http://www.seattletimes.com/
Everyone at the Seattle Times appears to be singing the same hosannahs without realizing that the result is just a displacement of further drug dealing, mugging and related crime to the U-District & Capitol Hiill. Right next to Jack in the Box on the Ave you can get your crack in a box from dealers who jive the buses up and down the Ave, and they all have phones.
The heart of the problem is the American criminalizarion of pleasure that coincides with the wages of slavery; an impoverished class with a strong component that revolves in and out of jail for having no recourse to income but what the majority of society regards as criminal activity. It has been that way for a long time as the history of policing & American racism will tell you.
I got to know just a little about this when I published
DRUGS AND MINORITY OPPRESSION by John Helmer (1975)
In the Southern states the development of American policing followed a different path. The genesis of the modern police organization in the South is the "Slave Patrol" (Platt 1982). The first formal slave patrol was created in the Carolina colonies in 1704 (Reichel 1992). Slave patrols had three primary functions: (1) to chase down, apprehend, and return to their owners, runaway slaves; (2) to provide a form of organized terror to deter slave revolts; and, (3) to maintain a form of discipline for slave-workers who were subject to summary justice, outside of the law, if they violated any plantation rules. Following the Civil War, these vigilante-style organizations evolved in modern Southern police departments primarily as a means of controlling freed slaves who were now laborers working in an agricultural caste system, and enforcing "Jim Crow" segregation laws, designed to deny freed slaves equal rights and access to the political system.
So, if the modern American police force was not a direct response to crime, then what was it a response to? More than crime, modern police forces in the United States emerged as a response to "disorder." What constitutes social and public order depends largely on who is defining those terms, and in the cities of 19thcentury America they were defined by the mercantile interests, who
Sincerely,
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