Oakland Police Deaths Require Public Investigation

The deaths this past Saturday of four Oakland police officers at the hands of Oakland resident Lovell Mixon has shocked our community (read the coverage in the SF Chron). Literally thousands of people in our community knew these officers personally as family members, friends, and neighbors. It will take a long time to process such a dramatic loss. In time, however, it is vital that the public learn more about what happened to produce this astonishing tragedy. Here are a few thoughts toward that goal.

As all the media coverage has emphasized, Mixon was on parole, but this provides little insight into why he responded to police with lethal violence. Some 60,000 people a year enter parole in California after the completion of their prison sentence. While nearly 70 percent will be returned to prison before the completion of their time on parole, only a tiny minority are sent back for crimes of violence.

Rodney King was also on parole when he was stopped and beaten after a car chase with the LAPD. Can you imagine how differently that story might have played out had the media labeled him "parolee Rodney King" rather than "motorist Rodney King"?

We still do not know why police stopped Mixon. He had apparently missed a parole appointment, a minor violation of parole that regularly occurs without resulting in an arrest. If Mixon was targeted for arrest because of his perceived risk to the community, the police should have been much better prepared for possible violence.

We may never know why Mixon responded with such violence. He had spent six years in one of California's toughest prisons, and his family suggests he did not want to return, but the most he could have faced for a parole revocation was one year, was he really willing to kill and die just to avoid what more likely would have been six months or less back in prison?

His sister movingly told the press that Mixon was "not a monster", but the real question is why did he have an AK47 assault weapon in his personal armory.

More than 60,000 California prisoners come back to the community on parole every year. More than 70 percent return within three years, most for minor crimes and parole violations. Would we be better off leaving the vast majority of released prisoners to seek services if they choose to (perhaps with state vouchers) while concentrating California's professional parole agents on a small portion of prisoners whose profiles suggest a sustained risk of violence?

Organized for Vengeance: Police Unions and Parole

The imminent parole release of former SLA member Sara Jane Olson (aka Kathleen Soliah) and plans for her to serve her parole term (maximum three years with annual reviews) in Minnesota, her home state as a fugitive for nearly twenty years, has stirred opposition from police unions. Olson is not being released early. California law provides for parole supervision in the community at the completion of a prison sentence. The purpose of parole is not to further punishment, which is satisfied by the prison term, but to assure public safety and facilitate the successful reintegration of the former prisoner into the community. In Olson's case both of these goals would be well served by returning her to Minnesota where she lived crime free for years and where she has a family and extensive support network.

The police union opposing her transfer to Minnesota, the Los Angeles Police Protective League, claims that Minnesota cannot be trusted to keep as close an eye on her as California (read the LATimes story by Andrew Blankstein). But Olso never was a crime threat. After her involvement with radical group, Olson apparently lived a normal life centered on family and community. Every study of parole has shown that the odds of re-offending are reduced when former prisoners return to a supportive family environment. The real reason the Police Protective League wants to keep her in the Golden State is vengeance. Prison time is supposed to repay one's debt to society. For LAPPL however, crimes against police can never be repaid, and those that have threatened police no matter how long ago or how different the circumstances, must be hunted and haunted to their graves.

This may reflect the actual sentiment of police officers, but let us be clear, it has nothing to do with public safety, and everything to do with a desire for vengeance.

The Promise of Police

Some of the smartest people I know who think hard about criminal justice from academic posts think that police offer a promising alternative to mass incarceration as a way to address crime in American communities (Bill Stuntz, David Sklansky, Frank Zimring, Justin McCrary among many others). A well reported article by Chip Johnson in today's SFChron offers an intriguing picture of that promise.

Crimes reported to the police are dramatically lower than for the first quarter of last year.

Since Jan. 1, felony crimes against people and property have dropped 23 percent, according to the Oakland Police Department.

Homicides alone decreased by 50 percent, to 14 slayings from 29 over the same period a year ago. Robberies fell by 16 percent during the same period, while auto theft dropped by one-third.

Although, as Johnson is careful to note, a quarter, is hardly a trend in the world of crime stats, its not too early for Oakland's politically shaky police department to take some credits for new tactics (take a bow from the wings, Chief Tucker). Especially after an alarming pattern of armed robberies last year, and fears that the economic depression would drive up crime, this is good news.

Some of these new tactics do sound different and intriguing (not a repeat of Bratton/Giuliani style policing which, whatever its crime repressing effectiveness would ultimately be unacceptable to the Bay Area).

From the article it appears that the major tactics are more beat cops walking commercial streets and the creation of a new police linked (but not managed) "outreach" initiative aimed at stalling conlicts in Oakland neighborhoods before it turns lethal.

No doubt the beat cops are reassuring, especially to business people like the furniture store owner interviewed by Chip Johnson:

"We had homeless people sleeping in our doorways, people wandering up and down the block, but when he came, that all vanished," said Ford, 68. "I would say about four out of six days a week, he will stick his head inside the door and say hi. It's been a great relief."

Whether a strategy of chasing homeless people away is constitutional or sustainable in the Bay Area (especially when many of our neighbors may soon be joining their ranks) we will leave for another post, let alone whether it has any effect on violent crime.

More intriguing is the outreach initiative which Johnson credits to Mayor Ron Dellums:

Toribio said outreach workers paid for through the city's Measure Y program have established a "strong working relationship" with some street toughs. The workers regularly target areas with patterns of violence.

"We send them in when we've determined there may be trouble brewing, and they work to try and let calmer heads prevail," Toribio said.

"Most of these guys (outreach workers) grew up in some of these neighborhoods. They recognize guys from the street," he said. "Some of them have been to prison and battled their demons, and they have a lot of credibility on the street."

Leave aside the interesting constitutional questions of an apparatus that "work with police", but "they aren't agents of the police and don't share information." The approach sounds promising to me.

Ironically it underscores some of the problems that shadow the promise of the police. Why do the police lack so much credibility in neighborhoods suffering from violence that they need a parallel apparatus to provide them information as needed to stop or solve violent crimes? When we put more police offices on the streets how might their conduct actually exacerbate violent crime?

Mr. Jones Goes to Washington

For readers of this blog who share this blogger's obsession with whether Dr. Obama will move us from a culture of fear based on "stranger danger" to a culture of hope based on collective action to overcome infrastructure danger, this morning's papers bring very good news indeed. Van Jones, lawyer, community organizer, and author of a best selling book on green jobs is doing to DC to serve as a special green jobs adviser to President Obama. (Read the NYT story). As a community organizer here in the East Bay, Jones has struggled against mass incarceration and its reconstruction of minority communities. His vision of greening the ghetto is a direct challenge to the carceral ghetto that the war on crime has produced. This means at least one voice in the administration who can help the President identify ways to help dismantle the culture of fear that past White Houses have helped to construct.

A Cure for Cancer in Our Time

You heard it in President Obama's speech last night. Obama did not use the phrase 'war on cancer' his promise to cure it in our time, and his invocation of cancer as a disease that touches every American, amounted to a national commitment that is the moral equivalent of war. In Governing through Crime I note that President Nixon declared war on drugs at almost the same moment he declared war on cancer, but he only fought the first. The war on drugs became a central preoccupation of domestic policy over the last forty years, while the war on cancer remained a small research concern.

The right kind of war on cancer could provide a much better project with which to reshape American governance and citizenship then our long war against crime, drugs, and now terrorism. A war on cancer focused on prevention, on environmental causes, and on lifestyle could drive down health costs (instead of driving them up as our current pharmacological war tends to) while encouraging Americans to take a more responsible and realistic view of the risks they face and the role personal decisions can play in managing it.

Governing the Financial Crisis through Crime

CNBC's Rick Santelli rant against President Obama's bailout last Thursday, has apparently resonated with many Americans. According to Brian Stelter's reporting in the NYTimes Santelli appearing live from the Chicago Board of Trade said:

“The government is promoting bad behavior,” he said, and later implied comparisons to Cuba and asked the traders around them whether they wanted to pay their neighbors’ delinquent mortgages. When the traders started to boo, Mr. Santelli said, “President Obama, are you listening?”

The "bad behavior" line is part of a larger set of conservative talking points that have been in use since the fall aimed at framing the catastrophic levels of mortgage foreclosures as the result of irresponsible and fraudulent behavior by borrowers that took on mortgages they could not possibly afford. There were implications that government linked corporations Freddie Mack and Fannie Mae were some how complicit in this fraud as an effort to promote home ownership among the poor and minorities.

Three quick points should be made about this line of attack on the economic recovery strategy. First, there is plenty of crime running around in the financial crisis, most of it among the business classes mortgage brokers and lenders and investment banks. There is little doubt that the financialization of our economy requires not only more regulation, but some criminal law enforcement against those who abuse their positions of trust in a system rife with conflicts of interest. Second, the conservative critique ignores this massive fraud to focus on those participants in the mortgage crisis who look the most like much politicized and racialized notions of street crime, i.e., the poor and minorities. Third, it is really this cultural formation, one linking the poor, minorities, and the role of personal immorality in their disadvantages that the "bad behavior" line is really aimed at reviving for one reason. It was just this soured view of the poor and government that helped halt the war on poverty in the 1960s and shift us toward the war on crime that has dominated our political imagination ever since and which the new financial crisis now threatens to dislocate (in a way the war on terror never could because it built on the war on crime).

The Advantages of Renting

Check out the very interesting interview between Scott Simon and Canadian professor and author Richard Florida this morning about the role of home ownership in the US economy in recent history and the possible return of renting as the most economically advantageous mode of housing tenure in the future. As Scott points owning a home has been held out not only as the epitome of the "American dream", but also a social policy that leads to positive social outcomes like more personal responsibility and connection to neighborhoods. That policy, fueled since the New Deal by the mortgage interest tax deduction, and in recent years by policy choices of the Fed and possibly Fannie and Freddie, now lies at the heart of the economic crises we are facing. Should President Obama commit his bailout to trying to restore that policy?

Richard Florida offers a compelling story about why Obama should consider strategies that will allow renting to replace home ownership for many of the present victims of the mortgage crisis. According to Florida, renting is a better fit with the careers of young adults, careers that routinely require rapid relocations to different cities and which offer the best lifestyles to those who can live very close to where they work. Home ownership may have fit the mid-20th century with its single worker, lifetime career model families, but today's young workers are better off being able to move easily and to find attractive housing closer to where they work.

This rental approach, which would benefit from a significant rethinking of current government policies, offers some very attractive gains on the environment and energy use, assuming that more rental housing will be in higher density formations in close proximity to public transportation. It would also help reduce our commitment to governing through crime and the resulting culture of fear and control. As Scott Simon pointed out, we treat home ownership as a kind of crime reduction strategy because it is supposed to make people more personally responsible and more committed to their communities. Richard Florida notes that a recent empirical study fails to find significant differences in major parameters of well being (both individual and community) between home owners and renters. Notice that our policies preferring home ownership have helped stigmatize rental properties and people who rent as associated with higher crime risk (a self fulfilling prophesy depresses many urban neighborhoods). Moreover home ownership tends to make people more fearful and sensitive about crime in their community. As David Garland suggests in his book, The Culture of Control, suburbs left empty by two career families produce a sense of looming menace to their residents. Higher density apartment neighborhoods close to public transportation, offices, and shopping, will rarely appear empty and menacing.

Home ownership also inculcates crime fear by producing a subject inherently concerned about the risk of future declines in property values. While the renter will be mainly concerned by actual threats of crime to themselves or their family, the home owner is necessarily more concerned about rumors of crime and their impact on housing prices.

Richard Florida suggests that great depressions produce fundamental shifts in the geography of the economy. The long boom following the New Deal was built around home ownership. Ironically it helped generate the regime of governing through crime which helped shatter the political force of the New Deal (which might have been able to hold the housing bubble in greater check). In its collapse, Florida suggests, we should look for the opportunity to facilitate a new geography of capitalism. Fear of crime, now the major product of the governing through crime regime, will remain one of the strongest obstacles to convincing Americans to embrace this new geography (see the post below).