This week’s “Daily Journal” guest columnist is Paul Messino, Project Management Specialist for the John Locke Foundation.
The easiest solution to any problem is to pacify its source. Pacification requires no real examination of the problem. It is a tactic for silencing opposition by hiding the root cause of the problem behind a supposed quick fix.
Sometimes pacification is simply empty rhetoric – it sounds nice because the language is eloquent. There’s no real solution in the words, just baseless panaceas and perfunctory bromides. Sen. Barack Obama’s recent message to the American people is a prime example.
Other times, pacification requires self-delusions. Problem solvers convince themselves that the problem doesn’t exist, and so nothing is done until it’s nearly too late. Think: Nazism, Communism, Islamofacism.
And then there is the worst of all – pacification that is offered up as if it were truly a solution. This form of pacification is the most insidious because it can last the longest. Once key decision makers have signed on to the pacifier’s solution, there may be no end in sight. Failures, as they inevitably arise, are simply written off as proof that, collectively, we’re not doing enough.
Unfortunately, there are many examples of this way of thinking. An example is public housing. You need look no further than Asheville to see the products of pacifism.
The city’s prime public housing development, McCormick Heights, has become a poster child for Asheville’s open-air hard drug market. At its inception, it was listed as one of the prime success stories for providing housing to the disadvantaged. Following the ribbon cutting and the occasional move-in sob story in the local paper, the real residents began to settle in – crime. And with crime came drugs.
Dr. Carl Mumpower, an Asheville City Councilman, is fighting back, and his push is rattling the pacifist establishment. His desire to identify the root causes of crime and the drug trade in public housing developments across the city has bucked the trend of former decision makers who have continued to fund these projects despite the environments they foster.
It’s not hard to see that public housing attracts the disadvantaged. That was its intent. What it doesn’t do is distinguish among the disadvantaged those who are trying to improve their lives and those who are simply using the area as a place to run gangs and sell drugs. It’s not a far stretch to assume that many of the disadvantaged turn to a life of crime as an easy way to make money and gain social esteem. Yet in this environment rich with the potential for crime, local police don’t do enough to undermine the illegal activities that spring from such fetid soil.
To prove this fact, Councilman Mumpower took to the streets to visit Asheville’s public housing. In 30 days, he went to 30 different locations at 10 different public housing developments. From his car, Mumpower was directly solicited to purchase drugs on 20 visits. According to his observational log, there were only five occasions during his study when no clearly visible drug-related activity took place. A quick view of this log reveals some astounding statistics.
In a presentation to the City Council, Mumpower concluded “regardless of [the city’s] efforts to ‘try,’ we are failing to protect public housing and other vulnerable neighborhoods and have essentially surrendered entire communities to the destructive impacts of hard drug dealers, users, and their protectors.” His bold move to take action against complacency and pacifism is not sitting well with some.
Responding to Mumpower’s criticism, City Police Chief Bill Hogan released a series of statistics to the Asheville Citizen-Times that showed the police force under his disposal had the “highest drug arrest rate of any of the state’s 10 other largest cities.” Furthermore, between November 2005 and October 2006, 42 percent of all drug-related arrests were made in public housing. But, as Mumpower’s observational study shows, this clearly isn’t enough.
Police protection shouldn’t be spread equally across all areas of the city, but should be concentrated disproportionately in areas where protection is needed most. According to current statistics, 3.9 percent of the city’s population lives in public housing. And among this 3.9 percent, it appears that quite a lot of criminal activity is taking place. Public housing received only 8 percent of total allotted police time.
It’s true that part of the blame lies with the court system and sentencing structure. But that doesn’t get the local police force off the hook. Time, energy, and money should be dedicated to the root cause of crime and the illegal drug trade. If one man can identify a hub that plays host to both, it would be a sin to turn the other way and embrace the pacifist solution.