What are policemen and prisons for?

In 2012 a colleague collected me from the Miami airport Hilton for a tour of college campuses to promote my textbook, Gateways to Art. As we walked to his car, we noticed a large number of police vehicles in the parking lot, all marked as police dog vans. My colleague, David, commented that he had loved working with police dogs. Until recently, he had been a drugs cop in Chicago. A transition from police officer to book salesman is quite unusual, so, as we drove around Miami and Palm Beach, we talked about his law enforcement career.

David told me that he resigned from the police force because he concluded that anti-drug policing was essentially corrupt. When his force was ready for a big bust, they would notify a local TV station, so that they were filmed for maximum publicity value to secure continued support from politicians and the public. Apparently, the police force earned a share of the value of each bust, which enabled them to buy more arms, helicopters etc. In short, if the drugs business disappeared the police business would suffer.

Earlier this week a friend sent me a brief article by a Mexican historian and commentator Héctor Aguilar Camín. The text referred to a forthcoming study of human rights abuses committed by the Mexican police. The writer argues that the US government, as part of the “War on Drugs”, established programmes to train Mexican police officers. Increasingly, the federal government, supported by police unions, has provided funding to equip American officers with quasi-military capabilities (and quasi-military mindsets). The training programmes for Mexican officers, apparently, were based on the same assumptions.

I don’t think it would be reasonable to blame US training methods for the many problems of Mexican policing, but this report reminded me of a book that my son Chris gave me a few years ago, by a remarkably fearless journalist, Anabel Hernández. The argument of her book is that until the mid-1980s the trade in drugs to the US market was run by Colombian cartels, for whom the Mexican crime gangs were humble intermediaries. In 1985, the Reagan administration wanted to arm insurgent groups (the so-called Contras) in Nicaragua in order to depose the revolutionary Sandinista government. The problem was that the US government was legally prohibited from spending federal funds for this purpose. The solution was to sell arms covertly to the Khomeini government in Iran, and to use the proceeds to buy arms for the Contras.

There remained one difficulty to overcome: transport. The Mexican drug gangs were the solution, since they had planes used to transport Colombian drugs that could be repurposed to ship arms to Nicaragua without any apparent US involvement. In return, the Americans told the Mexicans, they could bring back from Nicaragua whatever they liked. And, of course, they liked drugs and their enormous profit margins. Thus began the rise of the Mexican drug cartels.

Then, of course, the Mexican cartels used their profits to arm themselves. A friend told me a story of an exchange of views during an election campaign in New Jersey in 1982. A proposed ban of assault weapons in the state was a much-debated issue at that time. My friend was asked whether he supported the ban, to which he replied “Of course”. “Why of course?”. My friend responded that military weapons should not be in the hands of the public. The other man stated his view that the constitutional freedom to bear arms had automatically expanded in scope as new kinds of armaments were developed. When my friend asked if, therefore, he would advocate the freedom to bear tactical nuclear weapons, the man replied “Of course”. Now, it is not easy to acquire firearms legally in Mexico, but it is very simple indeed for American suppliers of firearms to sell them to drug cartel representatives who can then smuggle them into Mexico. As a result, the cartels now outgun not just the police but the Mexican army. When I lived in Mexico in the 1970s police officers were armed with revolvers. The only time I saw more potent weapons was in the hands of a bank security guard, or of soldiers searching buses for suspected guerrillas in the mountains. Today, a common sight is a pickup truck in the back of which stand behind shields police officers equipped like soldiers. Indeed, the federal police was recently brought under the command of the army.

The illegal trade in arms from the USA to Mexico is no secret. From 2006-2011, the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) in Arizona carried out a sting operation to crack down on such sales. The idea was to trace the firearms along the distribution channels to senior cartel figures. Unfortunately, the ATF lost track of the guns. Some were used to murder a US Border Patrol Officer, others were eventually seized by the Mexican army. Some simply disappeared into the hands of Mexican criminals. So, when Mr Trump vows to defend the freedom to bear arms, he is also vowing to continue to arm the very Mexican criminals from whom claims to protect Americans.

Add a good dose of corruption in most Mexican police forces, and you have a potent recipe for police abuse of human rights. In a society with a theoretical, but, in practice, very weak rule of law, the police can usually act with impunity. While in the USA and the UK protests have been at a national level and have focused on racial injustice in policing, in Mexico protests have been directed at local abuses.

For example, on 4 May a young bricklayer, Giovanni López, was arrested by police officers in Guadalajara for reasons that remain unclear. His family searched for him in various police stations without success, and the next day discovered that his dead body was in a city hospital. He died from cranial trauma and had several other wounds, including a gunshot to his leg. On 9 June, Alexander, a 16-year old American citizen visiting family in a small town in the state of Oaxaca, was shot dead by municipal police officers while riding his motorbike after buying soft drinks from a petrol station. In both cases, police officers have been arrested, but past incidents suggest that punishment may or may not ensue.

In sum, those directly responsible for the abuses that Mexicans suffer are individual police officers, but punishing “bad apples” alone will not solve the problem. An end to impunity would be a major step towards reform, but the forces that have shaped Mexican policing are far broader, and extend beyond the country’s borders. The bad apple theory does not fully explain police abuses, any more than it does in the USA.  

Oppression and cruelty is not confined to the policing element of the US justice system. I recall a visit to Delta State University in Cleveland, Mississippi. I met a photography professor who told me about his project photographing prisoners in the nearby Bolivar County Regional Correction Facility. He told me that the prison had provided quite a good education programme for its prisoners. However, a Republican politician had worked out that the per capita amount spent educating the prisoners exceeded the per capita sum spent to educate children in the state’s schools. One response would have been to increase the school budget, but the Republican gentleman preferred a much more law and order solution: abolish the prison’s education programme.

California’s higher education system has a justifiably excellent reputation. A professor once told me that there was a time when spending on the state’s universities exceeded the spend on prisons. However, a variety of law-and-order initiatives expanded the prison population to the point that spending on prisons exceeded the budget of state universities. In recent years, the state has introduced initiatives that have reduced the number of incarcerated prisoners somewhat. Nevertheless, in 2019-2020 the prison budget was $13.3 billion, while the state university system budgeted $7.3 billion. The political and business interests that drove the expansion of the prison population have been far more powerful than the educational lobby. California’s prisons have been run by private companies. In 2019 Governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill to end the involvement of private companies in prisons by 2028. Perhaps reducing prisoner numbers and ending private management of prisons will be beneficial, but results will take time.

A relentless focus on eliminating racism (a problem that will not be quickly fixed) and abusive behaviour is essential, but whether reform will include the wider interests and forces that determine how the USA is policed is another matter. Similar forces operate in the UK. One of our friends was employed in a prison to educate school-age prisoners. Her job was difficult because prisoners were often moved for administrative reasons, which disrupted their education. A private company, Capita, won the contract to manage the prison and told our friend that her role and salary would be reduced to that of a teaching assistant. She left and the prison lost an excellent teacher.

Colour and tradition: A lockdown trip to Mexico

We have all, of necessity, been preoccupied with too many gloomy topics in the last several weeks. I thought this might be a good time for something colourful and cheery. A visit to Mexico is always a feast for the senses, so I thought an online exhibition of some of the visual pleasures of Mexico would provide some needed joy.

A phrase that has stuck firmly in my mind while reading for my Mexico project is a comment that ancient Mexicans were “people of the book”. They kept records of all manner of things, using a pictographic writing system on paper made from fig bark. Stone tools for pounding bark into paper are frequently found in archaeological sites. Nowadays, paintings on fig bark are a popular form of tourist art in Taxco, a colonial silver mining town about 180km from Mexico City. Over the years I bought a few paintings that appealed to me. The first two were made in Maxela, a village about 100km south of Taxco, which specializes in bark painting.

Paintings on amate (fig) bark from Maxela, Guerrero

Like most tourist art, these views are idealized, but they succeed in portraying various aspects of village life. The architecture of the houses and church are reasonably accurate. The leisure activities are typical of rural Mexico: the charreada (a variety of rodeo), the cock fight, the musical band. The fauna and flora are also representative, with the exception of the coconut palms, imaginatively transplanted a long way from the coast to the mountain village.

These two were bought in the 1980s. I am not sure whether ploughs drawn by animals are still much used, but they were a common sight in the 1970s when I travelled around rural Guerrero. Hunting is definitely an important rural activity.

Paintings on fig bark purchased in Taxco, 1980s

When the Spaniards conquered Mexico in the 16^th century they were few in number and relied on indigenous labour for pretty much everything, including painting and architecture/construction. While we were in Mexico in 2018 we visited two magnificent churches in small towns in Michoacán. The 17^th-century church in Nurio has a magnificent painted ceiling over the entrance.

 

Painted entrance ceiling of the church of St James the Apostle, Nurio, Michoacán

St James the Apostle façade

St James the Apostle altar and retablo (reredos)

To one side of the church is an elegant chapel (known as a huatapera in Michoacán).

The interior of the 16^th-century church of Saint Bartholomew in Cocucho is much more restrained in its decoration, but the splendid paintings over the entrance more than compensate. Angels serenade on contemporary musical instruments while St. James the Moor Slayer goes about his business of dismembering infidel Moors. Unfortunately, 16^th-century Tarascan craftsmen had never seen a Moor, so they assumed they looked much like a Spaniard.

 

Church of St Bartholomew, Cocucho, Michoacán, façade

This space, with its cross, would have been used in the 16th century to preach to Indians too numerous to fit in the church

Paintings on the ceiling over the entrance, church of St Bartholomew, Cocucho, Michoacán

Interior, St Bartholomew, Cocucho

Our Ocumicho diablito

A visit to Ocumicho, a short drive from Zamora, where we stayed in 2018, took us to another huatapera. It lacked the paintings of Nurio and Cocucho, but we were visiting in May, the month of the Virgin, so the church was a riot of flowers, topped up every day by young girls. Ocumicho is a centre for crafts, particularly ceramics. The local potters specialize in making diablitos (little devils), and a side-line in erotic sculpture which earns the severe disapproval of the village priest. We opted instead for a painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe, which would surely have pleased the priest. Our diablito and the Virgin are the work of Octavio Esteban Reyes.

The huatapera of Ocumicho, Michoacán, altar and flowers in May 2018

The huatapera of Ocumicho, façade

 

Octavio Esteban Reyes, Virgin of Guadalupe

 

Octavio Esteban Reyes, Ocumicho, Michoacán, May 2018

Brown Lives, Black Lives, Statues

The killing of George Floyd has made the questions of skin colour, racism, discrimination, inequality, and community here in the United Kingdom a very live issue, as well as in USA. I thought that perhaps looking at how these issues have played out in another country might add an interesting perspective.

Part of the debate in the UK has centred on the responsibility of Britain for the ills of slavery and, more widely, of colonialism. The British were not, of course, the first European colonialists or slavers – the Spanish preceded us, but with a different model.

The defeat of the Aztecs in 1521 was possible only because the indigenous enemies of the rulers of Tenochtitlan fought with a few thousand Spaniards. Those Spaniards suddenly found themselves nominally in charge of some 22 million Indians. They were not inclined to be tillers of the land as the British would be further north. They needed to rely on others to grow their food, provide domestic service, build their churches and houses, work in their mines, and ideally make them stinking rich. On the other hand, the King’s deal with the Pope made Mexico his private property, but he was specifically obliged to care for the welfare and conversion to Catholicism of the Indians.

The tensions between these competing demands led to a vigorous religio-legal debate about the status of the Indians: were they human, did they have souls, could they be enslaved? The verdict was that they were children, without fully developed souls, could not be held fully responsible for their actions, could be enslaved only for rebellion, and should be protected by the state. The Indians had obligations, but also certain privileges and protections. They had to pay tribute (taxes), either to the King or to a private individual, and were subject to drafts of forced labour. On the other hand, they could not be prosecuted for heresy by the Inquisition, were exempt from certain taxes, and had a degree of self-government in communities designated repúblicas de indios (Indian republics).

But as the Indians died in enormous numbers, the Spaniards needed labour. They could not, in good Catholic conscience continue to enslave the Indians, but it was quite all right to enslave Africans, and assorted Asians (Chinese, Filipinos, Malaysians and the like). Odd as it may seem, these imported slaves sometimes enjoyed greater social status and home comforts than the Indians: Africans were often foremen in the mines or on the cattle ranches, managing Indian labourers. On the other hand, while the Indians were not liable for heresy, bigamy and the like, the Africans and Asians were. They had to watch out for the Inquisition, therefore.

All of this led to a society in which the obligations, rights, access to state offices and privileges, and wealth were determined by racial categories. The first level of division was a simple dichotomy. The Spaniards, Africans and Asians were “people of reason”. They had souls and could be held responsible for their actions and misdeeds. The Indians lacked fully formed souls and must therefore be treated well (in theory) as wards of the state.

Anonymous 18th-century casta painting

Two categories were not enough, so, the different groups had to be categorized. Initially, this was simple. There were Indians, Negros, Chinos (all Asians, not just strictly Chinese) and Spaniards. Before long, more categories were needed. There were very few Spanish women in Mexico for the first several decades of the colonial period, so racial mixing soon proliferated. Rather like the spread of a virus, each procreational contact exponentially increased the number of categories needed to classify the population. At the simplest level, the offspring of sex between a Spaniard and an Indian woman was a mestizo. A Spaniard and an African woman’s child was a mulato. But what if the mulato married a mestiza, and that if their child married somebody of yet another mix of bloods? If a mestizo married an Indian woman, their child was categorized as a coyote, a particularly unpleasant term.

It was not easy to keep up with this confusing proliferation of racial categories. Some kind of aide memoire was needed: artists were commissioned to make paintings that depicted in little boxes a man and woman of different racial groups and their child, with a caption denoting the child’s racial category. These were called casta (caste) paintings. In practice, this was an extremely imperfect science. Priests, officials, and society in general pretended to know what they were doing, but often had no idea. Three centuries of colonial rule made Mexicans a pretty mixed up lot from a genetic point of view.

Miguel Cabrera, De Español e India Mestizo, 1763

But the Indians, living in theoretically separate Indian republics, with their own government systems, land, languages, cultures, syncretic varieties of Catholicism, rights and obligations, remained somewhat separate (in theory, but not always in practice). When Mexico achieved Independence in 1821 things changed. The new republican rulers had no deal with the Pope to honour, and a good many of them espoused a 19^th-century liberalism whose ideal was the enterprising individual. They declared the Indians free and equal citizens.

You might think that the Indians just whooped for joy as they gained their freedom from the hated monarch. Things were not that simple. Firstly, the Indians lost the protections they had under colonial rule. Simultaneously, they lost their tax exemptions, and their way of governing their communities came under threat. In short, they had most to lose from independence, and not much to gain. In the second half of the 19^th-century, politicians with liberal views came to power. They favoured the modernising, dynamic invisible hand of free enterprise, and therefore opposed the community management of assets typical of many Indian communities. They also tended to consider the Indians as socially and economically backward. They favoured importing European blood to bring in new skills and energies. Many Indian communities lost their land, legally or illegally, their members forced to become labourers cultivating their village’s land for a new owner. Yet, at the same time the government used Mexico’s ancient heritage to promote the country in international trade fairs. Artists painted fanciful pictures of the ancient cultures.

During the 1910-1920 Revolution many communities rose up and seized land expropriated from them. The revolutionary regime espoused agrarian reform. It restored land to many communities, and gave land to some villages that had never owned any. The indigenous cultures of ancient Mexico became potent symbols in the great mural painting programmes of the 1920s and 1930s, alongside images of national heroes, including liberals who had expropriated Indian land, and Marx and Lenin. Revolutionary peasant leaders, and their agrarista (agrarian reformers) followers appeared alongside their presumed indigenous forebears.

But this was not a return to a glorious indigenous past, as the murals and revolutionary rhetoric intimidated. Indigenous Mexicans now became clients of a corporatist state. They could be delivered by their leaders to vote in elections, join demonstrations, combat rebellious generals, and fight against devout Catholic rebels. The price of land was support, and sometimes death at the hands of landowner’s gunmen. To some degree the government protected the indigenous cultures and languages, so praised in the soaring rhetoric of revolutionary political leaders. Government social programmes provided clinics, schools, libraries and technical assistance. But, the descendants of the Aztecs, Tarascans, Zapotecs, Mayans, Lacandons and so on, honoured in school textbooks, rhetoric and ceremony, are among the poorest of the nation. Their education and health care are basic at best. They tend to be looked down on by sophisticated city dwellers.

The descendants of the slaves imported from Africa and Asia are not numerous. Moreover, they have generally mixed with indigenous populations to create certain regional types, in whose skin colour and cultures traces of African ancestry can be seen. They do not form an easily identifiable (nor, indeed self-identifying) group, subjected as a group to systemic discrimination like the African  Americans of the USA or the BAME (Black, African and Minority Ethnic, a complicated acronym covering quite disparate peoples) of the UK, or the Arabs of France.

Afromestiza girls in Cuajinicuilapa, Guerrero

The net result of this history, is that, although slavery was common practice for several centuries, and although some (probably many) Mexicans are descended from slave owners, it is not easy clearly to identify any contemporary group of people who are enjoying the benefits of slavery. In Mexico there are is no equivalent of the Confederates and the Confederate flag. Nobody lives in grand country houses built on the profits of slavery. If identifiable villains there be, they are probably in Spain, or the African and Asian countries of origin.

El caballito, monument Charles V of Spain on the Paseo de la Reforma, Mexico City, 1880

As for statues, Hernán Cortés, the conqueror of the Aztecs, is strictly not welcome: no statue records

Monument to Cuauhtémoc, Cuitlahuac and other Aztec warriors, Paseo de la Reforma, Mexico City, c.1880

his violent but foundational contribution to Mexican history. Nor does his victim, emperor

Cuauhtémoc monument in its modern setting

Moctezuma, merit a statue. Mexicans are ashamed of this cowardly emperor who surrendered rather than resist. His successors, Cuitláhuac, killed by European disease, and Cuauhtémoc, cruelly tortured to death by the Spanish, are honoured as heroes with statues in the capital. Curiously, however, Charles V, King of Spain and the first sovereign of New Spain (as Mexico was known then), is commemorated with an equestrian statue (popularly known as El Caballito, the little horse), which for many decades occupied a prestigious location on the Paseo de la Reforma, the capital’s main boulevard. American friends might imagine what they would make of George III honoured with a statue on Pennsylvania Avenue, just a block or two from the White House. One colonial Spaniard who deserves statues in places of honour is Bishop Juan de Zumárraga, the first bishop of Mexico, known as the Protector of the Indians.

Statue of Bishop Zumárraga, Pátzcuaro, Michoacán

Thus, Mexico does not have a statue problem comparable to those of Confederate leaders in the USA, or slavers in the UK. This does not mean that racism is not a problem, simply that there is no easy target for protest on public display.

As for police brutality, sad to say that it is quite pervasive. A citizen perceived as “un pinche indio” (a ******* Indian) or “un negro” or a “pardo” (mixed race), is an easy target for casual violence. But an ill-trained, badly paid police officer, who can be confident of impunity, exposes all but the most powerful of Mexicans to the risk of arbitrary violence.

A footnote concerning statues out of favour in USA:

A friend in Indianapolis tells me that in 1912 a monument was erected to commemorate 1500 Confederate prisoners of war buried in mass graves. In the 1920s the remains of the prisoners were reburied in another cemetery and the monument moved to a park. The central plinth was surmounted by the word “pax” and bronze tablets recorded the names and units of the dead men. After the Black Lives Matter protests in Indianapolis, the monument was taken apart and the pieces removed to an undisclosed location. This means that the names of those buried are no longer recorded. For example, a descendant who wants to know what happened to an ancestor who might have been one of those who died in captivity in Indianapolis can no longer find this out. I think this has taken historical erasure too far, with no benefit to anybody. None of us can know whether one or more of these 1,500 men were good or bad characters, simply that they fought and died for a cause that is now judged much more harshly than it was in their lifetimes, some 150 years ago.

Black Lives Matter: reports from the ground

Black Lives Matter reached quiet Sunninghill this week as I noticed when I posted a letter.

I asked several friends in the USA what had happened in their neighbourhood. Their reports follow, unedited, except to clarify a point or correct a minor eror. In some cases, they are responding to specific questions I asked so I have summarized my questions to make sense of their answers.

The combined texts are quite long. For those who retain faith in the potential of community and politics to work for the good, but do no have time to read all, I recommend you scroll down to the account from Indianapolis.

 New York City (from two friends):

The protests are centered in Manhattan and Brooklyn. There are thousands peacefully protesting racial inequality and policy brutality throughout the [country]. Union Square, Washington Square Park are major venues, as is Times Square and the Barclay Center in Brooklyn. During the day and early evening, the protests are calm and then the evening brings looters and other evil doers. It has been pretty bad. The protests are borough-wide, though I wouldn’t imagine there are any protests in Staten Island, since they don’t welcome people of color under the best of circumstances. It is amazing to see the protests in so many cities throughout the country.  I say this because so many of the people are not black.  Now, if there was something we can do to work on systemic racism. Sad to say that is for the next generation to see any headway. The 18,000 police departments in the U. S. (yes) and the big police unions in NYC, LA, etc. have fought change at every step. I do remember being pushed, shoved and otherwise abused during the 1968 Chicago demonstrations and police riots.

Yes, the ignorant and criminals are at work after the protests. Thousands of protesters yesterday throughout the city with virtually no problems. A country that has tolerated systemic racism and police brutality is facing some terrible truths. Now we need to work on equality and changing the militarism of the police culture — fostered by police unions and no transparency. There was an Obama policy/guidelines defining two types of policing in existence - 1) warrior and 2) guardian, recommending that the current culture of police as warrior be changed to guardian of the people. Needless to say, guns, etc. would be involved, but the mentality should be different. Obviously nothing happened with this — and perhaps it will be impossible to implement. 

It took a video by a 17 year old girl to unleash the anger masked by denial. 

[In answer to my question as to whether there were protests in all the boroughs.]

And, yes there are even protests in Staten Island where Eric Garner was murdered by the police in a chokehold in 2014. The cop was never indicated and never lost his job. He’s been trying to get reinstated.

Here is a list of today’s protests. They are all registered with the city and are primarily citizens expressing their first amendment rights

https://bushwickdaily.com/bushwick/categories/news/6537-updated-blm-protests

In many of the looting situations, the police are standing back and helping exacerbate the situation. I have anecdotal evidence of this, as well as stories and videos from the news. There are 30,000 cops in NYC. They are all not working on the streets to protect protesters’ 1st amendment rights.

[In answer to my comments about policing policies in the UK.]

Entrenched racism and the militarism of police throughout the country is at the heart of the problem. They are quasi-militarized and use military equipment given them by the military. There can be no real comparison with American policing and any other policing. It is up to the lawmakers and citizens of this country to DO something. These are more like uprisings than demonstrations. This has been building in the minds and hearts of many Americans for some years now, seeing what the police do to unarmed citizens and get away with it. So, no surprises that watching the killing of a black man (who shouldn’t have been arrested by 4 cops to begin with) sparked this. Compounded with the COVID crisis, the fact that so many minorities were impacted by the virus in poor neighborhoods . . . a perfect storm. NYC’s police department (the largest in the country with 30,00 cops) has been run by the police union pretty much. There are any number of problems I can talk about, including the fact that we (pretty much in each state and certainly in NYC) are not allowed to see the “track records” or complaints against individual police offers.

This has been a long an intense discussion in this city and perhaps it takes Minneapolis (with a particularly racist police department) to get us to do something.

[In answer to my question why a mere accusation that one man had committed a non-violent crime was responded to by four armed officers.]

Store owner [in Minneapolis who called the police and accused George Floyd of trying to pass a forged $20 bill] was Middle Eastern, as are many of the bodegas and small store owners in cities. There has been a history of problems of Korean stories owners (when they were primary owners of small delis) treating black people badly (like calling the police). There is an underlying movement to work with Middle Eastern store owners serving the black communities to stop this profiling. But we shall see. 

[In answer to my question about the shooting of Ahmaud Arbery, an unarmed jogger, by two men with guns.]

In the case of the jogger, this father and son duo were just all out racists — with a history of such and they profiled a young black man running. They are just horrible people with guns. Nothing surprising here. But, if this wasn’t videoed no one would have followed up.

The word is racism and racism.

_____________________________________________________________________

It's shocking really to see the criminals destroying property so indiscriminately.  The mobs of protesters are throughout the city in all boroughs - and the looters just follow along.  The 8 pm curfew made a difference, but how disturbing to know that we have to live in a country that must impose curfews for public safety. The whole situation is disgraceful. 

New Jersey (from two friends):

The cities have been active with protests but are not seeing the kinds of violence seen elsewhere. Jersey City, Camden and Passaic are viewed as having community friendly departments. The police chief in Camden, Wysocki, joined the protesters. Even Newark, where downtown was reduced to ruins in the riots of the late 60s, has been peaceful. Paterson has not seen much protest related violence. But it has seen an ugly spike in gun violence, with two people killed and 23 others wounded in gun violence in the month of May. A disturbing element of the protests is that it appears some may be hijacked into violence by white anarchists, leaning left. It serves to escalate the oppression, discredit the protests, and destabilize the body politic. The [New York] Times reported that right wing gun nuts are making plans to head out and protect private property and law and order. Don’t be surprised when the Lunatic in Chief calls out the Second Amendment Boys to bring order to the cities.

Cities and towns control their local police departments  but most, if not all, are under the ultimate authority of the state attorney general, who is under the governor. The president does not have the authority to employ the armed services against American citizens except in an insurrection like the Civil War. Fear is Trump May claim insurrection and send in the troops.

__________________________________________________________________________

An email sent to the mayor of Jersey City:

My husband and I moved to Jersey City (from Hoboken) over 3 years ago, partially because we are appreciative of Jersey City's position as an incredibly diverse and progressive American City, and because we are invested in the same values you and your Administration are invested in.

I am grateful to see you marching with protesters this week, as I've seen you do before. I am reaching out today to urge you to advance specific action that would help address police brutality and improve quality of life for black and brown citizens in Jersey City. I know how proud you are of our police force - which under your leadership has grown to its largest size ever - and I think these actions will not only protect residents, but will make acceptable and unacceptable police behavior clearer, which in turn helps protect cops.

Please, through legislation or executive order :

- Require De-escalation 

- Ban Chokeholds and Strangleholds
- Require a Duty to Intervene

- Require Comprehensive Reporting

Finally, I urge you to support Councilmember Solomon's recent resolution establishing the creation of an ad hoc community review board, once its voted upon by the full Council. My hope is that under your Administration, this board would go above and beyond what Jersey City's current police citizen advisory board (which I know has been successful in its own ways!) can do.

Jersey City has been a leader in so many ways - in welcoming refugees, in celebrating our diversity, in City-funded rights to trans employees. I would be so proud to live in a City that, in the wake of George Floyd's murder, became compliant with all 8 tenents of the #8CantWait campaign.

Indianapolis:

We had two nights of curfew declared for Sunday and Monday from 8 PM to 6 AM.  This was in response to the deadly destruction wrought in the downtown by violence and vandalism on Saturday night.  The protests rallies during the day on Friday and Saturday stayed within bounds.  

But Friday night and especially on Saturday night a lot of damage was done in breaking plate glass windows on any number of downtown buildings---including my branch bank office.  Looters entered and ransacked some of the businesses.  To this we have as well that two people were shot and killed on Saturday in the downtown protest area. 

 The police were out with all their riot gear and fired tear gas and pepper stuff.  Unlike the daytime gatherings, the evening protests were pretty tense and hard to control.  We see how some bad types used the protest rally as a license to be vandals.  The scale of their mischief is shocking to see---and a sober reminder for why we need the cops.  

But let me say that for us living but two miles from where all this was happening, we heard nothing directly.  Only by checking the news did we discover what was going on downtown. Sometimes for summer festivals the distant sound of concert music reaches us in the evening from the downtown parks.  But I heard nothing untoward here coming from that direction Saturday evening.

Last night we got a reprieve as before the curfew hour the police and the protesters saluted each other and then paraded together in peaceful, and presumably friendly, tandem up to the Governor's Mansion some twenty blocks north of Ivy Tech [Communit y College].  There was no alert on my cellphone this morning as there was on Sunday and Monday telling me of the curfew. 

Indianapolis famously did not burn in April 1968 after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Tennessee.  Robert Kennedy* was here that evening for a presidential campaign stop.  He spoke movingly to a gathering in a predominantly African American neighborhood (just over a mile from here), of this latest American tragedy.  The eloquence of his appeal to honor King by peaceful vigils kept things calm in this city when so many others burned that evening.  

So, we had a reputation to sustain as a community that knows how to keep its head and heart when others seem to lose theirs.   A lot of us are thus pretty disappointed for what happened here this weekend, even as we know how the underlying issue of what is labelled as 'police brutality’, has local import.  We had two recent instances of police killing that are being investigated.  We thus have our own tinder here.  (We were stunned a month ago when in a two week span, a police officer and a postal letter carrier---both women---were each shot to death on the job---by angry young men with guns).  

The shocking killing in Minneapolis justly ignites national outrage.  We can add to our fury with the dawdling in Georgia where officials took two months(!) to charge the vigilante father and son who chased down in a truck and then shot to death a runner who was out exercising on a public street.  

So, things here in the USA are in flux and many of us hope we can somehow get through this till November when we have our rendezvous with destiny.  Need I say more on that?

My usual neighborhood polling site is not open this time.  So, I went to another one---in the Culinary Building at Ivy Tech!  It was a surprisingly smooth process such that it took me all told but a little more than an hour---including to pedal my bicycle to campus and back home!

Although I felt that Elizabeth Warren should be our next president given just how smart she is about how the tricksters game our system, I voted for Joe Biden as our yet great hope.

* For the text of Robert Kennedy’s speech (I recommend it) on 4 April 1968 see:

https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/the-kennedy-family/robert-f-kennedy/robert-f-kennedy-speeches/statement-on-assassination-of-martin-luther-king-jr-indianapolis-indiana-april-4-1968

This extract contrasts starkly with “When the looting starts, the shooting starts”:

 “What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black.”

Houston:

As for Houston, in comparison to the other major cities and many smaller ones, despite being George Floyd's home town (funeral scheduled for next week) it's been relatively chill here, in part perhaps because the police chief (Art Acevedo) has been super-decent, to the point of going on CNN to say that if Trump can't do anything to calm the nation's waters the least he could do is to shut up. 

Houston police chief responds to Trump advice on protests: 'Keep your mouth shut'

He also accompanied the Floyd family during the memorial procession yesterday (with up to 60,000 in attendance). But historically there hasn't been large-scale violence here; in the 60s Houston was the first major city in the south to desegregate public labor contracting (a booming economy didn’t hurt either) while elsewhere (and not only in the south) racist cops, unions and other institutions remained entrenched.

My Chinese-American friend who lives near to where Floyd was killed in Minneapolis tells the opposite story: one of the most racist police departments overseeing practically THE most racially unequal city in the country, liberal as it may be. He thinks it may have been a mix of boogaloo bois (far right accelerationist gun freaks) and some Antifa provoking and committing after-hours arson and other violence.

I've said it before and been wrong, but between the virus, the crash and now this, Trump's show seems to be falling apart at the seams. Even his lackey defense secretary, who had authorized the appalling spectacle of a phalanx of soldiers armed to the teeth deployed in front of the Lincoln Memorial, just came out and said there's no basis for invoking the Insurrection Act if he has anything to say about it.

Vallejo, California:

[A protester, his hands raised high, was shot dead by a police officer who suspected that he had a gun in his pocket. This turned out to be a hammer.]

I’m in Fairfield now, up the road from Vallejo --we had a curfew in our county for the past few days, and some of the drug stores and grocery stores have boarded up windows for safety.  The protests are definitely more concentrated in Vallejo, and the police were very slow to even admit that the killing happened.  Every day there are dozens of new videos and stories on Twitter from across the country – here, police take a knee as the protesters go by, and there, police freely wield billy clubs, plant evidence (in plain sight), and rough up protesters for fun. It’s systemic.

The police have taken the neo-Nazis aside and given them warnings, saying “oh we’re going to be using the tear gas soon, just so you know…” But of course, we have this horrible president, who is setting the tone. Meanwhile, aside from protesters exposing themselves to Covid-19 in order to defend civil liberties, the whole country is sick of this whole “Covid thing” and so has decided social distancing isn’t worth their time.  We are going to see a huge spike in cases in the South and Midwest.  A whole lot is riding on this November’s election!

Meanwhile in Mexico:

This week in Guadalajara, police stopped a man for ingoring the state edict that masks must be worn in public. The man was arrested (the police claim for violent conduct). The man’s family could not find him at the police station. They went to the hospitla where they found him dead. He had a bullet wound in one foot and died frm blunt trauma to his head. Casual disregard for human rights is not uncommon in Mexican policing. One interesting connection with the US situation is that many Mexican police officers have been trained in the USA as part of the War on Drugs. In other words, the USA teaches Mexican police the same militarized approach to policing that is applied in the North.

Combating coronavirus: personal accounts from New Jersey and Mexico

Since the pandemic started, I have been corresponding with our friend Chris Contillo, a public health nurse in New Jersey and New York City for the last thirty years. Jan and I first met Chris and her husband Bob when we were living in Takoma, Park, Maryland in 1979. She nursed our son Chris to health when he caught the H1N1 virus in 2009.

Here in the UK, the government gives a daily press conference at which it announces some new statistic or other (or not if the statistic happens not to look too good), usually accompanied by a new daily initiative. For all the information, it is often difficult to understand what exactly is being done in practical terms, why and with what results. Chris has been contact tracing in Bergen County since late March, when testing began. Bergen is the largest of New Jersey’s 21  counties by population. Chris also writes regularly for nursing magazines. She has direct experience of the practicalities of contact tracing in her county’s health environment.

As background for my non-UK friends, our own government had a national contact and tracing system in the early stages of the pandemic, when the objective was to contain the virus. As cases increased, the tracing system proved unequal to the task, and was abandoned until last Thursday, when a new, larger, “test, trace, isolate” system started operation. In the UK,  a person with symptoms applies for a test. If the result is positive, the infected person, and all members of the household, are asked to self-isolate for 14 days. The infected person is asked to identify, from two days before symptoms appeared up to seven days afterwards, people with whom they were in close contact. Close contact is defined as: a face-to-face conversation, physical, including sexual, contact and being in the same household. The infected person also identifies anyone with whom she/he has spent 15 minutes or more at a distance of less than 2 metres. All those people are contacted, and whether infected, symptomatic, or not, asked to stay at home for 14 days. There is currently no compulsion.

Unlike the Bergen County system, the UK operation is national in each of the four nations (England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland). The UK tracers do not have local knowledge of the kind Chris possesses. On the other hand, the US system is much more fragmented and constrained by jurisdictional boundaries. In other words, how contact tracing operates (and to some degree its effectiveness), is constrained by the health care, governmental and legal structures of a country.

As of 31 May, there have been 160,445 cases in New Jersey and 11,698 deaths. That’s 132 deaths per 100,000 people. At the same date, the UK had 276,156 cases and 38,571 deaths: 58 per 100,000 people.

Chris Contillo: Tracing Contacts in Bergen County, New Jersey

Bergen County, outlined, and the Tri-State area

On Tuesday, March 10, I returned to my office from a blood pressure clinic to find TV news satellite trucks blocking the street and newscasters milling around trying to get statements. Bergen county had just registered New Jersey’s first COVID-19 death hours earlier.

The number of deaths in New Jersey has been exceeded only by New York. At one point, our county, population almost 1 million, accounted for half the cases in the entire state of New Jersey, which as a population of 9 million. New York City did not become the epicentre of the COVID-19 pandemic simply because it’s crowded. Residents of the Tri-state area (New York, New Jersey and Connecticut) move around a lot. Bergen county is just across the George Washington Bridge from Manhattan. Housing, from suburban houses to high-rise apartments, costs a little less than in New York. Consequently, our area has a large commuter population.

One cheerful middle-aged man told me that the day before he developed “only a slight fever and cough”, he had delivered furniture to his daughter in New York, gone to the supermarket, a deli, a chemist, Starbucks, and had then joined a friend for lunch and golf. Later they had dinner at a nice restaurant with their wives. I asked him if he had notified his friends that he had a positive test result. He laughed and said “Oh, you should try to get them on the phone. They’re really busy.”

Our communicable disease department usually deals with maladies like salmonellosis, typhoid and strep. When we get a positive test result, we contact the patient to see whom they might have exposed and how they can limit further transmission. Our department is responsible for tracking about 50 communicable diseases. We report cases to the state health department, which in turn reports to the Centers for Disease Control. The CDC publishes “Morbidity and Mortality Report Monthly” which has all the numbers from all 50 states. In the USA, each health district, state, county, local, is independent and decides how to carry out contact tracing in its area.

Patients who test positive for hepatitis A, for example, might be told they cannot continue to work in a restaurant until they submit negative stool specimens. A recent mumps outbreak in the local jail was contained. We have legal powers to enforce regulations in such cases. Enforcement is complicated by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and privacy acts. Some people are very suspicious when I call them and very reluctant to give me information. Many do not answer the phone because they do not recognize my number.

I have had people ask me not to tell anyone they have tested positive, or refuse to give me the last names of their room-mates. A physician’s assistant without a fever, who had tested positive, told me she was instructed to continue to work because there was no one else to take her place.

My investigations began with a daily package of investigation forms. The test results come from local doctor’s offices, the federal drive-through site at our local community college, and multiple urgent care centers. I have spoken to doctors who tested themselves and their staff, and to a pediatrician who took the elevator down from his office to test a coughing father sitting in a car double-parked on the street.

The sheer scale of the COVID-19 pandemic has made enforcement much more challenging. For example, there have been outbreaks in large warehouses. I might call somebody there, but they seemed not to know that a co-worker had been sick. In many cases they don’t know their co-worker’s last name, even of the person they have lunch or coffee with every day. In some cases, I got the HR manager’s name and number so that she/he could tackle the problem.

We are responsible only for New Jersey. However, so many of the people I contact actually work in New York. Ideally, we would be contacting all the “close contacts” ourselves to make sure that they understand the quarantine and self-isolation restrictions but this has not been practical in all cases. I know that other investigators have ended up calling the New York City Health Department about some healthcare workers if they didn’t believe that they were notifying their HR departments correctly.

Because of the overwhelming nature of this current outbreak, I would ask for the names of the close contacts — closer than 6 feet for longer than 10 minutes over the period of the illness and the three days before symptoms began — and then I would ask if they had notified these people and what happened then. In almost every case, especially of people who got sick after the lockdown had already begun, they were with their contacts all the time, so of course, everyone knew who was sick. But what about people who were at work when their symptoms started? Had their HR been contacted? Usually yes, because, since they were out of work for a lengthy time, they would call to find out what kind of health benefits they were entitled to.

Another problem we encountered was the language barrier. Because we are so close to an urban area we have many languages. On staff we have Spanish and Polish translators, but there were many languages beside these. There is a legal issue about asking a family member translate for a patient, which I had to do in many cases.

In some cases, the state has contacted me about my investigations. One was the case of an elderly woman first admitted to the hospital for pneumonia in December. What followed was several fever admissions and discharges, and another pneumonia, but she wasn’t tested for COVID-19 until March, because there was no testing before then. Her husband died at home of COVID during this time. We could not determine whether or not this woman was an early case of coronavirus. Another case was a young college woman who flew home from Spain with a fever after meeting her Italian friends, all with fevers, to attend a rock festival. She came down with a full body rash and was admitted to a pediatric ICU. This was possibly an early case in a “child” of the kawasaki-like illness that some young patients suffer.

I think that knowing the local area and its demographics is enormously important. Public Health is less actual about patient care and more about knowing how to serve the community. If you don’t know who you are dealing with — what kind of businesses, religious centers, who to get on your side to reach their people — you can’t be very effective.

Public health has always been an underfunded specialty. The work of tracking trends and stopping the spread of illness isn’t glamorous, nor are our tools: vaccines, education and disease reporting. However, there’s nothing like a pandemic to demonstrate how important those things can be.

Meanwhile, in western Mexico

Our source for Mexico, where 90,664 cases and 9,930 deaths have been reported (almost certainly a substantial under-counting), is much more anecdotal, from our son Chris. But it gives some flavour of life on the ground. Chris, his girlfriend Carolina, and her two young children, live in San Vicente, Nayarit state, close to the border with the state of Jalisco. Chris and Carolina have made a few trips into Jalisco. On one occasion, they took the children to dinner in a tapas restaurant. The restaurant had a substantial area set aside for handwashing and hand sanitizers. A poster informed customers that the staff had taken the state’s COVID-19 training course. Tables were spaced well apart and the staff wore face masks. On the other hand, last week Chris and Carolina had dinner at a restaurant by the marina. When he made the reservation, Chris was told that customers must wear masks on arrival until they are seated at their table. As they began to put on their masks, however, the maître d’ informed them that a health inspector had visited the restaurant the previous day and had told the staff that customers must be in possession of a mask, but do not need to wear it.

Last weekend, they took the children into the Nayarit countryside for some exercise. They noticed a pleasant spot on the banks of the Ameca river and agreed to stop there on their way home. When they returned they found the area full of parked cars and picnicking families. This is the hot season of the year. The river enables families to escape homes in crowded towns that are often not well ventilated or easy to keep cool for the refreshing cool of the Ameca’s waters. The crowd was sufficiently large that some had set up tables and chairs in the river. A police car with a loudspeaker arrived and informed the picnickers that if they did not leave, the National Guard would be called. A great, not very distanced, rush to the parked cars ensued. Nevertheless, this was evidence of some official efforts to enforce a degree of distance.

 

Río Ameca

In general, it seems that there are some organized attempts to encourage safe practices, but enforcement is haphazard. For example, police are stationed on the bridge that marks the boundary between Nayarit and Jalisco, presumably to check whether journeys are essential. However, when Carolina and Chris crossed the bridge the police made no effort to stop them. However, tourism (the main economic activity of the area) has ceased, many (including Carolina) are unemployed. Consequently, public transport demand is reduced and bus services are less frequent. The President intends to relax restrictions this month while deaths remain at a high level. I suspect that more cases will ensue.

Middle class housing in San Vicente. Chris' home is to the left of the pickup truck