Just watched the Rock Center story
about Camden, NJ. Most viewers probably found it eye-opening.
Shocking. Tragic. Shameful. Horrifying. They might be moved to do
something.
I, on the other hand, found the piece
irritating. It made me angry, but not for the reasons some might
expect. I'm pissed because 30 years ago, I was a teenager living in a
neighborhood very much like the places Brian Williams rode through
with the Chief of Police. No reporters ever came around to see what
it was like. Our parish priest never would have answered any
questions. The local police commander was never seen, so I can't
imagine him driving on a tour of the area. Bottom line: nobody gave a
shit about us. We weren't worth the effort.
There was a man on my block raising
fighting dogs. Yes, pit bulls. We had a cop living on our block. A
younger boy we played with through his brother off the roof one day
and was arrested. He was home a day or two later. Nobody wrote about
it. It wasn't important.
We couldn't even get police to respond
if there was no weapon in evidence. I was out of school by the time
of the Simpson case. Late one night there was a loud argument on the
street in front of the house. I looked out the window and say a
couple having it out in the middle of the street. In half a minute he
was not just hitting, but punching her in the face. An emergency
dispatcher actually asked me what I expected the police to do about
it. I finally got pissed and told her that they could choose between
stopping the beating and waiting till he killed her. Nobody cared.
We came home one Sunday from a trip to
find out there had been a drive-by shooting at the corner. When the
cops were around, everyone was deaf, dumb, and blind. A few days
later I heard kids talking about what had happened and who was
involved. I called and tracked down the detective on that
investigation to tell him what was being said. There were no news
reports; it was just another shooting.
There was a drug dealer operating out
of the building on the corner. It was across the street from a city
bus stop. It was one block north from our parish church. The father
of one of my classmates ran a taxi service, and his drivers came by
regularly. The drug dealer provided drive-up service; the taxis would
pull up in front, and someone would run outside to deliver the goods.
During the summer, I sat on the front steps and counted how many of
those cars, with the company name on them, pulled up in 10 minutes,
30 minutes, an hour. We lost track of how many times the place was
“raided”. They would be released and back in business in 4 hours
flat. Local police knew about it. My mother made sure of that, and
even gave them license plate numbers. They still couldn't or wouldn't
do anything about it. It didn't make the news. It wasn't newsworthy.
Eventually, after several years of
this, a federal raid finally cleaned out the place one night. They
had to go in shooting, killed several people as they went, and
discovered the escape tunnels that came out somewere on the next
street. No reporter came around to do interviews. We weren't
interesting.
Starting when I was in high school,
gunshots would wake me in the middle of the night. After a while you
get to know from the sound whether it's a handgun, whether it's
automatic or revolver, and the echo lets you figure out how many
streets away it is. To this day, I automatically start counting when
I hear shots. I can still tell a handgun from a shotgun by the sound.
I used to ride public transportation in that city, and walk down streets that would make most of my colleagues run for cover. I shopped in tiny little ethnic grocery stores in places that would make your skin crawl. You looked both ways, not for cars, but for criminals out to empty your pocket for you. No news people were interested except for when President Carter came to visit. Those of us living it weren't worth thinking about after he left.
Why is it newsworthy today, but not
back then?
No comments:
Post a Comment