Graffiti and Murder: The Broken Windows Theory

In chapter 6 of The Great American City by Robert Sampson, he talks about the “broken windows” theory. This theory argued that minor public incivilities “attract predatory crime because criminals assume that the residents are indifferent to what goes on in their neighborhood” (Sampson 125). Essentially, the presence of minor crimes being broken as well as local ordinances or other rules can act as a signal to a criminal that a neighborhood is a good place to commit a crime without being caught. Criminals would be more likely to commit crimes in these neighborhoods rather than others because the presence of minor crime means that the residents are not willing to stop a crime or call the police if they witness something.

When there are neighborhoods that do not have watch programs or concerned residents, any kind of crime can occur. One example is the story of Catherine Susan “Kitty” Genovese. Kitty Genovese lived in a neighborhood in Queens, New York in the 1960’s. One night, she was returning home when she noticed a man standing near the entrance to her apartment complex. She was making her way to a police callbox, but the man caught up to her and attacked her. When he grabbed her, she screamed that she had been stabbed and the lights in a nearby building came on. Someone called out to the man, and told him to leave Kitty alone. The man walked away, and the lights in the building went back off. The man then returned and began to stab her again. When she screamed, more lights went on and some people opened their windows causing the man to run away again. Once the people had turned off their lights and gone back to bed, the man came back and stabbed Kitty again, killing her. The next day, her neighbors woke to police sirens outside their apartment building. None of Kitty’s neighbors called the police during the attack, only after. When the police were conducting their investigation, most of her neighbors said that they figured someone else had called the police or they didn’t want to get involved.

In the chapter Sampson later explains his thoughts on the ideas behind the broken window theory. He talks specifically about the example of graffiti as a cue for a neighborhood having high crime. He proposes that we think of graffiti as a positive influence on the community. He gives the example of the graffiti being on the walls of a college town or arts district and then asks if it would be perceived the same way as it would if it was in a different neighborhood. When I was reading this section, I thought about the way graffiti is viewed in hip hop culture. In hip hop culture, graffiti is art and it is considered a key element to the lifestyle. As I made that connection, I began to think about the different graffiti that I have witnessed in various neighborhoods. Sampson describes being in Paris and seeing graffiti on the walls, but the neighborhood was not the type described in the broken windows theory. The graffiti in Paris is not looked at as disorderly, and the neighborhood is intact. So why is it that the neighborhoods in the U.S are considered disadvantaged or on the verge of “urban decline”? Sampson calls for a reconstruction of the broken windows theory to help us better understand our perceptions of disorder. Personally, I agree that there needs to be another study to observe these perceptions and come to a different explanation.

Article on the murder of Kitty Genovese
http://www.nytimes.com/1964/03/27/37-who-saw-murder-didnt-call-the-police.html?_r=0

Implicit Bias and Racialized Meaning

The title of this blog post is taken directly from a title of a subheading in chapter 6 of Sampson's Great American City. This part of the chapter is only two pages, however, there are a whole lot of discourse-worthy points packed into these two pages. I will approach these points using personal thoughts and anecdotes, as well, I will try to incorporate themes, concepts, and ideas that we have learned and discussed in class.

            The book mentions that stereotypes are “especially tempting” to the untrained intellect. What I gather from this is that any and every human being will be guilty of some level of stereotyping of another individual or group of individuals. These means that no matter how well-intended or pure-hearted an individual may be, they will still partake in some level of stereotyping others. That is only, however, for an individual who is not made aware of their very subconscious stereotyping of others. Once a person is made aware of their stereotyping, the hope is that they will no longer engage in that behavior. Sampson adds to this concept when saying “we make decisions habitually and without much introspection.” So, then, it seems that this action of stereotyping is a natural behavior of a human being. Therefore, until an individual is taught and trained to look inward and contemplate their thoughts about themselves, others, and the world at large, they will in all likelihood continue to stereotype others.

            You may be asking yourself, “What does this have to do with the urban community?” This question can be best answered in this one sentence by Sampson, “A body of research shows that Americans hold persistent beliefs linking blacks, disadvantaged minorities, and recent immigrant groups to many social images, including crime, violence, disorder, welfare, and their undesirability as neighbors.” The last few words of that sentence, which I underlined, are the main connection to our class discussions throughout the semester and the course as a whole. We have seen again and again throughout our readings in the semester the role that race bias and stereotyping play in the formation and/or deformation of a community, particularly the urban community. We saw specifically in American Apartheid, how the real estate industry, for example, played a huge role in not allowing African Americans into certain neighborhoods in the United States. Their “undesirability as neighbors,” which can be argued is founded in stereotypes, is arguably the main reason and explanation for the status quo we now see in many of our larger, segregated urban communities across the United States.

            The links I have included below in this post are to two interesting articles. The first has to do police training and raising awareness among police officers about implicit bias. The second article has to do with racial bias and stereotyping in general. Also, the photo I included is, in my opinion, a very deep and profound reflection of the stereotyping we see in society today (pay close attention to the mugshots and how the accused are dressed in their respective photos).

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/destiny-peery/implicit-bias-training-fo_b_9464564.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/04/upshot/the-measuring-sticks-of-racial-bias-.html

Continuing struggles of Chicago

                                                 The Struggles of Chicago

Sampson introduces the appeal for social science research at the neighborhood level. He teaches us that even in a wired world, physical proximity still matters in shaping life outcomes. He also proposed that the ongoing segregation in particular areas of the city is proof of there being a defined contribution to the effect that include: low economic status, ethnic heterogeneity and residential instability. Sampson makes a very good point about the urban metropolis traversing into chatting away on a cellphone, plugged into an iPod, or even “tweeting”. Social network theorists have proved to us that urbanizes have created non spatial communities. Nowadays, urbanism and social relations are not with your community and instead they are with internet surfing, blog comments and superficial things like Facebook and texting. The classic thesis of decline has been described as “community lost” that posits the idea that the social ties of modern urbanities have become impersonal, transitory, and segmented that creates social disorganization. How many times have you been sitting at the dinner table and you try to have a conversation with someone and they are attached to their phone checking Facebook updates and texting their friends back and completely ignoring the fact that you are in the middle of the conversation with them. It gets really frustrating because their phone continues to vibrate from these texts and the individual today has to read and respond to it right away.

                Going on further in the chapter he emphasizes on what he calls, “A Birds Eye View”. Neighborhoods dramatically differ in their quality, feel, sights, sounds, and smells that much is experiences in out walks. But the diversity of behaviors and social actions that cluster together in space and that define the social organization of the city. Looking at the aspects of Chicago neighborhoods-whether it be the measures of homicide, low birth weight, infant mortality or teen pregnancy, there is compelling evidence point to geographic compromised health. Collective civil engagement and impassioned protest, is not fully modern either. Maybe networks are where globalization instantiates the potential to destroy community differences. Data suggests that the civic life is not dead but instead highly spatially ordered by looking at the outcome of fund drives, blood drives, parades, etc. 

                This makes me think of the movie, “Pursuit of Happyness”. Linda and Chris struggle to make ends meet in their low income neighborhood in San Francisco. They strive to make things work but Linda leaves him one day. Chris struggles with bringing his son to day care each day. Chris learns he's been offered the coveted internship. But it’s unpaid. Despite the financial risk, Chris decides to go for it, but dwindling savings quickly result in an eviction from their apartment. And then another from a motel. Soon, father and son are homeless, staying in city shelters on good nights and in public restrooms on the worst. This correlates really well with Chapter one based on the poverty levels Sampson talks about and the struggles people have to go through.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCy3mU-5Pd8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dklNDwmWsk

This clip is extremely relevant when it comes to getting a good outlook on the crime and poverty living conditions inside of Chicago. 

Segregation Alive Today

Most people think that segregation in school ended with the Brown vs. Board of Education, but it is still prevalent in schools today. The desegregation of schools was proved to be a hard law to enforce, especially in the South. The riots and violence that came with desegregating these schools had to have been scary for the first children to go through.

 No school is more noted for the violence that came with integration than with the Little Rock high school in Arkansas. The school board picked nine African-American students to be enrolled into Little Rock Central High. As soon as these students got out of the car by the school they were ambushed by an angry mob trying to stop them from going inside. They even had their own escort to walk them into school and to and from class to keep them safe. Even with that, they still experienced racist comments and stuff being thrown at them when their escorts were not there. Out of all nine kids, only one was able to graduate that year and the rest were set to graduate the following years, but they were forced to go back to their other schools.

            That part of history may seem like so far in the past, but schools are still segregated and no other place is worse than New York City. New York City has one of the most economically and racially segregated education systems and it reflects the cities segregated communities like the ones we talked about in the book. Next year the department of education wants to implement a new pilot system that will try to diversify the schools in that area. Some people have said that this system might be too little too late to change anything, but I think this can still help.

            Another store of segregation comes from San Diego. In 1977 it was revealed that the San Diego Unified Schools were so racially isolated that it was almost impossible for African Americans and Latinos to get a equal education. Forty years later, all except one of the schools are still segregated. Some of the schools are so bad that the co-director of the civil rights at UCLA said that they were like apartheid schools. The Vision 2020 project is trying to build quality schools in the neighborhoods so that these children do not have to leave their neighborhoods to go to good schools. The only problem with this is that the San Diego neighborhoods are racially segregated, so if they go through with this plan the schools will still be segregated because the neighborhoods are.

            Many people have “plans” to try and intergrate these schools, but since the cities are so segregated I think they have to do a little more than just build more schools. I personally do not know how I would fix this problem in the school, but I think it starts with the neighborhoods in these areas and diversifying them. Anyone could have the answer to this issue so I guess the question is, What would you do?

http://prospect.org/article/new-york-city-tackles-school-segregation

http://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/education/segregation-in-city-schools-could-get-worse-with-new-strategy/

Would You Like to Live on An Island?

 

In class this week, we learned that the Black Ghetto was constructed through a well drafted institutional practices, private behaviors, and public policies by which whites sought to contain the growth of urban black populations. After the construction of Ghettos, blacks were forced to live there and doing so, they experienced an extreme level of social isolation. For a better understanding, we always looked back on Chicago to understand how systematic segregation works. For example, we discussed how the development of infrastructure divided the East from the West and how after the Housing Act of 1949 was passed, public housing was purposely built in certain areas to keep low-income blacks out of more stable neighborhoods, and redlining just to name a few. We even talked about some public housing sites, like Robert Taylor, Henry Horner, and Cabrini Green, but I think there is another that we should shed light upon. This particular one is Altgeld Gardens. Altgeld Gardens was built in 1945 and it consists of 1,971 rowhomes in Riverdale IL. Although it is considered to be in Riverdale, it is still part of the Chicago Housing Authority. Looking at the location of this complex, isolation just screams out to me. They are surrounded by literally nothing. Altgeld Gardens is located South of Chicago and expands from 130th-138^th streets between Greenwood and St. Lawrence (respectively).  The Gardens is about 19.6 mi away from Downtown Chicago, which can take up to 34 minutes in a car depending on traffic. However, on public transportation, that ride can be over an hour. I mention travel times because there is only one bus that travels back and forth from 95^th in the Dan Ryan, that travels on south Michigan Avenue all the way up to 130^th street into the gardens. So traveling to a job or anywhere else for that matter becomes draining. They have one and only one local store where they can get food, which is not a good variety or quality for a high price because of the convenience. Luckily, there are 4 schools within the neighborhood, but there is not much variety between them. For example, one of the high schools is a charter and one is a military academy. Charter schools go by lottery so there is no guaranteed acceptance and we cannot assume that military school is for everyone.  Environment wise, Altgeld is located in near numerous manufacturing plants, former steel mills, and waste dumps. Because of this many residents have been and still are concerned about the number of deaths annually from cancer and other diseases. I couldn’t find any direct numbers as to how many people occupy Altgeld or crime rates, but from personal experience I know that the community is no stranger to crime. I was first introduced to Altgeld Gardens when my mother began working at a child care center located with the community. It was my first time really in any type of “project housing.” Riding through the Gardens, looked like a lot of the things we saw in There Are No Children Here, as far as people just hanging out all over everywhere because they really had nothing else to do, and nowhere else to go. I can recall my mother telling me about a resident telling her she had never been downtown Chicago before. In this day in age, it is almost hard to believe that anyone who lives at least 20 miles from a metro city has never even visited it before. I also believe the residents of Altgeld have lost hope to make anything of themselves. My mother often talks about how sometimes programs and resources are provided to the community, for example job training, but after a session or 2, they just stop showing up so programs just pack up and leave. It seems as though they have just become content with their circumstances and that’s just the way it is. Kind of how LaJoe felt in There Are No Children Here. 

Map of Altgeld  http://www.thecha.org/residents/public-housing/altgeld-gardens-and-phillip-murray-homes/ 

Post about environmental issues http://wethepeoplemedia.org/altgeld-gardens-environmental-issues/

Video of Altgeld https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03YqVvvi4Y8

Society's Segregation

The United States has had many problems with segregation. When black families migrated from the north to the south they moved into the inner city than to the suburbs. According to Massey and Denton in the book American Apartheid, "Suburbs that accept black residents tend to be older areas of relatively low socioeconomic status and high population density," (1993:69). When blacks were able to move to the suburbs they were put into these places. This somewhat reminds me of the movie raisin in the sun. The scene where the person for the white community came to speak to the Youngers to basically tell them not to move into the neighborhood and offer them money. This reminds why black people are seperated into their own neighborhoods, because of the "white communities" making it hard for other people to move into the suburbs.
In the lecture there was a video about Muhammad Ali. There was something he said about having children with his own people. One might explain this because the way he grew up everything was segregated. If he went and had relations with someone other then his own people then he would have received a lot of black lash. Everything now is different because there are a lot of interracial couples and there may be some back lash but not as much as it was before.
The article, "Segregation declines in chicago, but city still ranks high, census data show," explains that segregation has declined in Chicago but it is still racially segregated. It is the most segregated city according to William Frey a demograhpic. This article relates to the lecture that was presented on Thursday because the question that was asked was, "what do I think of when I think of racial segregation?" I also think of transportation when I think of racial segregation. Black people had to sit in the back of the bus and they had a whites section on the train. also it reminds me of Homer Plessy who was a biracial man but looked as if he was a white man. He sat in the white section on the train and ended up getting convicted of violating the law providing seperate cars. He was a man that inspired other civil rights activist after the incident. This chapter made you look at the details of where the lines are drawn for neighborhoods as far as segregation goes.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-segregation-declines-neighborhoods-change-met-20160103-story.htmlhttps://lcrm.lib.unc.edu/blog/index.php/tag/segregated-transportation/

Is Segregation Only An American Thing?

After reading chapter three in American Apartheid by Massey and Denton, it really blew my mind the staggering statistics of just how segregated urban America really is. When we think of urban cities, we think of how diverse it is, but something that usually stays in the shadows is just how segregated many major cities are. Massey and Denton used tables and indices to talk about how segregated urban America is, and compared it to European indices, but there was no other reasoning or physical information on how the two stacked up, so I got to thinking. How bad is the segregation in Europe? Moreover, why is it that segregation is not mentioned more when talking about historical perspectives? I mean, yeah, I get that we live in America but that should not diminish the potential for further studies in other countries to see what, if anything, Americans can do in order to break the mold of segregation and become more integrated as a society as a whole.

First of all, I guess something important to note, is that unlike the American segregation maps found all over the internet and in a multitude of texts and other scholarly books, I could not, for the life of me, find one single map of European racial segregation. Strange? Not really. Why, you might ask? Consider the following article: http://www.citylab.com/housing/2014/09/in-europe-and-america-segregation-continues/380408/. So what is going on in Europe that is (or is not) happening in America? One major factor, according to the article, is the layouts of the cities. It seems to be the case, when looking at typical city maps, that American cities are more spacious, occupying more area than the typical European city, which are generally more compact, with residents living in closer quarters. The divide creates, in American cities, isolation for low-income groups and areas for minorities to reside. The opposite is true in Europe. Since the cities are so dense, it creates more of a sense of integration, leading to a more desegregated community.

So what other areas is America seemingly lacking in, in terms of becoming more desegregated? Something else strongly supported in the article is the idea that, by and large, certain policies are to blame (to be thanked in Europe). American policies are more directed towards assisting the people enter low-income housing, which then forces those people to live together in similar conditions, creating a caustic environment. Europe, however, is doing the opposite of America, yet again. In the article, it mentions how France is giving tax breaks to businesses in order to bring them to the neighborhoods, thereby “chipping away” at racial segregation and creating less of a divide amongst the populations the reside in these neighborhoods.

It seems that America could take note of what other European countries are doing in order to end segregation, or at least to begin to diminish it. While there are some new initiatives being put in place (in the article), it seems that without swift movement by future policy makers, the United States will continue to lag behind in both equality and desegregation.

Another article about American segregation:

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-35255835