Open letter to police and their superiors:
Honorable Public
Servants,
Police across the country are asking us how to restore
trust in police and the governments they serve.
You can start with how you talk and write about us.
Stop calling us males and females! We are men, women, boys and girls, simple
words that convey not only our gender, but whether we are adults or children,
and our humanity. Any animal and some
plants are male or female. Only people
are men, women, boys and girls.
Don’t call us subjects. We are people, person in the singular. Calling us subjects makes us either a topic
or inferior to our public servants, not people equal in right. We are subject to the law, not to the people
who enforce it, who are also subject to it.
Don’t call me an
individual, which only means one, not even one person but one thing, and takes
5 syllables to do it. The longer the
word, the less it touches our hearts and changes our minds.
These words not only
dehumanize us, they take the humanity and drama out of reports of our
conduct. When writing reports, you
should feel and convey the humanity of the people you are writing about and the
drama of our actions and yours, using few and simple words to do it.
We may not think about
the words you use about us, but we feel excluded by them just the same. You probably don’t think about the way they
exclude us and elevate you, but the words you use show and affect how you think
about us.
Enforce the law equally against and in favor of us all. Unequal enforcement and protection of the law
angers us even more than how you speak about us, because we think about it.
For instance, it takes at
least two people in many cases for a piece of litter to hit the ground and stay
there: the person who dropped it and the one who lets it lie on his property. Sometimes they are the same person. But the person who dropped it is likely to be
cited if you see one drop it in public, while the one who lets it lie on his
property until it rots is rarely even warned to clean it up, though the offense
is ongoing and obvious. What’s more, the
one who dropped it is only likely to be cited if the person looks poor.
Enforce codes against property neglect as you go about your
business, and do not make citizens do your job of complaining about disorder. Unlike barking dogs and parking too long on
the street, the offense is ongoing and obvious to all; citizen complaints are
unnecessary.
Enforcement of property
maintenance codes by citizen complaint is unfair to the citizens who pay you to
enforce the law. It is particularly
unfair to the poor, because complaining about a neighbor’s property in a poor
neighborhood can be dangerous. When poor
people complain about property neglect, we get blown off, belittled, and
sometimes threatened or attacked by the offender. When rich people complain about a neighbor
violating code, they get enforcement.
Much has been said about the abuses of “Broken Windows”
policing, and the superiority of Community Policing. But both policing theories are featured in the
same article, “Broken Windows,” by James Q. Wilson, published in the New Yorker
in 1982. In it, he started out writing about
how unrepaired broken windows cause more vandalism and theft, and that a broken
window on a car will cause it to be battered and stripped in a city where it
would otherwise be respected. He moves
on to how people are more satisfied with police that walk their neighborhoods
and talk to them instead of driving around in their cars.
But he never mentions the
disorderly neglect that gets a disorderly person to break the first window in
an abandoned building: weeds and litter.
And he goes on to tell us that police should control disorderly street
people by unequal enforcement of nuisance codes, concentrating on vagrants,
prostitutes, and drug dealers.
We got Community Policing
in the ‘90s, encouraged by federal grants for more police. It went away after the grants ended, and you
moved on to just oppressing street people and drug dealers. The property bubble that started growing
during the ‘90s allowed bankers, developers and speculators to take over our city
governments and stop enforcement of property maintenance codes, allowing them to
hold vacant lots without the expense of maintenance until they got the price
they wanted. Some never got that price,
and those lots still grow and spread nuisance and noxious weeds and collect
litter. So do businesses whose owners don’t
care to keep their lots clean.
The true function of government is to keep order, and its
means are the necessary evil of nagging, backed up by force: fines and jail. Rights are necessary evils, allowed and defended
by governments to keep people from being so oppressed that they revolt.
Street drug dealing and
prostitution are created by bans on drugs and prostitution, laws that create disorderly
black markets. Repeal the bans and the
prescription system; allow drugs and casual sex to be sold, regulated, and
taxed like any other product or service; and street selling will stop. Enforce and obey city and county codes
against litter and weeds, and disorderly
people will not find the disorderly habitat that encourages disorderly conduct.
Talk and write about us
as people, not things. Enforce property
and nuisance codes against rich and poor alike.
Repeal laws that create disorderly black markets that pull our children
away from honest work in favor of risky riches.
Do these things, and we will love and trust our governments.
