Reel Time / Real Justice examines the Rodney King case and the resulting LA riots through a lens of racial struggle. It seeks to question if objectivity was really found when the case was first addressed. The article suggests not, and I would agree. The video depicts a man, surrounded by officers, getting beaten and kicked long after he was knocked down and restrainable. By definition, that’s excessive force. The video was dissected and taken out of context, and the jury disagreed. This is where the article’s premise, for me, started to fall apart. The jury may have come to the wrong conclusion, but I disagree with the article’s reason why. Disaggregation in the courtroom is the idea; the Rodney King case, in court, is a question of what happened in that instance, not what happens overall. Attempting to rule according to popular opinion is half the reason that OJ Simpson was acquitted, because no one wanted LA to burn again. And attempting to justify the ensuing riots as a community’s attempt to make ‘peace’ costly is invalid: it’s vengeance, and not even vengeance on the guilty parties. I understand it’s a counter-narrative, but it’s too far gone to be viable.

Question: What’s your take on the article? Do you agree with the lens? How would you interpret the Rodney King case?

The Gothamist ran an article about gentrification a couple years ago in their column Ask a Native New Yorker. The response they received was overwhelming, and one such response was published. A native to Bushwick, Rosa Rivera was displaced by increased rent in the neighbourhood and saw the gentrification of her block right after she left. Her anger over it is powerful. Rivera lends a voice to the multitude of displaced people who, undoubtedly, yearn for the security and appeal of gentrified neighbourhoods but don’t want them at their expense. What was once her home is no longer accessible to her due to the marketing toward affluence that pervades the neighbourhood. The image evoked – a woman locked out of a place she used to call her home – strikes a chord of fear and insecurity within us all. It forces us to ask the question if gentrification is really worth it, or if the human cost is too high.

Article can be viewed here.

Question: What is your opinion on gentrification, both before the course and after it? Was it affected by your research on Bushwick / the Bushwick walking tour, and if so, how?

I’m not surprised by the reading today, but I definitely have problems with it. Having visited LA and other Californian cities like it, I know what the city is like. I know its history. But I was most caught by Davis’ description of the Goldwyn Library. The library itself is fairly unassuming. If sentries and fences are problematic, then so is much of NYC. But for a library that had faced arson previously, the anti-vandalism and anti-theft measures are understandable. The vilification of safety seems ridiculous. Davis is projecting his own biases on Gehry’s architecture, claiming that the Library’s security measures – which, according to the Library, are used to protect a valuable archive of rare film materials – is a measure to intimidate ‘undesirable’ people, the poor and homeless, from being in the library. Libraries are public spaces with a purpose. And I’d expect libraries with rare collections who’d been previously burned to enforce that purpose. Trying to claim ulterior motives only serves to bring up the old argument that the only people concerned with security are the people who have something to hide.

Question: What is your take on the Goldwyn Library and the ‘Panopticon Mall’? What do you think of overt security in public places?

There is no policy that does not have both pros and cons, and the only sources provided for today’s reading are regarding the cons of quality of life policing. But coming from an area where jails were overcrowded for serious offences, so people who’d committed lesser crimes were booked and released – and it was always the same people getting booked – the logic behind quality of life policing makes sense. It’s probably something I would support. Whether or not it was excessive aside – and I really can’t say either way, there was no statistical evidence given (the Erzen article stated that the number of homicides had risen over 1999-2000, but provided no evidence for any other crime rate; it was all mostly anecdotal in both that and the INCITE pamphlet) – it did what it claimed. Did it clean up NYC? Most likely – the sources aren’t arguing against that. Did it catch people wanted for greater crimes on lesser charges? Again, most likely – but as no solid evidence was provided on this, I can’t say. But saying that arrests are higher after a policy designed to – honestly – increase arrests is too obvious.

Question: Why do or don’t you support quality of life policing? In light of today’s reading, do you think it would be effective if the policy were altered, or should it be scrapped altogether?

Today’s reading was pretty interesting. Community planning. People actively getting involved with the direction their neighbourhood will take. My one complaint is that it takes something drastic for people to start getting interested. The first portion of the reading was listing all these protests and uprisings and battles over urban development, when plans and meetings and projects are all public. Consensus planning doesn’t work in practice and I’m not saying people should go for it, but I’m not a fan of protest, especially when there are so many other ways to get something done. It shouldn’t have to take a protest for people’s voices to be heard, mainly because it really doesn’t have to. Urban plans affect the community, but lately it seems that the community is only interested when the world will fall apart. It doesn’t surprise me that plans then serve the purposes of a select few; they’re probably the ones who pushed them in the first place.

Question: What is your opinion of community planning, and the urban planning process?

I remember the posters all over the subway for the People’s Climate March. They’re still hanging in certain trains. I know some Macaulay students showed up for it and they enjoyed themselves. I didn’t really pay attention to it that much other than noting that, while a significant number of people did make it out, it wasn’t quite the million they were advertising. But I guess that’s one of the pitfalls with climate change right now. People don’t take it quite as seriously as other issues because it’s hard to personally document and it doesn’t seem as pressing. A vague ‘somewhere around the latter half of the century there will be more rain and more heat waves’ doesn’t really resonate as much as ‘Iran has a nuclear weapons program and the country’s president has publicly declared that after they wipe Israel off the map their next target is America.’ The projections put out by PlaNYC are certainly bleak, and on the West Coast California is steadily getting hotter and drier, but public protests only do so much.

Question: Is climate change an important issue to you? What would you do to make people more aware and more interested in this topic?

Don’t tell me none of you were thinking it. The “Class Struggle on Avenue B” reading evoked the Wild Wild West image multiple times. I specifically liked the bit about the suburban couple moving from Houston St and comparing themselves to those who crossed the Rockies. But the implications in the imagery is powerful. The premise behind Manifest Destiny is that it was their God-given right to expand westward, that they were civilising the native populations even as they were cutting them down. To compare the phenomenon to gentrification is damning at best.

There was actually another notable comparison that was drawn: when the mayor and others called the Tompkins Square protestors communists and anarchists. More damning words, especially given the era, but definitely worth the same consideration given to the image of Manifest Destiny to define gentrification. They did, after all, label the issue one of class struggle – and that’s Marxist history.

Question: Are the two images accurate? Are they not? How would you depict the groups?