What’s Good Enough for Fallujah Is Good Enough For DC
Joshua Foust on Jun 05 2008 at 5:00 pm | Filed under: Domestic Politics
One of the strongest arguments against current COIN doctrine has been made by the anonymous blogger Fabius Maximus—namely, that if we are so great at engineering societies we can write a slim manual about it, why haven’t we done so in our inner cities? He points out today that we’re now trying exactly that.
Under an executive order expected to be announced today, police Chief Cathy L. Lanier will have the authority to designate “Neighborhood Safety Zones.” At least six officers will man cordons around those zones and demand identification from people coming in and out of them. Anyone who doesn’t live there, work there or have “legitimate reason” to be there will be sent away or face arrest, documents obtained by The Examiner show.
Lanier has been struggling to reverse D.C.’s spiraling crime rate but has been forced by public outcry to scale back several initiatives including her “All Hands on Deck” weekends and plans for warrantless, door-to-door searches for drugs and guns.
Under today’s proposal, the no-go zones will last up to 10 days, according to internal police documents. Front-line officers are already being signed up for training on running the blue curtains. Peter Nickles, the city’s interim attorney general, said the quarantine would have “a narrow focus.” “This is a very targeted program that has been used in other cities,” Nickles told The Examiner. “I’m not worried about the constitutionality of it.”
Others are. Kristopher Baumann, chairman of the D.C. police union and a former lawyer, called the checkpoint proposal “breathtaking.” Shelley Broderick, president of the D.C.-area American Civil Liberties Union and the dean of the University of the District of Columbia’s law school, said the plan was “cockamamie.” “I think they tried this in Russia and it failed,” she said. “It’s just our experience in this city that we always end up targeting poor people and people of color, and we treat the kids coming home from choir practice the same as we treat those kids who are selling drugs.”
The proposal has the provisional support of D.C. Councilman Harry “Tommy” Thomas, D-Ward 5, whose ward has become a war zone. “They’re really going to crack down on what we believe to be a systemic problem with open-air drug markets,” Thomas told The Examiner. Thomas said, though, that he worried about D.C. “moving towards a police state.”
Yeah, I remember the propiska being one of those inhuman restrictions we used to call the USSR evil for imposing upon its citizens. The upshot of this is, at least police states usually have really low crime rates.
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One advantage in Iraq is that Iraqis don’t vote in American elections, so politicians don’t have to ply them with welfare and food stamps.
Somehow gated communities don’t oppress the rich. Amazingly enough.
Not that this is necessarily the best solution, but I’ve noticed something… people complaining usually don’t suggest a better solution. Personally, I dislike gated communities and see homeowner’s associations as the single most pernicious force offending our personal freedom in this country. (Not the only one, but up there on the top for offensiveness.)
But… neighborhoods… we’ve been designing neighborhoods (rather than growing them in authentic ways) for generations now and should we be surprised at the lack of a feeling of community and ownership? I don’t think so. I rather like my “neighborhood”. The lots are small but there’s enough scrub pinon and cedar between the houses that you really can’t see any houses. This is the opposite of the grand philosophical vision of fence-less front yards flowing into each other into an urban parkland… something that city and community planners are only slowly giving up, and something that has it’s roots in communism, frankly. It was about being part of this whole rather than selfishly shutting yourself up behind walls… as both the rich and peasants have done for as long as people built houses. How many suburbanites do their social duty with lovely but entirely unused front landscapes while living in fenced in back yards?
Inner cities are a bit different but suffer from basically the same thing. The public spaces are inhospitable not because they aren’t green and lovely but because they’re public.
Yes, people are social. But we’re social in smaller groups than that. We’re most social at the family-size level. When we’re forced to accomodate a larger group we form cliques or gangs. Because that’s what people *do*. It’s what they *need*. All those teachers telling you that cliques were bad were trying to force people into an un-person-shaped mold which only resulted in cliques that were unhealthy.
So you’ve got public spaces that you’re supposed to live in… parks… neighborhood blocks… but they’re too public. As a species we don’t *like* that. Not unless we chose and visit and then leave again to go *home* to our less public community space where we share ownership.
So what ought to be done? Blocking off roads and putting up check points and police looks a heck of a lot like a police state but is that because of the fact of road blocks and check points or because the gate isn’t made of pretty wrought iron?
Maybe the answer is to tear the houses down and start over with different designs… something that’s not made to appeal to those driving down the street on their way someplace else?
Somehow, the rich aren’t forced into cordoned-off neighborhoods and threatened with arrest if they try to leave without the proper residency papers. Amazingly enough. C’mon — you’re smart enough to tell the difference between choice and oppression.
So choice. Either the people have a choice to live where they live or they do not. A whole lot of people would say that they do not, for whatever reason, have a choice about where they live and the neighborhoods they live in or why would they live in them?
But do you actually know that people would hate so badly to live in an area with controlled access? For the people hating it, how many are glad that they can show an ID and go home and not worry about bored youths or criminals wandering about?
In the end the question is really what to do about the crime and insecurity in these areas. It’s fine to want to defend these poor people from oppression but, frankly, that’s deciding for them *too* isn’t it? They can all vote and fire the mayor if they dislike it so much.