#19 Memento, Darktown, and Defunding The Police
Hello from the Vault. That’s what I’m calling my new office on the first floor of a building built in 1906 that is now situated between two Tiki Bars in downtown Tacoma. My office consists of one 12’ x 12’ room with two gigantic whiteboards and an old drilled-out safe that no longer fully shuts.
This newsletter isn’t the only thing that got neglected in the last month or so. Things have been difficult. I went through a severe depression where I didn’t feel like doing much of anything. Then the depression turned to fear and the fear turned to anger and the anger turned to action. I couldn’t work where I was living and I’m not in a position to find a new place to live. So I found a new place to work.
And so now, I’m working from the Vault. I’m hoping that this will make me more productive. (If it doesn’t, I suppose we can scratch of ‘needs a place to write’ as a reason for my lack of work.)
What I’m Reading: Darktown
The only thing I knew when I picked up Darktown by Thomas Mullen was that it was historical fiction set in 1948 in Atlanta. Given that my thesis is set during that same era, it made my list.
Darktown is set up like a classic whodunit with a dead girl at the beginning and cops trying to solve her murder. The twist is it’s 1948 in Darktown, the colored section of Atlanta and the dead girl is black so no one much cares to solve it. Except for Boggs and Smith, two of the eight-member Negro Police Officers program. Navigating being a black cop at that time gives Darktown a unique environment for solid detective fiction. Think a more diverse LA Confidential in the Deep South.
Mullen does a fantastic job of bringing the reader into the world of Darktown. Given how well he did his world building, I was glad to hear that there is another book in the series. I just ordered Lightning Men.
What I’m Watching: Memento
Christopher Nolan’s second movie was his first that I saw. A friend of mine had mentioned something about it being unlike anything he’d ever seen. So I drove up to Seattle to the only theater playing this little movie no one had heard of and discovered a new favorite filmmaker.
Memento stars Guy Pearce who I knew from LA Confidential and Carrie-Anne Moss and Joe Pantoliano fresh off their work on the Matrix. It’s a movie that does something that’s become fairly popular in recent years but was utterly original in 2002 when Memento came out: The movie gives the audience the mental illness that the protagonist has. In the case of Memento, that means we have Guy Pearce’s inability to form new memories.
Christopher Nolan does this by using a unique story structure. It starts at the end of the story where we see someone get murdered in color. Then it cuts to an undetermined time in black and white where our protagonist is in a hotel room talking to someone on the phone about someone named Sammy Jankis. Then it cuts back to color only it’s a few minutes before the last color scene. This continues throughout the entire runtime of the movie. The black and white sequences are shown in chronological order like any other movie, but the color scenes are shown in reverse order so that we constantly have no idea what just happened, effectively giving us his condition.
It’s difficult to talk about the movie without getting into spoilers. This is often true of Nolan’s work.
This continues Nolan’s obsession with perspective and the experience of time. It’s difficult to overstate how different Memento feels from almost every other movie. If his first film, Following, showed a filmmaker with a lot of promise, Memento shows that even with a low Hollywood budget, Christopher Nolan can create a movie that people are still talking about nearly twenty years later.
Next Week: The only Christopher Nolan movie I haven’t seen yet, Insomnia.
What I’m Thinking About
In January when the president was impeached, I didn’t say much about it because I don’t know much about the impeachment process. In February and March when the pandemic hit, I didn’t have much advice because I don’t know much about epidemiology. But now, though we still have a corrupt president and the pandemic is still very much a part of our lives, the new topic is systemic racism in police departments and social justice. These are topics I happen to know a few things about.
For two years I worked in law enforcement at the Law Enforcement Support Agency transcribing police records. More recently I spent two years getting a Bachelor’s degree at Evergreen Tacoma, a college campus founded by a black woman and focused on social justice, the study of systemic racism, and racial equity. I’ve also been writing about every homicide that takes place in the city of Tacoma for over a decade. So when it comes to talking about law enforcement, systemic racism, the prison industrial complex, what cops actually do on a day to day basis and how systemic racism not only corrupts police departments, but is also largely responsible for factors that lead to criminal behavior, I feel like I know more than most people about the topic.
But I didn’t say too much when I logged onto my Facebook because my feed was absolutely full of people weighing in on a topic that is complicated, nuanced, and has a lot of history. I wasn’t surprised to find that Fox News was lying and literally Photoshopping the same armed dude into photos to make things worse than they are. I was surprised to find that a lot of the smartest people I know were reacting emotionally and not logically to what was happening.
The death of George Floyd was inexcusable, horrific, and tragic. I’m glad that the police officers involved in his death are no longer police officers and have been charged for the crime. Here in Tacoma, we have the death of Manuel Ellis. His death has a lot of similarities with the death of George Floyd. These deaths are only two of the nearly 1,000 police involved deaths that occur in America every year. I’m sure you’ve heard that statistic before. It comes from The Washington Post’s database on police involved shootings. And like any statistic, it helps to drill down if you want to get good information. In 2019 there were 1,003 police involved shootings. Of those, there were 55 that involved police officers shooting an unarmed individual. Of those 55 unarmed people shot by police last year, 14 were black.
On Facebook I mentioned the facts in the above paragraph. I was told I was being a bad ally. I was told I was being a police apologist. I was told I was missing the point of Black Lives Matter. Because the rallying cries behind Black Lives Matter are ‘Abolish the Police’ and ‘Defund The Police’, though I’m told (repeatedly) that most of the people chanting these things do not actually want these things. They want portions of the police budget to go to things like mental health professionals so that the police don’t have to deal with those going through a mental health crisis. They want less militarization. I’ve seen more than one sign insisting that police stop spending their budget on military equipment. The problem with that is that they don’t. They get military equipment for free. They only pay shipping. Protesters also want police to have body cameras and extensive training. (Both of these things would actually require more funding for police.) There are many good ideas in the BLM movement once one looks into it.
That doesn’t stop some from using faulty logic. One post declared ‘Judging a demonstration by its most violent participants but not judging a police force by its most violent cops is the language of the oppressor’. There are a lot of things wrong with this, but the simplest thing to say is that maybe judging any group by its most violent participants is a bad idea. I saw another that claimed that if we simply gave everyone financial opportunities to succeed then there would be no crime and thus no need for police. Clearly whoever thought of that is unaware of how much of police work involves domestic disputes or people of means who commit crimes simply because they can. Another meme says how we should not be bothered by the defunding of police because education is getting defunded all the time. Again, if one spends two seconds thinking about it, it’s easy to see how defunding institutions whether they are in education or law enforcement tends to be a bad idea if you’re looking to reform those institutions. Reform costs money.
If you’d like to hear a clear and well thought out refutation of the Black Lives Matter movement you can listen to the latest Making Sense podcast with Sam Harris. He does a very good job of pointing out the context under which police are operating. He points out things such as the fact that the number of police involved killings in Los Angeles is at a 30 year low. That more white people get killed by police than black people, that yes, a disproportionate amount of black people are killed by police compared to the population, and that yes, a disproportionate amount of black people are convicted of crimes. He makes an argument that would likely trigger any BLM supporter and might not upset a white supremacist. That’s not to say that Sam Harris is a white supremacist. He isn’t. He just hasn’t taken his argument to the next level.
If we know that a disproportionate amount of black people are being charged, convicted, beaten, or killed and we know that the reason for this cannot be that black people are somehow more criminal in nature, then we need to look at the reasons for this. Because here’s the thing. If a black man is born to a single mother because his father is in prison thanks to racist three-strikes laws and he goes to a school in a poor part of town where the school is underfunded and he ends up getting shot and killed by the police, even if he has a gun in his hand, a careful look can see how institutional racism still contributed to his death.
Police violence is a problem. Systemic racism is a problem. But we’re not going to get anywhere if we cannot talk honestly about these topics. And the second someone says that most police shootings involve armed suspects or most police shootings involve white victims or we need more money for police so they can get proper training and body cameras, one is accused of being a racist. We can’t even talk about what a good cop IS, much less how to be a good cop. This is like wanting to reform education but refusing to talk about or to teachers.
Perhaps the most disturbing thing about all of this is imagining what sort of young person right now would want to BE a cop. At a time when we need young people to be joining the police force for the most noble of reasons, we’ve created an environment where the only people I can imagine feeling a strong desire to be cops are the exact kind of people who should never be cops.
I don’t have all of the answers, but as usual I don’t think the answers are in the extremes. I no more think that every single police involved shooting is justified than I think every single police involved shooting is domestic terrorism. The truth is somewhere in the middle. In a country with over 300 million guns, there are going to be scenarios where police officers justifiably use lethal force to save their own lives or the lives of others citizens. All of the statistics show that this is the case in the majority of police involved shootings. This does not absolve police departments of wrongdoing in those situations where they take the life of an individual who presented no harm to anyone. Those situations need to be independently investigated and when necessary, federally prosecuted. Black Lives Matter and systemic racism is real. Police training in de-escalation, non-lethal submission, and mental health needs to be increased. Police need to stop acquiring offensive military equipment and need to start getting bodycam equipment.
On another note, the past two weeks on Facebook have shown me in very stark terms what Facebook is and isn’t good at. If you’re looking to be outraged, if you’re looking to point the finger at someone less woke than you, if you’re looking to join the mob complete with digital pitchforks and torches, then you will feel very comfortable on Facebook. If you’re looking for nuanced conversation be aware that Facebook finds such discourse more abhorrent than actual Nazis.
What are your thoughts on all of this? I’m genuinely interested.
- Jack Cameron