Quote Originally Posted by antongast View Post
Well, first off, I'm not the one who needs to sign off on this stuff. I'm just a random dude behind a screen name. I think any solution needs broad community buy-in to be effective. And it's not a quick fix. It means working through centuries of baggage, and addressing the fact that the police in America often serve as enforcers of a system of racial and class-based oppression. It means asking hard questions about the drug war, about mass incarceration, about privatized prisons. It means asking questions like the ones Detroit Stylin was mocked and chastised for raising upthread, and actually coming up with useful answers. We're not going to figure this out in five minutes on the Internet. Shit's complicated.

But since we're here, and we're talking about this, and you asked my opinion, my opinion is that it's going to be pretty hard to implement this idea of "uniquely harsh law enforcement tactics imposed on Detroit specifically" in a manner that is not arbitrary or capricious. The project strikes me as absurd on its face. Why are we singling out Detroit? How did we decide on uniquely harsh law enforcement tactics as a solution? How is this not arbitrarily penalizing Detroiters who have committed no crime? How is this not arbitrarily penalizing Detroiters who have committed crimes, but are punished more severely than people in other places who have committed the exact same crimes? And why, for the love of Christ, are we talking about loud music and loitering? We're going to militarize the fuck out of the police so they can crack down on loiterers? In full riot gear with tanks and nerve gas? I still don't see how this doesn't end badly.

Incidentally...
Can we get a "Like" button on this damn forum?