Il Governo della Paura

Yes the rumors are true, Governing through Crime, will shortly be out in an Italian edition, translated by the brilliant Alessandro di Giorgi (hopefully some of it rubbed off on my prose) Professor of Justice Studies at San Jose State University.

As if to celebrate, the new Italian government headed by Silvio Berlusconi, has launched a crackdown on "illegal immigrants" who are popularly blamed for much crime in Italy today. Sweeping through shanty towns police arrested hundreds of immigrants, most of whom were swiftly deported with little or no legal process. (See Elizabeth Blumenthal's reporting in the NYTimes). As di Giorgi argues in his important book on the logics of contemporary penal repression, Political Economy of Punishment: Perspectives on post-Fordism and Penal Politics (Ashgate, 2006), immigrants, especially non-western immigrants, stand at the core of the fear based efforts to recast governance in Europe.

But whether criminals, or immigrants, or criminal immigrants, the governance logic of arbitrary power in the name of the victims is the same. As a Berlusconi spokesperson said of the crack down (which almost certainly violates Italy's obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights):

“The anti-immigrant sweep was a positive thing because that’s what people want,” said Umberto Bossi, the minister of institutional reforms and federalism. “People ask us for safety, and we must give it to them.”

City of Walls

Michael Gordon's vivid reporting from Baghdad, in this mornings NYTimes raised again for me the question of how our security strategies in Iraq relate to our domestic security strategies. Gordon's frighteningly close descriptions of of American and Iraqi soldiers battling insurgents over the construction of a series of security walls through portions Sadr City, brought to mind the well established pattern of gated communities as part of middle and upper class security in the United States and globally.

The walls in Baghdad are aimed to create secured zones around the core area of Shi-ite popular resistance to American and Iraqi government forces. But as Gordon notes, the wall seems to become as much a site of violence as a tool for repressing it.

The Americans began building the wall a month ago, working east to west. The work started at night but soon extended into the day as American commanders sought to speed up the construction.

Supporters of Moktada al-Sadr, the anti-American cleric, denounced the wall as a nefarious effort to divide the city. Militia fighters with rocket-propelled grenades, machine guns and small arms have been trying to halt its construction.

Those efforts have failed, and the barrier is now 80 percent complete. But the fighters have blown a few gaps in the wall and, in one instance, appear to have hitched a truck to a damaged slab to yank it down. To make it hard for the Americans to fix the holes, the fighters have continued to seed the strip south of the barrier with explosively formed penetrators, a particularly lethal type of roadside bomb. Some have been hidden in the cracks or depressions in the wall itself.

Social scientists have long noted the trend toward walled security in cities without insurgencies, but where great economic inequality and alarming crime fears led those with resources to seek a new private kind of public space. In her classic work on the walled neighborhoods of Sao Paulo, Brazil, City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and and Citizenship in Sao Paulo, Berkeley professor Teresa Pires do Rio Caldiera writes:

Fortified enclaves are privatized, enclosed, and monitored spaces for residence, consumption, leisure, and work. They can be shopping malls, office complexes, or residential gated communities. They appeal to those who fear that social heterogeneity of older urban quarters and choose to abandon those spaces to the poor, the “marginal,” and the homeless. (4)

What is the relationship between these security strategies? Was the walled neighborhood as piece of colonial anti-insurgency strategy that found its way into the war on crime? Or is it an extension of the logic of urban security to the problem of permanent, or at least long term, insurgency?

Meager results for gun sensors

The desperation of governing through crime thinking comes through loud and clear in Wyatt Buchanan's story in today's SF Chron, on early results from the high tech gun fire sensor systems recently installed in SF and Oakland. The lead is that thanks to the detectors police have responded to twice as many gun shots as they did before they were installed. Lets return in a moment to the interesting question of why in a democracy computers are necessary to discover that gun shots are being fired in a major city's neighborhoods, the real question here is whether public safety was improved by lashing our police officers to this technological alternative to a citizen. As we are learning in our recent debates about whole body imaging, discovering more spots in your body that might be cancer is not the same thing as curing more cancer and does not necessarily improve your health outcomes (to date, inconclusive).

The results are fairly described as thin. In SF, twice as many police responses has netted 1 extra arrest and two seized weapons. Now the fact that they are calling it an extra arrest means it has no plausible connection to any homicide cases. Every time police deploy to neighborhoods where there is a lot of "gang activity" (i.e., young minority men with little connection to the legal economy) they have a chance of making arrests (and when they do, they may discover weapons in the inevitable search of the arrestee).

How do we know whether this one arrest in two months represents an achievement for public safety? We cannot, because we cannot know what those police officers might have done with the time they spent responding to gun fire sensor reports and the reports they had to write up about missions that yielded no arrests or information about the many unsolved homicides in the city.

Of course, that does not stop crime experts and politicians, who must respond to the crime fears unleashed by recent spikes in homicides and armed robberies, from proclaiming that the technology was "worth it." When you are faced with a bottomless fear than any amount of money thrown at it, may seem like money well spent, (even when a multi-billion dollar deficit means those millions spent on auditory surveillance, cannot be replaced to place more police officers on the streets, let alone hire youths for summer jobs).

While you are contemplating the long dry summer ahead here in the always tourist friendly Bay Area (unless you mind getting robbed in a restaurant), just consider what it means that computers report 65% more gunshots than the human beings they are using technology to listen to. The lack of respect and confidence for our law enforcement agencies and strategies speaks volumes. In the end its not the futility of spending millions to replace (rather than repair) the shattered confidence of your citizenry, but the futility of the war on crime itself that must be confronted.

When the President is Prosecutor

In this past Sunday's NYT, William Glaberson reported on the latest legal travails for the Bush Administration's military commissions set up in Guantanamo to try alleged war criminals. In a case involving Salim Hamdan, characterized by some as Osama Bin Laden's driver, a military judge has issued an order that in effect forbids the Pentagon from continuing to interfere with legal decisions being made by military prosecutors in the Hamdan case. One such decision was whether or not to use evidence derived from interrogations involving torture. The prosecutors had determined to exclude such evidence as unreliable, but that decision was, in effect, overruled by the Pentagon's representative, Brig. Gen. Thomas W. Hartmann.

The military judge, Navy Captain, Keith J. Allred, was particularly stinging in his opinion in denouncing interference by, what is essentially a political agency, in the decisions of military prosecutors.

“Telling the chief prosecutor (and other prosecutors),” the decision said, “that certain types of cases would be tried and that others would not be tried, because of political factors such as whether they would capture the imagination of the American people, be sexy, or involve blood on the hands of the accused, suggests that factors other than those pertaining to the merits of the case were at play.”

The American prosecutor, even in military form, is a distinctive legal model that is arguably 100 percent an American invention, even though now much replicated. Where as most legal officials around the world tasked with representing the state in seeking the criminal conviction of an individual are mere agents of national ministries, the American prosecutor is or works for an independent, elected, local official. In Governing through Crime, Chapter 2, I argued that American prosecutors had provided a unique model for the reconstruction of American executive authority in the 1970s. As governors and even presidents have fashioned themselves "prosecutors-in-chief" they have occasionally run into the problem that they cannot easily displace actual control prosecutors.

When the Bush administration, steeped in this crime model from his governorship on, began to construct their scheme for military tribunals, they created a duplicate of the American prosecutor with an important correction, an agent of the President, in this case called "the convening authority" in a position to control the entire proceeding through controlling the decisions of both military prosecutors and military defense lawyers. In this, as in so many ways, Guantanamo reveals the true genealogy of the war on terror, as not a radical rupture with the recent past, but its amplification; as a version of the war on crime with all of the remaining institutional limitations on executive power snipped out.

Muggings in Glen Park and Bernal Heights

The Bay Area's spike in armed crime by very young men continues. A story in this morning's SF Chron by Marisa Lagos details a string of gun point robberies in two nearby SF Neighborhoods, both situated on hillsides above the Noe Valley and Mission Districts. With views and close access to freeways, the once mostly working class neighborhoods have undergone considerable gentrification. According to police, the robbers likely drive from other areas, cruising the streets until they spot victims walking from BART stations or ATM stations. After confronting the lone victim at a moment of isolation, they use their cars to drive nearby gas stations where they attempt to use the victim's credit cards for gas before they are reported stolen. Police believe they may rob several victims before leaving the neighborhood.

These brazen gun point robberies by relatively young robbers fit an alarming pattern, one that is already leading to calls for a police crackdown (see earlier posts on this wave). Like most crime patterns, however, this one probably has its roots in situational factors unlikely to respond to a generalized increased in arrests or threats of even longer prison sentences. Here are a few theories to test for yourself.

The rise of the laptop, the Black-Berry, the I-Pod, Phone, etc., means the right kind of pedestrian (young, college educated or a student) is likely to be carrying over a thousand dollars worth of electronics on their person at any time. Moreover, these are goods that have immediate value to robbers and enduring value on the black market (unlike televisions, desk top computers, etc.)

The rise of ATM customer fees may have led more people to carry more cash on them. That, along with the above, raises the expected gain from each attempted robbery, while the costs have remained the same. Should we raise the cost of robbery by raising sentences for robbers? The problem is we've already raised them quite high and very young people are certifiably less capable of evaluating the cost side of the equation in any event.

An unusually dry April has increased the number of pedestrians walking from BART stations rather than waiting for a bus.

What should we do? Invest more in police tactics to raise the likelihood of arresting suspected robbers at or near the scene of the crime and while they are still carrying evidence (eye witnesses are notoriously unreliable when robbed at gun point). It may take a while for police to develop the right series of decoys, stake-outs, camera surveillance technology, etc. This will produce much more deterrence then threatening draconian prison sentences that many our youth neither reflect on nor fear. For young people with high discount rates on the future (economic talk for being focused on the present) arrest, and the prospect of spending the night in jail rather than enjoying the fruits of their crimes may have more deterrent value than months of extra time in prison later.

In the meantime, as citizens we need to chill out on the crime panic talk. We live in the Bay Area. We have chosen not to hide ourselves in gated communities. Let us embrace our freedom by aggressively walking the commercial streets of our communities, together as often as possible, and accept our risks wisely and with determination to reduce them through smart rather than emotional decisions.

Crime Wave in Oakland: The Chorus for a Crackdown Grows

The SF Chron editorial board yesterday added its influence to the growing political response to Oakland's wave of robbery. The editorial castigated Oakland's police leaders for the restraint and realism about the limited value of arrests to resolving the sources of violent crime in Oakland (this blog praised the very same a couple days ago). In an editorial titled "Arrests Do Matter," the editors wrote:

There are words that newspaper readers usually do not want to see as they are learning about a dangerous spate of local crimes. On the top of that list would be this quote, which appeared in Wednesday's Chronicle by Oakland Deputy Police Chief Dave Kozicki, in response to a rash of robberies of Oakland restaurants that affected staff and patrons alike: "Right now, it's pretty clear we are in a time of increased crime. But the bottom line is we believe we cannot arrest our way out of these problems."

To which Oakland City Councilwoman Pat Kernighan smartly riposted, "Well, you sure better try. We all have our jobs to do, and your job is to arrest people."

Fortunately, it turns out, Kozicki's rhetoric was just that, rhetoric. On the day he made that ill-timed remark, Oakland police made their first arrest in the heists. As of Thursday, police held two of four suspects, after what the department described as intense police work to end a crime spree that has left many Oakland residents worried, anxious and angry.

Citizens have begun to fight back. Recently an Oakland resident, a shop owner and a market clerk shot at men whom they believed were trying to rob them. Authorities do not see these incidents as vigilantism. As Oakland Police spokesman Roland Holmgren told The Chronicle, "I don't think they are taking the law into their own hands. I think they're doing their God-given right, which is to defend themselves and their property."

There is much that is misguided about this opinion.

Arrests do matter when they are carefully targeted at suspects produced by reliable investigatory techniques. However, when they are produced in the kind of classic crackdown on poor neighborhoods that the political and editorial tirades we have seen of late usually lead to they produce miscarriages of justice and less security. Once the jails are full of the "usual suspect," snitches and high risk interrogation tactics can produce the convictable defendants so satisfying to editorial writers, ---- but also wrongful convictions and scores of collateral casualties (whose repeated contacts with the jail population surely encourages more real crime).

The fact that residents are "worried, anxious, and angry" does not mean they will be better off when governments in response to these worries produce ineffective but heavy handed symbolic gestures, or haven't you visited an airport lately (please place your three once liquid containers, along with your shoes, belt and jacket into the bins ...).

"Residents are beginning to fight back...." The Chron has had a thing for citizens shooting back for some time. There is no evidence that this reduces crime but it is surely likely to get someone killed. Whats next, the return of the Committee of Vigilance (an elite lynch mob that mixed summary trial and hangings with intonations about law in San Francisco in the 1850s)?

Recycle, or else

The habits of governing through crime are hard to put down, even in liberal San Francisco. According to Cecilia M. Vega's reporting in yesterday's SFChron, Mayor Gavin Newsom wants to make sure San Franciscan's recycle, and plans to do so by making sure its illegal to throw the wrong thing away.

Newsom said Tuesday that his administration is drafting an ordinance that would require residents and businesses to recycle paper, plastics and other basic salvageable materials, as well as to compost food scraps and yard waste. It's the only way, he said, San Francisco will be able to reach it's self-imposed goal of having a 75 percent recycling rate by 2010.

"This is not, and should not be considered, punitive," Newsom said. "It's not about creating a new bureaucracy or enforcement police."

But whether he has actual criminal infractions in mind, or only some civil fine (that can become criminal if unpaid), the governmental tool kit is all about crime, and inevitably will involve methods of detection, informing, or mass surveillance.

Isn't there another way? Seattle and other cities give you an incentive to recycle by pricing collection services through the size of the container you select from the city. Even so Seattle according to Vega also relies on fines for commercial and multi-unit residential user (while homeowners get "tags" on their containers). Perhaps empirical research will document that sticks are always required and the right combination of carrots will not optimize recycling, but before we reinforce our hegemonic political habit of governing through crime, can we at least consider who is not recycling and why. How many "lazy" people are actually older or disabled people who might need a program of affirmative assistance to get them recycling?

Of course the idea of providing services (and jobs to unemployed urban youth) is probably a non-starter in California at a time of budgetary crisis. Any way, its easier to warn people, fine them, and eventually arrest them.

(Thanks to Hadar Aviram for calling this new "striped" version of "green" politics to my attention)