I should start by saying that I do believe that some symptoms of gentrification are not intentional, a belief presented in Recent Trends: Gentrification and Globalization. As an amateur artist, I can confirm that there is a need for low-cost workspaces. Art supplies are quite expensive, yet as art projects can pile up, affordable places are sometimes necessary, depending on how much art one does. These people didn’t come to a neighborhood planning to shake things up. However, the problem with the market is that people are desperate to keep up with whatever is “trendy.” If they see certain folk who they think are “cool” living in an area, they try to use that to their advantage. It’s like a more harmful version of when companies use soon-to-be-dead slang in order to appear modern, and cash in on fads. Yet the claimed superiority of upper-class tastes has existed or quite some time, and ingrained itself into the minds of some companies, landlords, etc. Hence the various ways people try to make the area more fit for the upper class, ignoring the lower class residents’ needs until they are forced to move away entirely.

In all honesty, it surprised me for a moment that gentrification affected the justice system, but then again, how could it not? New types of residents, specifically higher-income ones, single ones, and ones without children, have a different life experience that contrast that of their new location, of of the old residents. Thus the shift in the jury.

If gentrification happens because people find a certain class’s trends to be superior, then prejudice in crime happens because a groups are seen to be inferior. This is an obvious statement, but I’m getting at the fact that because certain groups are less valued, any and everything they do is sneered at. And in terms of crime, that means that their actions are fit for punishment. Upon reading about how minority men, specifically Latino/Hispanic and Black men, are punished for jumping the turnstile reminded me of a discussion I had on turnstile-jumping a few years ago. I was mentioning how I could never do it, because I simply couldn’t break a law (no matter how trivial), yet my friend argued that it was okay, as he had done it with police right there.

My friend jumped the turnstile in view of a policeman.

My friend is Caucasian.

Further data from the Daily News article by Ryley, Bult, and Gregorian shows how even more trivialities are punishable for minorities, such as drinking on the streets, and having too-loud music. Things that make littering look like murder. In short, just as gentrification happens as a way to praise upper-class citizens for existing, prejudice and injustice done by law enforcers happens as punishment for certain races existing.