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Tag: ghetto culture

  • Shoe-Leather Research

    It’s a lazy journalist and an incompetent academic who writes a story based on the anecdotes of cab drivers, bartenders, and shoe shiners. But…

    I was getting my shoes shined Friday afternoon in Baltimore’s Penn Station and the shoe shiner and I were chatting. He was a black man, a bit older than me. Baltimore born and bred. West Side.

    Snowing in New York, I said. Crazy.

    He has family upstate.

    No, New York City.

    Snowing in the city? Crazy. Upstate is one thing.

    Pretty bleak upstate.

    Too quiet there, he said. I’m a city man.

    Me too.

    He quoted something out of the Bible. Kind of lost me there.

    I asked him if things were getting better or worse in Baltimore.

    “You want what you want to hear or you want me to be honest?” He looked me in the eyes and said the truth: “It’s the same as it ever was.”

    He mentioned that he had a few other stands in other locations, too. But it wasn’t easy to expand his business.

    “Why?” I asked, thinking of the poor economy.

    “I can’t find any workers.”

    “Really? But there’s lots of guys standing on the corner.” This was a leading question because I knew the answer.

    “Yeah,” he said, “But of them kids have any work ethic.”

    All he wanted was somebody willing to show up on time every day and work. And he couldn’t find it.

    I mentioned that you won’t get rich shining shoes, but it’s honest work. My grandfather shined shoes. His grandfather taught him the value of honest work. Honest work. “That it is,” he said, “and it keeps the lights from flickering. Know what I mean? It pays the bills.”

  • Beyond Hope?

    Michael East is a veteran police officer in Saginaw, Michigan. He’s also an excellent writer. He has a new book coming out. Beyond Hope?

    Saginaw, not that you’d know, is a pretty messed up place of rusted industry and abandonment. It’s lost about half its population. Even Habitat for Humanity is helping tear it down.

    Mike’s book is great. I read an early draft. But it won’t be on sale for a few weeks.

    This isn’t even in the book. It’s from an email from Mike. But it gives you a good feel:

    Last Devil’s Night, a few thousand volunteers roamed the city to help prevent Saginaw’s residents from burning down these houses. We had numerous cops on overtime. My partner and I were assigned an East Side district and were told to check every abandoned house we could find and make sure the arsonists weren’t setting them up to burn (wood piles, gasoline, etc). At one house we opened the door, saw most of the floor missing and said: “Fuck this, let’s just do an outside perimeter check.” We did and moved on.

    Three days later some kids playing in the neighborhood went into the same house and found a woman who had been reported missing the week prior. She had walked inside, fell through the open floor, but her leg caught on a floor beam and it snapped her leg. She hung there, upside down, for God knows how long and died a slow death. She was inside, dead, the night we decided to skip that house. Creepy.

    Good stuff.

  • Turkey leg killing

    I mentioned the turkey leg killing story to my classes today. Many of the NYPD officers in my class had heard the story! How? I don’t know. It really is like a police urban myth. None claimed it as a New York City story. But none had any idea where it was from.

  • Killed Over a Loosey

    A 30-year-old man was chased down by four women and stabbed more than 20 times early Sunday after arguing with them over a broken cigarette, sources said.

    Here’s the story in the Chicago Sun Times: “The slain man, Morris Wilson, was drinking with the four women at about 2 a.m. when he broke a cigarette, angering the women, a source familiar with the investigation said.”

  • Stories of the Eastern

    I got Badges, Bullets & Bars in the mail and started reading it.

    I am amazed (maybe pleased is a better word) to find that one story — a police urban myth I constantly heard — is true. There are many crazy stories cops tell. And every squad has its own ghosts. Most of the stories are probably true (you really “can’t make this shit up”). But cops are also good bullshitters, so you never know for sure.

    There are stories that come to mind that I fully believe are true but weren’t in my book because, well, I didn’t see it.

    One involves fake snow and a sleeping police officer.

    another involves an officer who dragged a cold dead body across the street so he wouldn’t have to do paperwork.

    Turns out the dead guy had the misfortune of dying right on a post boundary line. What made it even worse was the the line wasn’t even a districtline (I mean if he dumped the body on the Southeast… or even gave it Sector 1, well, that is a littlefunny). But the SOB dragged the body across the street so another member of his own squad had to deal with it! What a prick.

    Or who knows? Maybe it never happened. (But it did.)

    Another story I heard (many times) involved brothers on Durham St. One brother stabbed his brother with a butcher’s knife. On Thanksgiving. At the family dinner table. Why? Because they were arguing about who would get the turkey legs.

    Now that’s certainly a doozie of story! True? Who knows? I mean, I wouldn’t kill my brother over a bird leg. But then there’s a lot of behavior in the Eastern I wouldn’t do.

    But I rarely heard stories that weren’t true… I mean, why make shit up when there’s such much true that is unbelievable?

    But still… Thanksgiving? turkey leg? brothers? carving knife? table all set up and everything. It seemed too picture perfect to be true. I mean, maybe they were just “brothers.” And it wasn’t Thanksgiving. And it was while eating a chicken box. But really it was about something else.

    Well… I’ll be damned. In his book, Dan Shanahan was working Sector Two in the Eastern and says not only is the story true, but hewas the primary at the scene! On Durham Street. In mysector. It happened back in 1976. (The way the story was told, it always seemed like it happened just nights before I hit the streets in 2000). Twenty-five years later (only one officer I worked with had more than 24 years on) this story was still being told to represent everything that was f*cked up about the Eastern.

    Still. I’m happy to read this. I feel like Mythbusters. “Man in Eastern stabs and kills brother over turkey leg at family Thanksgiving dinner.” Confirmed!

  • Ghetto Court

    The Detroit News reports:

    Mayor Kenneth Cockrel Jr.’s administration was dealt an embarrassing blow Friday, after his top lawyer ignited a racial flap by saying the city’s 36th District Court was “acting like a ghetto court.”

    Kathleen Leavey, who is white, resigned as the city’s corporation counsel Thursday, but said the comment was misinterpreted. That same day, the court’s chief judge, Marilyn Atkins, sent a scathing letter to numerous city officials calling the remark racist.

    Deputy Mayor Saul Green asked Leavey to quit. Cockrel’s spokesman, Daniel Cherrin, on Friday called the comments “unacceptable.”
    …
    “I called it that because of the way they treat people,” Leavey said, referring to long lines for service that are common. “They treat people poorly … whether you are black or white. You just get less service than you get in the suburbs. It’s just a bad situation.”
    …
    “It definitely could be perceived as a racist statement,” Kenyatta said. “I don’t think she would have said that about Dearborn’s court.”

    Leavey said she plans to revert to her civil servant position in the Law Department. She’s been with the city since 1985, including a stint as director of the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department from 2000 to 2002.

    “I am not going down without a fight,” Leavey said.

    She said she is “deeply, deeply wounded” by the accusations she is racist.

    So basically this woman is being canned because she’s white. I don’t normally have much sympathy for this line or argument. But let’s get real.

    Calling a messed up court system “ghetto” should not be a firing offense. Especially if the court system is! Yes, I know calling something ghetto is offense to some. And I briefly address this in my book (and then proceed to call the Eastern District “ghetto” with a capital G.).

    Yes, it’s a loaded term. Ghetto can be a racist term; it can also be a descriptive term. If it’s used to label a decent person as “low class” simply because of skin color, it’s racist. But many people call themselves ghetto. Many people actghetto. Many people don’t.

    To me, the question is whether callingthe Detroit system ghetto is justifiable. Now I don’t know the Detroit court system at all. But if it’s anything like Baltimore’s, and given Leavey’s comments it probably is, the court system is underfunded, overworked, and virtually incapable of meeting out true justice for and to the hundreds of thousand of poor black men and women–men and women from the ghetto (many but not all of whom are ghetto)–that walk through it’s revolving doors every year.

    The court system is one big hustle. It’s about getting by with what you got, pulling one over on people out to hurt you, and looking out for number one. The courts beat you down and saps your will to fight for what’s right. You can call that justice if you want, but if that’s not ghetto, I don’t know what is.

  • Sympathy for the Devil

    A reader turned me on to this articleabout life in the LA Hood: “Sympathy for the Devil: Crime Stats Say L.A.’s Streets Are Safer Than Ever, So Why Are Gang Hoods Still So Bloody?”

    It’s by Sam Slovick in the LA Weekly. It’s long. I’ll confess, I haven’t read it all (sheee-it, man… I got things I got to be doing). But if you’ve got an hour on your hands, check it out.

  • Willie Bosket

    I recently finished reading Fox Butterfield’s excellent All God’s Children: The Bosket Family and the American Tradition of Violence.

    Amazingly researched (Butterfield is a Class-A journalist), this 1996 book follows a culture of violence and its transference over time from white slave owners in the historically f**ked-up county of Edgefield, South Carolina to Willie Bosket and the contemporary ghettos of today. It’s not a feel-good story. But it’s a great read. Willie Bosket was a very bad boy.

    The New York Timeshas a story on him today. He’s been in solitary confinement for two decades.

  • Hit it!

    Ha!

    “Apparently, McDonald’s didn’t realize something everyone else did, namely that the “I’d hit it” slogan adorning a banner ad means “I fancy it sexually” in the language of its target audience, and that the slogan sounds somewhat strange in the context of hamburger advertising.”

  • The Eastern District and Iraq

    During any given year, a 15- to 34-year-old man in the Eastern District has about the same chance of being killed as a U.S. soldier stationed in Iraq.

    That’s just wrong.

    The Eastern stats are from page 203 of my book. The Iraq stats are taken from DonHodges.com.

    I bring this up because of an interesting comment from a good reader of this blog. There are a lot of people out there who are willing to say, “fuck ’em. That’s their problem.”

    As a police officer who’s worked the Eastern, I kind of understand this. You try and help. You put your life on the line day in and day out. And nothing ever changes. Plus, for your efforts, you’ll get called a racist.

    Once I half-jokingly accused my partner of simply not liking black people, he responded passionately, “I got nothing against black people. I just don’t like theseblack people” (that’s in chapter 3 of my book, by the way).

    On the Leonard Lopate Show the other day, the host asked me, was it not true that most people I policed were “decent, hard working people.” I could not take the easy (and politically correct) path and just say “yes.”

    Here’s what I said:

    “I don’t want to be too insulting, but I do have a tough time, having policed the area, calling the people I dealt with decent people, by and large. We didn’t get along well.”

    [“But they saw you as the enemy almost immediately. Didn’t they?”]

    “Yeah, I mean, but I was. My job was to lock them up. If I were them, I wouldn’t have liked me either.” (listen to the whole interview here.)

    I don’t feel that most of the people I policed were decent people. Most people in the Eastern District may be decent, but as a police officer, you don’t police most people. You police the problem-people.

    But decent or not, we’re all human beings. And this country is founded on the idea that we’re endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights. Life is one of the those rights.

    Even though I’m not “at risk,” I’ll keep bringing up the issue of violence, black-on-black murder in particular. I think it’s a moral issue. (I also think it’s an economic issue, but that’s another story.) I think it’s wrong to ignore this level of poverty and violence, no matter whose fault it is (and personally, I doblame the victim a lot of the time). We can do better.

    We’re a rich country. Supposedly we’re a caring country. And if you’re the type of person to ask “what would Jesus do?” go ahead and ask. I don’t know what He’d say, but I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t be “fuck ’em.”