Calming Our Fears

 

Given our frailties as bipeds, we seek protection from harm. We go to considerable lengths to be reassured that we are secure in our persons, our streets, our homes. But as women generally know much better than men, the safety that we feel is based on a pretty big illusion, one that sets us up for psychological manipulation. Here’s what I mean:

I got mugged some years ago and sustained a rather harrowing injury. Once the initial shock had passed, my medical needs attended to, and the concerned friends sent away, I experienced a period of trauma that manifested as agoraphobia although no one called it that at the time. I could not leave home alone and was uncomfortable walking the half-block to my bus stop in the middle of the day. I could not stop thinking that around the next corner, there could be someone ready to come at me with a club.

I was right—there could. Yes, of course, there was no such person. I say “of course” because that’s the psychic contract we sign up to as participants in society during normal times—the comforting assumption that no one is out to get us. But it was precisely the “of course” that I could not grasp. I had seen through the veil of our consensual reality and understood that there is, in fact, nothing stopping our fellows from battering us to death and making off with our stuff. Nothing, that is, except the general agreement that we won’t. Cops exist to discourage aggression, but they arrive only after it has occurred in almost all cases and thus play a merely retributive and punitive role.

What really keeps us safe is the deep, unconscious commitment to play nice with others that most of us mostly observe most of the time.

As women know, this agreement only goes so far, and they live with the permanent threat that the contract doesn’t fully cover them in the minds of too many large, aggressive bipeds. But I digress.

Notorious, alarming crimes undermine our sense that this protective social fabric remains intact. In our case here in New York City, nothing violates our confidence in the safety of our dense, urban environment like the sudden platform shove that puts someone in the path of a speeding subway train (as occurred January 18). We circulate constantly amidst thousands of fellow riders and pedestrians and shudder when standing near those terrifying engines to think that we are only inches away from its death-dealing irons. We’re right—we are.

The publicity attached to a rash of subway-related crimes, along with an uptick in deadly shootings, resulted in the installation of an ex-cop as our new mayor. Although a dissident during his time in uniform—especially over the topic of racism in the force—Mayor Adams so far has the very selective support of the NYPD as manifested in his role at the week-long memorials and funerals of the two officers killed on Jan. 21 when responding to a domestic violence call.

I have come to know a number of DV officers who have a difficult job and, clearly, a dangerous one. In the best of cases, they defuse potentially violent situations and mobilize resources to alleviate their underlying causes. One of the deceased, Jason Rivera, 22, joined the force after witnessing what he considered inappropriate police behavior applied to Hispanic youth like himself and thought he could do better, which makes his demise even more lamentable.

That said, it is an irony and indeed a disrespect to his memory that many now use his death politically to clamor for an end to all criticism of the way policing is done in our city and country. Alvin Bragg, the new Manhattan borough district attorney, campaigned and got elected on the idea that the current bail system is overly punitive and locks people up because they’re poor. After the dual NYPD deaths, Bragg’s plans were immediately attacked by all and sundry, including the new governor, who waved the bloody shirt of the dead officers. The D.A., said one commentator, has to “march in lockstep” with the NYPD, a blatant call to eliminate what little civilian control now exists over our $6 billion-a-year police force.

Right-thinking liberals who find Trump appalling mostly concur with that line of thinking, the same way they forgot about the rule of law once the Twin Towers came tumbling down. When it comes to the plea to “keep us safe,” there is little daylight between the red and blue teams. Demagogues everywhere know this and rise to popularity with pledges to toss out the rulebook (Bolsonaro, Duterte). If their crime-fighting tactics include dropping bodies from helicopters, most of us, if frightened enough, won’t object.

However, the get-tough approach doesn’t include everyone either, and that is another aspect of our inner totalitarian that gets ignored. Consider the case of Lauren Smith-Fields, 23, found dead in her Bridgeport, Connecticut, apartment on Dec. 12. She had been with a man met online who reported her dead; the autopsy reported fentanyl, alcohol, and other substances as the cause of death. But no one phoned or visited the next of kin to inform them that the young lady was deceased. They found out by calling her building superintendent after she failed to respond to messages.

Even stranger, the Bridgeport police did not interview the man who was with her when she died, nor did they collect forensic evidence from the site. Family members who later arrived found a used condom, a pill, and other evidence that no detective had bothered to retrieve.

Would it surprise us to know that Ms. Smith-Fields was African-American and that her date was white? Would it surprise us to know that the white man was a friend of the detective assigned to the case? Would it surprise us that another African-American female was also found dead in Bridgeport on the same day and that her family was also not notified?

Would police have proceeded in the same way if Ms. Smith-Fields were a 23-year-old white woman, like, says, Gaby Petito, and if her online date had been a black dude 15 years her senior?

The get-tough-on-crime meme doesn’t really have an answer to these questions because leaving enforcement entirely to those in uniform inevitably empowers all the prejudices that they bring to the job or develop over time. But even while recognizing injustices and the historical roots of the over-policing/ under-policing of minority communities that persist to this day, most New Yorkers will cheer Mayor Adams’ tired menu of get-tough policies, which are almost guaranteed not to work—if indeed the goal is to reduce violent crime. They will work, however, to reassure people psychologically that they will be kept safe and that real tough guys are in charge.

For example, Adams has proposed to add the category of “dangerousness” to the criteria for granting or refusing bail to detained suspects. That sounds reasonable until we examine the research evidence that judges routinely think black defendants are dangerous and white ones are not even when their records and pending charges are comparable.

Sometimes, an accused offender out on bail will commit a horrific crime, and the Murdoch yellow press immediately trumpets the tragedy as cause to lock up everyone within 5 miles just for good measure. Meanwhile, the contribution of our punitive prison system to maintaining the levels of violence in our society never gets a second look.

Adams also wants to remove Fifth Amendment protections from 16- and 17-year-olds arrested on gun charges to coerce them to rat out whoever provided them with the weapon. Aside from the irony that our gun-worshipping culture refuses to recognize the very real dangers that minority youth experience and punishes them severely for doing what white Texans brag about openly, Adams’s plan opens the door for new abuses like the case of the Central Park 5 in which innocent kids were browbeaten into false confessions and sent away for over a decade. But New Yorkers then wanted a resolution of the fear-inducing rape case, and not much has changed today.

M. A. Kaishian writes in Slate:

Adams’ focus on illegal guns comes as New York State—and New York City particularly—makes legal gun ownership nearly impossible. There are many reasons why people, including minors, choose to carry guns. In 2018 and 2019, the Center for Court Innovation interviewed 330 young people in New York City about guns, violence, and proposed solutions to violence. Eighty-eight percent had a family member or friend who had been shot and 81% had been shot or shot at.

We can send these young people off to long stints in upstate prisons, but violence and particularly gun violence will not be affected. But people will feel safer, which is what we want. Subway riders interviewed in the media repeatedly insist that we need more patrol officers on the trains. But six officers were assigned to the station where the fatal shoving incident occurred.

Our public discourse around crime is emotionally charged and cannon fodder for politicians to swagger. But once fear get a grip on us, we are incapable of acting rationally or, as some would say, applying The Science™.

While we succumb with depressing regularity to appeals to our anxiety about personal safety at home, the neocon establishment in Washington is eagerly drumming up the international version. Despite no real changes on the ground, we are suddenly assured (and not permitted to doubt) that the Russians are on the verge of staging an invasion of Ukraine and that they have massed the famous “100,000 troops on the border” in preparation for doing so. While one could question whether troop movements thousands of miles away from our national borders truly place us in danger, the assumptions of our Cold War upbringing kick in smoothly and convince us that, yes, intra-European disputes are our business.

Though our ideological enemies are long departed, Russia remains, in the collective brain, the land of dangerous autocrats. Therefore, NATO must march relentlessly eastward, and Poland, Romania, and Hungary must bristle with the latest weapons systems pointing at scary Moscow. Otherwise, Russians are likely to disembark into Sarah Palin’s back yard or, alternatively, take over Vermont’s power supply with Donald Trump’s collusion.

The surreal madness at work in this latest round of propaganda would be amusing if it were not promptly swallowed by the thought leaders of the blue team and the bulk of the managerial-professional class who constitute the Democrat base. They continue to insist that Trump was a Kremlin stooge in the face of no evidence. (These are the same people eager to censor unofficial Covid statements from Spotify and elsewhere.)

Our fears have taken over; our emotions rule. We seek new scapegoats, depending on our colors, Trumpian meatheads for some, woke snowflakes for others. All join hands to “support our troops” and their commanding generals who now flail about in confusion trying to figure out what to do next.

It would take a social historian much cleverer than I to tease out what on earth is happening in our disturbed polity. But it is clear enough that we have real grounds for fears that go far beyond someone surprising us on the street with a bat. While we hate on Joe Rogan or books about the Holocaust or Vladimir Putin or the Chinese who may shellac American athletes in the Olympics, we pose no threat to those making our future dangerous as hell.

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