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Tag: the ghetto

  • Youth: The future (prison) leaders of tomorrow

    The fourth in a series from Adam Plantinga’s excellent 400 Things Cops Know: Street-Smart Lessons from a Veteran Patrolman:

    As a cop, it’s easy to get discouraged about the state of today’s youth. You don’t see much of the honors student bound for Dartmouth, because she doesn’t do anything that would cause her to come into contact with you. You mostly see the teen hustler wearing a jacket with dollar signs written on it gearing up to break The Ten Commandments but good. You patrol neighborhoods where toddlers chew absently on cigarette butts from the ground and 2-year-olds with matted hair and jam-smeared faces play unsupervised in the street. You see fifth graders with girls’ names tattooed on their arms. You talk to teenagers whose dad is locked up and whose mom is strung out on dope. The kid’s breakfast is a bag of chips and his lunch is a butter sandwich—which is exactly what it sounds like—and his friends are all just like him and some of them are carrying guns. Does it really come as a shock that these young people tend to fall out on the lawless end? They’re just little criminals waiting to become big criminals. The shock would be if they turned out halfway normal. You marvel at the few that make it. It’s the equivalent of muscling their way out of quicksand.

  • Reporter fired for politically incorrect editorializing

    With regards to the killing of Jersey City Police Officer Melvin Santiago, Fox News TV reporter Sean Bergin no longer has a job after editorializing on-air:

    It’s important to shine a light on this racist mentality that has so contaminated policing and America’s inner-cities. … The underlying cause for all of this, of course, is America’s racist criminal justice system that makes it impossible for young black men to succeed. It’s nearly impossible to cover the issue in-depth and accurately when surrounded by stark raving conservatives who masquerade as journalists.

    Just kidding.

    Bergin didn’t say that. And he didn’t work for Fox. The truth is, if he had said that, it’s very unlikely he would have been fired. He was fired for editorializing in a conservative manner, based on his what he’s seen as a reporter.

    What Bergin actually said on-air was:

    We were besieged, flooded with calls from police officers furious that we would give media coverage to the life of a cop killer. It’s understandable. We decided to air it because it’s important to shine a light on the anti-cop mentality that has so contaminated America’s inner cities. This same, sick, perverse line of thinking is evident from Jersey City, to Newark and Patterson to Trenton.

    It has made the police officer’s job impossible, and it has got to stop. The underlying cause for all of this, of course: young black men growing up without fathers. Unfortunately, no one in the news media has the courage to touch that subject.

    Do I agree with this? Not one-hundred percent, but he certainly brings up a fair issue. Is what he said overly simplistic? Of course. But let’s not set the bar too high for local TV news. This sure beats another cute animal video. And don’t give me that “reporters shouldn’t have an opinion” bit. Or “there’s a time a place for everything.” This was a great time and place to express his opinion on a major problem.

    Bergin later told The Blaze(and then it was picked up by the AP and other news sites):

    I broke the rules, but I broke the rules because I was doing the right thing. You can’t fix a problem if you don’t talk about the problem. The truth is, 73 percent of African-American children grow up without fathers. It’s a topic that needs to be handled delicately — and really, this situation could have been used as a way to explore that.

    Now that 73 percent figure isn’t true and a reporter should know better than to throw around misleading statistics. (There’s a big difference between not having legally married parents living together at time of birth and “growing up without a father.” Regardless, the comparable figure for whites is 29 percent.) But still, Bergin’s greater point is valid: there’s a problem here; we need to talk about it and get to the bottom of it.

    Bergin went on:

    “I’m in these housing projects all the time, and it’s all for the same thing: black men slaughtering each other in the streets. Why is this happening?” he continued, adding that it’s nearly impossible to cover the issue in-depth and accurately when surrounded by “stark raving liberals who masquerade as journalists.”

    OK, strike two again Bergin for using the phrase “stark-raving liberal.” But I’ll give him credit for this: his opinions come from actually visiting the homes and neighborhoods where the violence happens. He sees bad things happening and actually cares. Before you criticize him, ask yourself if you care. Think about the last time you’ve done anything in a high-crime neighborhood other than lock your car doors.

    As I wrote in Cop in the Hood:

    If you really want to learn about the ghetto, go there. There’s probably one near you. Visit a church; walk down the street; buy something from the corner store; have a beer; eat. But most importantly, talk to people. That’s how you learn. When the subject turns to drugs and crime, you’ll hear a common refrain: “It just don’t make sense.”

    Bergin did all this. Reality, as cops well know, isn’t always politically correct. And you don’t have to like what what he says to defend his right to say it.

  • How the iPhone Changed the Way We Do Ethnography: A Methodological Note

    In
    my partial blog-writing absence (though in case you’re worried, all is well
    here in Astoria, Queens, post storm — we’re high and dry and with electricity)
    I wanted to feature a few promising up-and-coming researchers I’m excited about.

    The first of the young-upstart rising-star whipper-snappers is Jan
    Haldipur (his email). Jan, an
    ethnographer from upstate New York,is a PhD Candidate in Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center. He’s researching how the NYPD’s Stop, Question,
    and Frisk policies affect people in a South Bronx neighborhood.

    I
    had a few beers with Jan the other week, and (when I wasn’t trying to impress
    him with inferior Dutch-language skills) we got to talking about taking
    field notes.     When I was a cop, being required to carry paper and pen makes initial note
    taking comparatively easy, at least during down-times. But if you’re doing research
    with people who, to put it politely, are more questioning of authority, whipping out a notepad can be rather
    conspicuous in a head turning and even potentially dangerous kind of way. And yet, memory
    being what it is, a researcher needs to take notes. Jan discovered a great way
    around the dilemma. These are Jan Haldipur’s words:

    Perched
    on the top of a bench in a small courtyard nestled in the South Bronx’s Jackson
    Houses, I sat with “Chaz,” one of my contacts in the neighborhood. It was my
    first month in the field. With temperatures nearing the triple digits, we clung
    to the shady side of the bench, nearest the trees. As I sat, wiping the sweat
    from my brow, he told me about a recent argument he had with his grandmother. Not
    wanting to miss some of the key details, I clumsily pulled a notepad out of my
    back pocket.

    Chaz
    stopped mid-story and asked me what I was doing.

    Jan:
    I have to write some of this stuff down…remember? Like we talked about.

    Chaz:
    I know that much…but you looking like the Feds with that notebook [laughs]. You
    see everybody looking at us now?

    Feeling
    as if time had just stopped, I looked up to see that we were on the receiving
    end of a set of glares from a group of teens sitting on an adjacent bench.

    In
    an attempt to stay true to my ethnographic forefathers, I had been jotting down
    notes in shorthand. Deep in the recesses of countless seminal ethnographies,
    one can usually find a footnote or appendix detailing the experiences one has
    collecting data. Everyone from Whyte to Venkatesh [ed note: and Moskos], it seems, has shared
    personal anecdotes on finding odd moments to jot down notes of what they
    observed, heard and felt. What these texts seemed to gloss over, however, is
    just how conspicuous one can look with a pen and pad in 2012.

    Not
    wanting to make the situation any more uncomfortable than it was already
    becoming, I fumbled around in my pocket and pulled out my iPhone, opened the “notes” section and began typing. In an age when most teens and 20-somethings
    remain glued to their i-devices, checking mail, or texting, I found that my
    fiddling with a phone while talking to Chaz was no longer “curious” behavior. In
    fact, it was seen as quite normal.

    Over
    the next few weeks and months, meeting with Chaz and an assortment of other
    community members, I made a conscious decision to leave my pen and pad at home.
    Instead, I relied almost purely on my phone, and, situation permitting, a voice
    recorder. The core of the “ethnographic process” remains intact. The means to
    achieve change with the times.

    The
    iPhone! It’s the kind of brilliant yet simple observation I love. And hopefully it will help other researchers out there in the field.

    [Update: In November, 2012, I was in Chicago for the ASC conference and was riding the Green Line on W. Lake Street toward the loop around 1AM (my, how Chicago has changed since I grew up there). There was one other person in the L car, an African-American man about my age at the other end of the car. I was standing up, in the middle of the car, checking out the fancy new L car. I was scribbling notes in my pad (as I am wont to do). The other guy got upset and told me to, “Stop doing that cop shit!” I told him I was a writer. We ended up on decent terms.]