Shorewood versus 53206

Perhaps nothing explains the problem better than the numbers: The clip below of Milwaukee Police Chief Edward Flynn has gotten nearly a million hits, despite being on YouTube only since last November. But the clip of University of Wisconsin Milwaukee Professor Lois Quinn, who was commissioned by the NAACP to look at rates of incarceration of black men in the entire state of Wisconsin? It’s been up on YouTube three months longer, and has had 86 hits.

I came upon both Flynn and Quinn through a BBC video clip entitled “Why Does Wisconsin Send So Many Black People to Jail,” and that was jarring enough. Shouldn’t the BBC be writing about the mystery of Wisconsin’s famous cheeses, or the remaining legacy of Vince Lombardi in Green Bay? Sorry, guys—this is where we are now.

And I got to that clip because I had read a news story—again in the BBC—about, well, here’s a screen shot of what I saw:

  

Right, so people the world over are reading about what happened to a 19-year old black kid on the near east side of Madison, Wisconsin; it’s a place I know well, since I lived over there, and still have good friends over there. So I should know the area, the city, and the state—right?

I’m not so sure….

Certainly, the professor is a type I know well: Earnest, sincere, well-meaning. Her points are valid: It’s not just the city of Milwaukee that has an horrific are of incarceration of young black men, but the entire state of Wisconsin. And why is that? Well, the mandatory sentencing guidelines play a part, as do the stepped-up efforts of the Milwaukee Police Department to crack down on driving offenses. Why should that affect black people adversely?

Several reasons, the first of which is that the police are probably targeting the black population. But the real reason is simple: Once you have gone to jail, it is nearly impossible to stay out of jail again.

Everything is against you: The jobs that are available are not on the bus lines, so you need a car. But wait, your license has been suspended, so you drive in fear of being stopped. And even if you have a car and your license hasn’t been suspended? Well, what do you tell your boss, after you have been late three times to work this month, after all these stops?

Assuming, by the way, that there is any job at all, since telling your prospective employer you’ve been a guest of the state of Wisconsin for the last 2.4 years (the average time a prisoners spends in prison for a non-violent drug offense)? Inexplicably, it seems to have a dampening affect on the interview….

So it’s a problem, since Milwaukee has the third highest number of young black men per capita in the country, and do those guys have a high school education? A lot don’t, but it’s more than the lack of jobs and the lack of education. At one point in the clip, Quinn talks about one zip code in the inner city of Milwaukee, and I was interested to learn that she had studied it, and reported this:

This 2007 publication introduces two new sections addressing critical (and previously unexamined) issues facing the neighborhood: the unprecedented increases in subprime and high-interest rate housing loans to neighborhood residents and investors, and the growing population of ex-offenders of prime working age in the neighborhood. These new measures stand in sharp contrast with prior indicators which have generally shown relatively slow downturns and in some cases modest improvements. The new analyses, however, show substantial movement in a negative direction, particularly in the last 4-5 years as prisoners released to these neighborhoods have risen dramatically and subprime lending for refinancing mortgages has escalated.

Melancholy, isn’t it? Because apparently the neighborhood has been studied for the last twenty years, since 1993, and the neighborhood had been struggling, but not plummeting. Oh, and by the way, see that “this 2007 publication,” right up there in the first sentence of the paragraph above?  2007 was before the economic collapse, and remember, all of that subprime lending affected the poor more than the middle class or rich. No one will shed a tear for a rich guy buying ten apartments on spec to flip who then ends up shirtless, but a family who ends up on the streets, or sleeping in their car, because the bank has leant them money? All so that the bank could turn around and sell a package of mortgages to Korea? Sorry, that pulls my heartstrings.

Am I just another do-good liberal, then? Because Ed Flynn, the police chief of Milwaukee certainly lost it in the clip below, and with good reason. Yes, cops are out there putting their lives at risk while I sleep away, only waking up to go out and protest that black lives matter, but never showing up when a black kid is shot in a drive-by killing—as was the case with Flynn, during the protest—or worrying about the 80% of crime victims who are black, and their 80% of perpetrators who are black.

Nor is it really fair to point out that, statistically, crime tends to take place in the same neighborhoods as the perpetrators: If I live in zip code 53206—the zip code studied by the professor—am I going to hop a bus up to Shorewood or Fox Point to knock over a gas station?

No, the real problem is this. But wait: Let’s stop this finger-pointing and go back to basics. Ask any little black kid what he wants to be when he grows up, and what are you going to hear? That he wants to be an ex-con? A drug dealer? The biggest pimp in the neighborhood?
Don’t think so. He or she will want to be a doctor or a fireman or a policeman or a teacher. And somehow—those dreams are getting realized for little kids up in Shorewood or Fox Point, but not for 53206. And I suspect that however unequal things were in the Madison I grew up in, they are infinitely worse now. And it starts, as it always does, at the beginning: From prenatal care that is substandard in 53206 to the single-parent home to the underfunded schools to the societal norm of pushers and drug dealers on the street to the reality of drive-by killings and drug murders to gangs to school dropout rates to…. Do I have to go on?

One of Quinn’s points is that for Shorewood residents there’s a pass, when a rich kid gets in trouble with the law. He was swerving through the main drag in Shorewood with a blood alcohol level of .15? Kids will be kids! But one tangle with the law in 53206 is a life sentence.

So by all means watch the clip of Flynn, who is feeling understandably besieged. What shouldn’t you do? Read the comments by the viewers—all 5,681 comments, who may have been inflamed by the chief, as well as by the poster of the clip, Brian Solonge. He ends his introduction with this:

If black people in America dont wake up we are going to be an endangered specie like the Native American within the next 100 years,bet on it.

In order not to have to use a decade's worth of “sic” above, I will only say that the spelling and punctuation are as in the original.

So it’s a war, Shorewood versus 53206. Now then, we can fight it, or we can stop, take a deep breath, and look at all the systemic issues that keep this war going on. But for anyone disinclined to do that, let me tell you, there will never be a winner in this war. 

Not the way we’re fighting it.  

   

The Chief Flips the Bird

Well, the island collectively dropped its jaw when the news came out. Se fue muy molesto read the headline in The New Day, our local newspaper; “He Left Hot and Bothered,” would be the equivalent in English.

And the “he” is a pretty important he, since Héctor Pesquera is the head of the police department, which in turn is the second largest force in the United States (New York City is number 1).

Well, the question on everybody’s lips is, “why?” Granted, the job couldn’t have been much fun, since morale is low, public confidence in the police is virtually nil, the politicians are busy fighting each other—sometimes to the point of fisticuffs—and, to top it all off, the United States Department of Justice is suing the police department for violations of civil rights.

And was that the problem? Because yesterday, federal judge Gustavo Gelpí appointed Juan Mattos to be the federal monitor to assure that an 18-year reform of the Police Department was going according to plan.  

Pesquera denied that the appointment of Mattos has anything to do with his decision. However, Pesquera also refused to say why he was retiring and returning to his home in Florida.

And Mattos was presented to the public two days ago at the governor’s mansion, at which everybody and his brother showed up, except….right, you know who….

"Pesquera se cansó de las determinaciones apresuradas y el ridículo ayer, donde el Gobierno anunció un alegado monitor sin estar el Jefe de la Policía y sin dar detalles sobre la contratación, es el mejor ejemplo", dijo González.

Roughly, “Perquera got tired of political pressure, and the best example was the ridiculousness yesterday, when the government announced an alleged monitor without the chief being there and without giving details about how he was contracted,” said González.

“He works very hard—Saturday and Sunday, included—and he has the respect of the force,” said my friend Tony, who is the kind of guy who knows the inside story. What he didn’t do, apparently, was play the political game terribly well. And that’s crucial, because the reform won’t come cheap—it’s guesstimated that it will cost 300 million bucks over the course of a decade. Which means that any police chief is going to have to go to the capitol and press the flesh.

Pesquera made over a quarter of a million bucks annually, but guess what?

…wasn’t worth it.

When the Chief Goes Bad

You should know—click on the video below, and you’ll be exposed to a level of vitriol and hatred rarely seen. Your gut may wrench—mine did. Your blood pressure will rocket. When the madman fires his automatic weapon—which you knew was coming—after the explosive, profanity-laced rant, it’s like being kicked in the stomach.

And the madman is Chief of Police Mark Kessler.

And on 1 August, the town board of Gilberton, Pennsylvania, attempted to hold a meeting to decide what to do about this nut. The video had gone viral, with half of the country loving it, the other half horrified. And there was a problem—sure, most of the town loves their guns, but even this was a little extreme.

But not as extreme as what Kessler did, which was to get a hundred other crazy people from all around the country to run into Gilberton, and block the doorway to the meeting. And they were all weaponed-up.

This had, as you can imagine, a slightly chilling effect on the citizenry, many of whom opted to stay home—presumably under their beds. Nonetheless, the town board voted to suspend Kessler for a month, without pay. Here’s what Michael Morrill, an activist who had a petition of 20,000 signatures asking to fire Kessler, had to say:

In an email Morrill told me, “I have been organizing for four decades. I have faced Klansmen in Kentucky, Ustase in Bosnia and police indiscriminately beating demonstrators in Italy. [Wednesday] night in Gilberton was more frightening than any of those situations.”

Nor was it the first time that Kessler had got himself in trouble. In 2010, he illegally arrested a councilman and did a strip search on him. The reason? Kessler said it was the profanity the councilman allegedly used. The councilman turned around and sued—and the taxpayers forked up $15,000 in an out-of-court settlement.

There was also a little incident in a crowded bar, during which the off-duty cop shot himself in the hand. There was a brawl going on at the time; the event is still under investigation.

Well, the town is scared; many people who might have spoken out at the meeting feared retaliation, nor is it hard to see why. Here’s what one woman had to say:

You know why there’s not more residents here? The threats. That’s why. Because they’re afraid. They’re afraid they’re going to have their windows shot out.” – Lifelong Gilberton resident Rose McCarthy speaking about Police Chief Mark Kessler and his supporters on July 31, 2013.

Wanting to be fair, I went into Kessler’s website, and I bring you this:

"FREEDOM ISN'T FREE" 

I will sacrifice all I have defending my country, our constitution, OUR FREEDOMS

NEVER AGAIN WILL I BE RULED BY TYRANTS, DICTATORS, OR SCUM POLATICIANS

 For I am jus one man who stood against many and said, NO MORE!

OK—spelling is not his long suit. But let’s talk straight. This guy brought a hundred armed people and barred the way to a public meeting. The moment he did that, there should have been arrests. In fact, where is the United States Justice Department?

A month ago, the feds came to an agreement with the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico about the reforms needed and the plan of action established to improve the police department of the island.

In fact, the feds might address another situation: Kessler’s Constitutional Security Force, the group that provided the 100 gun-toting crazies last Wednesday night. According to one Internet source, the CSF has members in 38 states. Is it true? Who knows….

This is insanity. We have heavily armed nuts who are convinced that there is a dictatorship and who will, at the drop of a hat, blow the bejusus out of everybody.

We’re on the brink of catastrophe.

The Dancing Libertarian

Right, here’s a guy with a truly wonderful idea. He wants to get 10,000 lunatics together on the Fourth of July, all of them heavily armed with rifles slung against their backs, gather them at Arlington Cemetery, march them across the Potomac into Washington, troop around the Senate, White House, and Supreme Court, and then march over the bridge into Virginia again.

Adam Kokesh, the intellectual author of this plan, is planning to do this—if he gets the support—to send out a little message. He invokes Tom Jefferson, and the famous line, “when the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.”

Well, there is a little problem. The only guns allowed in DC are handguns, which have to be registered in the city. So the police chief came out sounding quite reasonable—he’s willing to work with any group that wants to come in peaceably and protest. But no, boys, leave the guns at home.

There’s serious craziness out there. But wait—let me go check Adam out.

OK—I’ve just spent 25 minutes with Adam, having watched two clips. The first is a 21 minute affair, and covers his libertarian beliefs, his role in the Afghanistan war, his realization that the war was unjust and illegal, and then his realization that Obama, far from sticking up for the rights and freedoms of the people, was just as bad and in fact worse at jumping into bed with the rich and powerful. The second clip was of Adam standing and being filmed in a no-film zone in front of the White House. A clearly peeved cop, exercising all his patience, has decided not to arrest him.

He’s articulate and intelligent, is Adam, and makes a good spokesman. And yes, there are things I can agree with. Of course he has the right to stand on a sidewalk in front of the White House and be filmed, for which he was not arrested; he also has the right to dance at the Jefferson Memorial, which he did, and for which he was arrested.

And he may be right in his assertion that the cops are abusive and generally disrespective. In fact, I started this day by reading that Puerto Rico is going to have to put 600 million bucks into upgrading our police department over the next ten years. Given that we have a deficit of over 2 billion and are facing likely credit downgrades into junk status, it’s a little difficult to see how we are going to do this. The United States Department of Justice, however, has mandated that the police department correct what Justice deems civil rights violations. So a local federal judge is overseeing the process.

OK—that’s the local news. Adam and I can probably also join hands on the issue of the maker of my computer—a MacBook Pro. Apple, it seems, has shielded billions in taxes by employing multiple schemes that are, by the way, perfectly legal. Corporations can do things that you and I can’t do; here’s The New York Times on the subject.

Congressional investigators found that some of Apple’s subsidiaries had no employees and were largely run by top officials from the company’s headquarters in Cupertino, Calif. But by officially locating them in places like Ireland, Apple was able to, in effect, make them stateless — exempt from taxes, record-keeping laws and the need for the subsidiaries to even file tax returns anywhere in the world.

Beautiful! And I also agree with Adam—the statistics on the economy are bogus. Unemployment at 8 point-whatever percent? Does that count everybody who has stopped looking for work? And yes, the rich have certainly gotten richer.

It’s hard, in some ways, not to be cynical, not to feel that in almost every facet of our society we have consistently gone backward. We let our government take away significant liberties in the fear-drenched days after 9 / 11. We’ve engaged in unjust wars and gotten the whole world to hate us. Our cops have too often used force against us.

So I’m happy to report good news; last Friday, May 17, I took part in a march against homophobia, and what an affair it was! Best, how many groups came out and protested, how organized the whole affair was! And despite some estimates of only 200 participants, there were, I can tell you, many, many more.

The mood was great; spirits were high. And yes, there were many kids there—teenagers and people in their early twenties. For the first time in Puerto Rico, there was a large, organized and multilateral march for gay rights, and against homophobia.

Our hour had come. And no, Adam, not with armed weapons slung across our backs….

Do You Know Where Your Prócer Is?

Well, having taken care of the decision, yesterday, of whether to charge the Boston bomber in civilian courts or treat him as an enemy combatant—thanks, Barry, for following my guidelines—we can turn our heads to local news.

Not much of which, typically, is particularly cheerful. We have fallen arms (brazos caídos) in the police department—which is to say that almost 1000 cops called in “sick” today. This, states the chief, is putting us all in danger.

This is questionable, at least for me, since the principal activity of our local force seems to be chatting. But my mind may have been poisoned, those decades ago before I moved to Puerto Rico, by the descriptions of the police given to me by my friend Harry, who also told me the following joke, common throughout Latin America.

An old lady hears noises in her living room late at night. She peers through the keyhole and sees two robbers stealing her silver. She then rushes to the window and cries out, “Thieves in the house, call the police!” The next night, she again hears noises, peers through keyhole, and rushes to the window. She shouts, “Police in the house, call the thieves!”

Right—Harry tells it better.

I will say, however, that I caught myself thinking, absentmindedly one day, “Wow, I can’t believe they give those guys guns….”

Well, the police are protesting because of changes to the retirement plan, which is broke, and which had to be amended by a recent law—an action that was basically forced on us by the likes of Moody’s and Standard and Poors. We are, sadly, one small step away from junk bond status, and any degradation would be, if not fatal, at least quite sickening. So we passed a law pretty much in the dark, since, in fact, we have absolutely no knowledge of how much money we need. Why not? Because nobody has ever done any actuarial work on the plan. In fact, it may be that nobody could do actuarial work—it’s not clear that we have the data.

So we passed a bad law and now people are, to say the least, grumpy. Actually, some people are predicting that there will be a massive retirement before the new law goes into effect on June 1, and nobody is quite sure what that will do.

People in our gated communities are grumpy, too—a federal judge has just told them that the Jehovah’s Witnesses have a constitution right to enter their communities, walk the neighborhood, knock on doors, and spread the good news. Well, churlish individuals don’t, apparently, want the news—“how do I know,” they are thundering, “that the Jehovah’s Witness isn’t really a delinquent?” (or delincuente, as it works better in Spanish….)

Well, it raises all sorts of questions. The Witnesses are allowed in because they sued, and won. But what about the Mormons? Or what about just Marc—shouldn’t I be allowed to walk down a street provided and maintained by the government? Among the many things that I never quite got, the right of a community to gate themselves in is one.

Right, so The New Day (El Nuevo Día, the local rag) reports that the Archbishop of San Juan, Roberto González Nieves, is very likely grumpy, too. Or maybe not—he’s a scrappy guy, always up for a fight. And what is it, this time? Well, two years ago he decided to name one of the chapels in the cathedral the Altar de la Patria.

Time for a language break—patria has a particular meaning. It’s the motherland, the homeland, the native land. It also, unfortunately, may mean nation, and here the battle starts. The archbishop has made no bones about his views on the status of Puerto Rico—he supports independence. No problem, says some of his parishioners, but don’t drag it into the church.

What González did drag in, a couple of weeks ago, are the remains of a guy—all right, a prócer or patriot—named Ramón Power y Giralt and another guy named Juan Alejo de Arizmendi.

OK—Power first. He was born in 1775 in Ponce, and then was sent at age 13 to Spain, to continue his studies. He joined the navy, and distinguished himself in the blockade of Santo Domingo against the French. None of that is controversial.

What is controversial—at least potentially—is his work as a prócer / statesman. He was appointed to represent Puerto Rico in the Spanish Cortes, a parliamentary assembly meeting in 1810 in Cádiz. And he must have impressed—he was named vice president of the assembly, and fought hard for more autonomy for Puerto Rico. He succeeded in passing the Power Act, which established five tax-free ports on the island, eliminated the monopoly on flour, reduced tariffs, and provided for economic reforms.

The Cortes also wrote a constitution, passed in 1812, and called—get ready—The Constitution of 1812. It was the most liberal of its time; it established universal male (of course) suffrage, freedom of the press, constitutional monarchy and—here you really should get ready—national sovereignty.

This was not a great time in Spain—the French controlled much of the country, what they didn’t control were controlled by juntas—, Bonaparte had deposed Ferdinand and installed his own brother Joseph as king. The Constitution of 1812, says Wikipedia, was never really enforced. At any rate, Ferdinand regained power in 1814, and guess what the first thing he did was?

Right—tear up the constitution.

For those people who support independence, Power y Giralt is a major figure since, for two tumultuous years, it was through him that Puerto Rico enjoyed autonomy. The rest of the island, of course, doesn’t spend much time on him.

Important—Ramón Power y Giralt died and was buried in Cádiz, Spain, in 1813.

Right—on to Arizmendi. First important fact—he was the first native-born bishop in Puerto Rico. He was a strong defender of the poor, and made straw baskets, sold them, and used the proceeds to buy food and clothes for the poor.

He was also a strong supporter of Power y Giralt, and most famously gave his bishopric ring to him, saying it was "as sure pledge that will sustain you in the memory of your resolution to protect and maintain the rights of our fellow countrymen, as I myself am resolved to die for my beloved flock."

Seems pretty innocuous, right? Well, I’ll step back from the controversy and let Wikipedia tell the story:

A modern day interpretation, which has no historical foundation that can be found in the footnote, is that for Arizmendi this was also a national symbol of Puerto Rico by joining his country and God in his heart.  

Well, two years ago the current Archbishop of San Juan dreamed up the idea—why not dig up the remains of Power, over there in Spain, and bring him over to be re-united with the remains of his old friend, Arizmendi? We could have the two great próceres together and put them—guess where?—¡en la Altar de la Patria! Wow—who could object?

If you don’t know, you’re not Puerto Rican. And since there is a group that is both Catholic and pro-statehood, they began petitioning the Vatican, which last year sent over a guy from Ecuador, Antonio Arregui Yarza, to check into the matter.

And Arregui—what did he find?

Not known, says the New Day, but what is known is that the Archbishop of San Juan has been told twice—enough with the Altar de la Patria and nix to the idea of interring the remains of the two patriots in the chapel.  

And so it was that on 6 April 2013, the remains of Ramón Power y Giralt were escorted solemnly into the old city by a group of very dignified—you can see them below—young sailors from the Spanish navy training ship. The remains went first to the capitol, where everybody received them with much formality and respect and protestations of good will. Then, they went to the Department of State, where the process was repeated.

And now?

Well, the New Day doesn’t quite say where the remains are, but…

…I’m running up to the Cathedral to see….