I appreciate the link in this story to I Got a Monster, given @baltimoresun’s complete blackballing of our book. But I can’t imagine what Alec actually got out of the book while still thinking that a police pullback is the problem. https://twitter.com/alecmacgillis/status/1301500767191343106

The idea that the only thing Police corruption did to increase crime was make it harder to win back the trust of the community is not quite as bad as B.S.’s bs read of MacGillis, but it is close.

The underlying assumption is exactly the “thin blue line” ideology that we, subject to human nature, are all just ready to kill each other the second cops lift their knees off our necks. And I say “we” loosely because most people with this ideology mean specifically Black people

But police are exempted from this view of human nature, which doesn’t even entertain that they are human and light actively create crime and engage in crime, which is politically and financially advantageous for them.

This story cites as fact Melvin Russel’s laughable claim that a drug dealer said “we need our police” and doesn’t talk to any drug dealers at all. But it ignores the death of Davon Robinson who was murdered over a drug debt after being robbed by GTTF.

It ignores the chaos created by 30-50 door pops a night, where cash and drugs were stolen. Ignores the years of using snitches and then telling people they snitched and ignores the targeting of violence interrupters

Like @JeffreyButts told me and @notrivia in this story, Alec is engaged in this fantasy. https://theintercept.com/2020/07/26/baltimore-safe-streets-public-health-gun-violence-police/

We’ve been arguing against this fantasy but the establishment types just ignore the arguments, even if citing the book as just about bad apple corruption which misses the whole point. Here we showed how waging war on citizens creates crime https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/14/opinion/police-guns-baltimore.html

Here we show how actively increasing violence is beneficial to police forces and how they use it to thwart reform, leveraging violence over cities https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/baltimore-police-reforms-crime/2020/06/18/7d60e91e-b041-11ea-8758-bfd1d045525a_story.html

In order, especially for a white writer, to make the argument that Alec tries to make, you have to address these arguments we make here and yet they are simply ignored. https://www.cjr.org/q_and_a/qa-baynard-woods-and-brandon-soderberg-on-police-power-in-baltimore-and-beyond.php

And in fact takes the logic of policing and whiteness a step further saying that ONLY if cops are protected and not bound by law and ONLY if residents are bound and not protected can we be safe.

It’s amazing to me that a good writer with two respected publications behind him can write a story on the rise of crime and not talk to people accused of committing crimes, or even to violence interrupters? If you ask cops why crime rises, of course they’ll give this answer.

While it’s not a single source story, virtually everyone cited shares a similarly institutional view of the world and misses the complex reality of crime entirely. And what they don’t say is: how exactly does “cops doing their jobs” decrease crime, especially when doing their job

is seen as harassing loiterers. And then the laments over consent decrees. So people on the street are supposed to know and be held accountable to all the nuances of the law—what is loitering etc—but cops just can’t figure out the 4th amendment.

It’s just too damn hard for them to figure out how to be constitutional despite $500m a year budget and training. How dare we hold them accountable for not knowing a rule—whereas they do precisely that, with guns and chains, when a citizen violates a rule-and that’s what keeps us

safe? And saying at first it was a slow down, but of course that can’t account for five years of high murder, so it must be the consent decree, is illiberal and dangerous. Consent decrees simply try to defend our 4a rights. This argument tells you, if you have 4a you have murder.

This is nuts. How many more stories do we need to demonize communities and the constitution, in order to validate the thin blue line ideology that it is only cops stopping loiterers who keep us from the “wolves”?

To anyone who lives here it’s probably obvious, but if you don’t, this is not the lesson to be derived from Baltimore’s spike in crime and it is definitely not what our reporting for I Got a Monster, where we talked to countless accused of or involved in crime, showed.