via feminist philosophers, David Simon, executive producer and writer of the HBO series The Wire, has a piece in the Guardian addressing a recent draft of a report that found that jurors in Baltimore were less likely to convict defendants than jurors in surrounding areas. The report was the focus of some journalism for a few days, before the hoopla of the Olympics, but then it disappeared from public discussions. Arguing that there really is two Americas (an affluent one and one in which citizens are dispensable), and lamenting that public discourse (politics and mainstream media) consistently fail to ask the “why” of topics, Simon goes on to offer an answer to why there would be considerably less convictions in Baltimore:
For the last years of his administration, Mayor Martin O’Malley ordered the mass arrests of citizens in every struggling Baltimore neighbourhood, from eastside to west. More than 100,000 bodies were dragged to Central Booking in a single year – record rates of arrest for a city with fewer than 700,000 residents. Corner boys, touts, drug slingers, petty criminals – yes, they went in the wagons.
But school teachers, city workers, shopkeepers, delivery boys – they too were jacked up, cuffed and hauled down to Eager Street – hundreds of them a night on the weekends. Some were charged, but few were prosecuted. And in 25,000 such cases, they were later freed from the detention facility without ever going to court; no charges were proffered because, well, no crime had been committed.
I wasn’t arrested. Nor was Ed Burns or Dominic West or Aidan Gillen. Nor were my neighbours or the Baltimore Sun’s editors or the members of the Maryland Club. But then, we’re all white. Among the black members of my cast and crew, it was often impossible to drive from the film set to home at night without being stopped – and in some cases detained or arrested – on nonexistent probable cause and nonexistent charges. The crackdown came wholly in black neighbourhoods and it landed wholly on the backs of black citizens.
And now, just a few years later, comes this document that causes the state’s attorney to deny the obvious and leaves everyone else wondering weakly and vaguely as to the why of it. Is it so hard to understand that the same people who had their civil rights cleanly dispatched, who spent nights in jail because police officers lied on them and dragged them off without charge – that these people might be inclined to disbelieve the word of law enforcement in any future criminal case?
Go read it; it’s worth the time.
