David Simon on Baltimore’s Anguish

https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/04/29/david-simon-on-baltimore-s-anguish

by ekianjo • 11 years ago

85 41 11 years ago

nrao123• 11 years ago

David Simon is a national treasure. The Wire had lots of scenes on how metrics & incentives screwed up Baltimore city. Here is a great scene talking about metrics/stats from The Wire - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xH_6_8NOfwI

Article also refers to Martin Malley's ambition to be Maryland's governor that really screwed up the incentives and cooking of the books.

"How do you reward cops? Two ways: promotion and cash. That's what rewards a cop. If you want to pay overtime pay for having police fill the jails with loitering arrests or simple drug possession or failure to yield, if you want to spend your municipal treasure rewarding that, well the cop who’s going to court 7 or 8 days a month — and court is always overtime pay — you're going to damn near double your salary every month. On the other hand, the guy who actually goes to his post and investigates who's burglarizing the homes, at the end of the month maybe he’s made one arrest. It may be the right arrest and one that makes his post safer, but he's going to court one day and he's out in two hours. So you fail to reward the cop who actually does police work. But worse, it’s time to make new sergeants or lieutenants, and so you look at the computer and say: Who's doing the most work? And they say, man, this guy had 80 arrests last month, and this other guy’s only got one. Who do you think gets made sergeant? And then who trains the next generation of cops in how not to do police work? I’ve just described for you the culture of the Baltimore police department amid the deluge of the drug war, where actual investigation goes unrewarded and where rounding up bodies for street dealing, drug possession, loitering such – the easiest and most self-evident arrests a cop can make – is nonetheless the path to enlightenment and promotion and some additional pay. That’s what the drug war built, and that’s what Martin O’Malley affirmed when he sent so much of inner city Baltimore into the police wagons on a regular basis.

"When you say, end the drug war, you mean basically decriminalize or stop enforcing?

Medicalize the problem, decriminalize — I don't need drugs to be declared legal, but if a Baltimore State’s Attorney told all his assistant state’s attorneys today, from this moment on, we are not signing overtime slips for court pay for possession, for simple loitering in a drug-free zone, for loitering, for failure to obey, we’re not signing slips for that: Nobody gets paid for that bullshit, go out and do real police work. If that were to happen, then all at once, the standards for what constitutes a worthy arrest in Baltimore would significantly improve. Take away the actual incentive to do bad or useless police work, which is what the drug war has become.

jokoon• 11 years ago

Yeah, legalizing heroin is not going to fix the problem, medicalizing it might cost a lot, and you won't be able to compete with drugs dealers. Users might buy from dealers anyway.

If you want to remove the dealer's profits, you have to compete with drug dealers, but it has to be healthy, you have to treat users and remove the incentive to use drugs, and it's a very tricky thing to do.

I really don't know how to do this, but it boils down to the same problem of unemployment and crime. How do you integrate people into a healthy social model ? Poverty and economic opportunity is still at the root of the problem.

soylentcola2• 11 years ago

At the very least, I feel like not throwing someone in jail for being a drug addict or smalltime dealer would be a good start. Too many people resort to drugs to escape despair (if only temporarily) or poverty (through working the only business that seems to be "hiring" in your town). Addressing the root causes of this is indeed difficult, but you exacerbate the problem when those same people who need solutions are saddled with criminal records for life.

ryandrake• 11 years ago

Measuring a police officer's performance by number of arrests is like measuring a developer's performance by number of lines of code.

bobwaycott• 11 years ago

In which you could learn a thing or two about how "policing" works in Baltimore. Or, in which you could learn who the other "thugs" are.

Way too many people across the internet think they can accurately and justifiably levy blame on parents, kids, criminals, communities, rioters, etc., all the while granting massive, unquestioning benefit-of-the-doubt to the police. Decades of brutal and unconstitutional policing in Baltimore is just as much a part of the equation here.

I'd run, too, if I lived in this shit show. I'd riot when the anger, fear, rage, and hate boiled to the surface after yet another man met his last day on earth at the hands of the authorities. I wouldn't tell my kids they have nothing to fear if they just obey the law. I wouldn't tell my spouse they have nothing to fear if they just comply with the police. I wouldn't feel safe and secure when I saw a cop. I wouldn't feel comfortable knowing I "have nothing to hide". I wouldn't judge the guy I see with a rap sheet when I know that rap sheet was built from arrests by cops who get paid overtime for arrests, who aren't subjected to any rigorous accountability, who get to invent "probable cause". I wouldn't sit around smugly thinking those who are victimized by abuses of power "must have deserved it". I certainly wouldn't dare judge with ignorant superiority people who live in a shit-hole where drugs and crime are how one survives. I would know the cops can't be trusted--I'd see it every day of my whole life.

And yet few try to understand having to live like that. They judge from white skin on comfortable suburban couches and fancy phones in nice neighborhoods that have not been brutalized by badges for decades.

Understand the way you see and experience life and the world around you has nothing at all to do with the way life is or even can be for anybody else. Understand that your experiences in life do not in any way translate to being actual, persistent properties of reality everywhere. Understand life in middle-class white America, and all the privilege that comes with it and protects you, doesn't in any way translate to the existence experienced by others elsewhere. Hell, it might not even translate to the existence of those in your own neighborhood.

Or, you know, don't bother to understand it. That's your choice. But do the nation and the victims of these horrid conditions a solid, and just don't speak about what people who live in areas infested by unaccountable and tyrannical brutal cops should do when another person they know is arrested with a high probability of bogus "probable cause". Or charged with fabricated crimes to serve a political and social agenda. Or beaten and otherwise abused unnecessarily--but, of course, after the officer has yelled the appropriate ass-covering phrases that make all the white people think they couldn't possibly be bullshitting or abusing their power. Or killed. Or all of the above.

Remember the 60s, when white people saw horrific violence on their TVs, and it shocked them out of their decades-long stupor and prompted them to get off their asses, and get into the streets with those who were being brutalized by badges? They didn't sit back and tell themselves the people on the bridge in Selma were asking for it. They didn't say the victims must have deserved it. They didn't excuse the police brutality. It sucks to say it, but that was a turning point moment that legitimized the civil rights struggle in the national consciousness in a way that had not been so before. The brutality was televised, and the people woke up.

In a nation built on and for privilege, shit doesn't change much until those with privilege stand up.

Another man died at the hands of the police. His life was extinguished by something they did. He's never going to draw another breath, while those responsible for his death still breathe. There are people who love him who will never see him again. Never hold him again. Never hug him. Never kiss him. Never pat him on the back. Never hear his thoughts.

Our moral compasses are completely fucked when meaningless, inanimate, material shit being damaged and destroyed ranks as a higher concern more worthy of conversation and cameras than yet another man's life being taken with impunity by those with a badge.

Kaizyn5• 11 years ago

America was founded on the rule of law and respect for authority. Rioting and any other violent means are simply inexcusable under any circumstances. We have non-violent means to redress problems with the political and civil leadership. These people in Baltimore should be met with overwhelming (and lethal if necessary) force by the government. If the city is incapable of restoring order, then the national guard needs to be called in to do the job.

pjc506• 11 years ago

And that's why America was founded by the non-violent and peaceful process of legal independence. And when there was a dispute as to whether state independence included the right to keep other humans as slaves, that was resolved without recourse to violence, leading to an America where nobody need fear for their life due to the colour of their skin.

Singletoned2• 11 years ago

Surely if America was founded on the rule of law and respect for authority, they wouldn't have committed treason and overthrown the King?

It would seem to me that America was very much founded on the opposite. A lot of the constitution seems to be focussed on limiting the power of law, not limiting the power of the people (the right to bear arms being the clearest example).

privong• 11 years ago

We have non-violent means to redress problems with the political and civil leadership.

I am not advocating violence, but in your mind, what should people do when (many of) those non-violent means of redress are ineffective at solving the problems?

silentmars• 11 years ago

You are perhaps trolling/satiring but there are certainly people who feel this way, even if they don't state it in such up-front absurd ways.

Our founders responded to taxes they didn't like by seizing the contents of cargo ships and dumping them into Boston Harbor. If we described that in the same terms as many are talking about Baltimore, the headline would read, "rioters loot ships, smash cargo".

Compare the circumstances: "the government is taxing us and we don't like it" vs. "the government is killing us with impunity."

America was founded on a fundamental distrust of government, and certainly not on the idea that law and order is of higher importance than justice and liberty. "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants," is what America is about. When agents of government are systematically brutalizing and killing people, America is not a "sit back and ask nicely for it to stop" kind of country. America has always been about taking it to the streets

It's white hypocrisy alone that lets us pretend that if the situation were reversed and whites were the victims of this kind of pervasive government brutality, we would be just sitting at home and drinking tea while writing letters to the editor and blanching at the thought of doing anything violent. Bullshit! We used to do this all the time, until we set up minorities to take the abuse for us.

cgearhart• 11 years ago

Surely you're joking.

America was founded on the rule of law and respect for authority.

Are we talking about the same nation that was formed in an armed rebellion against a monarchy?

These people in Baltimore...

Which people, exactly? As in, how many mistakes are you willing to tolerate as the authorities attempt to positively identify and subdue just the rioters?

...should be met with overwhelming (and lethal if necessary) force by the government.

So your solution to a problem that started when authorities allowed a citizen to die in their custody is to double down and wield more violence against those citizens -- and then to raise the stakes by dropping all pretext of justice and simply killing everyone involved in order to bring them back in line?

I honestly hope you're trolling -- the alternative is terrifying.

pdkl95• 11 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis

Those "non-violent means to redress problems" work great in theory. I would even agree that society ought[1] to work that way. Unfortunately, a working political[2] system is not a fundamental law of nature. Far too many people seem to think it is, which leads to the common belief that the law on paper has any reliable mapping to what happen in reality.

[1] somebody call Hume

[2] or economic

drawkbox• 11 years ago

David Simon on why he created The Wire and set it in Baltimore: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYXNdELqCe4

bshimmin• 11 years ago

I love David Simon's writing (and "The Wire" is the best thing ever to be on TV, in my opinion), but I was unable to read this article because the secondary navigation ("Popular on Facebook" ... "Q&A", etc) which kept swooping in every time I scrolled up drove me utterly insane. The fact that the actual text was overly large and offset strangely to the right also did not help.

Why do people have to ruin content in this way?!

Singletoned2• 11 years ago

I agree with the first bit, but I use a JS blocker and had no problems reading it as none of those things happened. You should definitely try one if that really bothers you.

humanrebar3• 11 years ago

I don't see the political monoculture mentioned in any analysis about Baltimore, New York, St. Louis, Detroit, etc. These cities have been basically one party rule for fifty years (or more). If the police become too brutal or incentives become perverse, the party is not thrown out of office. If the mayor or council members are shown to be corrupt, the party is not thrown out of office. There's no real accountability.

To be clear, I don't think the problem is unique to big cities. Political monoculture certainly happens in rural areas, but the tragedies out there (even more extreme poverty, lack of opportunity, population decline, meth epidemic) aren't seen as acute for whatever reason. I do think the problem is that, at some level, you can't credibly say "You messed up -- the other party gets a shot at running things" in much (most?) of the country.

To some degree, the problem is the two-party system. If the district is liberal (as is the case in Baltimore), there needs to be at least two credible liberal alternatives. Maybe it's time to consider making room for more parties, for the benefit of local communities if nothing else.

brownbat• 11 years ago

the party is not thrown out of office

Where I grew up, we had two radically oppositional factions that just happened to wear the same label during national elections.

The number of viable parties isn't always a good measure of political diversity or the capacity for churn in government.

Maybe they're correlated in Baltimore, though, I'm less sure there. City governments have fewer moving parts, so they can get captured by a strong network of insiders and the network can stay in power for decades.

pjc506• 11 years ago

This would definitely help. The only way to a multiparty system is non-FPTP voting; one of the preferential schemes like STV.

Local government is often bad in a lot of countries, but one of the things about America is that its sheer size makes it unlikely that the national or state government will take it upon itself to "fix" a broken regional or city government. And if it did it would be objected to on principle.

maxerickson3• 11 years ago

I think a less controversial step in the right direction is to make it easier for randos to get on the ballot.

There can still be some rules about how many people appear on the ballot for a given election, but in a single party area, it should be possible for a challenger to get on the ballot simply by collecting the second most signatures (and the party should not have any sort of ballot persistence either, they should be on equal footing with the randos).

rayiner• 11 years ago

Another problem is progressive taxation in cities with massive wealth inequality. In theory police work for the public, but I think they recognize that it's a small percentage of the public that's actually paying their salaries. And I think that sets the stage for how they treat everyone else.

mkempe• 11 years ago

If we are going to have this debate, I'd like to hear about large American cities that have been run exclusively by Republicans --not Democrats-- for the last 50-90 years, and then we can compare corruption levels, crime rates, institutional racism, etc. (It could be a bit like comparing East and West Germany before the fall of the Wall. Or North vs South Korea today. Or not.)

edit: for instance, an article in National Review [1] claims the root of the problem is one particular party's domination of these large cities.

[1] http://www.nationalreview.com/article/417601/riot-plagued-ba...

humanrebar3• 11 years ago

I'd like to hear about large American cities that have been run exclusively by Republicans

They don't really exist; the political split in the U.S. is more urban/rural than red state blue state. The big cities in otherwise red Southern states like Texas, Louisiana, and Georgia are thoroughly Democratic (though perhaps in a different flavor than northern Democrats). People that have lived in those states know that's true. People that haven't lived in those states need to travel around the country more.

You can find Republican cities in the U.S., but you'd be looking at medium-to-small cities, depending on where you care to draw the line. And those cities are either fast-growing (newly sizable) or competitive politically. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/11/red-stat...

Like I said above, there are bad symptoms in any political monoculture. But the problems seem to present differently in urban and rural areas for whatever reason. There are huge problems in rural areas to be sure, like I listed above. In especially poor rural areas, drug abuse and the poverty trap is on par with any inner city, if not worse, like I mentioned above.

admiun• 11 years ago

Good point, I found that quite interesting too. He mentions Martin O'Malley as the person responsible in some degree and then follows with this quote:

"And, hey, if he's the Democratic nominee, I’m going to end up voting for him."

So while in the primaries he might vote for someone else, in the general he will vote for the person responsible for a lot of the issues described in the article. which is quite saddening but understandable.

justin662• 11 years ago

Let me preface this by saying that I think having a third party oriented towards the interests and desires of people who live in cities would be totally, completely great.

I don't see the political monoculture mentioned in any analysis about Baltimore, New York, St. Louis, Detroit, etc. These cities have been basically one party rule for fifty years (or more). If the police become too brutal or incentives become perverse, the party is not thrown out of office. If the mayor or council members are shown to be corrupt, the party is not thrown out of office. There's no real accountability.

This is off in a couple of ways. First, in cities where everyone avoids the Republican candidates, the real election is the primary. Or else you just save time and have a nonpartisan election. There are usually a number of points of view represented on the half dozen or so topics that city voters tend to care about.

More importantly, I think: corruption and culpability tends to cut across party lines in city and county government. As much as the two parties are very similar flavors at the state and national level, at the local level the differences just don't matter. You've got an office to fulfill, you've got people you need to work with, you've got corruption, and you are either an insider or an outsider. That is the distinction that matters, not party. People who play the game choose to be insiders because it's the only way you get anywhere. When corruption happens, Democrats and Republicans all get paid, or suffer if they do not conform.

In other words, the traditional party discipline dynamic tends to get replaced by a whole other form of discipline. brownbat mentioned a "network of insiders" below, that's what I'm talking about.

To some degree, the problem is the two-party system. If the district is liberal (as is the case in Baltimore), there needs to be at least two credible liberal alternatives.

O'Malley was up against six other people in the Democratic primary in Baltimore in 1999. There were a diversity of views represented. The views probably all tended to suck, but I don't think that has as much to do with party organization as you think it does.

David Simon on Baltimore’s Anguish

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