. And it is not a cost that we can continue to bear.
David Simon, who co-writes "the Wire" on HBO, the clearest mirror to American cities I have ever seen, whatever Mark Bowden says, says the show is about "how contemporary American society—and, particularly, 'raw, unencumbered capitalism'—devalues human beings."
“Every single moment on the planet, from here on out, human beings are worth less. We are in a post-industrial age. We don’t need as many of us as we once did. So, if the first season was about devaluing the cops who knew their beats and the corner boys slinging drugs, then the second was about devaluing the longshoremen and their labor, the third about people who wanted to make changes in the city, and the fourth was about kids who were being prepared, badly, for an economy that no longer really needs them.
Histrionic or not, it's true. The near-half the people sitting in city jails because they cannot afford bail are being treated as expendable. The people hurt or killed on all sides of the battle for the corners, they are being treated as expendable. Same with the thousands of kids who enter high school but aren't there by the end. There's no point to my sitting here preaching except to say that it is pretty clear that our moral imperative is to revalue every person and block in this city.
Everyone is worth less
One of the things I love about the vision on The Wire, expressed beautifully in that quote, is its universality. This avoids the naive belief in a strict hierarchy, that some people have become worth less while others are still valued, these are two discrete and distinct groups, and that the problem of being devalued is one for other people if you happen to be on the other side of that divide. Everyone on The Wire -- drug dealers, police, civilians, longshoreman, and now, journalists -- is expendable as an individual, along with the substance of the institutions they serve. When you cease to be sufficiently profitable, you cease to exist. All that happens is for you to be "a little bit slow, a little bit late." The institutions, however, remain, in however parodic or skeletal a form.
So when you talk about the devaluation of human beings, in this kind of wide lens, it isn't just about how police officers or passive consumers of media don't value certain classes of human beings -- criminals, the poor, other races or genders. It's about how that devaluation boomerangs; how the police, the teachers, the press, and everyone else that we usually place on the "authority" or "privileged" side of that divide likewise has seen their value erode away.
In other words, it can be and will be you, if it isn't already.
And this is almost precisely the nature of tragedy. This is, I think, a paraphrase of what Simon says elsewhere, but if you look at Greek tragedy at its core, what it is about is coping with the fact that the moral universe (aka the gods) are basically indifferent to human heroism. Oedipus saved Thebes, but the gods don't care. As Police Comissioner Burrell tells Major Bunny Colvin, "This is Baltimore. The gods will not save you."
our moral imperative is to revalue every person and block in thi
how? i love your post jennifer, but are we also participants in that other great greek art form, farce?
we all agree with the language that you put forward in these kinds of posts--but when the rubber hits the road, and we talk about how to solve our problems--higher wages, health care, after school, better education, affordable housing etc.--a million explanations or obfuscations are offered.
It's funny
I am not sure why, but I left out the end of the David Simon quote, about the fifth season:
I don't mean that this is all about media failures or responsibility. Rather, when you look at it, one dimension of the media's role has to do with what we collectively accept and tolerate and what we don't. Norms, whatever.
We can justify or we can condemn, and I know it is kind of duh to say, but they're not the same thing. Here, sure, some of the answers are super hard. Fixing the drop out rate for example is not going to be done by saying 'this has to stop'. But loss of life, particularly the different responses when faced with several shootings of police and several shootings by police, first you have to collectively condemn that sort of loss and collectively pledge that it can't be tolerated by society. We are not even all on that same page.
Criminal charges by the DA if they are justified. Hardcore retraining or reenforcing training regarding the use of deadly force, rethinking the way we police drug crime. Coupled with whatever the hell we can do, respecting privacy, to stop gun carrying.
I have the same feeling here as I do with the idea of a new New Deal and all the other lofty goals of this administration: whatever happens, they have to be that lofty because we won't even get to the next question of 'how?' if they aren't.
Another example of things that are about will
I linked the Radio Times discussion between civil rights lawyer David Rudovsky and Prisons Commissioner Leon King on prison overcrowding before on here, and I mentioned it again above.
A ridiculously high proportion of people in the city system are there only because they cannot afford jail. They have not been convicted. And many many more are there for non-violent low-level drug crimes.
Aside from the court-recognized unconstitutional overcrowding, the effects on the emotional and economic health of individuals, their families, and communities is huge.
The court has said something has to change. This has been a 30-plus year litigation. The prisons know that change has to happen. The lawyers and activists have been pushing and pushing. All it takes is deciding on some systems of alternatives to incarceration (house arrest, ramped up probation-style monitering). And it is just a matter of who--courts, prisons--are going to step up and actually do it.
Here are the numbers:
Relativity
I don't mean to turn this into a "Wire" lovefest, but I can't help it. And, it ties in so correctly to what Jennifer says above about the person.
One element of the show that has always struck me is the inability for so many people to control their destiny. In Season 1, you had DeAngelo Barksdale and McNulty who were, because of their circumstances, tied together. Niether could control the circumstances around them--DeAngelo his family ties to the drug trade and McNulty being a slave to his own ego, alcoholism and, at the same time, the oppressive bureacracy he worked for.
In Season 2, you always had this feeling that Ziggy and Frank Sobatka were going to die. The circumstances around them showed a tightening nuace--most importantly was Frank who, for his family and union, went to sometimes criminal methods to keep things alive. The best part of that Season, which I think is underrated, is the very end, when Nick Sobatka is standing at the chain-linked fence looking out into the water and the season flashes by, he had lost the opportunity to control his destiny due to his cooperation with the Feds, but, at the same time, what was his destiny anyway. He was a young union member in a dying industry.
Season 3 showed you how Stringer Bell lost control of his destiny.
Season 4, well, is perhaps the best television statements of children born into poverty. At the end of the season, when Michael Lee pulled that trigger and Dukie dropped out of school, your heart broke. But, because of their families, the City they lived in, and also the schools they went to, they couldn't control their destiny. And, I think in Season 5, you are already seeing Michael's regret at the path that he took. But, what were his choices?
On my end, I feel like I have some control over my destiny. But, I'm a contrast to the characters from the "Wire." Increasingly, however, that is changing. While I don't worry about living on the streets anymore, the controls on my destiny are entirely different--the economy, the need for litigators, student loans, and mortgage. Those are the same things that empower me too.
I'm rambling a bit, but the most depressing part of the Wire and real life is the lack of control of your destiny. And, it is all relative to who you are, where you are from and what you do for a living.
We are all devalued. The question isn't if we are devalued, but by how much. And, the proof is in your ability to control your own destiny. Clearly, I, and many of the people on this site, have been able to maintain more value than Dukie (I'm using Dukie for the purposes of this thought). Unfortunately, that is because Dukie started off with little value.
I am working to elect Larry Farnese to the General Assembly. Unless otherwise expressly stated, this and every comment or blog I post on YPP and any action I take hereon is solely attributable to me and not Farnese or Friends of Farnese
ok i don't care about the wire
sorry i am not as hip as you guys. too much else on my netflix. that said, great point Gaetano:
I know that I have been valued a lot more in my life, by a lot of people, than some of the folks Jennifer refers to, and despite whatever effort or hard work I have put into my own value, the reality is that 90% of what has happened to me is luck and privilege.
So that's why i am sort of wondering, besides just talking about how awful violence is, what would each of be willing to pay--to take away from our own value--to help solve the problem of rampant violence in our city.
And poverty, and a lack of a middle class.
I for one, would pay more in taxes if I there was a specific spending program that seemed like it was gonna make a dent. And I would give my time to help make that successful.
Last, before it gets lost in another Wire reference, let's not forget what Jennifer and Wilson Goode Sr. have both said: what does it mean when someone is shot in the back by cops?
A couple more specific things money or will could be spent on
I wish I had the totalizing answers to everything. But, aside from getting people out of our jails who don't need to be there (getting them away from all the destructive consequences of incarceration):
- Reforming the probation system and further expanding prisoner reentry support
This has, commendably, been the focus of Mayor Nutter and Councilman Goode. I will try to write at more length soon about past proposals for reform, where we are now, and what is possible.
- Getting every eligible child into a Head Start or early intervention program
I didn't dig them up right now but there are a lot of studies that show, as limited as school-based interventions usually are, very early exposure to these types of programs have very clear helpful returns. Only a fraction of eligible kids get in because there is not enough funding for the need.
- Trashing certain parts of No Child Left Behind and any inner-city curricula that aims to prepare students only for arbitrary standardized test measures and limited futures as low-level workers
I talked about this a bit when I made the mistake of taking Dan's Jonathan Kozol book to the beach this summer. He describes schools using curricula that would never, ever be used in well off areas and which literally stunt students' mental development and limits their ability to think critically about their world and social position. He shows us creating whole classes of kids who are being shut off from basic functions of being citizens.
And of course, all these come up--painfully--on The Wire. :)
Ray:
Are you asking, specifically, what we would do and/or give up to solve the problems that plague much of Philadelphia? Or are you just making a point.
I want to know what I'm getting into before I answer.
I am working to elect Larry Farnese to the General Assembly. Unless otherwise expressly stated, this and every comment or blog I post on YPP and any action I take hereon is solely attributable to me and not Farnese or Friends of Farnese
And another Wire corrollary
and here I have no final answers so please, god, don't ask for them.
But I mentioned 'rethinking how we police drug crime'. And one underlying point of the whole post is that a man's life is a huge, huge cost for a corner drug bust.
It's part of why police major Bunny Colvin, on the Wire, cordoned off a vacant block of his district and basically legalized the drug trade there. Buffered from the rest of the city, dealers weren't shooting each other, police weren't shooting dealers. And all the crime numbers went down, making all the others at COMPSTAT jealous.
Of course, people were still addicted and still suffering and dying from those addictions. That sad-comic thought experiment is not the answer. But for the same reason that the fictional mayor half-seriously considered figuring out how to preserve the experiment once news and outroar broke--the problem of the dysfunctionality of the way we police the drug trade is clear.
Love's me the Wire
As do lots of us who love cities like Baltimore and Philadelphia and who want to make them a better place to live and grow because it addresses real problems from city corruption to failing schools and policing efforts that sometimes do little provide a sense of real security to folks to living in the 'hoods that get passed by too often. Its by being a show that gives everyone from every angle a real humanity that distinguishes it from others that have dealt withcrime and urban ills before.
I'm even trying to cruise passed that post implying that those of us who sometimes differ strategically on the how (i.e city vs. state and federal) to address the conditions of urban dispair are somehow "obfuscators" with a smile.
To veer back on topic for a moment, dangerous overcrowding in our local jails by those too poor to make bail for minor offenses does not make any of us a lick safer and in many ways is counter-productive to stopping violence in our city. If we hit a point where mandatory early releases are ordered across the board because we have so failed the basic constitutional rights of the lowliest of offenders, we will have royally shot ourselves in the foot. And that day may be very, very soon.
Unfortunately, like insane sentencing disparities between crack and powder cocaine, its a problem that everyone acknowledges but is considered political suicide for anyone seeking elected office to address head on. Even the politically "easy" part, getting those who should be serving state time but are kept in dangerously overcrowded local facilities because of faulty counting of months of sentence doesn't make progress. Never mind policies that intervene to stop the cycle of addiction and repeat small time offenses with treatment.
How do we change the way people talk about this stuff to the point where its ok for politicians to talk about the solutions that can actually work? How do we put together the package to get broad based support at the state level, to show this is a situation that all of Pennsylvania can not afford to see any of its cities fail at?
What are the "real" solutions and what the solutions that will at least help that we can "sell" to rest of the state as mutually beneficial?
And Ray's and my threads come together...
City finance director Rob Dubow asked every city department to submit plans for a 5% budget reduction (and, alternately, a 3% reduction). The Inquirer comments: