Urban America Under Arrest

Transitioning from Sad Anniversaries to Hopeful Planning — Part IV

The Twin Cities (MN) in early June 2020: left, newspaper headlines with a poignant, sad message lettered below in chalk, center, St. Paul’s Midway neighborhood afire, snapped from my high-rise balcony, right, on-location sketch of a Minnesota National Guard member in front of our State Capitol (after I completed my sketch his off-duty team members invited me to come up to the portico to meet him; he kindly introduced himself as Brian Z.). (Source: photos and sketch by the author.)

Findings, a kind of executive summary to date…

My research note and illustrated essay started with a short list of questions, offered a middle part with infamous civil-rights anniversaries by way of brief but thorny histories visualized via data exploration, and ends with seeing racially disproportionate patterns of unlawful traffic policing still occurring in present day Los Angeles. Sadly there seems to be too little change from 30 years before. Next steps demand that we be planful and decide on paths to proper social justice by design.

My study was shaped by a commonplace technical method — exploratory spatial data analysis. This is sometimes judged tentative by scholars, some of whom might argue that much more could be done, larger data sampling (i.e., big data, perhaps), stouter modeling, and deeper statistics. Such a method for the latter endeavor is known as confirmatory data analysis, it being the other face of a double-sided coin under a social science mindset. (15). However — for me, frankly — what’s the point?

Scholarly publications on policing topics are more than merely plentiful. An internet search (tagged within Google Scholar) of “pretextual policing published papers” returned 18,000+ hits. That’s papers in the tens of thousands with a look-and-feel that’s exhaustive, exhausting, or both. As such these “scholarly” findings nearly overwhelm us with their many “evidence-centered” facts. (Then there’s opinions, whew.) Isn’t now the time to move from argument to action?

So let’s cut to the chase: there is a dire need less for analysis and more for a sea change in policies to end unconstitutional policing. It starts with accountability and ends with community.

Recently another Medium author (and former law enforcement practitioner) published a pithy and practical assessment of the 2021 status of police accountability. Davin Hall makes frequent mention of community and policing. However, his own take on “what’s next” is not very upbeat: due to “wildly disproportionate policing of minority communities” — it may never be possible to tell “police officers that they can still be welcome in our communities.” He concludes with a final, edgy “ask” of his readers: “… create a new system.” (16)

Maybe, but a brand new system takes time. Are we back to decades? It’s been 30 years since the Christopher Commission Report mentioned in my Part I was released. I thus will offer my fourth and final question that flips the past to the future. Pretend to do what futurists like so much, backcast with a question: What will one’s children see regarding all of this when viewed from three decades in the future (say, 2051)?

Hopefully today’s troubled law-enforcement landscape will someday be viewed by them as distant anniversaries of long-superseded chapters of enforcement misconduct, police brutality, unconstitutional policing, racial terrorism, and other past transgressions of the various phrases that will have endured only in title. I’d like to imagine that problems I’ve geovisualized and discussed have had at least a drag or “soft mitigation” placed upon such concerns — for the better — along with the many protest events of the last two years, some of which I have witnessed first-hand and close to home where I live and work (see my banner above).

To ensure I analyzed these matters with adequate holism I recently read Peter Moskos’ Cop in the Hood, a page-turning account of what it took to be a police officer in Baltimore when he wrote it. (Empathy means something important right now.) (17) As an author, an academic, and former police officer Professor Moskos very recently reported — not on Baltimore — but specifically Los Angeles: “In 2020 [total] arrests [there] dropped … 37%, and this year they are down another 6% so far, even as shooting and murders … continue to rise.” (18) The latter suggests, once again, a step forward seems accompanied by steps back: said Moskos, the trend in Los Angeles is now that of “less arrests” yet “more murders.” He ends with, “The rise in murders last year happened very quickly, as have declines in the past. [Such] rapid changes can also happen by design; we need to ensure it is change for the better.” (Italics mine, see endnote 18)

Moskos’ “by design” phrase spoke to me, as I am an urban cartographer and designer. So I close with a plea: as a Counter Arts reader, a U.S. (or global) citizen of any color, or whoever, let’s ponder some holistic civic design — by way of long-range planning — that needs to be stridently ushered forward by leveraging our local and national leaders towards rebalancing these key facts of life (and death). Our actions must become the most positive decisions that we will have made — right now — offering a hope-filled end to unjust policing which can be properly seen in 2051 by our descendants of the next generations. Consider how Professor Moskos hinted that “rapid changes … for the better” could benefit from being both planful and “by design.” However, let’s do it much more speedily in order to unburden future generations of urban America’s communities of all colors.

“Long-range planning does not deal with future decisions, but with the future of present decisions.”

– Peter Drucker, Interdisciplinary management planner, author, and educator, 1909–2005

Endnotes

15. Blitz, Shelby. (2017). “Exploratory and Confirmatory Analysis: What’s the Difference?,” Sisense Data and Analytics Platform.
Online, https://www.sisense.com/blog/exploratory-confirmatory-analysis-whats-difference/

16. Hall, Davin. (2021). “Police Accountability: Is this even possible?,” Medium, July 30.
Online, https://medium.com/equality-includes-you/police-accountability-fed3e531b2b4

17. Moskos, Peter. (2008). Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore’s Eastern District, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

18. Moskos, Peter. (2021). “The 2020 Murder Spike: Where the Police Pull Back,” Wall Street Journal, July 24–25.

Acknowledgement: Editing assistance with all four parts of this research note courtesy Kathy Heuer. Errors that might remain are mine and mine alone.

All hyperlinks were last visited today.

This report’s narrative matter and images are assigned Creative Commons v4 CC 2021.

J. Kevin Byrne (MA/Minnesota, MFA/Cranbrook, MSc-Cert./Saint Mary’s) is Professor (now Emeritus) at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MN/USA). He has published in print and continues to do so online. Byrne’s current roles are those of an urban cartographer, designer, and spatial information analyst interested in mapping a hopeful future for civil rights.