It reminds me a bit of the Black Panther groups in the 60s that were doing so much of the community work that should have been provided by a social safety net.
Not to focus on the wrong thing, or praise the cops for doing the minimum, but I appreciate how matter-of-fact the person presenting the award was. Alex didn't get tackled before he finished speaking, and even got thanked for it!
The part about "safety groups" reminded me of the Guardian Angels. I'm surprised to learn that they apparently still exist and have a DC chapter. That particular organization definitely seems like a relic of 80s issues.
I only learned about the Guardian Angels from Russian Doll. And then I learned the long and dully sordid story of Curtis Silwa.
I did! He wears a Smash White Supremacy shirt and says "I'm not with you guys".
Grading is so boring that I'm willing to watch videos to stave it off.
This is America, two chunky guys in late middle age who don't like each other but can coexist for long enough to get through one more thing.
Alex openly criticized the police as useless and said he is a certified firearms instructor -- how long before the local cops try to find some pretext to harass and/or arrest him?
I guess I was more impressed with the "riots work" mic drop than you sophisticates. And then the fist bump!
I didn't know what the grading rubric was.
... seems like a relic of 80s issues
Were all the 80s issues solved? Nobody told me, so I'm not surprised to learn that the Angels are still around.
The New York City crime wave of the '80s certainly is no longer a thing.
The Angels were specifically directed at protecting people who felt unsafe on the streets and in the subways. And as someone who was a teenage girl on the same streets and subways then, they weren't all that remarkably unsafe when crime was at its peak, and it's much safer now. So they were always kind of theatrical nonsense, and they're really nonsense now.
There is a lot of really good grassroots work happening here. Unfortunately it is done by what seems to be the same 200 people all of whom are basically doing a second totally unpaid job. (I do not include myself; I do a little bit around the edges at about normal volunteering volume.)
I live in an "unsafe" part of town and I will say that I feel a lot less safe than I did a few years ago, although that is not because of prowling criminals. There's a lot of unsafe/trash/etc knock-on effects from our homelessness crisis, for instance. Also the mood here is bad and people drive a lot more dangerously - as a cyclist I have really noticed it.
Is crime up? Is it down? Dunno, police statistics are full of lies. There's definitely been more scary stuff in my immediate neighborhood over the past three years. The police push unhoused and messed up people plus street prostitution back into the poor parts of town when it threatens to spill over so things feel very different ten blocks south of here. It might well be that scary stuff is up in my neighborhood and stable or down elsewhere.
The biggest moves for safety would be getting people into housing. Everything except the bad driving that has changed here is the result of having people living on the street.
As far as I can tell, the way that the riots worked was that there was a big change in popular consciousness and a big flowering of mutual aid groups. The cops got worse, Frey took the mask off, the right got nastier, rich people got whinier...but we certainly do have a lot more people who know about or are peripherally involved in mutual aid than would have seemed even remotely possible in 2019. If there actually were a revolutionary moment/moment of radical change, we might actually have enough slight-mobilized people to make something happen. The political ground really has shifted here even though it is not necessarily visible at the city government level.
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Did anyone see the sheriff in Florida talk about these people who went after somebody with guns who dropped off a misdirected prescription at their house? YouTube link above. He kept saying that it wasn't protected behavior under the stand your ground law. He's right, and the behavior shouldn't be encouraged. But it was almost a satire. The people who went after the 'burglar' were not white, an it is so blind8mgly obvious that if they had been white, and the person coming to the door had been black, he would have been saying something completely different.
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The increase in dangerous driving is really noticeable. People got used to empty streets and they intend to drive the same now that the streets are full again. It is nuts.
There's a pretty broad increase across the board in anti-social behavior, you see it with customer behavior as well as driving. I'm not sure how much of it is just people being unsocialized from staying home so much, or if it's some kind of mask-related fatigue where people resent having to behave pro-socially, but I don't think empty streets were the main factor.
That's exactly my theory. That the rightwing resents everyone re-habitating their world, after it was so nice and empty in 2020.
I don't think it's just the rightwing though, though certainly that's a big part of it (more leftwingers have instead reacted with agoraphobia). I think the large increase in young men murdering each other is part of the same phenomenon, and that's not mostly right-wingers.
But like, Americans aren't doing ok, across the board.
What was the high point for the most people doing basically okay?