yeah. when the sizzlean pulled that stuff in the late 70s and 80s, hip hop culture and rap started to emerge: what Tricia Rose describes as the taking back of public space that had been taken away by the sort of policies Nutter describes.
I can tell you this, my one experience of living in the ghetto was that the views were complex enough that, on the one hand, people did want a response but on the other, they feared that response because they were so vulnerable or simply tired of being treated as the enemy. What they didn't want was the response we too often got. Once a kid was wondering around the neighborhood with what looked like a gun. Neighbors and I discussed what to do. When we finally did call the cops, they showed up at the caller's home to interrogate her. Meanwhile, the kid was still out there. He shot his intended target -- and himself -- while the cops were busy knocking on the door of the person who called 911. They weren't in that apartment trying to find the kid or a better description of his appearance. They were searching the caller's home and asking her if she had anything to do with the kid, how'd she know him, blah blah.
That wouldn't have happened in white suburbia.
Nor would it have happened that, nearly any time any of called 911, the cops used it as a pretext to get inside *our* homes and look for reasons to arrest us. We eventually set up a neighborhood watch, which is the closest you'll get to some sort of community policiing and police of the police in LimpDick.
I'd also add the caveat that, in some ways, it does happen in white suburbia. E.g., a business guy was out on the town, night before he was to be best man at a wedding. At a crowded bar catering to snowbirds, he was mistaken for another customer who was being a rowdy asshole. Bouncers took the guy out, smacked him around outside while an audience stood by telling them they had the wrong guy. Cops arrived, saw him on the ground, and started kicking him and beating him some more, even as people protested.
Just an ordinary business guy who found himself in a hospital for nothing more than have a bachelor party at a nightclub and, later, suing Pork Power over the incident.
"You know how it is, come for the animal porn, stay for the cultural analysis." -- Michael Berube
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