It is no wonder that fervent protests against our rulers’ contemptuous treatment of many disadvantaged communities continue.
Here is a comment with its background outlined below, which may resonate with the perception of many of us who are genuinely concerned about the direction decades of “irresponsible” government are taking us: “We built this car where half of the damn country, divide the money and power, chew the other half”.
The city of Baltimore, USA is known for its high crime rate. Averages over 300 murders per year (population 600,000 plus) and is considered one of the most violent major cities in the US. The city’s notoriety came to the attention of audiences worldwide due to the police drama television series The Wire, which spanned five seasons with a total of sixty episodes between 2002 and 2008.
A poll of BBC culture critics rated The Wire as the best television series of the 21st century. It portrayed a dysfunctional police system intertwined with politics and an overburdened justice system. Characters are composite characters drawn from elements of real people’s lives.
In April of this year, the creators of The Wire released their new six-part series titled We Own This City, once again set in Baltimore, based on an entirely true story of corrupt police officers who are not held accountable effective, but were eventually brought down and imprisoned as a result of a separate investigation.
Last week I watched We Own This Town. It suited my mood as I wrote this month about our fiery protests and especially what they might represent in response to police-involved killings as our rulers play with that fire. It is from We Own This City that I pulled the comment that appears above. It’s a comment from an actor whose role was written to portray the character of a Justice Department Civil Rights attorney who chose to resign from the corrupt Department.
Both TV series expose the injustice and brutality inflicted on citizens, mainly residents of disadvantaged areas, and the complete breakdown of trust and confidence in the police. It is strongly emphasized that the police will not receive information from communities whose members are routinely slapped. We also see how youth are alienated from the mainstream when the system fails them, their relatives and friends.
Like several other cities in the US, Baltimore had a high-profile police killing involving a person, in this case one Freddie Gray. That murder made a bad situation worse. The killing here in Trinidad of Morvant 3 and Lara Promenade 3 has also been devastating to civil order. It can be seen that even the supposedly legitimate responses of the police can be portrayed as “you advantage us”. In the current climate, disadvantaged youth can easily be persuaded to accept such a divisive message.
There are other parallels. A place can be famous and infamous at the same time. A few years ago, having a relative in a graduate program at Johns Hopkins who graduated well, I went through Baltimore twice. Johns Hopkins, as most readers know, is one of the world’s most famous teaching hospitals, but in adjacent neighborhoods, such as where one of the doctors’ car parks is located, there are very visible “at-risk” communities.
Recently, I’ve had people on a neighboring Caribbean island that has an annual carnival tell me how much they’d love to come and experience Trinidad and Tobago’s famous carnival, but earnestly ask if it would be safe to do so.
Incidentally, for those who still doubt the effect of depressed socioeconomic conditions on behavior, see for example the publication of a study led by researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, dated November 9, 2017: Perceived Neighborhood Quality , family Processes and trajectories of child and adolescent externalizing behaviors in the United States – written by Li, Johnson, Musci, and Riley.
This study “suggests that the quality of the neighborhood where a child grows up has a significant impact on the number of problem behaviors they display during the elementary and teenage years.”
