David Simon on Baltimore’s Anguish
themarshallproject.org
themarshallproject.org
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.
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.
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.
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).
I could be wrong, though.
A simple alternative would be to only allow people to publicly attest that they believe someone to be a worthwhile candidate (that is, sign a ballot petition, with no limitation on the number of such signatures). There is probably some problem there with minority views getting representation on the ballots, but I guess in the cases where that problem would be egregious the minority representation on the ballot would tend to anyway be irrelevant.
A first pass at the rules for picking from many petitions would be to always take 3, and then to also always take all the petitions that had "similar" numbers of signatures (I haven't thought about what a good test for similarity would be, but it would be something like taking the number of signatures collected by the #3 petitioner and taking all the ballots that were above some floor function of that value (like, nearest multiple of 10, or 1/2 that value, or...).
That way the inside baseball of the majority party doesn't end up being the thing that actually decides the election. Which overlaps with your statement about multiple credible candidates up for election, I'm expanding my thoughts here because it isn't clear to me how your reply relates to what I said (I don't mean that as a slight, just that I don't see the connection clearly).
This rarely matters - FPTP focuses the vote on the big parties - but there have been a few cases where a well-loved local MP has fallen out with his party and got himself elected independently.
What has hugely disrupted politics of Great Britain is the establishment of the devolved governments with non-FPTP voting systems.
A statewide party can be established by collecting 32,261 signatures (with some rules about how the signatures are distributed).
So I'm basically advocating to discard any advantage that is handed to existing parties and making the signature requirements slightly more dynamic (if someone comes in 3rd in any signature gathering contest, I don't see any reason to exclude them from the ballot).
That's actually a little shocking. I'm not sure I agree with making signature requirements "dynamic" but something obvious as this should certainly be changed. It's a rule only a party official could love.
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...
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.
"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.
> 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.
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.
/s
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).
Not to mention that until Loving v. Virginia inter-racial marriage was unlawful. Presumably the enforcement of that would not itself count as "unlawful tyranny"? Despite actually being a serious impairment to social freedom.
(The 2nd amendment setup is in practice very different to the model of Switzerland, and is used to justify private gun ownership for private security reasons and private fears of black crime, not public/state security)
Edit on lawfulness: man fires unregistered handgun into crowd, kills one injures one, is not convicted of anything. Guess why. http://crookedtimber.org/2015/04/28/no-justice-for-rekia-boy...
We're at that point.
From the article:
> It used to be said — correctly — that the patrolman on the beat on any American police force was the last perfect tyranny. Absent a herd of reliable witnesses, there were things he could do to deny you your freedom or kick your ass that were between him, you, and the street. The smartphone with its small, digital camera, is a revolution in civil liberties.
Unlawful government tyranny, in the form of cops doing whatever they want, is exactly what the riots are about.
(Also, rule of law and respect for authority come into direct conflict when the authorities act unlawfully, which is what you're covering for)
Even the Declaration of Independence occurred via a vote of the government. And it was written as an indictment against the King. It made legal arguments. He was violating their rights as English subjects.
Americans have a very strong respect for the rule of law. The Supreme Court is unelected, has no power, no money, no army, no police force or agents to carry out it's will. Yet it the absolute final word and Americans follow it.
The constitution isn't an example of the limitation of the power of law, it's the greatest example of the extreme power the law has in America. The rule of law is so strong that the constitution (a law) can override the will of the President, the congress and the people.
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?
I'm not excusing violence or suggesting that it is productive...but I get it. Human beings have tipping points. It's different for every individual but when pressure builds and crowds start moving, brawls and riots aren't uncommon to see. This happens even when people are happy about something (like a home team winning a championship game).
So you can imagine that when the media starts freaking out and spreading some viral "meme" about planned riots and sends in a couple hundred riot cops (and a tank!) to corral a couple hundred high school kids at their bus stop, preventing them from going home, there might just be some of those people who are a little more pissed off than the rest and have a little less impulse control and decide to start throwing water bottles and rocks.
And once shit starts rolling that way and the situation escalates, you can see why some people who might have been shit on and beaten up by cops all their life might just see this as a chance to hit back.
So you get a few hundred cops fighting with a few hundred pissed off citizens and the broken cars and windows we all saw on TV.
But those few hundred people who went the violent route are still a few hundred out of tens of thousands who live here. The vast majority of us (many of which have had it MUCH better than the people in West Baltimore) haven't been angry or frustrated enough to resort to violence. Thousands of us have marched and petitioned and protested. But it doesn't surprise me in the least that for a few hundred of us, a bat to the cop car seemed like a bit of payback for generations of a boot to the throat.
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.
Blacks lined up to protect the Police in Baltimore because they realize, unlike SJWs, that most violence against blacks is done by black criminals, like the rioters.
> 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.
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
Why do people have to ruin content in this way?!
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.
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.