http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/31/this-fugitive-life/ ---------------------------snip
Policy analysts sometimes look at a neighborhood like this one and conclude that the main problem is one of police legitimacy. This sanitizes the intense conflict going on between the police and the residents of poor minority communities. In these neighborhoods, the problem is not that the police lack legitimacy; the problem is that residents who are already struggling with acute poverty, joblessness and drug addiction are living under daily threat of arrest. Whatever our opinion about Mike or Chuck’s guilt or innocence, we might agree that a criminal justice system that arrests an 11-year-old boy for sitting in the passenger seat of a stolen car or makes a 14-year-old boy scared to seek medical treatment for a severe injury is not working for the public good. Perhaps we might also agree that requiring young men to avoid their mother’s houses, their workplaces and their friends’ funerals in order to stay out of jail is also misguided. In this Philadelphia neighborhood, the agencies charged with providing justice and safety were instead sources of fear and instability. Locking up large percentages of African-American young men is morally wrong and immensely costly, but creating a shadow world of police surveillance and fugitive living is perhaps equally harmful and ultimately self-defeating.
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