Police State, USA

22 thoughts on Police State, USA

1. Is this something they are doing all at once, or are they targeting specific neighborhoods perhaps individually for a period up to 10 days?

   Sounds like politics like most short-term suppression type policing is.

2. Yeah, I think the “targeting” is a big issue here… I live in an area of DC that is adjacent to some of the areas being talked about as, um, “Neighborhood Safety Zones.” I think it’s safe to say that I, as a middle class, white woman, would be very unlikely to be stopped by police just for walking in an area near my apartment.
   I am really concerned about the uptick in violence in DC, but I can’t believe this is the best solution that Lanier & co. could come up with! Additional foot and car patrols in these neighborhoods could accomplish the same objective without violating any one’s freedom of movement.

3. You know the Examiner is a racist, right-wing paper, right?

4. eh, public perception of safety and the publics belief in the constitution will always conflict when things look grim, should be interesting to see this play out. Reading this reminded me of “the siege” and thats definitely not a good thing.

5. Not even sure what to say about this:

   Wow. I’d never thought I would see the day when an American city….the capital, no less….would be turned into a military occupation zone not too far removed from how the Imperial Japanese military forces occupied Chinese cities my older uncles resided in as young adolescents during the Second Sino-Japanese War.

   As it is, law enforcement personnel are too eager to arrest anyone for even a perception of disrespect or verbal disagreement….even when it is part of our constitutional rights. This is as far removed from our society’s purported ideals as one can get. 🙁

6. My guess is they’re not interested in keeping the violence out.

   They’re interested in keeping it in. Ignoring the crime within “certain” communities, especially domestic, drugs, and prostitution, merely focused on keeping their image as safe when in reality all they’re doing is attaking a single neighborhood.

   This happens “under the radar” in many cities (I happen to know of a few “containment” neighborhoods in Minneapolis…is it a big coincidence that one of them is half occupied by an urban reservation?); they’re just stepping up an old method by requiring ID of everyone coming into the neighborhood(rather than just the people they decide to target). But don’t fool yourself; this is already happening all around us. It’s just a way to harrass the inhabitants of that neighborhood to keep them afraid of authority while at the same time doing nothing for the people in that neighborhood who live under crime and exploitation every day.

7. My guess is they’re not interested in keeping the violence out.

   My thoughts exactly. This is just a hop, skip, and a jump away from just having the officers turn around and question the business of everyone who’s trying to leave an area.

   And if it’s not just to harass and intimidate and perform shady, quasi-legal surveillance and searches… then what purpose does it serve at all? Are they really going to stop people who don’t have “legitimate reason” to go into a neighborhood? Almost anyone can come up with a legitimate reason, like going to shop at a store in the area, visiting a friend who lives on Oak Street, whatever. That’s not how they’re going to decide to arrest people at checkpoints; they’re going to profile them.

   And if that doesn’t work to constrain all the traffic through an area in an airport-security like scheme, what next? Build a fence around the whole area, maybe? The word “ghetto” gets closer to its roots all the time.

   In my neighborhood, they just have checkpoints like this at the subway station, where they profile people who want to go through the turnstiles on the excuse that they need to search your bag for terrorist threats. You don’t have to submit to a search, but then you’re not allowed to go into that subway station, and have to walk to the next one. And it sure as hell isn’t random, let me tell you that. I’ve only been stopped once (and refused, and was fifteen minutes late for a meeting) but I’ve never seen some types of people being searched, and definitely seen others.

8. This reminds me of the checkpoints that I’ve passed through in southern Arizona and New Mexico. The US government has checkpoints stationed on major roads, many, many miles inside of the US-Mexico boarder. As a white, English speaking woman, I usually get waved through without even stopping. I kind of doubt other folks traveling these roads pass through so easily.

   It seems that patrolling US boarders is becoming generalized to include more than the political boarders that define the outer geography of the country. It’s really creepy and quite indicative of the common prejudicial notions that undergird classism, racism, and xenophobia.

9. Holy SHIT. This is insanity.

10. This is not my country. 🙁 At least, it isn’t the one I thought I was getting when I studied all that American history.

    So — who gets to protest this shit? And where? ‘Cause that nonsense is getting a little too close to certain fascist regimes for my comfort, even out here in the Midwest. Or maybe I should protest the ones in my own city first. *hangs head in shame at not knowing about the ‘containment’ neighborhoods in Mpls.*

11. Laurie, I guess you read the sanitized histories.

    (There’s also an old news photo out there of mounted police chasing down student demonstrators in Central Park like Kossacks during the late 60s or early 70s which I’ve seen linked on blogs over the years, but I can’t track it down at the moment.)

12. Nothing ever new, not even in our lifetimes. (Found one of them: I [?mis?] remember another picture with several older kids, one of them female, from a different angle.)

13. How are the police supposed to determine who is a stranger and who belongs? It’s not like people have community ID cards. This is a stupid waste of money…like most of the latest edicts to come out of Washington, D. C.

14. Atlanta did the same thing during the height of the crack wars in the late 80s/early 90s: the Red Dogs. Antidrug squads who sealed off entire neighborhoods, searched cars going in and out of the area, searched people for walking down the street.

    Many of the residents didn’t mind – the neighborhoods had gotten so dangerous that meter readers and mailmen flat out refused to go into them. I lived next to the Techwood projects in those days, and I’ll tell you that there were nightly gunbattles going on. The Red Dogs may have stretched the 4th amendment out of recognition, but the neighborhoods were calmed.

    Most of those projects have since been torn down and replaced with mixed-income housing – always fewer units than there were before. The Red Dogs are still around.

15. Yeah, I live in DC and as much as I think this is a stupid and ineffective and quasi-constitutional program by MPDC, there were seven or eight shootings in a couple neighborhoods last weekend, and I suspect that quite a few of the residents of these neighborhoods are in favor. I think two of the people shot were caught in cross-fire or were innocent passerby of some kind.

    I’m not sure that MPDC deserves the benefit of the doubt on this, but I do wonder what folks who do live inside those couple neighborhoods. think about it all.

16. We had much smaller scale suppression in my city for several neighborhoods. No checkpoints but pretty aggressive traffic stops and the police would always say, we stopped this car and look what we found! Guns! Drugs! But they would never mention the 10 or so cars they stopped that just carried residents or their families. Many people think they’re between a rock and a hard place. Not wanting the violence, but not wanting their rights forfeited or police harassment either.

    And it doesn’t address crimes within a neighborhood, as has been stated.

    But on its face, this strategy isn’t effective at least at addressing crime. Certainly, not for anything but short-term. More like people have said, keeping it inside.

    Out west, when you hear the term, “neighborhood safety zone” used, you think more along the line of injunctions.

    I wonder if these are the officers working in D.C. that will be assigned to the checkpoints.

17. I also live in DC, in a neighborhood adjacent to this one. I agree with Sappho that this is probably not going to do a hill of beans worth of good, but I doubt there’s a lot of people in the neighborhood against it. I think it’s very easy for people who do not live in neighborhoods like Trinidad to cry foul when something like this offends their constitutional sensibilities, and I used to be no different. However, living in this city and seeing neighborhoods overwhelmingly full of law-abiding, honest people turn into war zones will challenge even a very staunch liberal. I want a safe neighborhood, and I know my neighbors want the same thing. We’re sick of the crime, and horrified at the idea of innocent people getting wrapped up in this crap. I don’t think this will do much good, but I can’t fault the effort.

18. However, living in this city and seeing neighborhoods overwhelmingly full of law-abiding, honest people turn into war zones will challenge even a very staunch liberal. I want a safe neighborhood, and I know my neighbors want the same thing. We’re sick of the crime, and horrified at the idea of innocent people getting wrapped up in this crap. I don’t think this will do much good, but I can’t fault the effort.

    Though I may not have lived in neighborhoods with police checkpoints and cordons, I’ve had many African-American and Latino scholarship classmates, especially males who were glad to get out of such neighborhoods precisely because they felt caught in the vise between being victims of violent crime and being constantly profiled and harassed by the police who cared more for throwing their weight around rather than actually helping to stem the violent crimes.

    Please don’t paint us all as sheltered people who never lived in a high crime area as that’s assuming a lot. I lived in a crime-ridden urban working class neighborhood that was suffering from the effects of the 80’s crime/crack epidemic and some of my childhood friends were killed as a result.

    Moreover, I know from some family members’ experiences living under Japanese colonial occupation and under a totalitarian Communist regime that checkpoints and cordons are often more useful in controlling the local population so the state could ensure their conformity to its policies/orthodoxy with minimal effort.

    That was precisely the kind of society my family were escaping when they emigrated here and as someone who has taken the lessons from their experiences seriously, I am still sometimes stunned at how clueless many Americans are of the disturbing totalitarian implications of such practices.

19. I live three blocks from one of the “neighborhood safe zones” in DC (Rosedale neighborhood), and many of these comments are completely off-base.

    The MPDC are not trying to keep people in, they are legitimately trying to prevent crime. 7-8 people were killed in a one mile radius last weekend, which is absolutely ridiculous for a city in America, much less the nation’s capital. My roommate works at a school in this neighborhood that regularly has to go on lock-down, or worse, close early because of threats of violence when the middle school is supposed to let out. Often the administration doesn’t know of a threat until students just get up and start leaving the classrooms, saying “I don’t want to get killed.”

    The people of these neighborhoods deserve peace and safety. Who knows if the “safety zones” will work, but at least the MPDC are giving it a shot, as opposed to other cities who shall remain nameless…

20. Bellatrys:
    I’m hoping you find this reply, since I was off-line for a few days. 🙂

    Thanks for the links. I am actually of the generation that didn’t *get* to study most of the 1960s in school (yeah, I’m a lazy history freak, and my favorite periods are WAAAAY earlier). For whatever reason, those of us in school in the 70s and 80s had our American history stop short with the escalation of the Vietnam War. In fact, it wasn’t until fairly recently that I knew that it had been building for *years* as a nasty.convoluted situation with military advisors and troops placed for “police action” (although I’d heard that term before). We just never got that information any of the three times I studied American History in elementary/high school, and sadly, I’m not sure where to start now. I am aware that the protests of the time were often repressed, sometimes violently. Just not aware of the many instances, apparently.

    I was referring more to the principles that this country was *supposed* to have been founded on (yeah — I know that has been mythologized too), and the fact that the kind of control being exerted over those neighborhoods comes very close to some of the excesses that the British troops indulged in back before we WERE a country. Sorry for not being clear! 🙂 Please feel free to e-mail me directly if you have any further comments you’d like to make — I give my permission to have my address handed over to you for that purpose.

21. Though I may not have lived in neighborhoods with police checkpoints and cordons, I’ve had many African-American and Latino scholarship classmates, especially males who were glad to get out of such neighborhoods precisely because they felt caught in the vise between being victims of violent crime and being constantly profiled and harassed by the police who cared more for throwing their weight around rather than actually helping to stem the violent crimes.

    A vice is a good choice of words.

    Exactly. That the price of a “safe” neighborhood means getting stopped by the police not just once but often dozens of times. To the point where many parents send their young sons to other relatives to live not just because they might get shot and killed by gang members and drug dealers, but because of all the hassling and what could be worse, by police. Parents don’t mind their kids getting stopped once or twice to be profiled or checked by police, it’s when it is repeatedly or their children are treated with disrespect.

    There’s a lot of problems with the D.C. plan especially when it comes to dealing with crime over the long term and not just a five day period here and there.

    If you have three or four roads into a neighborhood and have checkpoints for vehicles on one and no checkpoints for pedestrians then this is for show. Yes, for show because if outside criminals want to get in, they’ll go around the checkpoints. If they want to go in and buy drugs from dealers or supply them, they will get in. If they want to go and shoot up someone or someones, they will get in. Criminals are known for doing things like that. Or they can wait out the short stint of the checkpoint, since it’s impossible to keep them going for very long for financial reasons.

    And sometimes crime that might happen in a “safety zone” will be pushed to areas around it. I remember there was a lockdown of a neighborhood next to where I live, and the next thing I know there was a massive movement of guns outside of that neighborhood into mine and the homicide rate in my neighborhood went up fairly quickly. Fortunately I was out of town the day some guy got shot and died several feet away from the stairway to my apartment. That’s not uncommon for areas hit with gang injunctions as well.

    They might work best when it’s a smaller area that gets hit by mostly outside crime and has one way in and out and pedestrians and motorists were screened. But this program doesn’t sound like that.

    Also checkpoints do little to address the majority of most crime which is within neighborhoods. Even in cities like Los Angeles when they had high homicide rates, a lot of those crimes were domestic crimes. If you have gangs or factions of gangs within a neighborhood, then it’s not going to impact them, because again if they have people outside, they’ll get inside around the checkpoints. And if you have a lot of crime in a small area like a square mile, it’s more than likely that the criminals who are causing that are already in the neighborhood.

    It’s partly because operations like this one are very costly, and that’s why they’re done for very brief periods of time (the five days listed here for example) not to mention that even people who feel victimized by violent crime and support police efforts get upset at police actions, and about a week or so after a short-term major suppression effort like this is when complaints start coming in.

    I’m for fighting crime in part because I have lived in the middle of it. I’ve had more guns pointed my way even by children than I can count. Shootings nearly nightly. Drug dealing and prostitution everywhere. Lived on top of drug dealers and gun dealers. Had friends or their relatives shot and killed and so forth. But one thing that I’ve learned and studies seem to back it is that suppression tactics like these can perhaps bring a reprieve on crime but the longer they are used, the more neighbors they alienate even those who initially supported these efforts and at best it’s a short term fix to say, okay look we’ve fixed our murder rate problem so you can feel free and safe enough to bring your tourists dollars back to our city. But crime is a much tougher problem to deal with than that and tied into so many other things that suppression doesn’t address or may even worsen.

22. My roommate works at a school in this neighborhood that regularly has to go on lock-down, or worse, close early because of threats of violence when the middle school is supposed to let out. Often the administration doesn’t know of a threat until students just get up and start leaving the classrooms, saying “I don’t want to get killed.”

    Here, the students who walk home from school have to be escorted by adults most of the way to avoid being jumped or attacked. This, in the middle of a “safety zone” that’s got one gang injunction (of which people were split, partly because of two gangs, only received an injunction). It hasn’t made them feel any safer, because the problems on the streets with animosities and rivalries are also within the schools.

    The MPDC are not trying to keep people in, they are legitimately trying to prevent crime. 7-8 people were killed in a one mile radius last weekend, which is absolutely ridiculous for a city in America, much less the nation’s capital.</blockquote.

    Why is it much less for the nation’s capitol? I’m not picking on you, it’s just that I think that’s playing a large role behind the rationale of this kind of drastic suppression operation.

    It’s like in L.A. when there’s been murders in southern and eastern sections for ages and then someone gets caught in the crossfire of gangfire in West L.A. and the mayor, the police chief and the representing council man or woman are standing before the cameras and saying, about “it can’t happen in our city” meaning West L.A. whereas it’s been going on in the city.

    It may or may not quiet things down for a short duration but long-term, it will no impact at all. And as hard as it is to deal with, addressing crime on a long-term level where a neighborhood feels empowered and stake holders in the process and not just plundits that are told how they will be policed, is the only way to effect change. And that’s actually working in some pretty hard hit places in California at least.

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