The good old days, the downside

So I was looking for that Garry Wills book on John Wayne. (Long story.) I didn't find it. I found this instead:

Oh yes. A Garry Wills book about the impending RACE WAR. Written in 1967, when he was 33. You have to see the back cover:

To be fair, the book seems to be fair, if you assume the possibility of a racial American civil war in 1968 is fair. Since I only existed as a distant (but more hopeful) possibility myself at the time, it's a little beyond my range of experience.

But I knew I needed this book when the random page test gave me this paragraph to read:

Frank Rizzo's father came from Italy, and became a cop. So did Frank. "We were in a minority group," he says now; "but I was brought up to respect the police." He was a tough idealistic captain, widely admired and feared, with a passion for police competence. (He is very proud of the fact that three armed bank robbers who made the mistake, last year, of firing on his men were all three killed before they reached the door, and no bystanders were hurt. It was all over in ten seconds.)

Ah, Philadelphia. I suppose other cities have called airstrikes on themselves, maybe, but what I want to know is, where did they get the bomb to drop in the first place? I think this book might provide me with vital clues to discovering that answer. Another random page test had a general discussing the differences in the types and application of tear gas on urban rioters. SWEET.

Comments

[Noel Maurer]

Tell us more as you read it. That tome seems very worthy of a blog entry.

Meanwhile, I'm trying not to go down to Chicago and strangle Jeremiah Wright. (Well, he could probably kick my ass.) Aargh. I understand what Wright meant and why he said it; but being a bit of a flag-waver myself, especially before 2004 or thereabouts, I /also/ understand why hearing it is a kick-in-the-gut.

So remind us that things used to be worse.

Say, anyone else on this blog been tear-gassed?

[Andrew R.]

Yep, got tear-gassed in boot camp, and then a few times thereafter for my yearly gas chamber qualification. It's unpleasant, but not as unpleasant as all that. Indeed, I actually found yearly rifle qualification more onerous (since the whole gas chamber business was over in a couple of minutes, but the range took a week and a half).

[Noel Maurer]

There is this particularly nasty trick that the drill sergeants like to pull at Fort Benning. When everyone is out in the field, they'll force the recruits into full MOPP gear (in the summer, in Georgia), sans masks, and run then through calisthenics. Then they'll hit them with ... smoke. Followed by more calesthenics. Followed by ... you see where this is going.

Running is not an option. They're ready with more gas.

It doesn't end well.

Although it is educational. I think.

After that, getting a whiff in a Mar de Plata high-rise is nada.

You know what it is about CS though? It's not the tears, it's not the stinging. It's the /choking/, that feeling that you're not getting any air into your lungs.

Nobody else?

[Andrew R.]

Yeah, I agree that the worst part of CS is that stabbing feeling in your respiratory system when you try to inhale. The whole business definitely teaches you the importance of being able to don and clear, though.

[Noel Maurer]

Y'know, I can't really describe it in a single adjective. It feels like you can't open your lungs, like you can heave your chest up and down as much as you like but no air will enter.

But yes, it does. But more than those gruesome pictures of the effects of a chemical attack? I'm not so sure.

[Carlos]

I wonder how well riot control gases would work on organic chemists?

Regarding Wright... you know, I used to read tape.

[Dennis Brennan]

As you know, Bob, Philly didn't bomb itself until 1985. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,956982-1,00.html

I'm old enough to remember the Rizzo-Goode mayoral election of 1987 (Rizzo, who had been elected to two mayoral terms as a Democrat in the seventies, switched to Team Red and ran against then-incumbent Goode. The debates were... something else. I'm not sure that either of them had more than a passing command of the English language.

In 1991, Rendell ran again. After winning the Team Red primary, he dropped dead. His opponent was Ed Rendell. SHWI probably could have chewed on that one.

[Noel Maurer]

You mean, "In 1991, Rizzo ran again," right? I don't think Philly experienced anything like New York's Koch versus Koch.

[Carlos]

Dennis, a theme of Wills is the growth of sales of military-style equipment to urban police departments, which happened pretty much overnight. Those must have been some interesting sales conventions.

"Now this is a nice gentle *water*-based gel! [voice drops] explosive."

"Uh, you mean, like nitro?"

"If you like!"

(Another theme is the use of urban police departments as white suburban paramilitary groups operating in the city. True enough, but not as far-ranging as Wills feared, and rolled back. Dennis Franz as an agent of racial healing?)

[Andrew R.]

I figure that actually getting gassed is more instructive in the value of your MOPP gear because it has a very visceral *feel*. I mean, pictures of people who've been hit with blister agents or what have you are a warning, but for the reptile brain, I think that the full body experience of CS is a bit better than simply seeing a graphic image.

[Tony Zbaraschuk]

Wills has always been a pretty interesting writer, but boy that book was strange, in the way that the 60s were. (Or so I am told, not having been there for most of them.)

[Doug M.]

-- In retrospect? The integration of police forces in the 1970s was huge.

There are a lot of samples of this all over Europe, BTW. The Brits got it right, though it came a decade later (or two or three, in Northern Ireland).

On t'other hand, not being able to integrate the cops is one of the huge outstanding problems in Eastern Europe, esp. the Balkans. There's no Romanian "Hill Street Blues" with a Hungarian and a couple of Roma.

Sales of military equipment to police forces: Hunter Thompson mentions this in passing in _Fear and Loathing_, a book which is pretty much burned onto the hard drive at this point. It's easy to miss, but there's some real journalism under the drug-addled raving. Actually, it's very easy to miss, and most people did miss it, and still do. Which is why FaL is a great book with a thousand crappy imitations.

But I digress. Police force integration was huge, but how did it happen, I wonder? I know very little about this.

Doug M.

[Dennis Brennan]

Noel-- my bad, I meant Rizzo. Rendell is, as far as I can tell, not dead, and this was also true in 1991.

Speaking of highly-armed police forces...
If memory serves, the police force of Newtown Square, Pennsylvania (a small, wealthy municipality in the western suburbs of Philly, near where I live) has way more firepower than it reasonably needs. This was because back in the 1990s, a wealthy resident and gun enthusiast by the name of John E. DuPont procured a lot of guns, vehicles and so forth for the police force, out of his own pocket. He also built a firing range on his property for the cops' use. He just liked hanging out with cops. He also liked hanging out with wrestlers (*), and constructed a large, world-class wrestling training facility on his property too.

Then he went nuts.

From what I've heard, he shot Olympic champion wrestler Dave Schultz (who lived on DuPont's property since he was associated with the wrestling facility) either because he (Schultz) rebuffed DuPont's sexual advances, or because DuPont thought that Schultz was part of a conspiracy against him.

At this point, DuPont's previous chumminess with the police starts to become highly ironic. DuPont barricaded himself in his house (I once delivered a pizza to him at that house-- small world), and he refused to talk to the police unless they addressed him as the Dalai Lama. He also claimed to be Jesus, the President, and a Bulgarian secret agent.

Fun facts about John DuPont-- he owned (still does, as far as I know), the 1 cent black magenta guiana stamp (supposedly the only known specimen of that stamp in the world). Villanova University's main athletic facility was named after him, until it was renamed to simply "The Pavilion".

[Carlos]

Hm. "Don't let it be a black and white one/ 'Cause they'll slam you down to the street top/ Black police showing off for the white cop." My God, the song is twenty years old.

[Noel Maurer]

I haven't read the book, and I'm not disagreeing with Doug that the integration of urban police departments kept many urban problems from getting much worse.

I will suggest, though, that another factor was even more important in mitigating the risk of urban riots: police forces simply stopped trying to carry out police functions in majority-black areas. The Amsterdam News complained about this as early as 1962; the LAPD stopped patrolling in black areas after 1965; and it is still true in many (perhaps most) cities today.

This is still true in many places today.

http://www.law.upenn.edu/blogs/dskeel/archives/2008/03/race_and_crimestuntz.html

I think his conclusions about the reasons for the disparity are wildly wrong, by the way, but the phenomenon is tragically real.

[Carlos]

Um. Stuntz appears to be misusing the term "rational" in his third paragraph as commentary on his second. It may be that I'm ten times more likely to be killed in a car than by walking; does this mean it's rational to fear cars? That I should avoid them, that I should pattern my life around their absence, that this would be at all a sensible way of life? I call hooey.

That's poor enough reasoning to make me doubt a priori his paper.

[Michael]

Aw, come on! True, Rev. Wright has got a rabelaisian streak that occasionally careens over the edge, and his prophetic style has gotten old-fashioned. But that's not the problem. This is the problem:

http://www.youtube.com/user/TRINITYCHGO

The problem is how to define the irreverent reverend as the great American character that he is in a way that's not Faulkner vs. FOX (in fact, ABC). That was the point of Obama's speech. Axelrod can't do it. So Obama had to prod the country's creative juices. And it worked! Behold Peggy Noonan going around trying to help liberals with their talking points:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23766063/page/3/

[Michael]

Ugh, they just moved that video down the page. Direct link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvMbeVQj6Lw

[Lynn Kendall]

Ah, Rizzo. He boasted of having increased city police firepower so greatly that they could have successfully invaded Cuba. He promised to "make Attila the Hun look like a faggot." And he never saw his mother naked.

He presided over the first MOVE disaster, but it was Wilson Goode who bombed his own city and then said, "Let it burn." And when the neighborhood was rebuilt at fabulous government expense, there were years of lawsuits over shoddy building practices.

Then there were the days when City Council had a quorum in prison over the Abscam sting.

As Lincoln Steffens said in 1902, "Philadelphia -- corrupt and contented." Some things don't change.

[Jussi Jalonen]

Same here, I was tear-gassed in the military. Part of the normal basic training.

I also had napalm thrown on me. Once again, part of the normal basic training.

Cheers,

J. J.

[Nich Hills]

Are police necessary?

Noel wrote:

> The Amsterdam News complained about this as early as 1962; the LAPD stopped patrolling in black areas after 1965; and it is still true in many (perhaps most) cities today.

If the Republic can survive without policing in majority Black areas, is policing really essential in any other districts?

[eyelessgame]

Nich -

If you rob, or shoot, a white man, you go to jail. If you rob or shoot a black man, you don't.

Given that, I prefer policing.

[Noel Maurer]

Nich, what was your point, if you don't mind me asking? Once again, I feel like I'm missing an obvious joke.

But if you're not joking, well, go to East Baltimore and then reassess the premise of your question.

I'll admit that I'll be surprised if you're not kidding; I'm just missing the punchline.

[Nich Hills]

Hi guys,

My point was surprise that there are some areas that the police have stopped patrolling. My assumption was that these were high-crime areas. If so, then these are the areas that most need patrolling. If patrolling is optional in high-crime areas, is there a need for patrolling anywhere?

Of course, there is the possibility that policing is done on the interests of the police themselves, rather than the citizens. The cops may be staying out of harm's way. Police will often focus on their own needs ahead of the community's. We saw this in Sydney, Australia a generation ago where the Armed Robbery squad planned armed robberies, the Vice squad managed vice etc. However such behaviour is antithetical to the sphere of true public service. If squads or forces act in their own interest rather than citizens' interests then they should be disbanded and - if still needed - reformed.

A police force that acts in their own interest, or in a sectional interest, is not a community police force. Its existence can be called into question.

[Jussi Jalonen]

There's a regional factor, Nich. Patrolling is still necessary in safe areas in order to pre-empt and prevent a potential spill-over from those high-crime areas.

So, instead of its old role as a long-range recon patrol, these days the police force is basically acting as a border guard. It's still in the interests of some citizens; and those would be the same citizens who pay taxes for the upkeep of the said police force, and whose interests consequently are most important.

Granted, it would be simpler to sub-contract those tasks to some private security agency, which is what's done in Poland and Iraq.

(I'm surprised that Stuntz didn't mention that possibility when he decided to draw a parallel with the Iraq situation.)

Cheers,

J. J.