2014 Shaping the Future of New York Fridays: 11:00-1:45 Boylan Hall, 2231

As many of my class mates have stated, this week’s reading is disturbing. Not just because it discussed way in which those most susceptible to urban decay and diseases like HIV are taken advantage of and treated like lesser human beings, but because the way in which those things were propagated was so deliberate.  It hurts to hear that basic services like fire departments were pulled from poor neighborhoods, leading to displacement as urban decay in those neighborhoods grew. I wonder how such policies were able to be passed, and how we can change what happens in these areas, now that we are aware of this.

The connections between urban decay and the spread of HIV is something I wouldn’t have thought much about, but now that I’ve read about it, it seems that we need to make services for people with hiV more accessible, so that people don’t have to be in one specific location to get the health services they ned. As for how to stop the displacement, as we discussed last week, that is a more complicated matter which obviously required further discussion.

As some of my classmates have pointed out, city planners are not always that bright when planning urban renewal. They are only looking at the financial effects of their efforts and nothing else. But if we are to look at this through the lens of public health, it is very clear that urban renewal is far more sinister than it cheery name suggests.

Many might think this is not a public health issue. It has been proven, however, that the most effective public health endeavors are the socially- driven ones. On an even more basic level, the idea of removing people from their homes and leaving them with no place to go causes serious problems concerning mental health, which another public health issue that needs more attention in this country.

The failure of city planners and large corporations to see the social implications of gentrification is ridiculous and ironic, when we think that these are the same people who have the most to say when bad conditions cause civil unrest. You reap what you sow. This country should not be run with an “us vs them” mindset. When the poor are treated the same as anyone else in this country, we can say that we have finally made progress.

It’s interesting that we read these chapters that spoke about the militarization of police and consent warrants, because I literally just heard about this crazy drug search case from a few months ago.

The full article can be found here: http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/man_to_get_1.6m_for_humiliating_3-enema_hospital_colonoscopy_ordeal_after/

Basically, a man in New Mexico was stopped for running a stop sign, and the police officer who stopped him had a police dog with him that seemed to think there were drugs in the car. The cop also “observed’ that the man was “clenching his buttocks” so he BROUGHT HIM TO THE HOSPITAL to have three enemas, a colonoscopy and more, because he thought there were drugs up his butt.

SPOILER ALERT: There were no drugs up his butt!

The man did sue and win $1.6 million, so the story ended well, but this is absurd. The way the police crack down on drug possession is so obsessive, unlawful, and more often than not, racist. We have to remember that cops are just as human as the rest of us, and if given too much power, they will abuse that power. Something needs to be done about this. This war on drugs is a cover for human right violations gone wild.