I am totally enthralled with this use of mapping (especially since the CPD seem to feed information directly into it). It requires a lot of consultation of the ohio revised code (especially for sex crimes) since ohio has such strange names for offenses that tell you nothing about it. Luckily, though, I am procrastinating and have plenty of time to dedicate to this pursuit.
Now lets just mash this up with a police blotter.
The feedback that I got from writing that column and others (like the one I wrote months before that about ironic bigotry for shock value) makes me realize that there are just so many different ways of relating to punk, and that my way of relating to it is a minority perspective, and I use the word minority recognizing all of its connotations.
I grew up going to shows in a town where if certain people in the audience were making it impossible for the rest of the audience to enjoy the show by being violent or otherwise intolerable, certain bands would stop playing and wait for the idiocy to die down before they started playing again. That is punk to me: Creating the kind of atmosphere you want to have around you. Realizing that you are in charge of your own experience.
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I share this idea of what punk shows should be like, and its pretty miserable going to shows in a town where it seems like not many other people do.
For the last 18 years I have photographed Julie Baird’s complex story of multiple homes, AIDS, drug abuse,abusive relationships, poverty, births, deaths, loss and reunion. Following Julie from the backstreets of San Francisco to the backwoods of Alaska. [via]
There is a lot here, and the enormity of the factors at work in this story is really overwhelming. Trauma, abuse, drugs, social services, CPS, HIV care. Not to be too much like everything-reminds-me-of-philippe-bourgois or anything, but the exposure of the photos and the depiction of suffering reminds me of the photos in Righteous Dopefield.
Doctoral student in anthropology, Anna Wilking discusses the struggles of fieldwork, especially when (and honestly, when don’t you) you find yourself in the subject:
I’m testing the waters with this confession as discussing one’s own personal battles in the field is still taboo in anthropology. Anthropologists never share their behavior during fieldwork—we are supposed to be neutral observers who “do everything right,” when in fact everyone knows plenty of anthropologists have sex with their informants in the field, for example. But still, no one ever includes such “horrors” in their final academic products—it would be frowned upon in the academy. We are supposed to be “perfect” beings, perhaps a touch “superior” then our informants.
Seriously, read it. [via]
A 40-year-old Cleveland man died after he was Tasered by police following a traffic stop.
According to a police spokesman, patrol officers stopped Rodney Brown Sr. about 8:40 p.m. Friday at East 113th Street and Benham Avenue, near his home.
Brown “became uncooperative and combative,” Sgt. Keith Campbell said.
He then ran. Officers caught him a block and a half away, where he resisted arrest until more officers arrived and Brown was stunned with a Taser.
Paramedics were called, which is routine after a Taser is used. Brown appeared to suffer from cardiac arrest and was taken to University Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 10:25 p.m., medical examiner’s spokesman Powell Caesar said.
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40-year-old man dies after Cleveland police use Taser on him
More high-caliber policing by the CPD. I am still bewildered as to why cops carry these things and act like they are non-lethal, or even ‘safe.’ And even if they are ‘non-lethal’ (which they clearly aren’t) it seems like the potential for confusing a gun and a taser is reason enough for police to only be carrying one thing that looks and feels like a gun.
The Cleveland Fire Department is investigating why firefighters who extinguished a burning car early Saturday failed to see the body of a man who had been shot to death and left inside.
The victim, who had not been identified Monday, was shot in the neck and died before the fire was set, according to the Cuyahoga County Coroner’s office.
The body was not discovered until about four hours after the fire was doused when police arrived to tow the vehicle. Officials would not say where the body was in the car.
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Cleveland fire officials to investigate why body was not found in burned car
Most of those guys probably weren’t informants. Which is a pity because it means they are not getting paid a dime for all the destructive work they do. We might think of these misogynists as inadvertent agents of the state. Regardless of whether they are actually informants or not, the work that they do supports the state’s ongoing campaign of terror against social movements and the people who create them. When queer organizers are humiliated and their political struggles sidelined, that is part of an ongoing state project of violence against radicals. When women are knowingly given STIs, physically abused, dismissed in meetings, pushed aside, and forced out of radical organizing spaces while our allies defend known misogynists, organizers collude in the state’s efforts to destroy us.
The state has already understood a fact that the Left has struggled to accept: misogynists make great informants. Before or regardless of whether they are ever recruited by the state to disrupt a movement or destabilize an organization, they’ve likely become well versed in practices of disruptive behavior. They require almost no training and can start the work immediately. What’s more paralyzing to our work than when women and/or queer folks leave our movements because they have been repeatedly lied to, humiliated, physically/verbally/emotionally/sexually abused? Or when you have to postpone conversations about the work so that you can devote group meetings to addressing an individual member’s most recent offense? Or when that person spreads misinformation, creating confusion and friction among radical groups? Nothing slows down movement building like a misogynist.
— Why Misogynists Make Great Informants: How Gender Violence in Movements Enables State Violence
The two Cleveland police officers who mistook the body of a slain woman left alongside Interstate 90 for a deer carcass are remorseful for their mistake and expect to be disciplined, their union leader said…
Loomis said the locator device in their patrol car showed that they did go to the highway at 4:43 a.m., after a motorist reported seeing a body between West 44th Street and Lorain Avenue.
The officers rolled past the body of 28-year-old Angel Bradley-Crockett going 40 to 50 mph, Loomis said. She was curled in a loose fetal position under the West 44th Street overpass, he said. They saw her naked back and thought they saw a deer. They told the police dispatcher to have the Ohio Department of Transportation pick up the deer.
Then they asked to take their 45-minute lunch break. There were no other calls for police assistance waiting, so their request was granted. While they were eating at the 2nd District station, a second motorist reported seeing the body at 5:34 a.m.
A third reported it at 5:49 a.m.
And the ODOT worker sent to pick up a deer carcass called police at 6:19 a.m. to report the body.
I wonder whether this ‘mistake’ would have happened if it had been a murdered white woman, or if she had been found in almost any other part of town..
2009 City Crime Rate Rankings, more
good showing, midwest. surprised to see how low Tucson (#65) and phoenix (#92) are rated. Everett, WA has more crime than Phoenix?
1. All The Victims Were Black
2. Many Of The Victims Were Drug Users Or Had Run Into Trouble With The Law
3. Previous Reports Regarding Sowell’s Behavior Went Ignored
4. The Police Didn’t Take The Missing Persons Reports Seriously
5. His Neighbors Saw Sowell As Strange, But Non-Threatening
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5 Reasons The Cleveland Serial Killer Case Flew Under The Radar
The news about this has been so bizarre, but I was still kind of surprised to hear that it was a national story.
I use ‘violence’ in scare quotes because such a wide range of tactics are considered violent by the dominant culture, whether it’s breaking windows, setting fires, blocking intersections, or even dragging newspaper boxes into the street, irrespective of the fact that none of these things involve hurting people. More unnervingly, many ‘radicals,’ whether overtly or unconsciously, buy into this framework. How many times have you read accounts of street actions where the writers repeatedly refer to ‘peaceful protesters,’ ‘non-violent demonstrators,’ or hope to inspire outrage against incidences of police repression against ‘non-violent activists’? The presupposition here is that it would be totally OK for the police to smash the faces and ribs of people smashing windows. That, as soon as someone oversteps the bounds of law, in place to protect property and preserve privilege, they are making an ‘illegitimate protest’ and their concerns aren’t to be taken seriously and we aren’t to be concerned when they get a judicial smackdown.
— BAAM Issue #25 - Page 7 - Who You Callin’ Violent? By Adrienne
What follows is a fragment of a much larger project of research on debt and debt money in human history. The first and overwhelming conclusion of this project is that in studying economic history, we tend to systematically ignore the role of violence, the absolutely central role of war and slavery in creating and shaping the basic institutions of what we now call ‘the economy’. What’s more, origins matter. The violence may be invisible, but it remains inscribed in the very logic of our economic common sense, in the apparently self-evident nature of institutions that simply would never and could never exist outside of the monopoly of violence - but also, the systematic threat of violence - maintained by the contemporary state. [via]
Cleveland homicides up to 55, seven more than same time last year
Intriguing reporting, Plain Dealer.
This is just a collection of things I think are neat.
A general overview of 'things I think are neat':abandonment/the post-industrial midwest, anarchism (syndicalism, insurrectionalism, etc), race/ethnicity (esp. defining/constructing the boundaries of whiteness), gender, class (talking/thinking about class generally seems to be an underrated activity), health care (access to, the experience of obtaining, etc), art, science fiction, punk music, conservative talk radio and anthropology (which probably incorporates almost everything else about people).
