Wisdom is where you find it. A quick glance at the morning news shows reminds us that this week in 1945 the United States used atomic weapons against the people of Japan. That regrettable course of events will forever be the locus of debate. At best, it was a situation of necessary evil.
Here in Pine Bluff, we must confront our own devil’s bargain with regard to crime. In order to better confront the issue, we must endure challenges to dominant social and cultural norms that we might otherwise eschew. Ironically, two prominent World War II era figures provide some guidance with regard to our local concerns. Paradoxically, their sage admonishments came long after the conflict.
The first of these is the oft-quoted illustrator Walt Kelly, whose cartoon opossum, Pogo (ca. 1943) observed on the occasion of Earth Day 1970: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
The second comes from Arkansas’ native son, Gen. Douglas MacArthur in Reminiscences: General of The Army from 1964: “Two things we must never do: never lie, never tattle.”
These two sentiments combine with lethal effect here in Pine Bluff. To Kelly’s admonition, we have the crime we do because we have failed to guard against it. We have permitted bad habits, poor planning and broken politics to dominate our community. When we compare ourselves to relatively crime free communities, we should notice a key difference: the quiescence they have is grown from within, not tacked on from outside. In short, they have less crime because their communities contain structural and systematic barriers to it. This is not merely a different or better kind of policing, but a whole other paradigm of communal management. They are driven by questions of growth and progress, rather than just stemming the tide of negativity.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
The second quote, that of MacArthur’s, gets a little closer to a nerve, “…never lie and never tattle.” The value of the first part is self-evident. All things predicated on deceit are bound to go asunder. The second part, “never tattle” is more open to debate.
In communities — especially minority communities — with historically poor relations to the police, a broad cultural ethos has arisen that proscribes helping the police. To assist the police is to betray one’s own people. Bret Asbury, a professor at Drexel University, discusses the prominence of this trait in some communities. He argues that the prevalence of an “anti-snitching” or “stop snitching” cultural directives should be viewed as an outgrowth of natural power relations and racial fealty. In specific he argues, “… black community members’ refusal to cooperate with police investigations should be viewed as neither ethically condemnable nor inexplicable, but rather as a natural extension of the innate human aspiration to be loyal… by asserting that the refusal to cooperate with police represents a privileging of community loyalty over loyalty to the state.”
Beyond matters of loyalty, people who live in high-crime neighborhoods are often afraid if they talk to police, they could be hurt or even killed by gang members, drug dealers or other criminals. Police know this. Often it come down to a simple, unsatisfactory dichotomy: Either call the cops or live with the bad guy. Regardless of your choice, there could be repercussions.
All of this is perfectly rational and understandable. Individual circumstance and specific cases seem atomized and disconnected. They are discrete events that don’t bear on one another. Unfortunately, when these things happen often enough, the dots start to connect. Over a period of years the unsolved cases mount. The unreported crimes multiply. The culture of fear and indifference takes root.
Changing this pattern of self-destruction is a necessity. Abandoning old dysfunctional habits is the first step. We must learn the value of mutual accountability and collective responsibility. False loyalty and misplaced defiance only serve to perpetuate a climate in which no one thrives. Fortunately, we have alternatives. We can get out of our own way.