Matt Taibbi has produced what we all expect from him, an in-your-face analysis of a social issue. This time, in the latest Rolling Stone, it’s a commentary on what happened during the lead-up to the protests in Baltimore. His lead-in is powerful:
“When Baltimore exploded in protests a few weeks ago following the unexplained paddy-wagon death of a young African-American man named Freddie Gray, America responded the way it usually does in a race crisis: It changed the subject.
“Instead of using the incident to talk about a campaign of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of illegal searches and arrests across decades of discriminatory policing policies, the debate revolved around whether or not the teenagers who set fire to two West Baltimore CVS stores after Gray’s death were ‘thugs,’ or merely wrongheaded criminals.”
Taibbi notes that the debate has also focused on policing, as though the issue would be addressed with more body cameras (as Baltimore has already committed to provide) and better police training as opposed to dealing with “poverty, race, abuse, all that depressing inner city stuff.”
“Body cameras won’t fix it,” he writes. “You can’t put body cameras on a system.”
It is systemic across the nation, he says, and not just in Baltimore, though the stories he cites from Baltimore are horrendous:
“Go to any predominantly minority neighborhood in any major American city and you’ll hear the same stories: decades of being sworn at, thrown against walls, kicked, searched without cause, stripped naked on busy city streets, threatened with visits from child protective services, chased by dogs, and arrested and jailed not merely on false pretenses, but for reasons that often don’t even rise to the level of being stupid.”
He describes policing against inner city blacks as the equivalent of South Africa in the 1980s, but invisible to most white people because they “have literally no social interactions with black people, so they don’t hear about this every day.”
Taibbi puts much of the blame—and devotes much of his article to—the “Broken Windows” theory of policing that took hold under New York City police commissioner Bill Bratton during Rudy Giuliani’s terms as New York City mayor. He calls it “organized harassment” that had little or no impact on the crime rate. He goes through a variety of specifics of abusive police behavior, including an interesting story about one mayor who was as obsessed with Broken Windows metrics as anyone, former Baltimore mayor and now presidential candidate Martin O’Malley. In Baltimore, at the peak of the implementation of this strategy in 2005, 108,000 of the city’s 600,000 residents had been arrested, he says, a figure that seems incredibly high and hard to validate. Nonetheless, Taibbi’s point is that in this kind of policing system, huge numbers of citizens have formal encounters with the police even when they have done nothing to warrant police intervention.
The problem is that Taibbi’s analysis, brilliant, incisive, and deftly written, is long on why the police strategies employed in Baltimore and elsewhere are counterproductive, but short on options for the future—other than implicitly getting rid of this kind of policing. But what to put in its place?
Continued.
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Originally Posted by Joseph Svinth
