Ian & Stuart's Australian Mac: Not for Sale/Another.not.for.sale (Australia).iso/hold me in your arms/Mike Davis⁄Ecology of Fear/Half-Moons

Text File | 1994-10-02 | 10KB | 168 lines

   Prev: Free Fire Zone Up: Contents Next: The Neighbors are Watching


     _________________________________________________________________

4. The Half-Moons of Repression

   In the original Burgess diagram, the "half-moons" of ethnic enclaves
   ("Deutschland," "Little Sicily," "the Black Belt," etc.) and
   specialized architectural ecologies ("residential hotels," "the two
   flat area," etc.) cut across the "dartboard" of the city's fundamental
   socio-economic patterning. In contemporary metropolitan Los Angeles, a
   new species of special enclave is emerging in sympathetic
   synchronization to the militarization of the landscape. For want of a
   better generic appellation. we might call them "social control
   districts" (SCDs). They merge the sanctions of the criminal or civil
   code with land-use planning to create what Michel Foucault would
   undoubtedly have recognized as further instances of the evolution of
   the "disciplinary order" of the twentieth-century city.

   As Christian Boyer paraphrases Foucault:

     Disciplinary control proceed[s] by distributing bodies in space,
     allocating each individual to a cellular partition, creating a
     functional space out of this analytic spatial arrangement. In the
     end this spatial matrix became both real and ideal: a hierarchical
     organization of cellular space and a purely ideal order that was
     imposed upon its forms.

   Currently existing SCDs (simultaneously "real and ideal") can be
   distinguished according to their juridical mode of spatial
   "discipline." Abatement districts, currently enforced against graffiti
   and prostitution in sign-posted areas of Los Angeles and West
   Hollywood, extend the traditional police power over nuisance (the
   legal fount of all zoning) from noxious industry to noxious behavior.
   Because they are self-financed by the fines collected or special sales
   taxes levied (on spray paints, for example), abatement districts allow
   homeowner or merchant groups to target intensified law enforcement
   against specific local social problems.

   Enhancement districts, represented all over Southern California by the
   "drug-free zones" surrounding public schools, add extra federal/state
   penalties or "enhancements" to crimes committed within a specified
   radius of public institutions. Containment districts are designed to
   quarantine potentially epidemic social problems, ranging from that
   insect illegal immigrant, the Mediterranean fruit fly, to the ever
   increasing masses of homeless Angelenos. Although Downtown L.A.'s
   "homeless containment zone" lacks the precise, if surreal,
   sign-posting of the state Department of Agriculture's "Medfly
   Quarantine Zone," it is nonetheless one of the most dramatic examples
   of a SCD. By city policy, the spillover of homeless encampments into
   surrounding council districts, or into the tonier precincts of the
   Downtown scanscape, is prevented by their "containment" (official
   term) within the over-crowded Skid row area known as Central City East
   (or the "Nickle" to its inhabitants). Although the recession-driven
   explosion in the homeless population has inexorably leaked street
   people into the alleys and vacant lots of nearby inner-ring
   neighborhoods, the LAPD maintains its pitiless policy of driving them
   back into the squalor of the Nickle.

   The obverse strategy, of course, is the formal exclusion of the
   homeless and other pariah groups from public spaces. A spate of
   Southland cities, from Orange County to Santa Barbara, and even
   including the "Peoples' Republic of Santa Monica," recently have
   passed "anti-camping ordinances to banish the homeless from their
   sight. Meanwhile Los Angeles and Pomona are emulating the small city
   of San Fernando (Richie Valens's hometown) in banning gang members
   from parks. These "Gang Free Parks" reinforce non-spatialized
   sanctions against gang membership (especially the recent Street
   Terrorism Enforcement and Prevention Act or STEP) as examples of
   "status criminalization" where group membership, even in the absence
   of a specific criminal act, has been outlawed.

   Status crime, by its very nature, involves projections of middle-class
   or conservative fantasies about the nature of the "dangerous classes."
   Thus in the nineteenth century, the bourgeoisie crusaded against a
   largely phantasmagorical "tramp menace," and, in the twentieth
   century, against a hallucinatory domestic "red menace." In the middle
   1980's, however, the ghost of Cotton Mather suddenly reappeared in
   suburban Southern California. Allegations that local daycare centers
   were actually covens of satanic perversion wrenched us back to the
   seventeenth century and the Salem witch trials. In the course of the
   McMartin Preschool molestation case -- ultimately the longest and most
   expensive such ordeal in American history -- children testified about
   molester-teachers who flew around on broomsticks and other
   manifestations of the Evil One.

   One legacy of the accompanying collective hysteria, which undoubtedly
   mined huge veins of displaced parental guilt, was the little city of
   San Dimas's creation of the nation's first "child molestation
   exclusion zone." This Twin-Peaks-like suburb in the eastern San
   Gabriel Valley was sign-posted from stem to stern with the warning:
   "Hands Off! Our children are photographed and finger-printed for their
   own protection." I don't know if the armies of lurking pedophiles in
   the mountains above San Dimas were actually deterred by these
   warnings, but any mapping of contemporary urban space must acknowledge
   the existence of such dark, Lynchian zones where the social imaginary
   discharges its fantasies.

   Meanwhile, post-riot Southern California seems on the verge of
   creating yet more SCDs. On the one hand, the arrival of the federal
   "Weed and Seed" program, linking community development funds to
   anti-gang repression, provides a new set of incentives for
   neighborhoods to adopt exclusion and/or enhancement strategies. As
   many activists have warned, "Weed and Seed" is like a police-state
   caricature of the 1960s War on Poverty, with the Justice Department
   transformed into the manager of urban redevelopment. The poor will be
   forced to cooperate with their own criminalization as a precondition
   for urban aid.

   On the other hand, emerging technologies may give conservatives, and
   probably neo-liberals as well, a real opportunity to test cost-saving
   proposals for community imprisonment as an alternative to expensive
   programs of prison construction. Led by Heritage Institute ideologue
   Charles Murray -- whose polemic against social spending for the poor,
   Losing Ground (1984), was the most potent manifesto of the Reagan
   era -- conservative theorists are exploring the practicalities of the
   carceral city depicted in sci-fi fantasies like Escape from New
   York.

   Murray's concept, as first adumbrated in the New Republic in 1990, is
   that "drug-free zones for the majority" may require social-refuse
   heaps for the criminalized minority. "If the result of implementing
   these policies [landlords' and employers' unrestricted right to
   discriminate in the selection of tenants and workers] is to
   concentrate the bad apples into a few hyper-violent, anti-social
   neighborhoods, so be it." But how will the underclass be effectively
   confined to its own "hyper-violent" super-SCDs and kept out of the
   drug-free Shangri-las of the overclass?

   One possibility is the systematic establishment of discrete security
   gateways that will use some biometric criterion, universally
   registered, to screen crowds and bypassers. The "most elegant
   solution," according to a recent article in The Economist, "is a
   biometric that can be measured without the subject having to do
   anything at all." The individually unique cart-wheel pattern of the
   iris, for example, can be scanned by hidden cameras "without the
   subject being any the wiser." "That could be useful in places like
   airports -- to check for the eye of a Tamil Tiger, or anybody else
   whose presence might make security guards' pupils dilate."

   Another emerging technology is the police utilization of LANDSAT
   satellites linked to Geographical Information Systems (GIS). Almost
   certainly by the end of the decade the largest U.S. metropolitan
   areas, including Los Angeles, will be using geosynchronous LANDSAT
   systems to manage traffic congestion and oversee physical planning.
   The same LANDSAT-GIS capability can be cost-shared and time-shared
   with police departments to surveil the movements of tens of thousands
   of electronically tagged individuals and their automobiles.

   Although such monitoring is immediately intended to safeguard
   expensive sports cars and other toys of the rich, it will be entirely
   possible to use the same technology to put the equivalent of an
   electronic handcuff on the activities of entire urban social strata.
   Drug offenders and gang members can be "bar-coded" and paroled to the
   omniscient scrutiny of a satellite that will track their 24-hour
   itineraries and automatically sound an alarm if they stray outside the
   borders of their surveillance district. With such powerful Orwellian
   technologies for social control, community confinement and the
   confinement of communities may ultimately mean the same thing.


     _________________________________________________________________

   Prev: Free Fire Zone Up: Contents Next: The Neighbors are Watching