Imagine outside the punishment paradigm

I awoke to banging on my front door at about 4:50 this morning. When I opened it two police officers were standing there. I asked why they had come. They were puzzled by that. The woman of the pair said that 911 had received a call from my phone, with an immediate hangup. She asked if I was OK. I said I was. She asked if I lived alone. I said I do. I asked what phone number made the call. She talked to her base, then said the number. I agreed it was my number. She apologized for bothering me and they left. I went back to bed, then got up and wrote myself a note and returned to bed. It took more than an hour before I fell asleep again. I slept in. The note was where I had left it, so it wasn’t just a particularly vivid dream I managed to remember. This afternoon I called AT&T to get a confirmation of the 911 call. I wanted to know: Was it my phone, had someone spoofed my number, or was there another problem? The AT&T website provided a customer service number, though that wasn’t easy to find. I waded through the decision tree. I talked to a person who verified who I am, then said I needed to call customer service, here’s the number for someone in southeast Michigan. Wait, hadn’t I called customer service? I called the second number and a bot answered, one of those computer voices that tries to interpret what the customer is saying to route the call appropriately. In my experience bots always get it wrong. So I kept saying “agent” until it connected me to a human. I explained the situation, that I wanted to verify a call had been made from my phone to 911 this morning. The agent said if the call in question happened this morning it was too soon to find it. Besides, I would need a subpoena. Huh? This is a call from my own phone, shouldn’t I be allowed to see it? Sorry, sir. It’s a private AT&T record. If you want to see it you need a subpoena. But maybe you should talk to Tech. This is Billing. I was connected to Tech. This agent kept asking me to confirm details of my account and finally said he handles AT&T Uverse (which includes TV and internet), not AT&T (which is just landlines). The agent gave me a number. I called and got another bot. This time I asked for a “tech agent.” I was put through. After another round of identification this agent said we don’t have that information, maybe Repair does. She forwarded my call. Back to the bot. I knew to ask for a “repair agent.” Once speaking to a person I explained what I wanted. I was told I could get a lawyer or have the line checked. I said let’s check the line. I was handed off to another agent (this time avoiding the bot). Yeah, she said, faulty lines have been known to dial 911. The earliest the line could be checked is Saturday. They’ll do the check. If they need to come onto the property they’ll call me and set up a time. Yeesh! Yeah, I’m feeling grumpy today. Especially when someone from some sort of Medicare services keeps calling, even after I explain I’m not eligible for Medicare and ask them to not call again. When I got a second call today I went into a rant (I said I was grumpy) and they hung up before I was done. I’m sure it was not someone from the actual Medicare department of the government. Those that warn of scams remind us the government doesn’t call. They send letters. So it is likely someone from some sort of Medicare “service” – a variety of services, some attached to actual medical companies, have been badgering me all fall to make sure I pick their Medicare package during December’s open enrollment, even though I don’t qualify for Medicare. I think open enrollment ended two weeks ago. While I’m somewhat on the subject of police here are couple related items that have been in my browser tabs for a while. The first is by Mary Hooks for Prism within Daily Kos. It was published on December 1. Hooks, a woman of color, talked about a day in second grade when Officer Friendly and McGruff the Crime Dog (someone in a dog costume) came to class to talk about public safety. The officer telling kids that when they saw crime they should call the police was in conflict with what she heard at home. There they did not call the police. Things that happened in the house stayed in the house. The officer had all the kids be fingerprinted in case they were ever kidnapped. In hindsight she now understands that in they eyes of Officer Friendly she and her classmates were already suspects and cops were just waiting for the first mistake. While Hooks was growing up visits by the police in her community were frequent and unwelcome. Things were worse after they left. The police would take someone, which meant on Sundays they went to the jail to visit that someone. She first thought the adults around her were making bad decisions, not knowing all options were bad. Nor did she know about the War on Drugs, the welfare-to-work laws, the disappearing factory jobs, and the Clinton crime bill. Hooks wrote:

I know without a shadow of a doubt that this has all been a set up. There is no way the “public safety” we have been taught is going to bring about safety in a real and meaningful way. The reality is that we have lived this lie long enough and public safety must be redefined and reimagined in order to consider the totality of the people who inhabit the public sphere, not just the properties that make for a good skyline. To reimagine public safety requires a sober assessment of the current order of the day and being honest about who it’s hurting, what is being kept safe, and what isn’t.

What would make her and her neighborhood feel safe are such things as meaningful work they could control, services to address the crack epidemic, and a place to gather to talk about the hard things in life. Let’s aim for a different direction. Portugal has decriminalized drug use and provided harm-reduction methods. An organization provides recreational facilities to give an alternative to drugs. There have been attempts at training people to be violence interruptors. Hooks concluded:

We can’t get rid of policing as we know it if we continue to value one person’s time and labor over another’s, which is a requirement of racialized capitalism. We must fight like hell to break isolation and mediocrity which nurtures capitalism and fear. This may seem like a tall order. However, if we exert the same amount of force and energy that has been used to instill fear, make mass consumption an art form, shred the social safety net, lie to and manipulate the public to support war and exploitation, and instead imagine and build alternative systems of public safety, then I believe we can do what must be done to turn the world right side up again.

Arissa Hall was a guest writer for Kos Prism. This particular post has been in my browser tabs since September 23 (and one I recovered when I lost my browser tabs). While she awaited the birth of her first child she pondered what it meant to raise a free black child. That meant avoiding police propaganda aimed at children. One idea was to teach the child of full autonomy – he was in charge of his own body. That included no spankings or shaming. She didn’t want to teach punitive systems. Such systems stunt our ability to imagine outside the punishment paradigm. People want to avoid accountability because that is usually associated with punishment and pain, but there are ways to hold accountable without it. This glamorization of punishment and policing has been a part of a long-running public relations campaign that dates back to the early 20th century as part of an attempt to clean up their negative reputation as extorters and paid enforcers of the underground economy as published in the provocative Lexow Commission. Since then, the police have been portrayed in Hollywood as fully formed human beings who are goofy, tender, brooding, brave, and heroic—turning them into nice, relatable crime-stoppers, instead of the deadly and violent arm of the white supremacist state. Even more, the violence and terror police wreak is framed as noble and necessary, as seen across media and Hollywood—including shows like Law & Order SVU, as well as children’s shows such as Paw Patrol. Hall also had to be on guard for helpful police who pop up in children’s books and shows. The police PR machine starts early. And she’s looking for things for children that include collective learning around cultivating safety and accountability, that show marginalized identities as fully human. There was a conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn yesterday, the closest they’ve been seen in 800 years. My area of Michigan had cloud cover. This evening was clear and I saw Jupiter, but didn’t see Saturn. Lots of branches from shrubbery didn’t help. Thankfully Ed Piotrowski got a good picture. Click on it for a larger view.