The Counterpublic Papers vol. 1 no. 31

Premiere League soccer starts today, so I’m writing this during half-time of the Arsenal v Liverpool match. Which wouldn’t be worth commenting if it weren’t for the fact that I’ve now heard Wendy’s Baconator commercial enough for it to really seep in that a double cheeseburger with six strips of bacon is a real thing instead of a bad Saturday Night Live skit.

Anyway. Last week the Department of Justice released its report on the Baltimore Police Department. Some facts from a piece I’m working on that may or may not appear in the Jacobin:

The recently released Department of Justice Report on the Baltimore City Police Department says what many people in and outside of the city have long recognized. But the details of the report are likely to shock and awe. Baltimore City residents have in effect been living in a police state. To wit over a five to six year period the Baltimore City Police Department (page numbers in parentheses):

• Recorded over 300,000 pedestrian stops (and likely made several hundred thousand unrecorded stops during the same period), with over 40% of the geo-coded stops concentrated in two districts (the Western and the Central) (p. 26).

• Only cited or arrested individuals in 3.7% of these stops (based on a random sample of 7200) (p. 28).

• Only investigated ten of the 2818 force incidents in the police department. Of these ten only one force incident was found to be excessive (p. 102).

• Routinely uses unreasonable force against people who present no threat to officers or to others (p. 76).

• Routinely detain, arrest, and use force against people for first amendment speech acts (p. 116).

• Routinely blames victims of sexual assault for their assault, particularly those in the sex trade (p. 122, 123) and failed to properly investigate over half of rape charges brought to them (p. 124).

• Appears to have either ignored or failed to investigate charges that officers coerced sex from sex workers in exchange for money and/or arrest avoidance (p. 149).  

    These practices, which the report notes are disproportionately used against black men, women, and children are so deeply ingrained in the police department, that some of them occurred during ride-alongs. Police officers feel so comfortable that what they’re doing follows policy they’re willing to post them on Facebook.

In some cases, unconstitutional stops result from supervisory officers’ explicit instructions. During a ride-along with Justice Department officials, a BPD sergeant instructed a patrol officer to stop a group of young African-American males on a street corner, question them, and order them to disperse. When the patrol officer protested that he had no valid reason to stop the group, the sergeant then replied “Then make something up.” This incident is far from anomalous. A different BPS sergeant posted on Facebook that when he supervises officers in the Northeast District, he encourages them to “clear corners,” a term many officers understand to mean stopping pedestrians who are standing on city sidewalks to question and then disperse them by threatening arrest for minor offenses like loitering and trespassing. The sergeant wrote, ‘I used to say at roll call in NE when I ran the shift: Do not treat criminals like citizens. Citizens what that corner cleared.’ (p. 29)

    The report, obviously worth reading, can be found here. It bears stating, restating, and restating again. It seems as if Baltimore’s police department’s primary function is to reproduce a population that justifies its existence. A population not just left out of the economy but a population left out of the political economy—it’s not just that they don’t have jobs or can’t get them, it’s that they can’t fully participate in any of the political spaces they could conceivably use to make government function for them. This and the Port Covington marketing report should be read together. These findings are only shocking to people who haven’t been paying attention. Baltimore isn’t Ferguson, they aren’t using their police to extort extra revenue from the poor. But what they’re doing is arguably worse. (Of course, some have a different opinion.) 

….

    Got a chance to check out the last three or four episodes of Baz Luhrmann’s The Get Down, Netflix’s new series about the beginning of Hip-hop. I appreciate the way it seems to get the aesthetic of seventies-era New York right, and here I’m not just talking about the style of dress, the bombed out look of the Bronx, and subway cars filled with graffiti. Even the film used to shoot the series evokes a seventies Chinatown/The Warriors feel. In write-ups about the show Grandmaster Flash talks about being consistently asked about the eighties, as if this is where hip-hop appeared. This surprised me a bit—I thought everybody knew hip-hop was a seventies creation—but I guess it shouldn’t have. Anyway, Flash wanted The Get Down to re-situate hip-hop’s origins. In so doing he, Luhrmann, Nelson George (who wrote one episode), ended up telling a story about hip-hop, but about punk, the fall of disco, and New York City politics as well—I almost fell off the couch when I realized that one of the central protagonists ended up getting an internship for the “fiscal control committee” (a thinly veiled version of the Fiscal Control Board). I’m going to go back and watch the earlier episodes I missed, but if you have Netflix, or a friend with Netflix it’s worth checking out. 

    (And while I’m making Netflix recommendations I’d also recommend Stranger Things. If The Get Down shouts out the seventies, Stranger Things shouts out late seventies early eighties era Spielberg.)

…..

    Reading Angels of Detroit at the moment….or trying to. I’m hoping it gets better, but I’m a few chapters in and don’t recognize anything about the city so far. No streets, no places, nothing. I’m hoping this is just a matter of technique—that the writer wants to gently introduce the city as the city to the reader. 

    But if you’ve been reading this newsletter for this long, you know hope and I don’t really get along.

    On that note I’m out. Be good. If you’re reading this from Baltimore (and drinking while doing it) be sure to hydrate.