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Kolkata Friday September 2, 2011
www.thebengalpost.com OP-ED 9
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A billion words
Cities are built on the
backs of poor labourers,
yet their toil has seldom
been rewarded.
Debasish Bhaduri
captures the faceless of
Kolkata who live and die
in acute poverty
Sudhir Venkatesh
Nothing stirs up the American policymaking
community like talking
about crime. This is understandable
when crime skyrockets, but anxiety
levels have remained high even as
America’s crime rate has descended to
its lowest level in 40 years. Scholars
and wonks rush so quickly to claim
credit — as quickly as they seek refuge
to avoid blame — that getting to the
core of the problem is not so easy. But
when you leave aside the politicking,
you find that it’s actually more important
to understand community respon -
ses to crime, rather than to figure out
exactly how or why crime persists.
But fads are not easy to ignore.
Consider the latest intellectual fashion
that links imprisonment with reductions
in crime rates. Simple enough in
principle, but is it truthful (or just
A city that refuses to wake up to its poverty
Karl Marx had once said, “Capital
comes dripping from head to toe,
from every pore, with blood and dirt.”
The urban jungle, ruthless in its disposition
towards labourers and indifferent
to human suffering, is the cradle of
exploitation. It’s the same picture in all
the cities of the world down the ages.
Kolkata, the city with a heart, toes the
same line. What is often termed as
development is a thinly disguised
attempt to maximise profits at the cost
of cheap human labour. And, it’s not
going to change, at least not in foresee-
able future.
These photographs pay tribute to the
human machines.
1. On Central Avenue, opposite
Mahajati Sadan, some van pullers of the
city and lorry drivers from across the
country sleep blissfully. They even have
a couple of stray dogs for company.
2. These are Gujaratis who trade in
old clothes collected from the rich and
the middle-class. They assemble in
front of Liberty Cinema and sleep on the
footpath for a couple of hours. Around
2.30 am their clients, the city’s poor,
Plunging crime graph in the US
‘truthy’)? The chief proponent, besides
US police and sheriff associations, is
public policy Professor James Wilson,
who argues that lengthier penal sent -
en ces keeps potential criminals beh ind
bars.
In the other corner, groups like the
Sentencing Project beg to differ, with
some nifty statistics to prove their
point — for example, that the states
where imprisonment was below the
national average experienced the
greatest drops in crime. It would be
silly to ignore the positive effects of
incarceration — some offenders do
tend to transgress repeatedly over the
life course, so keeping them off the
streets is smart.
But, it is equally foolhardy to think
that incarceration is the always best
answer. Canada, for instan ce, has much
lower incarceration rates than the US,
yet its crime rate is also low.
AFP
Empowering citizens to effectively respond to crime is the best bet
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The problem is making generalisations
across all crimes and across all US
cities and states. Criminologists still
really don’t understand why Chicago’s
youth homicide rate went through the
roof last year, while New York’s stayed
at a near-historic low. My colleague,
Freakonomics economist Steven Levitt,
shows that changing drug habits can
affect some crimes but not others:
homicides dropped after the early
1990s as crack became less popular, but
other crimes did not.
Instead of studying why crime
occurs, we should instead be looking at
the capacity of communities to take
action against it. Local public safety
depends on the locals who can respond
to criminal and delinquent acts before
they destroy the social fabric. No region
in America is free from social problems,
but communities differ widely in terms
of the capacity among citizens to
respond. Recent research suggests that
rather than fighting criminals directly,
it may be as advantageous to help communities
fight against crime. As we
champion our favourite deterrents —
prisons on the right, job growth on the
left, we may want to remember that an
active citizenry, able to defend itself, is
a proven ingredient for ensuring public
safety.
Tracey Meares, Yale University's
renowned legal scholar, has demonstrated
the power of ‘take back the
night’ vigils and protests for warding off
criminals, especially when religious
leaders lead the crusade and bring poli -
ce aboard. Social scientists at Harvard
argue that the best predictor for low
crime rates is the “collectively efficacious”
behaviour of residents — a fancy
phrase that refers to the ability of
neighbours to work together when
things go awry. And David Kennedy has
start coming in to buy these clothes.
Transactions go on till 5.30 am. before
the city wakes up to its morning chores.
3. At night on Howrah Bridge it is
easy to spot these people pushing carts
with heavy iron pipes. Their job is to
deliver goods from Bajrang Bali, the
steel market in Salkia, to different parts
of Kolkata.
4. Van drivers, rickshawpullers and
porters who supply clay from the
Ganges to the artisans in Kumartuli
have only bare concrete as their bed.
Their workplace is their resting place.
shown proven results with his “Cease -
fire” programme, which focuses on
issuing real threats to criminals, with
consequences that are delivered swift ly.
Such efforts fall under a large
umbrella called ‘community policing’,
which took off in the 1990s — and in
Europe, the decade after. President
Clinton helped cities hire 100,000 cops.
Urban mayors from Chicago to Seattle
to New York built local coalitions of residents,
businesspersons, clergy, school
principals and other so-called ‘stakeholders’
who could respond to crime
before it spiralled out of control.
The power of such coalition-style
policing lies in the phalanx of crime
fighters that confronts local criminals:
not only do the perps feel the weight of
the law around them, but they come to
believe that law enforcement is sincere
when it threatens to lock up criminals.
In short, truth in advertising has proven
to be an excellent deterrent to crime.
But ‘community policing’ is subject
to interpretation — and not surprisingly,
left and right differ in predictable
ways. Advocates of gun rights are quick
to call for the need for relaxed weapons
laws, while those on the left want community
organisations to become even
more empowered with federal funding
and services.
Don't expect any of these debates to
get settled soon. Instead, I’d recommend
a simple exercise when the next
theory about crime rates makes headlines.
Ask yourself, what do communities
do when crime occurs? Can they
act ‘efficaciously’? Or are they held
host age by gangs, car thieves, vandals
and other criminals? We may never
understand with great precision what
causes crime, but we can always
empower citizens to respond when it
occurs. —The Guardian
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5. The tea and foodstall owners in the
Poddar Court area have little option but
to turn the footpaths into bedrooms.
They live and procreate in the open,
while their children grow up amid filth
and squalor.
6. Nearly hundred rickshawpullers
ferrying people in central Kolkata have
the roadside as their homes. On Surya
Sen street these Bihari migrants, who
had come to the city long ago in search
of a livelihood, can barely make ends
meet. Even the dreams of prosperity
have eluded them.
7 & 8. They are from Gosaba, Satjalia,
Kumirmari villages of the Sunderbans.
Their homes have been devastated by
cyclone Aila. They come to the city to
work as porters in Howrah haat. They
return to their villages on Tuesday,
each earning about `400 for three days
of back-breaking labour. While in the
city they sleep on the open road, next
to the Howrah post office. The district
magistrate’s bungalow is a stone’s
throw away. If a speeding vehicle ever
loses control, it will be the end for
scores of these people.
The Guatemala scar
Hugh O’Shaughnessy
The commission call ed
in by President
Obama to investigate
American involvement
in the deliberate infection
of Guatemalans
with sexually transmitted
diseases has repor -
ted its interim findings.
The case concerns 5,500
Guatemalans who were
the subject of ‘medical
research’ that took place
with US collaboration
between 1946 and 1948:
1,300 were deliberately
exposed to sexually tran -
s mitted diseases such as
syphilis, gonorrhoea or
chancroid.
Dr Amy Gutmann, a US
university president who
led the investigation, said
some of the staff inv -
olved were ‘grie vously
wrong’ and ‘mor ally culpable
to various degrees’.
I note however that the
implication that some
were not ‘grievously
wrong’ and others were
only partially guil ty.
To be frank, the
labours of President
Obama’s commission
and Dr Gutmann’s carefully
nuanced statement
would be laughable if
they were not so insulting.
They appear a sort of
political legerdemain
that, by offering a confession
to one crime, is
seeking to divert attention
and escape responsibility
for an infinitely
greater one.
What happened with
the syphilitic atrocity
between 1946 and 1948
was as nothing when
compared with the US
involvement in cataclysmic
genocide of
200,000 people visited
on Guatemala — and
particularly on the May -
ans and other indigenous
peoples — when
that country was under
the heel of military dictatorships
fostered, enc -
ouraged and supported
by Washington.
According to the rep -
ort of the commission
for historical clarification
(CHC), set up under
the Oslo accord on Gua -
temala in 1994 with the
involvement of the EU,
Mexico and the US to
investigate — but not to
judge — the atrocities,
this was rooted in the
overthrow of the constitutionally
elected government
of President
Jacobo Arbenz by conservative
military in
1954.
The coup d’etat
enjoyed the active and
now fully acknowledged
co-operation of the CIA.
Washington was enga -
ged in the cold war, and
US anti-communism,
backed by a misnamed
‘national security doctrine’,
received firm support
from the Guate -
malan right-wing.
This took the form of
“reinforcing the national
intelligence apparatus
and … training the officer
corps in counterinsurgency
techniques,
key factors which had
significant bearing on
human rights violations
during the armed confrontation”.
It was mixed up with
“anti-reformist, then
anti-democratic policies,
culminating in criminal
counterinsurgency”.
The Guatemalan military
then waged a war of
annihilation against tho -
se they considered enemies
whom they termed
“insurgents”, a term that
has reappeared in the
context of the western
invasion of Iraq and
Afghanistan.
The CHC found that
insurgent actions produced
a mere three per
cent of the human rights
violations and acts of
violence perpetrated
against men, women
and children, including
five per cent of the arbitrary
executions and two
per cent of forced disappearances.
It was the
western-supported military
who bathed in the
blood of fellow citizens.
—The Guardian