Editorials

One of the few jokes I can remember is the one about the drunk who staggers from the bar to his car, only to realize that he’s dropped his keys somewhere. A friend comes across him two hours later, on his hands and knees under the lamppost on the corner. “Why are you still looking here?” the friend asks. “You must have dropped them nearer to the car.” The drunk responds that it’s too dark to see the keys on the ground near the car, which is why he’s still looking under the lamppost, where it’s easier to see. 

I thought of this joke on Monday night, when we came back to our car from an evening enjoying the sensational Sista Kee, aka Kito Gamble, at Yoshi’s.  

Talk about stupid. We’d arrived just before 8, late and in a hurry, too much of a hurry to negotiate the parking structure when there were plenty of places on the street.  

Why were we late? I’d just finished signing off on the Daily Planet for Tuesday, the one which led with Jesse Taylor’s story about how the “increased police presence on Oakland streets” will be less than meets the eye. We knew from reading his previous stories that at present, when it’s near time for police shifts to change at midnight, crime in Oakland goes up because police street presence is down. But we parked on the street anyhow, because we were in a hurry. Big mistake. 

We got back at midnight to find that some jerk had smashed the window of our car and tried to steal the radio. He couldn’t pry it out, though he did destroy it. In the process of trying he managed to rip out most of the stuff in the dashboard, including the heater controls, to the tune of (as we later learned) about 800 bucks. No police anywhere in sight, and we didn’t bother to call them, because why? They wouldn’t do anything.  

Another story in Tuesday’s Planet was the big pot bust in Berkeley. Five months, 21 officers, 5,000 marijuana plants, 100 pounds of dried weed and some arrests. Was it worth it? And the federal raid on marijuana candy sellers in Oakland last week? Are we safer yet? 

Who’s the drunk searching under the lamppost in these incidents?  

You might think we were, foolishly choosing the easy on-street parking place when there was a patrolled garage available, and you’d be right. But how about our law enforcement officials, spending a whole lot of time and money keeping the world safe from marijuana vendors since they’re pretty easy to find, while neglecting much more serious crimes like thefts and murders? These events took place in different jurisdictions, it’s true, but the bottom line is, it’s our tax dollars at work where it’s convenient, and not at work where we need them to be.  

In Oakland, the police chief had proposed a plan for re-structuring shifts for officers which made a lot of sense. It’s too bad the Oakland City Council dropped their big stick and gave their blessing instead to what amounts to expensive cosmetic changes in assignments instead of more officers on call when they are needed. All the taxpayer-funded incentives which have gone into making Jack London Square, where Yoshi’s is located, more attractive for visitors and new residents will be wasted if there aren’t enough police around the area (just a couple of blocks from a police station) to make sure that locked cars are relatively safe on the street most of the time (not to mention pedestrians.) 

And what of the hapless thug who couldn’t even steal our radio successfully? Even if there were more police officers on the street, and even if they arrested more would-be thieves like him, what then? Prison, perhaps?  

A somber New York Times story on Monday detailed the trajectory of a substantial percentage of young black men, like many in Oakland, who haven’t got much going for them as they become adults, and who turn to crime because they have no education and no alternative vision of how to make a living. The story notes that “among black dropouts in their late 20’s, more are in prison on a given day—34 percent—than are working—30 percent—according to an analysis of 2000 census data by Steven Raphael of the University of California, Berkeley.” And incarceration in California does nothing to improve the young men who experience it, except perhaps sharpen their criminal skills, so that when they come out they know better ways to steal car radios, and can go back to prison quickly. Not all thieves are men, and not all are black, but if you’re a young black man you start out with the odds stacked against you, and they don’t get better.  

Someone once chided a Frenchman in my hearing about the high rate of unemployment in the French welfare state. “Ah,” he said, “you have unemployment that’s just as bad as ours. You call it ‘prison’, that’s all.” 

And for that matter, what will become of the young white men who were busted for marijuana cultivation in Berkeley, Brentwood, Castro Valley and other suburban enclaves last week? The kind of sophisticated factories that they were operating cost a pretty penny to set up and produce substantial revenue for investors. Seized cash alone came to $120,000. Typically what happens in situations like this is that well-connected white pot growers manage to avoid doing much time, unlike the black street kids picked up for simpler crimes who don’t have the same economic base and access to lawyers.  

The enormous investment of time and money which it takes to arrest marijuana producers nets little benefit for our society as a whole. The whole equation is skewed. Both the “victim” and the perpetrator of interpersonal crimes like breaking into my car turn out to be victims at the end of the day. If we’d use the vast sums of money spent on prisons and the war on drugs for trying to change the lives of those young men who have been left behind in today’s world, we’d all be safer.  

When it comes to dealing with crime’s causes, effects and cures, our society looks a lot like the drunk searching for his keys under the lamppost, doing what’s easy and not tackling the more important but harder tasks.  

P.S. There were Thursday morning news reports that the Santa Cruz police have been reprimanded by an outside auditor for dressing up like surfers and infiltrating meetings of an artists’ group planning a New Years Eve parade. There’s plenty of crime in Santa Cruz, too, while their police are playing dress-up.  

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