What's a Mayor to Do? Right on Ron

Ron Dellums, a Bay Area legend for his twenty-plus years in the House of Representatives where he made a national reputation as a critic of American war policies, now finds himself sinking in America's greatest quagmire, its war on crime. A series of highly publicized gun crimes have angered and embarrassed a city that has long struggled for a measure of recognition for quality of life, arts, and culture as against its famous neighbors, San Francisco and Berkeley. The California Senate President Don Perata, was carjacked in Oakland while dropping off a Christmas present for a friend. Less than a month later, a 10 year old was paralyzed during a piano lesson by a bullet that came from a gunman across the street robbing a service station. The perception that crime is growing out of control (seven homicides this last weekend) is building inexorable pressure on the Mayor to announce some kind of crackdown (typical is the sniping of Chron columnists Matier & Ross).

It is a measure of Dellum's strength that he has not rushed to announce some dramatic but improbable strategy in the fashion of his equally crime-troubled predecessor Jerry Brown (but then he was already focused on further office, Dellums, who came out of retirement to run, is done after this). One hopes, however, that behind the scenes he is meeting with his outstanding Police Chief Wayne Tucker to develop the quieter, longer-range strategies that can work.

First, Oakland needs to break down these crime patterns on a block-by-block basis and develop policing deployments that can bring the maximum pressure to bear at the right times and locations to deter assaults. Second, the mayor needs to use his formidable leadership to mobilize corporate, state, and federal funds for a massive effort to engage Oakland's legions of children and youth living in poverty this summer in a host of age-appropriate educational, employment, and public service opportunities. There is a sense of desperation among the very poor for whom George Bush's (until recently) invisible job crisis and now the subprime housing crisis, have hit hard. Finally, the mayor has to speak out about both the causes of crime in Oakland and the reasons why Oakland needs to forge a strategy to reduce it that expresses the city's own deep values of diversity, integration, and public participation.

Crime and Punishment to Book End Bush Presidency

After a wobbly first nine months, the Presidency of George Walker Bush found its stride in the aftermath of the devastating terror attacks of September 11, 2001. The tough on crime Texas governor was suddenly in a comfort zone, promising to bring outlaws to justice and demanding power in the name of the victims. Everything else that has unfolded since has been far less effective. Whether waging war or rebuilding nations and cities, the Bush Administration has found itself haunted by evidence of incompetence and deception. Success alone has come from reinvoking the terror crimes of 9/11 and the possibility of redemptive justice.

According to reporting by William Glaberson in the New York Times, the administration has now set a course certain to assure that the last year of the Bush Presidency will be filled with a trial and almost certain death sentence against Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and five other top Al Queda terrorists now being held at Guantanamo.

Military prosecutors have decided to seek the death penalty for six Guantánamo detainees who are to be charged with central roles in the Sept. 11 terror attacks, government officials who have been briefed on the charges said Sunday.

The officials said the charges would be announced at the Pentagon as soon as Monday and were likely to include numerous war-crimes charges against the six men, including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the former Qaeda operations chief who has described himself as the mastermind of the attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people.

In addition to bringing the horrors of 9/11 back into perspective in the middle of a new presidential campaign that was likely to focus on domestic priorities (like health care and jobs), the trial and litigation over the death sentences will generate other dynamics likely to foster Mr. Bush's image.

The death penalty is a practice that Mr. Bush practically made his signature act of governing during his governorship of Texas where he presided over more than 100 executions.

Even better, the death sentences are likely to be delayed by litigation and court interventions. Mr. Bush's style of executive leadership is a permanent protest against the constitution's separation of powers and fights with courts are a tonic to it.

The torture of Mohammed, whose water boarding by the CIA has been admitted, will divide the country over whether the human rights of terror suspects are as important as security for America (at least as defined by the President). Ironically this may prove a problem for likely Republican nominee John McCain who has long spoken out against the practice.

Update: See Steve Lee Myers analysis in the NYTimes for a similar suggestion that focusing public attention on the terrorist trials and on the legal niceties of whether it was ok to water-board and now execute them.

When Organizing Becomes Racketeering, You are Governing through Crime

When a union started complaining about working conditions in Smithfield Foods giant hog slaughtering operation in Tar Heel, North Carolina, they didn't get mad, they got lawyers and field a RICO complaint. The law, designed to capture elusive mobsters has increasingly been used by government lawyers against white collar crime. Now corporations are turning around and using it against unions. According to Adam Liptak, of the New York Times, the underlying "bad act" of this crime, looks a lot like free speech.

This brings us full circle back to the beginning of the 20th century when unions were considered criminal conspiracies.

Break Your Contract, Go to Prison: Governing the Workplace through Crime

In the 19th century, Parliament turned the work rules of the British railways into a penal statutes. A trainman violating work rules, could find themselves facing not just discipline, but punishment. The growing political power of workers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries gradually eroded the practice of criminalizing labor disputes, but as the power of workers has declined, and the salience of crime to governance has gone up, governing through crime is becoming a more common way to exercise workplace power (see Chapter 8 of my book).

A recent example comes from New York where a group of Filipino nurses found that when they tried to quit their jobs at a hospital for critically ill children, they were facing not just unemployment, but criminal charges of child endangerment.

As reported by Frank Eltman of the AP:

For months, the nurses complained that they were subject to demeaning and unfair working conditions - not what they were promised when they came to America from the Philippines in search of a better life. So they abruptly quit.

But in doing so, they put more than their careers at risk: Prosecutors hit them with criminal charges for allegedly jeopardizing the lives of terminally ill children they were in charge of watching.

The 10 nurses and the attorney who advised them were charged with conspiracy and child endangerment in what defense lawyers say is an unprecedented use of criminal law in a labor dispute. If convicted of the misdemeanor offenses, they face up to a year in jail on each of 13 counts, and could lose their nursing licenses and be deported.

The case apparently has the fingerprints on it of liberal Democratic Senator, and long term crime warrior opportunist, Chuck Schumer.

Second Class Universities and World Class Prisons?

Cal State University Chancellor Charles Reed got it half right yesterday when in a speech to the University's Board of Trustees he blasted the proposed 10 percent cuts being imposed on higher education (and most of the rest of public spending) in Governor Schwarzenegger's proposed budget (read Tanya Schevitz's account in the SFChron). Reed asked the trustees (rhetorically one assumes):

"What kind of California do we want? I do think we are heading down the road to funding and building world-class prisons and second-class universities.."

We may well be on the road to the latter, and Chancellor Reed is correct to see California's three decade long incarceration binge as a significant factor in the declining state of our universities (roads, bridges, water systems, etc.). However to call our bloated and now catastrophically overcrowded prison system "world class" raises troubling questions.

World class prisons might be imagined to be places where wrongdoers are held accountable for crimes that seriously harm or threaten violence against others, in safety from each other, while being prepared for release through the application of tested methods of controlling substance abuse, and aggression while treating post-traumatic stress disorders of all sorts that frequently lead people on the paths to serious crime.

Such prisons may exist in parts of Europe. California's prisons, however, are nothing like that, and were not designed to be. Indeed, as the recent Plata and Coleman cases which have now brought the system under federal court control have revealed, these prisons were designed to function without consideration for rehabilitation or even minimal health and hygiene. As overcrowding has gotten worst over the last few years, conditions have deteriorated to the point of endangering the basic health of both inmates and staff. Moreover, they hold a tens of thousands of people for drug and property crimes as well as technical parole violations that often amount to little more than the crime of being homeless and or addicted.

Bluntly put California's once world class prisons (in the 1960s) are becoming little more than concentration camps without ovens (hear those last two words, I'm not accusing Californian's of genocide, but of building high security warehouses for the long term containment of people they are angry at and afraid of).

So cheers for Chancellor Reed for pointing out the fateful choices we are making. But lets not mistake world class prisons for unconstitutional and internationally scandalous detention centers.

Happy Birthday Martin

You cannot look at the devastation that governing through crime has brought to America, and especially to Black America, without wondering what Martin King might have done about it, had he lived.

First start with the central fact that had King lived, he might have been able, even under President Richard Nixon (who after all embraced affirmative action as the black capitalist alternative), to negotiate the kind of federal follow up to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that would have substantially reduced America's ghetto poverty in the following decade. This tidal wave of progress might not have fully diverted the wave of criminal violence that was already unfolding in American cities in the 1960s, but it would have created an effective example of governing through opportunity and progress that might have bolstered activist government against the crushing pessimism that became the legacy of the 1970s and which made governing through crime a survival strategy for both conservative and liberal politicians in the 1980s.


Instead, King's murder, coming just weeks after the murder of Robert Kennedy, and less then five years after the murder of President John Kennedy, added immeasurably to the sense that lawlessness was overtaking American civilization and at the heart of our cities (each of these murders took place in the downtown section of a major American city). This impression was significantly bolstered by the fact that each crime was ultimately blamed on individual bad actors, strange drifters without apparent links to the massive interests which benefited from these deaths.

Combined with the murders of other civil rights leaders earlier in the decade, including Medgar Evers and Malcolm X, the killing of Dr. King must have sent a particularly spirit-killing message to the young Black men of America. Criminal violence seemed to be frustrating the demands of justice at every turn. In the meantime apostles of violent response within the Black community seemed to be vindicated. In California, the Black Panthers, no doubt aided by the FBI and the California Department of Corrections, degenerated into a real criminal organization, the Black Guerilla Family which became an influential force in California's prison culture. Since then, big parts of two generations of young black men have been lost to the streets and the prisons. Since then the "two America's" that the Kerner Commission glimpsed in the embers of the riots that followed King's murder, have girded into a society of prisons and gated communities that increasingly look like one fearful and unfree America.

It will take leaders like Martin King to bring us home from the Exodus of the War on Crime. But don't look for that leadership in the Presidential campaign. It will have to come from below. From someone who is even now working in a community like Oakland, Memphis or Montgomery. Someone who is gathering around them a yet invisible but swelling tide of people who believe that they see our needs as a society and as a generation, in a new light.

"Come back to us... Martin Luther King, we are marching into Selma, while the bells of freedom ring."

(with thanks to Steve Earle for his wonderful song, Christmas in Washington)

Go for it Gavin

Frustrated with the SF's continuing homicide spike, Mayor Gavin Newsom is reported (see Jaxon Van Derbeken's article in today's SFChron) to have ordered drug investigators to drop their cases and hit the streets of the city's high violence neighborhoods. Unlike our national and state leaders, Mayor Newsom cannot ignore violence in his city. He is said to have been particularly roiled by the murder of anti-violence activist Terrell "Terray" Rogers outside a girls basketball game last Saturday.

The Mayor is absolutely right to recognize that stopping the violence is far more important than drug investigations; or for that matter investigating the survivors of the Christmas Day tiger attack in a misguided effort to pin the death of 17 year old Carlos Sousa on his friends (that investigation has also thankfully be shelved according to another story by Van Derbeken). But he is creeping up on a far deeper and more troubling paradox. It is precisely the disastrous decision by our national leaders to hand the irrepressible market in recreational drugs (like marijuana and cocaine) to juvenile criminals that fuels the violence. Would these young men whose predictable cycles of honor based conflict leave bodies in SF streets be so cocky, so reckless, and so well armed if they were not flush with the rewards of the drug trade?

If you could buy marijuana and cocaine at a well regulated and licensed outlet whose sales were heavily taxed to offset community harms and provide treatment for the real addicts who need it, the local gangs would deflate and the young men in them would realize that high school, college, real jobs are they way to get respect, women, and toys.

Mayor Newsom cannot do that, even if he wanted to. The feds control the drug racket and SF is just one node in a global network of cities suffering from violence created by the criminal cartels spawned by federal drug policy. If SF started regulating and taxing general dispensaries for marijuana and cocaine, the entire bureaucracy would find itself facing massive drug conspiracy charges.

Here is what the Mayor can do. He can call a press conference to deliver the following message to the city's drug purveyors.

If you sell marijuana and cocaine in San Francisco, you will not be harassed by the SF Police Department, nor will the SF Police Department cooperate with Federal law enforcement operations against you, under the following circumstances:

You move all drug sales operations to discreet indoor establishments where kids and parents do not have to see drug sales or use in their face, streets, or parks.

You do not sell drugs of any kind to minors.

You do not carry weapons or use violence of any kind to conduct your business.

If you abide by these norms, you will not be the subject of investigation or arrest by the SF Police. Furthermore, if you are robbed or threatened, the SF Police will treat this behavior as the crime it is and seek to arrest and prosecute anyone involved in robbery or extortion.

However, if you violate any of the above conditions, you and you alone will face the full pressure of the SFPD while your competitors continue to operate unimpeded.