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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29421 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 31, 2023

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Suburbs come in all different kinds. Some have community, some are very atomized.

From Arthur Doyle's The Adventure of the Copper Beeches

By eleven o’clock the next day we were well upon our way to the old English capital. Holmes had been buried in the morning papers all the way down, but after we had passed the Hampshire border he threw them down and began to admire the scenery. It was an ideal spring day, a light blue sky, flecked with little fleecy white clouds drifting across from west to east. The sun was shining very brightly, and yet there was an exhilarating nip in the air, which set an edge to a man’s energy. All over the countryside, away to the rolling hills around Aldershot, the little red and grey roofs of the farm-steadings peeped out from amid the light green of the new foliage.

“Are they not fresh and beautiful?” I cried with all the enthusiasm of a man fresh from the fogs of Baker Street.

But Holmes shook his head gravely.

“Do you know, Watson,” said he, “that it is one of the curses of a mind with a turn like mine that I must look at everything with reference to my own special subject. You look at these scattered houses, and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there.”

“Good heavens!” I cried. “Who would associate crime with these dear old homesteads?”

“They always fill me with a certain horror. It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.”

“You horrify me!”

“But the reason is very obvious. The pressure of public opinion can do in the town what the law cannot accomplish. There is no lane so vile that the scream of a tortured child, or the thud of a drunkard’s blow, does not beget sympathy and indignation among the neighbours, and then the whole machinery of justice is ever so close that a word of complaint can set it going, and there is but a step between the crime and the dock. But look at these lonely houses, each in its own fields, filled for the most part with poor ignorant folk who know little of the law. Think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in, year out, in such places, and none the wiser. Had this lady who appeals to us for help gone to live in Winchester, I should never have had a fear for her. It is the five miles of country which makes the danger."

Now, myself I am a big fan of atomization. I hate the idea of living in a small gossip-ridden community where everything that I do is discussed soon afterward at the local watering hole (and in such a community, there are only 2 or 3 watering holes, so essentially just one because almost everyone who goes to one of them goes to the others as well).

But suburbs can actually encourage, and I can say this from personal experience, a bit too much atomization, to the point that people go insane and pop pills and such with no feedback from anyone, and people can spiral down into shit without having any helping hands to try to pull them out of it.

The pressure of public opinion can do in the town what the law cannot accomplish. There is no lane so vile that the scream of a tortured child, or the thud of a drunkard’s blow, does not beget sympathy and indignation among the neighbours

This is a lovely theory that was thoroughly disproved by the murder of Kitty Genovese.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Kitty_Genovese

In my experience, not one person in an urban area ever attempted to stop my abuser. At least out in the countryside they called the cops a few times.

This is a lovely theory that was thoroughly disproved by the murder of Kitty Genovese.

No, it wasn't. If you read that Wikipedia article carefully, this was a case of misreporting by the New York Times and the popular account is incorrect. This is all from your own link:

More recent investigations have questioned the original version of events.[58][24][67] A 2004 article in The New York Times by Jim Rasenberger, published on the 40th anniversary of Genovese's murder, raised numerous questions about claims in the original Times article. A 2007 study (confirmed in 2014[24]) found many of the purported facts about the murder to be unfounded, stating there was "no evidence for the presence of 38 witnesses, or that witnesses observed the murder, or that witnesses remained inactive".[7] After Moseley's death in March 2016, the Times called their second story "flawed", stating:[8]

While there was no question that the attack occurred, and that some neighbors ignored cries for help, the portrayal of 38 witnesses as fully aware and unresponsive was erroneous. The article grossly exaggerated the number of witnesses and what they had perceived. None saw the attack in its entirety. Only a few had glimpsed parts of it, or recognized the cries for help. Many thought they had heard lovers or drunks quarreling. There were two attacks, not three. And afterward, two people did call the police. A 70-year-old[fn 1] woman ventured out and cradled the dying victim in her arms until they arrived. Ms. Genovese died on the way to a hospital.

Because of the layout of the complex and the fact that the attacks took place in different locations, no witness saw the entire sequence of events. Investigation by police and prosecutors showed that approximately a dozen individuals had heard or seen portions of the attack, though none saw or was aware of the entire incident.[68] Only one witness, Joseph Fink, was aware Genovese was stabbed in the first attack, and only Karl Ross was aware of it in the second attack. Many were entirely unaware that an assault or homicide had taken place; some thought what they saw or heard was a domestic quarrel, a drunken brawl or a group of friends leaving the bar when Moseley first approached Genovese.[7] After the initial attack punctured her lungs, leading to her eventual death from asphyxiation, it is unlikely that Genovese was able to scream at any volume.[69]

A 2015 documentary, featuring Kitty's brother William, discovered that other crime reporters knew of many problems with the story even in 1964. Immediately after the story broke, WNBC police reporter Danny Meehan discovered many inconsistencies in the original article in the Times. Meehan asked Times reporter Martin Gansberg why his article failed to reveal that witnesses did not feel that a murder was happening. Gansberg replied, "It would have ruined the story." Not wishing to jeopardize his career by attacking a powerful figure like Rosenthal, Meehan kept his findings secret and passed his notes to fellow WNBC reporter Gabe Pressman. Later,[when?] Pressman taught a journalism course in which some of his students called Rosenthal and confronted him with the evidence. Rosenthal was irate that his editorial decisions were being questioned by journalism students and angrily berated Pressman in a phone call.[70]

On October 12, 2016, the Times appended an Editor's Note to the online version of its 1964 article, stating that, "Later reporting by The Times and others has called into question significant elements of this account."[5]

On the one hand, the pattern you are pointing to, where a knowledge-producer who provided a foundational block to a lot of peoples' worldview is, yet again, revealed to have simply made it up is deeply infuriating.

On the other hand, this seems to be the quote that's being questioned:

"There is no lane so vile that the scream of a tortured child, or the thud of a drunkard’s blow, does not beget sympathy and indignation among the neighbours, and then the whole machinery of justice is ever so close that a word of complaint can set it going, and there is but a step between the crime and the dock."

...And I find that description absolutely absurd when it is applied to our modern world. Maybe it was true in Doyle's time and place. It certainly is not true now.

...And I find that description absolutely absurd when it is applied to our modern world. Maybe it was true in Doyle's time and place. It certainly is not true now.

It is true now in first-world Asian cities. It is sufficiently true sufficiently much of the time in most European cities that the average European urbanite would find the discussion above bizarre.

America (apart from NYC) is bad at policing, in the sense that they can't convert dollars spent on policing into crime reduction efficiently. One upshot of this is that Americans keep trying to move to places that don't need policing. Others are that America is unusually tolerant of vigilantism, and that America tends to substitute harsh punishments for effective policing in the same way and for the same reasons that medieval societies did. Americans are sufficiently used to this that they don't seem to find it a problem - probably because they think it is a universal fact about what is possible - and assume that there must be some reason why Singapore doesn't need policing. Singapore does need policing, and is effectively policed. London and Paris also need policing, are less effectively policed, and while safe by American standards have levels of crime that Singaporeans would find intolerable.

Given the absence of any political faction that wants policing to be expensive and useless, I suspect the reasons for this (which are not well understood) are structural rather than being a policy choice. This excellent substack by a retired cop blames the Bill of Rights.

Right. The statement is false now, but the break isn't where the Kitty Genovese story places it -- witnesses will call the police, but they likely won't come in time (also true in Doyle's time) and the machinery of justice is both uncertain and slow.

He's not necessarily wrong, but the increased public pressure pales in comparison to the increased potential for crime caused by vastly greater population density.

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