Stories from Slate Stories from Slate “Not Going To Change One Thing I Do” <p>How would gun and ammunition sellers react to President Obama’s proposals to combat gun violence? I decided to find about by asking people who operate out of the so-called “secondary gun market,” where those without federal licenses to distribute weapons ply their trade. <a href="">About 40 percent of guns reach people via this off-the-books route</a>, including many of the guns that reach young people.</p> <p>I spoke to three gun sellers who work in and around Chicago. I was prepared for defensive reactions, given the 30-plus legislative recommendations and executive actions on the table. Instead, they were skeptical when I read them Obama’s proposals. One summed up the general sentiment: “Not going to change one thing I do, thank the Lord.”</p> <p>That response makes sense when one looks closely at gun markets, which are a bit quirky. The three Chicago brokers I spoke with don’t own gun stores or sell over the Internet. They make their money in the illegal, secondary market in three ways: They sell guns directly; they find customers for suburban gun dealers, who pay them a finders’ fee, and who then sell the gun off the books; and they match sellers with gun buyers in alleyway gun shows. Ninety percent of these sales are handguns, as opposed to assault rifles and shotguns.</p> <p>Obama’s proposals, by contrast, deal forcefully with legal gun markets where the assault or assault-like rifles and high-capacity ammunition are sold, but not with the secondary gun market, nor with the handgun trade. Consider a cornerstone of Obama’s plan: the bans on armor-piercing bullets and high-powered assault rifles, and limits on large magazines. These products mimic the weapons one finds in the military—and they grab headlines when they appear in tragedies like Columbine and Newton. But guns used in armed combat make up only a small part of what appears on American streets. Focusing on mass shootings and assault weapons doesn’t match up well with the current contours of common gun violence, which are rooted in new and second-hand handguns, sold among friends or via brokers, and likely to be fired in intra-personal conflicts, not premeditated, mass public shootings. As <a href="">Bill Scher</a> wrote in 2011, 6,000 homicides were caused by handguns while 300 were caused by rifles. A <em>comprehensive</em> gun policy would need to take on the illegal market for handguns. Obama’s proposals don’t address this at all.</p> <p>The Chicago traders also operate outside the world of background checks, another cornerstone of Obama’s proposal. They are like a small cartel with their own self-imposed customs for denying guns to certain people—for example, they will turn down customers who seem unstable, and most of them never sell to children. In any given region, they know each other and replicate each other’s customs. In fact, counter intuitively, illegal gun traders are more cooperative than competitive: they generally respect one another’s territory, they will collaborate to keep out gangs and other newcomers, and if they don’t have your desired weapon, they’ll send you to a competitor. This creates a solidarity that’s hard to attack. Background checks at legitimate gun stores may only end up sending more customers to these illegal markets, unless we find ways to constrain them simultaneously. A far better approach would be (simultaneously) to support regional law enforcement initiatives, like FBI or ATF taskforces, which dismantle these trading networks.</p> <p>In dismissing Obama’s proposals, the sellers exaggerated when they said nothing at all would change for them. In fact, they anticipated three ways in which their business might shift in the months ahead, none of which bode well for the public. First, they predicted a rising demand for “guns in pants”— small pistols and handguns that people want to hold while they travel. This is dangerous. Citizens walking around armed and in fear pose a risk, given that most have little training or experience. Even criminals and violent types understand that cops will go harder on them if they are holding a weapon, so they often leave them at home.</p> <p>Second, expect stockpiling of ammunition. More people with handguns means rising demand for ammo, so illegal traders are buying up ammunition, to resell, as fast as they can.</p> <p>Third, expect the marketplace to grow more violent: New intra-state gun-runners are challenging the old guard. That’s because background checks slow legal sales, which make the illegal marketplace hotter. Since demand is increasing, and people generally fear any kind of background check, they will drift to the secondary market. This means more sellers willing to cross state lines to fulfill orders of several dozen weapons, which is the amount that most brokers on the street purchase. Look for gun prices to rise, and for more friction as new players enter the scene to compete.</p> <p>In offering these three predictions, the traders were thoughtful and realistic. They conceded that Obama’s proposals would probably slow down legal gun sales. But, from their perch, they see another world of weapons trading, one that the media has not given much attention or scrutiny. Unless gun policy tilts toward dealing with this informal sector, there won’t be much change on the horizon in the day-to-day conditions that many Americans face— not only in and around metropolitan areas with high gun violence rates, but also in small towns and rural communities where informal, off-the-books gun trading thrives.</p> <p>Which lays bare the question: What might work to dismantle the secondary gun market? In the long run, Obama’s approach—go after the low-hanging fruit of assault weapons—may widen the door for future legal curbs on the sale of handguns. If that happened, then fewer guns would reach the off-the-books markets, eventually putting some these traders out of business. But this is far away, and in the shorter term, we should be building a national campaign to raise awareness in the places where many guns circulate—among youth at school, in social gatherings (at bars and clubs), and even in homes where showing off a weapon is an American tradition. Just as changing the discourse on alcohol helped reduce drunk-driving deaths, it is reasonable to assume that a similar victory might be won by changing the norms around the use of guns in interpersonal conflict. Stopping the sale of military-style weapons and ammunition aren’t enough to get us there.</p> Tue, 22 Jan 2013 14:24:54 GMT Sudhir Venkatesh 2013-01-22T14:24:54Z Off-the-books gun sellers say Obama’s proposals will just boost their trade. News and Politics Will Obama’s Gun Control Proposals Boost the Illegal Weapons Market? 100130122005 gun laws guns gun control Sudhir Venkatesh Jurisprudence false false false Photograph by Scott Olson/Getty Images. President Obama’s proposals deal with legal gun markets where assault-like rifles and high-capacity ammunition are sold, but not with the secondary gun market Fighting Inner-City Crime <p>Last year, residents in Chicago’s Washington Park neighborhood asked for my advice about a local gang problem. Their leader and block club president, Marla McCoy—a teacher’s aide, homeowner, and mother of three—noticed that drug dealing in the local park was starting up after a yearlong hiatus. Her opponent, an18-year-old upstart named Filly, had orchestrated a successful and violent coup d’etat. He controlled a $2,000 per week criminal enterprise based in the park.</p> <p>When Marla called to ask, “<em>When</em> do I call the police?” I understood their hidden agenda. Few among her neighbors expected the police to do much. And so the group wondered whether they should engage in street diplomacy themselves—and only then notify the police of their efforts. They wanted Marla to ask Filly not to sell drugs in the park after 3 p.m., when kids walked home from school. Given that the gang was armed and she was not, and police were not responding, Marla felt this was the best possible outcome. A few of her neighbors brazenly called for Marla to impose a “tax” on the thugs’ weekly receipts: The money could be used for kids’ activities in the park.</p> <p>For most Americans, a dangerous gang boss would produce an instantaneous 911 call rather than a series of reflective dialogues and creative regulatory schemes. But as residents of a predominantly black, inner city, low-income neighborhood, Marla’s neighbors were used to neglectful police and inadequate law enforcement service. Negotiating with police was as much an everyday activity as dealing with the local gang.</p> <p>I had known Marla’s mother, the late Shauna McCoy, herself a powerful neighborhood leader. Marla wondered what her mother might have done with Filly—or, for that matter, her uncle and grandfather, both of whom had kept the peace in Washington Park in the mid-20<sup>th</sup> century. They, too, negotiated with unruly gamblers, pimps, “policy” kings, and other underworld figures. They, too, called police sparingly—and saw police patrols in their area rarely. They, too, imposed unofficial taxes on black market entrepreneurs in their ’hood.</p> <p>Marla might have done better to call David Kennedy, the author of a memoir about fighting crime and violence in America’s inner cities. <a href=";tag=slatmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=217145&amp;creative=399373&amp;creativeASIN=1608192644"><em>Don’t Shoot</em></a> is Kennedy’s journey into the bizarre and often counterintuitive world of criminal justice policy. Kennedy, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, is best known for helping to bring about the so-called “Boston Miracle.” In1990, youth homicide in Boston had reached historic heights and trust between cops and minority residents was at a nadir. Kennedy’s team mined the data to find that a small, hard-core group of offenders were committing the vast majority of Boston’s violent crime. They brought this “moneyball” approach to police and community leaders, and soon they were reaching out to the perpetrators in open town hall meetings. They adopted a carrot-and-stick approach: one more homicide and the police will make nightly arrests, confiscate drugs, call in the Fed, and do whatever else it might take to bring down profits and make life miserable. No killings and you’ll get services, housing subsidies, and help finding jobs.</p> <p>For many reasons, this outreach wasn’t easy. Police had to publicly admit their failures, black community leaders had to back white police, and both had to be seen consorting with criminals in the interest of public safety. The results were hard to argue with. Youth homicide rates went down to zero in 1996, and the overall homicide rate dropped by 50 percent by the end of the decade.</p> <p>The recipe was rooted in a simple theory of deterrence: Criminals are rational and susceptible to group-think. (Most troublemakers run with gangs due to peer pressure.) They will listen to cops if the warnings are delivered respectfully. For their part, cops don’t need high-tech weapons and costly surveillance operations. If they talk to criminals directly, enforce the law when people break it, and rely on judges who actually penalize those violating probation, criminals will fall in line.</p> <p>After the Boston results came in, Kennedy was deluged with calls from mayors and police chiefs in other cities. Kennedy is not shy about championing his efforts. The pages of <em>Don’t Shoot</em> are filled with self-congratulatory pronouncements, even though the results of his efforts are more mixed than the Boston triumph suggests. In some cities (Minneapolis), his program reduces crime. In others (Baltimore), the team can’t even start the process because of turf-battles and in-fighting—among law enforcement, not the gangs! And Kennedy acknowledges that his approach doesn’t eradicate drug problems. “The markets would reset themselves,” he writes, “the dope was going to go somewhere. … But could we get rid of the violence?”</p> <p>Kennedy’s Operation Ceasefire program speaks to a real dilemma in American criminal justice policy. How far will we allow citizens to take matters into their own hands before a neighborhood watch turns into a vigilante group? As Marla knows, there is no easy answer. In the suburb where I grew up (Irvine, Calif.), residents will promptly call 911 on behalf of a neighbor, but they would be unlikely to support a local militia that chases suspected perpetrators. New York’s Orthodox Jewish communities rely on the Shomrim—a volunteer police force—to respond to violent crimes, not the NYPD. There have been numerous complaints that the Shomrim physically assault perpetrators before the police arrive. Is this a sign of community strength or mob rule?</p> <p>Kennedy’s Ceasefire program is not the only one offering unorthodox blends of self-governance and state law enforcement. He gives police the leading role: They and local leaders bring the highest profile criminals to a general neighborhood meeting, where stern warnings are delivered. Citizens then take a backseat to police, who hit the streets and jail violators. The other approach—the brainchild of Gary Slutkin, a Chicago health practitioner, and also known as “CeaseFire”—puts citizens at the forefront. The strategy is to find citizens resolving conflicts before violence escalates, and typically before the police arrive. In fact, the CeaseFire staff—self-designated “violence interrupters”—takes pride in refusing to cooperate with law enforcement. Often ex-criminals, gang members, and others with direct experience in the underworld, they fear a loss of street cred, which could hamper their diplomacy as well as their personal safety. The program has been chronicled in a high-profile documentary film <a href=""><em>The Interrupters</em></a>, directed by Steve James and Alex Kotlowitz.</p> <p>With states around the country experiencing budget shortfalls and cities laying off cops, innovation in policing is going to be necessary. Whatever the results of the two programs—and there are few scientific evaluations of their work—they certainly both succeed in galvanizing local action. Whether citizens and cops are working together to scold local thugs, or conflict mediators are putting out fires, more talking and doing are never unwelcome. In fact, research shows that increasing collective action among neighbors is the best way to reduce crime—better than eliminating poverty, providing youth jobs, cleaning up broken windows, good though all of these things are for a community.</p> <p>At the end of the day, Kennedy’s program will offer more to a disenfranchised community besieged with crime. I say this having watched for two decades as poor residents (in New York and Chicago) enforced the law when police weren’t around or refused to patrol. After a while, cops started to treat them as vigilantes, and relations with the local police force eroded further. We have done a lot in this country to mend police-community relations, particularly among black and Latino populations. It took us 30 years to build up trust and legitimacy. Police need to be involved at some level, and the earlier the better. The crime problem calls for follow-up efforts, too, the more sustained the better. I am continually struck by the failure to build on the truces, peace treaties, and drops in crime that Kennedy, Slutkin, and Marla bring about. That’s when neighborhoods can make the best use of social services, economic opportunities, school improvements. At the moment, government has no resources for such public works, and philanthropy is totally blind to criminal justice and public safety initiatives. Less than 1 percent of all charitable giving goes toward securing American communities</p> <p>But communities need to address violence right way. The Marla McCoys of the world often can’t wait for police to do their job. Sometimes they have no choice but to deal with violent offenders directly. That will be more, not less, true as the recession deepens, unemployment rises, and citizen unrest grows. I responded to Marla’s query about her mother’s crime-fighting strategy by relaying another statistic. Between 1996 and 2003, I saw her mother put out fires <em>without</em> the police 76 percent of the time. To keep the parks safe, Marla’s neighbors decided they had little choice but to work out a truce with their gang. They would call police after the violence subsided. As of this writing, Filly has expanded his successful drug dealing operation and earns about $5,000 per week. But there hasn’t been a public shooting or fatality in Marla’s neighborhood since she began negotiating with the gang boss. Kids use the park during the day; drug traffickers sell there at night. Rogue justice or American democracy at work? It’s getting hard to tell the difference.</p> Mon, 21 Nov 2011 12:16:53 GMT Sudhir Venkatesh 2011-11-21T12:16:53Z When, and how, citizens should take action is a pressing question. Arts David M. Kennedy’s <em>Don’t Shoot </em>Reviewed: David M. Kennedy on Fighting Inner-City Crime <em>.</em> 100111121001 police and Don’t Shoot by David M. Kennedy review of Don’t Shoot by David M. Kennedy David M. Kennedy’s Don’t Shoot reviewed inner-city crime and David M. Kennedy’s Don’t Shoot Don’t Shoot by David M. Kennedy reviewed The Interrupters and Don’t Shoot by David M. Kennedy review of David M. Kennedy’s Don’t Shoot gangs and Don’t Shoot by David M. Kennedy violence and David M. Kennedy’s Don’t Shoot Operation Ceasefire and David M. Kennedy’s Don’t Shoot police and Don’t Shoot by David M. Kennedy review of Don’t Shoot by David M. Kennedy David M. Kennedy’s Don’t Shoot reviewed inner-city crime and David M. Kennedy’s Don’t Shoot Don’t Shoot by David M. Kennedy reviewed The Interrupters and Don’t Shoot by David M. Kennedy review of David M. Kennedy’s Don’t Shoot gangs and Don’t Shoot by David M. Kennedy violence and David M. Kennedy’s Don’t Shoot Operation Ceasefire and David M. Kennedy’s Don’t Shoot police and Don’t Shoot by David M. Kennedy review of Don’t Shoot by David M. Kennedy David M. Kennedy’s Don’t Shoot reviewed inner-city crime and David M. Kennedy’s Don’t Shoot Don’t Shoot by David M. Kennedy reviewed The Interrupters and Don’t Shoot by David M. Kennedy review of David M. Kennedy’s Don’t Shoot gangs and Don’t Shoot by David M. Kennedy violence and David M. Kennedy’s Don’t Shoot Operation Ceasefire and David M. Kennedy’s Don’t Shoot Sudhir Venkatesh Books false false false Photograph by Sibylle von Ulmenstein. Author David Kennedy Could Riots Happen Here? <p> It's been awhile since we've had a full-blown riot here in the United States. I don't mean the occasional minor conflagration—Cincinnati in 2001, Oakland in 2009, and a Chicago ghetto street corner practically every month, if YouTube is to be believed. And I don't mean a single night of drunken mayhem. I'm talking about unrest that spreads, from downtown to neighborhood, city to city, night after night. These social disturbances can sometimes look necessary after the fact—a catharsis for an ailing social body or the antidote to a dictatorial regime—but they can also carry significant costs, including fatalities, loss of property, and damage to the social contract.</p> <p>Europeans and those living in the Middle East are witnessing the spectrum of protest firsthand, from sober public demonstrations to violent mass unrest. From Greece to Jerusalem, London to Egypt, the masses have taken to the streets, and only sometimes peacefully. At times, there appears to be an identifiable cause that mobilizes the angry mob, such as government cutbacks (Greece, Israel). Prolonged frustrations over political leadership have also ignited violence (Egypt). But riots can also take off from a single incident, like an allegation of police abuse (London), and then a wider range of motives can keep the flame burning. </p> <p>Could we see similar outbursts in the United States? Given the potential injuries to participants, bystanders, and property, this isn't a purely academic question. Anticipating the conditions that give rise to riots can help us identify hotspots and prepare for the worst. And conditions are not so great at the moment. Joblessness continues to rise, particularly among the youth, who typically makeup the majority in a riot. Overall, crime rates are at historic lows, but cities across the country are cutting basic services, like policing (New York, Camden), physical upkeep (Oakland), and public services (Madison, Milwaukee). We're likely to see frustrations increase among young people, at a moment when fewer social workers, school teachers, beat cops, and community leaders are at the ready to channel the energies into productive directions.</p> <p>Before addressing the U.S. situation, it's worth pointing out a few common misperceptions about rioting: <br /><br /></p> <p><strong>1. If you have enough angry individuals, you'll likely end up with a riot—or at least some form of mass violence.</strong></p> <p> There are really only three questions that matter to a potential rioter: Do I go? Do I go crazy when I get there? When do I stop? Enough people must decide that it makes sense to travel, to break the law once they arrive, and to keep doing so, for a full-fledged riot to occur. A few unruly actions does not a riot make. An angry mob must <em>stay</em> engaged and angry. &nbsp;</p> <p>Though it may seem that people who are angry and in search of mischief can walk out of their homes and proceed directly to a riot, in fact getting a riot off the ground can be quite a production. Texting and tweets address the mass-communication challenge, but you still have to get people to the riot. Police patrols, citizen associations, and even rival gangs can restrict the movement of an aspiring rioter, making even a few blocks' distance seem insurmountable. I've spent time with rioters, as part of my research into youth political action in the United States and Europe. I've found that rioters are surprisingly malleable; that is, they will change their mood and willingness to act based on little more than a shout or a text. But this doesn't mean they are easily moveable or that they can find the crowd and join the action.</p> <p>In 1990s Chicago, I watched elderly, female homeowners instruct angry black youth to stay off their block; they were armed with little more than the threat of a butt-whupping, but they safeguarded stores and homes while their less-active neighbors suffered. As youth ran about looking for mobs, these homeowner blockades diffused their energy, transforming them into a distracted, motley crew. In 2005, Parisian youths told me matter-of-factly that they didn't think twice when crossing police barricades. But fearing the following day's scolding in front of their parents, they wouldn't dare enter the neighboring district of a powerful local religious leader. Months after <em>les emotes</em>, suburban streets in Paris were a checkerboard of unharmed and burned-out districts.<br /><br /><strong>2. To stop a riot, you need sufficient numbers of well-armed police willing to open up with tear gas, gunfire, and the like.</strong></p> <p>The economist <a href="">Edward Glaeser</a> argues that the mob just needs to be larger than the police for crowds to tip from protest to riot. Once the crowd sees its relative advantage, then, <em>voila</em>, a thrown rock or Molotov cocktail, a general call to arms, and you're off! </p> <p>Well, not always. Take London, for example. The media credits Prime Minister Cameron for finally stopping the riots by dispatching 10,000 law enforcement officials to overcome rioters. But in fact plenty of police were on hand while youths burned stores, damaged cop cars, and attacked the cops themselves. The ratio of police to rioters is important, but rioters usually have no idea how many cops are around, and they are often <em>energized</em> by a large law-enforcement presence.</p> <p>Instead, the perception of police behavior in a society is often the critical fact. Under Thatcher's rule, after prolonged allegations of police harassment and corruption, there was a national review of British law enforcement. But Brits still are fighting over whether their passive tradition of policing, so-called &quot;policing by consent,&quot; is effective for modern crime, or whether they should encourage greater use of force and surveillance. Compared to the United States, the British still lag in convincing ethnic minorities to see cops as legitimate and fair. And both the right and the left have called for more consistent, effective law-enforcement services. </p> <p>The lack of faith in law enforcement shaped the forms of mass unrest we saw last month in the U.K. In the first 48 hours, rioters displayed wanton disregard of police because there was no expectation of predictable response. By contrast, notice the near absence of looting in Japan after the earthquake—and historically. The Japanese may have a &quot;culture of respect,&quot; but they also expect that law-breaking will bring about a predictable response and so they adjust their actions accordingly. Comparisons are hard to make across nations, but in general, when policing is believed to be arbitrary or capricious, those who wish to loot and riot are more likely to find like-minded souls to join them.</p> <p><strong>3. Riots are spontaneous, chaotic, and hard to influence, whereas peaceful protests are organized, planned in advance, and easily to manipulate.</strong></p> <p>Riots tend to begin as nonviolent protests and demonstrations. It is less common to see an event like Vancouver's recent violence, in which it seems that the instigators arrived even before the final Stanley Cup game was over to begin committing arson, and more common to see an event like the London riots, in which protestors started as peaceful demonstrations.</p> <p>Predicting whether a large group becomes riotous is difficult. The logic of crowds is different than the logic of many individual decisions made separately. The sociologist <a href="">Mark Granovetter</a> argued years ago that crowds are uncommitted masses that require particular sparks to grow rebellious. Different individuals make different cost-benefit analyses, and some are more prone to violence than others. But a group of individuals can be influenced much like a caucus. In some groups, individuals may be deaf to religious pleas, in others, they may respond to race-based calls to action, and in others they may be sensitive to anti-capitalist screeds. You need the right spark for the right crowd. (And views of the police are just one key factor affecting public opinion.) </p> <p>The idea that individuals who spread information and rumor may effectively incite action in one crowd but not another is supported by recent research on artistic influence by Yahoo! Research's <a href=";rep=rep1&amp;type=pdf">Duncan Watts</a>. By tracking the role that key &quot;influencers&quot; can play in mobilizing group opinion, Watts finds that &quot;average individuals&quot; are sometimes as powerful in shaping collective behavior as charismatic, well-known figures. (He thus concludes that companies who pay celebrities a high price to publicize their product or fashion trends may be throwing their money down the drain.) For riots, this means that the spark can come from unpredictable places, and not only from a powerful blogger, activist, or leader. Anyone could potentially be the instigator—if he or she wants to be.</p> <p>The implications probably sound a bit depressing: If anyone in a crowd can start a riot, how do we make a strategic intervention? But the converse is also true: Anyone in a crowd can help stop a riot, too. A few discordant pleas from different voices, and no one will know whether to throw the rock or put it down. For this reason, to stop a riot, there are many options, big and small. </p> <p>Sending in cadres of police certainly can work. But mobilizing hundreds of cops can take days and most countries aren't equipped to carry out coordinated enforcement. In this respect, the United States gets high marks; for over a century, local police forces have excelled in quelling mass unrest by strategically using force, closing off streets, and infiltrating the crowds. By contrast, European cops typically look like deer in the headlights when crowds gather. They are slow to act, they hesitate to use force, and they have poor leadership—Britain sill uses volunteer forces to respond to unrest.</p> <p>In practice, riots can dissipate without excessive police actions like tear-gas spraying and the use of heavily armed battalions. In the 2005 riots, sociologist Laurent Bonnelli found what I saw in 1990s Chicago: Local religious leaders and outreach workers walked about the streets, sending youth various messages, from warnings that police were arresting their friends at great rates to updates that everyone else had left the streets and gone home. Small doses of confusion can be effective because crowds are highly susceptible to one another's actions. If a few people curtail their violence, their counterparts may feel isolated, vulnerable, and exposed. </p> <p>So, then, what should we look out for in the United States? </p> <p>I don't predict a wave of rioting to take over towns and cities, even if the country sinks back into recession. However, there has been a steady growth in large-crowd actions recently. This year, several dozen large &quot;movement&quot;-based protests were organized by unions and advocacy organizations over cutbacks in services, treatment of immigrants, and <a href="">bargaining rights</a>. Nearly all have been peaceful. But there have been spontaneous gatherings that have precipitated violence. A few weeks ago, &quot;flash mobs&quot; of youth in <a href="">Philadelphia</a> ransacked stores and harassed pedestrians; in January, <a href="">Milwaukee</a> suffered a similar outbreak at a shopping mall. </p> <p>Well-behaved crowds don't indicate an absence of threat on the horizon. In fact, let me go out on a limb by pointing out a few places to watch:</p> <p>1. <em>Georgia, Alabama, and the Carolinas</em>. From Mobile, to Charlotte and Sumter, to Atlanta and Dalton, a flailing economy is hitting communities hard, with steady double-digit joblessness. This region doesn't receive a lot of media attention, but it merits a second look. More households are leaving the Northeast and the Rust Belt for the American urban south. Young people in particular are leading the exodus, and they are not finding what they came for. In addition, these states cannot keep warehousing their disenfranchised in jails and prisons forever. Budgetary constraints alone will force the region to find alternative and cheaper solutions. A <a href="">report</a> by the Institute for Economics and Peace cited this region as not only the &quot;least peaceful,&quot; but the place to watch as violence and unrest outpaces government response. </p> <p>2. <em>Chicago</em>. Even when the crime rates fall overall, Chicago manages to keep up its reputation as a hotbed for organized youth violence. Across the city's poorest, ethnic-minority tracts, youth homicides, gang wars, and <a href="">gun-related violence</a> have risen to levels that have not been seen since the late 1980s. There is particular cause for alarm because the areas experiencing high violence have low levels of social services, government support, and philanthropic attention. In these &quot;edge&quot; communities, on the far South and West sides of the city, locals have little experience combating entrenched poverty and warring gangs. And just across the city border, suburban poverty tracts are equally plagued. If ever there was an urban cauldron waiting to ignite, Chicago is it.</p> <p>The bright spot is newly elected Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who has shown a willingness to tackle a problem that has been largely ignored by his predecessor, Richard M. Daley. His administration will have to bring citizens, activists who distrust the police, and police who rarely work with the activists all together. The harsh realities of the city's budget alone will necessitate cooperation. A <a href="">report</a> by the Chicago Crime Lab estimates that the social costs of the city's gun violence to be $2.5 billion per year, or $2,500 per Chicago household.</p> <p>3. <em>Oakland</em>. The Bay Area has a love for protests. In this year alone, demonstrations have been held against <a href="">public transport policies</a>, restrictive immigration laws, <a href="">radio station closure</a>, <a href="">educational cuts</a>, and <a href="">foreign wars</a>. As the proud birthplace of the Black Panther Party, Oakland appears to specialize in the youth unrest variant. The shooting of an unarmed man, Oscar Grant, by an Oakland police officer prompted immediate rioting in 2009, and then looters hit the streets again after the two-year minimum sentence was imposed in 2010. The city always seems on high alert, which is not surprising given that the overall unemployment is <a href="">16.3</a> percent, and 25 percent of black youth under 24 years of age are <a href="">unemployed</a>. (This figure would be even higher if it included those who have given up looking for work altogether.) Alameda County has the second highest rate of <a href="">youth violence</a> in the state, most of it concentrated within Oakland. </p> <p>The rash of killings has brought out local organizations, like the Center for Third World Organizing and the <a href="">Ella Baker Center</a>, who are hitting the streets to calm tensions, but everyone worries about youth with free time on their hands.</p> <p>4. <em>Immigrant California</em>. We tend not to link together immigrant disenfranchisement, foreclosures, and organized youth violence. But we should. Across the state of California, immigrant communities are facing severe hardships that stem from the recessionary economic conditions. Government services are harder to come by, the job market is depressed, there are vast pockets of blighted neighborhoods, and youth are joining gangs that have deep ties to Mexico, El Salvador, and Guatemala. A populist, anti-immigrant sentiment seems to support measures to restrict immigrant rights, which is only turning up the heat inside the ethnic enclaves. </p> <p>Different forms of organized, collective action have surfaced. Beginning in <a href="">2006</a>, public demonstrations by pro-immigrant groups became <a href="">commonplace</a>. But youth can always move in other directions; it's not a great leap to assess the rise in gang membership and youth violence as a partial response to these conditions. Cities like San Jose, Bakersfield, and Fresno, where immigrant gangs are prevalent, have neither the manpower or expertise to handle youth unrest, and so they are calling in the <a href="">feds</a>. </p> <p>Rioting is a highly specific and relatively rare form of collective unrest. It would be hard to convince most Americans that the country is anywhere near mass mayhem. And I share this view. But I also would have laughed a few weeks ago if you said that the Brits were about to unleash a prolonged period of looting, arson, and racial conflict. </p> Thu, 22 Sep 2011 22:13:00 GMT Sudhir Venkatesh 2011-09-22T22:13:00Z Violent unrest has swept Europe and the Middle East. Is America next? News and Politics Riots: Violent unrest has swept Europe and the Middle East. Is America next? 2304416 Sudhir Venkatesh Crime false false false Could the kind of riots that happened in Britain happen here? What Is the Matter With Sociology? <p> In the late 1980s, I fell in love with the discipline of sociology by reading books written by patient, perceptive observers like Elijah Anderson. As I told my father excitedly during my sophomore year in college, these scholars helped me see my immigrant anxieties as &quot;normal&quot; and a signature American experience. Concepts like identity and ethnicity let me express sentiments that until then had been inchoate and threatening. Going deep into the pockets of American society and hanging out at length, sociologists could draw on the human ballet to examine our cherished beliefs and institutions as well as our stereotypes and misguided social policies. This seemed to me to be a great magic trick, taking us into foreign, seemingly impenetrable worlds and emerging with useful insights.</p> <p>For over a century, sociologists were some of our country's influential truth-tellers. They gravitated to those issues—race relations, social inequality, and the workings of government—that were part of the American experiment to build an open, free democracy. Think of battles to end school segregation, ensure fair housing policy, and promote public sector accountability. A data-carrying sociologist—St. Clair Drake, Herbert Gans, James Coleman—was often at hand, gathering evidence, providing analysis, writing intelligibly for the citizenry. Anderson's own ideas shaped criminal justice, welfare, and urban development policy. The sociologists may not have been household names, but they were important cogs in the civic wheel.</p> <p> On the face of it, Anderson's new book, <a href=";tag=slatmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0393071634"><em>The Cosmopolitan Canopy</em></a>, an in-depth portrait of race and public life in contemporary Philadelphia, calls our attention to another great national achievement. The City of Brotherly Love, like much of the country, has become racially and ethnically diverse. Whites are no longer in the majority in many cities and throughout the American South and West (Texas, New Mexico, California). By 2050, the nation will lose a white majority population entirely. With Latinos and Asians rising in numbers, Anderson says we've generally grown more tolerant and less conflict-ridden—at least in public. He applauds us for creating a canopy, &quot;where diverse people converge, defining the setting as belonging to everyone and deemphasizing race and other particularities. No one group claims priority.&quot; This is a far cry from the last half of the 20<sup>th</sup> century, when Philadelphia was a cauldron of black-white animosity, and when Anderson took it as his mission to report on ghetto tensions imperceptible and incomprehensible to much of the rest of the city. The bulk of <em>The Cosmopolitan Canopy</em> is Anderson's attempt at timely sociological analysis that moves forward the country's civil discourse in a new era of far more extensive multiethnic mixing.</p> <p>Yet to devote pages of vintage &quot;fly on the wall&quot; sociological observation to a portrait of safe public intermingling can't help seeming like a curiously superficial endeavor in 2011. It's as though Anderson himself recognizes the limitations of his trademark method of public eavesdropping. Tucked into the middle of his book is a new twist on his abiding interest in African-American experience: He ventures behind closed doors in a corporate world that, thanks to a generation of changes, has become a relevant venue for exploring the minority experience in America. There, using private interviews, he discovers a rather different story, which challenges his main argument of diverse assimilation: Among African-American employees, there remains a vein of distrust of whites and suspicion about racial progress. This observation is left hanging, and so is the reader: Are black Americans content, angry, or just keeping their mouths shut? And why the celebratory &quot;canopy&quot; reference if a current of hostility lies underneath? </p> <p>Anderson's struggle to make sense of the current multicultural situation is not only a function of his own intellectual uncertainty. It is also a symptom of the field in which he is working, which is confused about its direction. Where sociology once gravitated to the most pressing problems, especially the contentious issues that drove Americans apart, it no longer seems so sure of its mission. With no obvious crisis, disaster, or glaring source of inequity as a backdrop demanding public action, a great American intellectual tradition gives every sign of weathering a troubled transition.</p> <p>Sociology was born in Chicago in the early 1900s, and was from the outset made by Americans, for Americans.&nbsp;(I have always thought Saul Bellow's wonderful opening to <a href=";tag=slatmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0143039571"><em>The Adventures of Augie March</em></a><em></em>makes a perfect epigraph for the field: &quot;I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, freestyle, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.&quot;)</p> <p>Its earliest practitioners—Robert Park, Jane Addams—saw the American city as not only their laboratory but their mission. Europe was their symbol of a dying tradition. The American metropolis offered an opportunity to build a civil (and civilized) society, with reform efforts guided by on-the-ground knowledge. They were fascinated by the most straightforward problems, like counting the number of people living in a neighborhood—the census arose from these efforts—or finding out how groups &quot;think&quot;—the focus group was then created. Their toolkit was a hodgepodge of pragmatic thought. Today they fielded a survey, tomorrow they took apart a government budget, the day after they used patient observation to understand how a gang works. They weren't proud, nor were they technocratic policy-wonks. They diagnosed, opining only when necessary, though they were driven by the goal of social improvement.</p> <p>As a consequence, sociologists were deeply fascinated with conflict, in particular the black-white tensions that were threatening the health and welfare of 20<sup>th</sup>-century cities. W.E.B. DuBois, the great African-American activist and writer, became the nation's first sociologist of race by exposing Philadelphians to the injustices and impoverishment that its black citizens faced at the dawn of the 1900s. In <a href=";tag=slatmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=161640261X"><em>The Philadelphia Negro</em></a>, DuBois marshaled facts, observations, statistics, and a perceptive understanding of the American capacity for tolerance to call for a humane approach toward racial inequity. </p> <p>Anderson's work has remained squarely in this tradition, so much so that during his tenure at the University of Pennsylvania, he was dubbed DuBois' heir. (He is now at Yale University.) In his most influential books, <a href=";tag=slatmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0226018164"><em>Streetwise</em></a> (1992) and <a href=";tag=slatmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0393320782"><em>Code of the Street</em></a><em></em>(2000), he stayed quietly in the shadows of public spaces and came away with a precise, tactile understanding of local mood at a time when an entrenched, impoverished black population—the so-called &quot;underclass&quot;— seemed unable to integrate into the American mainstream. He presciently described the rifts between middle-class and poor blacks who shared ghetto streets. He wrote compassionately about gentrifiers intent on improving the neighborhood yet agonized about evicting low-income households. His gift was to glean the underlying &quot;codes&quot; or moral dichotomies that shaped the intimate rhythms of daily life he subtly observed from a perch in a caf&eacute; or on a park bench. </p> <p>So, for example, he argued that two kinds of people live in the ghetto. He championed the &quot;decent&quot; families who attend church and have two parents, by pointing to their need to defend against &quot;street&quot;-oriented neighbors who drink in public, are on welfare, and commit crimes. He boiled down the ghetto to a battle between the two to define the neighborhood. If this sounds simplistic, well, that was one criticism of his work. His scientifically oriented colleagues complained that this approach was shallow, journalistic even. The humanists down the hall said that the disparaging view of &quot;street&quot; families was just a form of pandering to the popular need to blame the poor. But Anderson kept on, rarely addressing either camp, except to say that his observant eyes did not deceive. He focused instead on the power of this moral <em>pas de deux</em> to reach a wider audience. Though he studied Philadelphia, his writings engrossed Americans across the country who found in his work a direct and morally sensible way to understand their own cities, where the races and classes struggled to mix. That, in itself, was sufficient validation for his approach, even if his field was growing less enamored of his authoritative eavesdropping style.</p> <p>The most illuminating chapter of his new book shows him marshaling this same determination to be the informant who uncovers hidden codes—and in doing so, he boldly departs from his usual observer role. Sensing that race is no longer solely a public matter, Anderson heads into a corporate office to interview middle- and upper-income black employees. He emerges with another dichotomy to highlight the <em>intra</em>-racial tension that persists four decades after the civil rights movement. He finds that highly successful black Americans still face some inner demons. Those who adhere to an &quot;ethnocentric&quot; perspective feel as though whites will never really accept them, and so they are primarily loyal to their own racial group. Their counterparts are &quot;cosmopolitan,&quot; which means they place great weight on the social strides made by American blacks; they are quick to point out that the color of one's skin doesn't get you preference—or poor treatment. Anderson finds that, akin to their &quot;decent&quot; and &quot;street&quot; counterparts, the two moral &quot;codes&quot; can live in tension. Two people might take sides, or a single person can struggle psychologically, pulled by the merits of both.</p> <p>This is timely terrain, and it is sociology at its finest. There are few writers openly exploring this undercurrent of hostility and self-doubt experienced by a historically subjugated group that just managed to elect one of their own as president. Not since DuBois' impassioned declaration a century ago, that black Americans had a &quot;double consciousness,&quot; have we seen such sharp use of social analysis for truth-telling. There is an unfulfilled promise in this country, a real divide that persists, and we shouldn't ignore these sentiments as paranoia or whining. </p> <p>Having made our hearts race with this venture into a new and more psychologically subtle frontier, however, Anderson retreats to the public terrain of more humdrum interactions and to the posture of detached eavesdropper that have been his staples. He concludes his book with some tepid observations about the &quot;canopy&quot; that embraces us all. He pursues neither the theme of black animus nor the public-private split. </p> <p>Anderson's fascinating foray and his inability to tie together the seemingly contradictory threads highlight the new challenges that face our field. On the one hand, sociology has moved far away from its origins in thoughtful feet-on-the ground analysis, using whatever means necessary. A crippling debate now pits the &quot;quants,&quot; who believe in prediction and a hard-nosed mathematical approach, against a less powerful, motley crew—historians, interviewers, cultural analysts— who must defend the scientific rigor and objectivity of any deviation from the strictly quantitative path. In practice, this means everyone retreats to his or her comfort zone. Just as the survey researcher isn't about to take up with a street gang to gather data, it is tough for an observer to roam free, moving from one place to another as she sees fit, without risking the insult: &quot;She's just a journalist!&quot; (The use of an impenetrable language doesn't help: A common refrain paralyzing our field is, &quot;The more people who can understand your writing, the less scientific it must be.&quot;) </p> <p>For Anderson to give up &quot;fly on the wall&quot; observation, his m&eacute;tier, and put his corporate interviews closer to center-stage would risk the &quot;street cred&quot; he now regularly receives. This is sad because Anderson is on to the fact that we have to re-jigger our sociological methods to keep up with the changes taking place around us. Understanding race, to cite just one example, means no longer simply watching people riding the subway and playing chess in parks. The conflicts are in back rooms, away from the eavesdropper. They are not just interpersonal, but lie within large institutions that employ, police, educate, and govern us. A smart, nimble approach would be to do more of what Anderson does—search for clues, wherever they may lie, whether this means interviewing, observing, counting, or issuing a FOIA request for data. </p> <p>If you search hard enough, you can find pockets of experimentation, where sociologists stay timely and relevant without losing rigor. It is not accidental they tend to move closer to our media-frenzied world, not away from it, because it's there that some of the most illuminating social science is being done, free of academic conventions and strictures. At Brown and Harvard, sociologists are using the provocative HBO series, <em>The Wire</em>, to teach students about urban inequality. At Princeton and Michigan, faculty make documentary films and harness narrative-nonfiction approaches to invigorate their research and writing. At Boston University, a model turned sociologist uses her experiences to peek behind the unforgiving world of fashion and celebrity. And the Supreme Court's decision to grant the plaintiffs a &quot;class&quot; status in the Wal-Mart gender-discrimination case will hinge on an amicus brief submitted by a sociologist of labor. None of this spirited work occurs without risk, as I've found out through personal experience. Each time I finish a documentary film, one of my colleagues will invariably ask, &quot;When are you going to stop and get back to doing <em>real</em> sociology?&quot; </p> <p>Academic disciplines should not have to apologize for serious scholarship that does the unheralded work of systematically breaking down stereotypes, advancing policy, and ameliorating social inequity. We need sociologists to keep applying their fine-tuned antennae to social frictions because these will never be topics that can count on appealing to public curiosity about social reality—a consumer base that is always moving on to the next big idea. In Anderson's case, the greatest contribution of his book may be simply the diagnosis of a contradiction that cannot be neatly summed up in a tidy blog post or expedient reportage—or a scientific, sociological survey for that matter: Americans have become more tolerant in their public dealings, but at the cost of moving some of the animus to quieter, less visible quarters. Better to point it out, however speculative and provisional the results may be, than to hide from the truth.</p> Mon, 18 Apr 2011 02:02:00 GMT Sudhir Venkatesh 2011-04-18T02:02:00Z Elijah Anderson's new book points up an identity crisis. Arts Elijah Anderson's The Cosmopolitan Canopy: Race, ethnicity, and the future of sociology. 2290579 Sudhir Venkatesh Books false false false Elijah Anderson, author of The Cosmopolitan Canopy The Snakehead&nbsp; <p>Patrick,</p> <p> I think a fitting place to end our exchange is by discussing law enforcement. I won't give away the details, but <em> <a href=";tag=slatmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0385521308">The Snakehead</a></em> opens with a riveting minute-by-minute chronicle of a sea rescue, in which New York City's emergency personnel take the lead when a smuggling ship, and its human cargo, runs aground off the coast of the city. From that point on, as the investigation into the disaster gets underway, the reader is given a rare peek behind the curtain of policing. You show in great detail the enormous challenge of fighting a practice like human smuggling, which cuts across borders and involves authorities working in different social, political, and linguistic contexts.</p> <p>As a fieldworker in Chicago, I was privy to a very small slice of the world of street cops. It forever changed my view of how policing functions in a large city. I grew up in the suburbs, where the local officer was largely out of view, so going in, my understanding of Chicago was based largely on the media and popular entertainment: Simply put, I believed that residents and cops were from two separate worlds and were forever enemies. But when I arrived in the Southside Chicago ghettos, I immediately saw that relationships were more complicated—as cooperative as they were hostile. I also learned that the urban police officer had one of the most dangerous jobs in America: The local criminals were often better armed and more willing to use deadly force.</p> <p>The officers I spoke with made several statements that surprised me. First, they were adamant that inner-city police cannot prevent crime. This was an unachievable task, so instead, they focused on ensuring that criminal acts didn't veer out of control. For example, they stopped youth fights before they turned into gang drive-by shootings; they held angry husbands in jail for brief periods to prevent escalated spousal abuse; they separated drug dealers from rival factions to different areas of a park, accepting illegal activity in order to prevent violence. In a few instances, they did try to eradicate gangs, prevent abuse, and stop drug selling in public places. But frankly, not often.</p> <p>Chicago police also were quick to voice their displeasure with outsiders—namely, federal law-enforcement agencies. There were the expected &quot;turf battles&quot; wherein local and federal officials tried to claim authority over an investigation. But as important, the local cops felt that the arrival of the FBI, ATF, and other federal bodies actually <em>increased</em> the likelihood of local violence. The out-of-towners had no connection to residents, they had no confidential informants, they could not understand that, on occasion, you wanted the local gangs to remain in place because &quot;the devil you know is always better than …&quot; So, when the feds arrived, the relationships that beat cops had forged were disrupted, resident trust of police was lowered, and the job of local law enforcement was made more difficult. At least according to the Chicago police—I'm sure the federal agencies had their own equally justifiable perspective.</p> <p><em>The Snakehead</em> riveted me because, throughout the book, you managed to lay out the terrain of modern law enforcement in great detail. We learn about the challenges of local cops in Chinatown who must deal with federal agents who travel thousands of miles to find a perpetrator. And about the challenges American officials face when trying to persuade their counterparts around the world to cooperate with an investigation. Global policing seems to be an unworkable proposition, yet you show how capture, arrest, and indictment do occur on occasion.</p> <p>What surprised you about law enforcement, both in the context of a tightly knit neighborhood like New York's Chinatown, as well as in a larger, international context? Did you have to change any of your beliefs or stereotypes of police (or criminals!) along the way? And when you walk along city streets, do you now find yourself noticing aspects of social behavior that once you ignored or had no reason to observe?</p> <p>Thanks for a spirited set of exchanges. I'm sure readers will enjoy <em>The Snakehead</em> as much as I have.</p> <p>Sudhir</p> Thu, 23 Jul 2009 10:50:00 GMT Sudhir Venkatesh 2009-07-23T10:50:00Z Arts Local Police Really Do Get Annoyed When the Feds Show Up 2223274 Sudhir Venkatesh The Book Club false false false The Snakehead&nbsp; <p>Patrick,</p> <p> I have been studying the illegal economies in America's urban ghettos for more than a decade. It was hard not to notice the parallels between <em> <a href=";tag=slatmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0385521308">The Snakehead</a></em> and my own fieldwork. In our last exchange, we touched briefly on the world of unregulated commerce, in which humans become yet another commodity to be bought and sold. But we did so in the context of the American dream and its impact on different immigrant groups. Let me push this in a slightly different direction, in the process addressing the query you posted to me at the end of your message: Does the notion of &quot;joining the mainstream&quot; have the same meaning in a poor African-American enclave in Chicago as it does in a poor Fujianese enclave in New York?</p> <p>I will never forget the answers I received from young black men in Chicago's drug trade when I asked them how they defined &quot;success.&quot; Unlike the classic immigrant narratives, in which the new arrivals wish a better life for their children, these young men pointed to their mothers (and other guardians: aunts, grandparents, etc.). For them, the risks of the drug trade—prison, shootings, hostile relations with the community—could be tolerated if there was a chance of moving their kin out of the ghetto. They would say to me, in only half-joking terms, &quot;I want to move my mother to the suburbs and mow her lawn.&quot; For these young blacks, the &quot;lawn&quot; and the &quot;suburb&quot; were real desires but also symbolic: If the inner city is viewed by most Americans as isolated and culturally pathological, then they were signaling a wish to live at the heart of the social and geographic mainstream.</p> <p>The historically aware among them would point to the Italian Mafia—and other ethnic groups—as having climbed into the mainstream via the underworld. &quot;If the <em>shady</em> world was good enough for white ethnics, why then for blacks is it disallowed?&quot; </p> <p>The young men drew these parallels because the underground economy included a legal system: There may be crimes, but there also is a structure in place through which disputes get resolved, prices are set, money can be borrowed and invested. The popular view of illegal commerce as &quot;lawless&quot; doesn't capture the complicated web of relationships that actually regulate the &quot;un-regulated&quot; world. How many times in <em> <a href=";tag=slatmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=B0019L770A">The Godfather</a></em> (Part I) did local folk come to Don Corleone to broker a peace or regulate a transaction? Michael Corleone grows up believing a good and powerful man provides such services. Similarly, inner-city youth see numerous people in their communities who broker truces, provide financing, and otherwise smooth the rough-and-tumble ghetto trade. So the underground becomes acceptable, in the short run, and a means of entering the mainstream over the long haul.</p> <p><em>The Snakehead</em> fascinates because Chinatown appears as both a chaotic world, where hope is held up by a thin string, and a highly structured world: Everyone knows where &quot;on the street&quot; to borrow money, find a good or service, smuggle a relative into the country, and so on. A parallel economy, with its own regulatory system, seems to be in place, such that when things go wrong, a whole host of local characters are called upon. Some are brokers, like Sister Ping, whose influence in one area allows her to expand her power. But it seems that others might be less visible, less heinous, less interested in accumulating power. </p> <p>I wondered if you could say more about the people and relationships that make the illegal trade flower and flourish. For example, at one point in the book, one of your characters, Sean Chen, has to borrow money within the Fujianese community to start a small business because he is undocumented and can't access a bank's line of credit. The business fails, Sean is embarrassed, and his family comforts him. Can Sean borrow again? Are there financial penalties for failure to pay back the loan, for either Sean or his family? This is one specific example, but it made me wonder about the scope and character of the underground economy for Chinese Americans. Specifically, I had these questions:</p> <p>Is the underground economy largely restricted to criminal operations, like human smuggling, or has there developed a parallel economy for Chinese immigrants that is much broader in scope and important for daily life? In other words, would <em>documented</em> Chinese immigrants draw on informal connections for credit and services, and if so, why?</p> <p>You mentioned that second generation immigrants would become American in the usual ways—move to other neighborhoods, learn English. But would they become entirely divorced from the underground economy in the process? I can think of some second-generation South Asians who still pay off-the-books for marriage services, astrological readings, food, day care, language instruction. … Assimilation can mean one foot in the mainstream and one in the old neighborhood.</p> <p>Did you find any police or law-enforcement officials who felt that the underground economy was actually more ordered, more stable, more trustworthy than the legal, government-regulated commercial realm? I ask because many immigrant communities will respect local traditions more strongly than the larger societal norms. And because police can sometimes be the most knowledgeable sources of illegality.</p> <p>Sudhir</p> Wed, 22 Jul 2009 11:00:00 GMT Sudhir Venkatesh 2009-07-22T11:00:00Z Arts What Does New York's Poor Chinese Enclave Have in Common With Chicago's Poor African-American Enclave? 2223250 Sudhir Venkatesh The Book Club false false false The Snakehead&nbsp; <p>Patrick,</p> <p> I enjoyed working my way through your new book, <em> <a href=";tag=slatmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0385521308">The Snakehead</a></em>. As someone who has studied the American underground economy, the international focus was illuminating. And as an ethnographer who tries to access hard-to-reach groups, your penetration into the Chinatown underworld was quite impressive. By way of full disclosure, this was actually the <em>second</em> time I read the book; the first reading motivated me to give you a blurb for the jacket.</p> <p>Let's start with a summary of some of the book's central themes. The title of the book is taken from the colloquial use of the word <em>snake</em> to refer to a &quot;circuitous smuggling route.&quot; The book's subject is the complex and clandestine network of people, places, and organizations that facilitates human smuggling. Specifically, it is a detailed account of how one human smuggling operation was created and carried out between China's Fujian province and New York's Chinatown. </p> <p>The character at the center of the story is Sister Ping, an entrepreneurial leader who rose to become a notorious figure in Chinatown's underworld. Picture a Mafia don or, more accurately, a Harlem madam. Ping not only directed large-scale smuggling operations but also became invaluable to families wishing to stay connected to China—she transferred money and goods for them and offered basic credit in the absence of financial institutions. So important is her role in the community that when she is eventually brought to justice by U.S. law enforcement, the locals portray her as a Robin Hood helping the disenfranchised Fujianese peoples find a better home in America. </p> <p>Ping typically worked out of backrooms and stores in New York's Chinatown, but her operation was truly global, as is the scope of <em>The Snakehead</em>. The book takes us to the rural villages in China where the migrants originate and to the coasts of Africa, Guatemala, Hong Kong, and other ports where migrants stop over on their journeys; obtain visas, fake IDs, and passports; and otherwise find transport to enter the United States. If globalization is often celebrated for the dissemination of ideas and the use of technology to create widespread quality-of-life improvements, we leave this book wondering about the darker side of human progress. </p> <p>Upon arriving in the United States, Mexicans, Chinese, Somalis, Senegalese, Haitians, Jamaicans, etc., create cloistered, insular spaces where tradition and the ways of the old country still dominate—along with food, cafes, satellite televisions, and newspapers that keep people connected to their place of origin. On one level, this is the American dream; immigrants to the United States usually understand that the ethnic enclave is their first stop but that their children may move on—both culturally (away from their native traditions) and geographically (to new neighborhoods). </p> <p>Yet the book suggests that things have gotten way out of control. Chinese and other ethnic migrants are increasingly transported in the dead of night, exposed to great personal danger along the way; they are working in unsafe work conditions; and many are wrapped up in criminal activities. To make matters worse, their families back home go into debt to help them make the voyage, thereby exposing many relatives to the capriciousness of underworld figures and rogue government officials. </p> <p>The immigrants are also isolated from the social mainstream. In Chinatown, the Fujianese you describe have little access to education, health care, social services, and over time, they seem never to grow more assimilated and in touch with American society. Indeed, it is Sister Ping, the underground kingpin, who seems the most in touch with our cultural ideals of economic growth and prosperity!</p> <p>In the epilogue of <em>The Snakehead</em>, you observe the parallels between different ethnic immigrant streams. For example, you allude to <em> <a href=";tag=slatmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=B0019L770A">The Godfather</a></em>—Francis Ford Coppola's epic saga of Italian-American life—as a potential point of comparison to the modern Chinese-American experience. The question I have is: How do we situate the Chinese experience within the historical context of U.S. immigration? That is, what similarities and differences did you find between the late-19<sup>th</sup>-/early-20<sup>th</sup>-century settlement of predominantly European migrants and the more modern versions rooted in Asian, African, and Latin American peoples? </p> <p>Is America less hospitable than it was in the past? Is it possible to welcome the new—mostly darker-skinned—migrant streams, as we did the Jews, Irish, Italians, and Germans who landed on our shores? Although their lives were no cakewalk, the European arrivals found work in corporations, government, and higher education and eventually assimilated into mainstream institutions. Why can't the Asian, African, and Latin American hopefuls do the same? A service economy offering only menial work? Cultural barriers? Racism? Or do the strong connections that the Fujianese people maintain with China even after arriving dampen their desire to forge a productive association with America?</p> <p>Your book challenges conventional portraits of immigration and settlement. Stories of immigration usually describe a linear progression in which each succeeding generation becomes more &quot;American.&quot; I'm not so sure that the Chinese experience falls into this category. Instead, the story seems to be one of halting progress. We find ourselves viewing a fragile community that not only depends on the underworld for spirit and sustenance, but that shows no yearning desire to move into the suburbs and live next to the Joneses. Whither the American dream?</p> <p>Sudhir</p> Tue, 21 Jul 2009 10:48:00 GMT Sudhir Venkatesh 2009-07-21T10:48:00Z Arts The Don Corleone of Chinatown 2223111 Sudhir Venkatesh The Book Club false false false How To Understand the Culture of Poverty <p> Pop quiz: Who made the following observation? &quot;At the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of [black America] is the deterioration of the [black] family. It is a fundamental weakness of [black Americans] at the present time.&quot; Each year, I pose this question to my undergraduate students. Most will guess George Bush, Bill Cosby, Al Sharpton, or Bill Clinton. This is not surprising, given their age. More telling is their perception that such a view might come from the political left or right. It reveals just how commonplace the link of family-race-poverty is in the American mindset.</p> <p>But there is a little trickery going on: Replace &quot;black&quot; with &quot;Negro&quot; and change the date to 1965. The correct author is Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan. He wrote these words as part of a policy brief to help President Lyndon Johnson understand the distressed social conditions in urban ghettos. &quot;The Negro Family: The Case for National Action&quot; leaked to the press and created a firestorm of controversy with its contention that a &quot;tangle of pathology&quot; engulfed black America.</p> <p>The so-called &quot;Moynihan Report&quot; brought about a new language for understanding race and poverty: Now-familiar terms like <em>pathology</em>, <em>blame the victim</em>, and <em>culture of poverty</em> entered American thought as people debated whether Moynihan was courageously pointing out the causes of social ills or simply finger-pointing. Moynihan forced a nation to ask, &quot;Is the <em>culture</em> of poor blacks at the core of their problems?&quot; </p> <p>This question continues to haunt us, and Moynihan's arguments about black culture still preoccupy and divide academics. (The January 2009 issue of the <em> <a href="">Annals of the Academy of Political and Social Science</a></em> is dedicated to a critical reappraisal of his report.) Coming from a liberal democrat, the senator's discussion of race was remarkably bold and straightforward: Unemployed black men were &quot;failures&quot;; female heads of households (&quot;matriarchs&quot;) threatened black masculinity; blacks needed help from &quot;white America.&quot; One wishes social scientists would write with such conviction today, even at the risk of simplifying complex social processes.</p> <p>The wider disputes the Moynihan Report set in motion are anything but ivory-tower squabbles. Liberals charged that the senator's theory gave ammunition to right-wing arguments for diminished government support of anti-poverty programs. They watched, with growing helplessness, as a crescendo of Republican voices began invoking Moynihan's writings to defend reduced funding for Head Start, job training, adult literacy, and welfare. Simply put, conservatives argued that blacks needed to change their behavior before money could do any good.</p> <p>In this way, a deep American schism was born. Liberals believed that black poverty was caused by <em>systemic</em> racism, such as workplace discrimination and residential segregation, and that focusing on the family was a form of &quot;blaming the victim.&quot; Conservatives pointed to <em>individual</em> failure to embrace mainstream cultural values like hard work and sobriety, and intact (read: nuclear) families. It's like Yankees vs. Mets, and for 40 years there has been no middle ground. (That the current generation of college students might not necessarily share this polarized view may augur an important shift in the years ahead.)</p> <p>In this standoff, along comes the eminent sociologist William Julius Wilson, whom I studied with at the University of Chicago in the 1990s, promising to transcend the polarizing discourse on race in American society. (Sound familiar?) Wilson claims his analysis in his new book, titled <em> <a href=";tag=slatmaga-20&amp;link_code=as3&amp;camp=211189&amp;creative=373489&amp;creativeASIN=039306705X">More Than Just Race</a>, </em>will bridge the two worlds and create a new, more enlightened way for Americans to talk about race (heard this one before?)—but he is well aware that won't happen without controversy.</p> <p>It is fitting that the most famous contemporary sociologist has decided to address the most significant policy issue of our time. Anything but shy, Wilson has devoted his career to wading into contentious debates that have enormous social implications for the way we understand race and inequality in America. In the wake of the civil-rights era, as black politicians bemoaned the persistence of discrimination in America, Wilson published <em> <a href=";tag=slatmaga-20&amp;link_code=as3&amp;camp=211189&amp;creative=373489&amp;creativeASIN=0226901297">The Declining Significance of Race</a></em>(1978). He used evidence of a rising black middle class to argue that race alone can't explain the plight of black Americans. He was shunned in black intellectual circles but won a MacArthur Foundation &quot;genius&quot; grant. His subsequent study of inner-city poverty, <em> <a href=";tag=slatmaga-20&amp;link_code=as3&amp;camp=211189&amp;creative=373489&amp;creativeASIN=0226901319">The Truly Disadvantaged</a></em>(1987), challenged conservative and liberal dogma regarding poverty alleviation. In it, Wilson made the case that the focus should be on promoting work opportunities and alleviating poverty concentration rather than simply fighting racism or promoting punitive policies. After President Clinton called the book a must-read, Wilson's critics on both sides quickly ran over to his side.</p> <p><em>More Than Just Race</em>, which draws on Wilson's earlier research as well as more recent studies, is yet more proof of his willingness to ignore political and academic pieties and his will to make social science relevant to the public. Wilson wants to explain inner-city behavior—such as young black males' disdain for low-wage jobs, their use of violence, and their refusal to take responsibility for children—without pointing simplistically to discrimination or a deficit in values. Instead, he argues that many years of exposure to similar situations can create responses that look as if they express individual will or active preference when they are, in fact, adaptations or resigned responses to racial exclusion.</p> <p>Consider a young man who works in the drug economy. Doing so doesn't mean he places little if any value on legitimate work. Employment opportunities are limited in the man's racially segregated neighborhood. There are few neighbors and friends who have social connections to employers, and most of the good jobs are far away. To complicate matters, many of his friends and neighbors <em>are</em> probably connected to the drug trade. Survival and peer pressure dictate that the man will seek out the dangerous, illegal jobs that are nearby, even while he may prefer a stable, mainstream job. Delinquent behavior? Certainly, but more than likely a comprehensible response to lack of opportunity.</p> <p>One could apply the same logic to teenage pregnancy, another all too common feature of inner-city life. The political left and right both argue that the prospect of welfare payments can motivate young women to have children—conservatives point to delinquent values, while liberals deem this a response to lack of income. Apply Wilson's &quot;socialization&quot; lens, and learned behaviors take priority over economic need: Young women achieve both personal identity and social validation in their community by entering into motherhood. They join others whose lives are similarly defined by early parenting. The receipt of welfare helps them contribute to the household while placing them on a surer moral footing than those who fail to bring income into the home.</p> <p>Wilson does more than argue for the rationality of such behaviors. The actions of both the young man and the teenage mother are &quot;cultural,&quot; he suggests, because they follow from the individual's perceptions of how society works. These perceptions are learned over time, and they create powerful expectations that can lead individuals to act in ways that, to the outside world, suggest insolence, laziness, pathology, etc. In this way, Wilson's framework seeks to find individual agency in contexts of dire economic hardship.</p> <p>Wilson describes this process succinctly: &quot;Parents in segregated communities who have had experiences [with discrimination and disrespect] may transmit to children, through the process of socialization, a set of beliefs about what to expect from life and how one should respond to circumstances. … In the process children may acquire a disposition to interpret the way the world works that reflects a strong sense that other members of society disrespect them because they are black.&quot;</p> <p>If you think you're at a disadvantage (however justified or unjustified that belief may be), you internalize your status, such that your low expectations become as durable an obstacle as the discrimination you might be facing. This is why people (of any race and social class) turn down assistance: The simple belief that help is futile can be a powerful deterrent to social change.</p> <p>What Wilson argues may sound obvious and even a bit like Psychology 101, but there is a deeper motivation to his writing. Wilson appreciates Moynihan for shedding light on ghetto poverty. But by focusing on the capacity of the poor to act rationally and thoughtfully, Wilson wants us to get off the victimhood bandwagon that followed Moynihan. In his view, neither defending the victim nor blaming the victim is very helpful in moving us forward.</p> <p>Moynihan was also not altogether hopeful that black family patterns—which he traced to a legacy of slavery—might change, although, to be fair, his report was not intended as a primer on poverty-alleviation strategy. Wilson's history is more recent, and his optimism is apparent: Three generations of black ghetto dwellers have been relying on welfare and sporadic work and doing so in isolation from the mainstream. It is folly to believe that some distinctive behavior, values, or outlooks have not arisen as a consequence. Whereas Moynihan seemed at pains to point out &quot;pathology&quot; in the black community, in Wilson's work, the recognition functions almost like confession: Let us face the truth, so that we may finally bring forth change.</p> <p>The book stands to have a powerful impact in policy circles because it points to the elephant in the room. Wilson knows it is difficult to engineer cultural change. We can train black youths, we can move their families to better neighborhoods, etc., but changing their way of thinking is not so easy. Evidence of this lies in the many &quot;mobility&quot; programs that move inner-city families to lower-poverty suburbs: Young women continue to have children out of wedlock and, inexplicably, the young men who move out <em>return</em> to their communities to commit crime! These patterns flummox researchers and, according to Wilson, they will continue to remain mysterious until we look at culture for an answer.</p> <p>Critics will complain that Wilson himself has little to offer in terms of policy recommendations. But <em>More Than Just Race</em> contains some clues as to where he may be headed. He emphasizes the advantages of &quot;race neutral&quot; programs. Wilson knows that Americans and their elected leaders are more likely to support initiatives that are not identified with poor blacks. And in this economy, there is no shortage of disadvantaged Americans—white or black—who require employment assistance and supportive services. He is also partial to addressing joblessness first, despite his insistence that culture matters (and that behaviors don't change as quickly as policymakers wish). Wilson repeatedly points to the benefits&nbsp;that jobs programs and vocational training have on the cultural front. Stated somewhat crudely, increasing employment will reduce the number of people who might promote or even condone deviant behavior. Change might not occur overnight, and it may not be wholesale, but it will take place.</p> <p>Wilson advised the Obama campaign, and it is likely that his combination of race-neutral social policies and &quot;jobs-first&quot; agenda will be attractive to our president. Perhaps after addressing the financial mess, terrorism, the Iraq war, &quot;AfPak,&quot; education, health care, and the climate, the administration will turn its attention to domestic poverty. However long that takes, it is alas safe to predict that ghetto poverty will still be a pressing national problem.</p> Mon, 16 Mar 2009 10:49:00 GMT Sudhir Venkatesh 2009-03-16T10:49:00Z William Julius Wilson once again defies both right and left. Arts William Julius Wilson's More Than Just Race. 2213618 Sudhir Venkatesh Books false false false But What Does It Mean for the Prostitutes? <p> There are some people who might just benefit from the current turmoil in the financial markets. One probably won't surprise: lawyers. The other might: sex workers.</p> <p>In the late 1990s, New York and other large American cities witnessed the rise of a so-called indoor sex-work trade. Women either left the streets for strip clubs and escort services, or they started their own businesses by advertising on the Internet or cruising hotels and corporate centers to find clients. You may recall &quot;Kristen&quot; (aka Ashley Dupr&eacute;), the young woman whose tryst with Eliot Spitzer helped bring down the New York governor. &quot;Kristens&quot; might earn $1,000 per evening, which places them toward the higher end of the indoor sex market.</p> <p>I came across these women when I began <a href="">studying</a> New York's sex industry at the end of the 1990s. Mayor Rudy Giuliani, in an effort to clean up Manhattan's neighborhoods, forced sex off the streets of Times Square and other Midtown neighborhoods. In the process, his administration created a new economic sector. I've been following the lives of more than 300 sex workers—in New York <a href="">and Chicago</a>, in high and low ends of the income spectrum since 1999. </p> <p>One thing I've learned is that economic downturns can be boom times for high-end sex workers. Sex workers of the past waited on street corners, outside bars, and around parks, and their transactions were fleeting and usually for a few dollars. Today's high-end sex workers see themselves as therapists, part of a vast metropolitan wellness industry that includes private chefs and yoga teachers. Many have regular clients who visit them several times per month, paying them not only for sex but also for comfort and affirmation.</p> <p>The cost may be thousands of dollars for an evening of leisure. Few people outside of the corporate work force can afford this price tag. And, in good times, Wall Street came calling.</p> <p>But bad times seem not so bad either, at least in the short run. After the dot-com bubble burst and again in late 2006 when the housing market began to flatten, the high-end women I interviewed in New York and Chicago reported upticks in business. Their clients were coming to them for a mix of escape and encouragement. As Jean, a New Yorker and a 35-year-old former paralegal turned &quot;corporate escort&quot; (her description) told me, &quot;I had about two dozen men who started doubling their visits with me. They couldn't face their wives, who were bitching about the fact they lost income. Men want to be men. All I did was make them feel like they could go back out there with their head up.&quot; (Like most of the sex workers I interviewed, Jean was concerned about her participation in an illegal trade and asked that only her first name be used.)</p> <p>That's probably not all Jean did for her clients. But, as I <a href="">reported</a> in <strong><em>Slate</em></strong> a few months ago, about 40 percent of high-end sex transactions do not involve a sexual service. It's not difficult to imagine that a man's need for positive reinforcement is amplified when a pink slip lands on his desk. </p> <p>In my study, approximately half of the sex workers I have been following (150) work in the high-end sector. Nearly all of them tell me that this pattern of increased activity following an economic downturn lasts about six to eight months. &quot;They get tapped out,&quot; Caroline told me. Caroline specializes in &quot;Internet stiffs,&quot; her term for folks who work in Manhattan's high-tech sector. &quot;They party with me. Or I listen when they tell me they can't face their kids. When the money runs out, they go back and they deal with it.&quot; </p> <p>Caroline learned quickly that she had to diversify in order to survive these cycles. Now, she never has more than half of her clients in one economic sector. &quot;I always have lawyers, very dependable. And I never have too many stock brokers. They're a real pain in the ass. I've never heard anyone whine more than them.&quot; But Caroline may be an exception. Most high-end workers find their clients via word of mouth. They can easily become lodged in one sector, rising or falling with the economic tide.</p> <p>As the women I interviewed spoke to me about the strategies they used to manage risk during hard times, it became quickly apparent that Caroline's adjustment was one of many strategies that higher-end sex workers have used. Women get used to the lifestyle—fancy apartments, nice clothes, a vacation now and then—and they need to keep income flowing, especially in recessionary periods when men run out of cash. It is quite common for sex workers at the high end to take men &quot;on credit,&quot; giving them freebies for a few months or longer until they can get back on their feet. Equally common is the willingness to reduce rates.</p> <p>A smaller percentage of high-end sex workers are more innovative and find ways to distribute their risk. These women draw on techniques that are more common in legitimate economic spheres. Marta, for example, said that she took inspiration from the revolving-credit associations that her mother once belonged to in New York's Spanish Harlem neighborhood. These modest savings accounts—some only a few thousand dollars—helped the women make ends meet between paychecks. In some cases, they provided capital to start a new business. Marta asked five of her friends to put a few hundred dollars in a money-market account. A week ago, Marta told me the story of one of her friends who lost three clients (two of whom reportedly worked as investment bankers) and who withdrew funds to help make ends meet. I've known Marta for almost a decade, and while I didn't meet her friend, I've seen others in her social network use such strategies to ride out bad times. </p> <p>Of course, it's not always as simple as that. If too many women draw on the account, each may not find the money she needs. And participants will not always agree on the rules for membership. Some of these accounts charge interest as a means of penalizing women who make repeated withdrawals, although this is not the norm. Others may place restrictions on the number of withdrawals allowed in any time period. Such formal rules are quite rare, but these days I've been finding an increasing number of sex workers seeking ways to respond to their vulnerable position. Ultimately, however, access to cash is a great benefit. Even in the high-end sector, women may not have bank accounts or credit histories—this makes access to loans (and credit cards) difficult. It takes only a few client cancellations to make next month's rent payment a source of concern. Knowing that cash is available is a source of comfort. </p> <p>I've even seen a small number of women, flush with cash from sex work, use their resources to play the role of insurance broker. Unlike Marta and her friends, who must pool their money, a small percentage of women invest their own savings to insure the risk of other sex workers. Recall that sex workers face a number of risks, from men who do not pay for their services or who steal their money to the sudden loss of their entire client base. Savvy individuals will volunteer to assume such risks, in effect contracting with sex workers to insure them against misbehaving clients or unforeseen drops in business. Jean was so successful as a sex worker that she decided to use some of her income to insure 10 high-end sex workers against potential losses. Each woman gave Jean 5 percent of her earnings each month. In exchange, the women could take out $1,000 per month for five months a year if times were tough. I met most of the women in Jean's insurance pool. Each one volunteered a story of how the cash disbursements helped them avoid a personal crisis.</p> <p>On first glance, a sex worker could probably do better by simply putting some money aside in a cookie jar. But sex workers are not the best savers (who is?). And a sudden loss of clients means no cash comes in the door. If they lack credit cards or have no room to borrow, a cash payment from Jean is invaluable. </p> <p>Escort-service managers, strip-club owners, pimps, and other entrepreneurially minded people often approach sex workers with similar proposals to assume some of the risks of the trade. The majority of sex workers I have studied admit feeling trapped when these offers come along: They can try to make it on their own or pay someone to provide some protection. Of course, not all insurers pay up—and the government is not around the corner to bail anyone out.</p> <p>The trick to surviving lean times, says Caroline, is to be patient and do everything it takes to keep your clients. &quot;They are going to come back. I mean, c'mon, it's Wall Street! These guys are never out of the game for that long. That's what's so great about what I do. If you can keep your cool, it's pretty rare that you lose money. Just make sure you keep the man happy.&quot;</p> Fri, 26 Sep 2008 17:20:00 GMT Sudhir Venkatesh 2008-09-26T17:20:00Z How the financial crisis affects the oldest profession. Business What the financial crisis means for high-end prostitutes. 2200640 Sudhir Venkatesh The Dismal Science false false false What does the economic crisis mean for prostitutes? Unjustifiable Carnage, Uneasy Alliances, and Lots of Self-Doubt <p> If you are a fan of the new <a href="">Grand Theft Auto video game</a>, I have just the neighborhood for you. The setting of GTA IV, Liberty City, is an amped-up <a href=";en=26b15206bbe48f82&amp;ei=5124&amp;partner=permalink&amp;exprod=permalink">version of the New York metro area</a>. If you want a slice of the real thing, however, I'd recommend Chicago's South Side. The last time I visited Chicago, I stopped by 59<sup>th</sup> Street, near Washington Park (and only a few short blocks from the picturesque University of Chicago). Two of the local gangs were fighting each other in full view for control of a prime sales spot, a hotel. For a monthly fee, the proprietor had promised to allow one gang to turn the place into a bordello—drugs, prostitution, stolen merchandise. For the gangs, winning meant more than simply getting rid of their enemy. Neither controlled the area surrounding the hotel. Anyone bringing drugs (or women, or guns, etc.) to the hotel would have to run the gantlet formed by <em>other</em> enemy gangs, who would be at the ready to shoot down the transporter.</p> <p>There is nothing funny about this situation. The residents of this neighborhood are living a nightmare. Their elected political officials have offered little help, and the police don't answer their calls to stop the gang wars. So you guessed it: Their only hope is to pay yet <em>another</em> crack-dealing gang to intervene and keep the peace between the warring outfits. To put it bluntly, they can rely on street justice by turning an enemy into an ally, or they can sit, suffer, and hope for the best.</p> <p>I thought of these Chicagoans and their moral conundrum when I played GTA IV for the first time a few days ago. Nearly every review has championed the unparalleled technical accomplishments of the creative team—and there are many. But I also found GTA IV to be a compelling commentary on urban life, gangland, and illegal economies.</p> <p>This may sound strange, but I found that Grand Theft Auto actually offered a <em>less</em> sensational portrait of gangland and ghetto streets than the one put out by most cops, politicians, policymakers, and even academics. There is nuance in the game that exceeds most of the conventional portraits of American cities; the game goes beyond a black-and-white tale of innocent law abiders fending off the obnoxious criminals. Not that I'm suggesting that we turn to GTA IV to solve the gang problem or that we should we make it required viewing in our high schools. The game is a carnival of violence, deceit, and cruelty that makes you slightly nauseated after playing for only a few hours—I had to periodically rest and play a Neil Diamond song just to calm down. But I have to admit that I was surprised a video game had such a well-developed, fine-grained understanding of human nature.</p> <p>The game's success can be traced to a simple principle: Niko Bellic, the protagonist who roams around Liberty City, making his way in the world by building relationships. Even in a city dominated by warring gangs and unjustifiable carnage, people have to find ways to work together not only to commit crimes but to resolve disputes, respond to injustice, and otherwise fulfill their assigned missions. As you move the dashing Niko through beautifully rendered streets, you build up his network of friends and comrades. Of course, in the exploitative terrain of the black market, you can't trust anyone for long; this is one of the key challenges that animate GTA IV. But the point is that a lone wolf can't survive. Niko has to take a risk and trust somebody.</p> <p>Even the criminals must follow this rule. In the real Big Apple, the local gangs are made up of self-interested mercenaries who move about as money and circumstances dictate. A Jamaican &quot;posse&quot; may control one project one day, but they'll move over a few blocks if the money is right. A gang member might also become a turncoat and join another outfit, even one run by a former adversary. In other words, free agents abound on Wall Street and ghetto streets. GTA IV's Liberty City gets this fluidity of enmity and alliance exactly right. A friend can become a foe; a gang member can turn on you; an ally is never to be trusted for too long. You can't do it alone, and the game forces you to make your bets.</p> <p>The story lines of GTA IV's missions also resonate with life on New York's streets. Should our protagonist help his cousin even if it is not in his own interest? Should Niko remain with his girlfriend, even if it might jeopardize his personal safety? Could an enemy gang be befriended and turned into an ally? I was always left with a residue of self-doubt after making these decisions. Right and wrong are never so clear—at least in terms of the consequences of one's actions—and Niko's mission can fail because you either did or <em>did not</em> do the right thing.</p> <p>While GTA IV is both a dizzying and dazzling experience, I definitely won't be playing the game up until the final mission. I could never master the joystick in time to stop running over pedestrians while I'm steering Niko's car. But I am curious to see what comes next.&nbsp; <a>GTA IV</a> was, by all reports, a huge improvement over Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and I can imagine GTA V taking us to even greater heights (or depths, depending on your perspective). <a href="">*</a></p> <p>If the creative team needs some fuel, they might want to visit Chicago's South Side. There, they will find that gang killings and mercenary actions have some interesting consequences—beyond the tragedy of injury and fatality. When a real-life mission fails and gangs are indicted, the remaining players must first form a gang before they can move on. No one can move forward until they come together and develop shared interests. The result can be a powerful feeling of solidarity—albeit in the South Side, it is one often wasted on disreputable pursuits.</p> <p>Another logical step for the creative crew at <a href="">Rockstar Games</a> would be to extend the logic of the current game: Why not let us form gangs ourselves in virtual space? Imagine the possibilities: My friend and I could form a gang of nasty South Asian suburban nerds. A bunch of middle-class frat boys might realize their common interests. Let women join in the fun, too. They could create a group of disgruntled ex-corporate lawyers who, after failing to make partner, go after their pig-headed male superiors. In this way, the enemies would depend on the gangs we formed, and, over time, the landscape would reflect our decisions.</p> <p>And, hey, maybe different gangs can advertise online and play each other? I, for one, would love to form a group of writers who could take on the editors at publishing houses who zap my creative juices with their unintelligible feedback. I'd like to run them over in the streets, get out of my car and bash their heads in, steal their keys and money, break into their homes and destroy their furniture, and then I'd … You get the point.</p> <p><em><strong> <a>Correction</a>, May 12, 2008:</strong></em> This story originally and incorrectly referred to Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas as the &quot;third version&quot; of the Grand Theft Auto series. It was actually the fifth Grand Theft Auto game—two titles, Vice City and San Andreas, were released between Grand Theft Auto III and Grand Theft Auto IV. (<a href="">Return</a> to the corrected sentence.)</p> Fri, 09 May 2008 10:46:00 GMT Sudhir Venkatesh 2008-05-09T10:46:00Z What Grand Theft Auto IV gets right about gangland and illegal economies. Technology What Grand Theft Auto IV gets right about gangland and illegal economies. 2191012 Sudhir Venkatesh Gaming false false false A scene from Grand Theft Auto IV Skinflint <p>The first thing that grabs your attention about the sex scandal involving New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer is, of course, the client. But, there's another aspect to the story that should raise eyebrows: $4,300. That's <a href=";sq=%244%2C300+spitzer&amp;st=nyt">the bill</a> Spitzer incurred for his dangerous liaison at the Mayflower hotel. Who would pay that much, and could you ever <em>really</em> get your money's worth? </p> <p>In fact, $4,300 is not an altogether alarming sum of money in the high-end sex market. Spitzer got a bargain—and that may have been his downfall. </p> <p>In many so-called global cities, like New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, sex is part of a lucrative service sector that has developed for those with expendable income. Soliciting a prostitute can be as pricey as hiring a personal chef or finding a private school for your kids. In New York, it's not hard to find sex workers who charge $10,000 per &quot;session,&quot; which can last for 15 minutes or two hours (jokes aside).</p> <p>Although you can still drive through neighborhoods where prices aren't nearly so high—in New York, the average rate for intercourse is around $75 if you find a street-based prostitute—the biggest changes in recent years have occurred at the upper end of the market. Cities that cleaned up their red-light districts, like Chicago's West Side or Hell's Kitchen in Manhattan, pushed the sex-work trade indoors—to the Internet, to strip clubs, to escort services. These indoor sex workers created a larger, less publicly visible market that tends to serve the middle and upper classes. </p> <p>I found this world by accident in 1999, when I started interviewing sex workers in Hell's Kitchen, Spanish Harlem, and other New York neighborhoods that were points of entry for newly arrived immigrants. I expected to hang out on the streets, but in fact I had to enter apartments, public-housing projects, strip clubs, bars, and brothels to locate subjects. What I found was women checking voice mail or sitting behind computers watching their online ads and e-mail accounts. This was the sex world that New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani helped to create when he drove prostitutes off the streets as part of his effort to make the city hospitable for upper-end residential development and tourism. While it's hard to say whether the total number of prostitutes increased, the Giuliani strategy did expand the indoor market: the white-collar workers who may have visited a street prostitute now and then quickly discovered a discreet, online, and referral-based world of higher-priced sex workers. The higher end of the market exploded. </p> <p>The new &quot;indoor&quot; sex worker differs from the older prototype. In the past, sex workers tended to view their role as part-time &quot;survivors&quot;—selling sex to keep up a drug habit, to pay rent, or to eke out a living until something better came along. Pushed indoors, some became &quot;careerist.&quot; They were professionals offering a legitimate service, like nursing or counseling; they looked at their work as partly therapeutic. These indoor workers stay in the game for longer periods of time because they find a level of autonomy and flexibility that the legitimate economy often does not provide. They're also less likely to be targeted by cops, social workers, or clergy, all of whom work to get street-based prostitutes out of the profession. The street-based prostitute tends to leave the job after six to nine months, returning when money is tight or drugs need to be purchased. </p> <p>At the lucrative end of the market, I have found it useful to think of three tiers of women (men constitute only about 10 percent of high-end prostitutes). Spitzer was paying for &quot;Tier 1&quot; sex workers: Fees usually range from $2,000 to $5,000 per session; women come in all ages and ethnic stripes; they rigorously guard their health and watch for STDs; and most have a high-school degree but have limited work experience. They can promise you discretion, but most work through escort services that are routinely under surveillance. In practice, this means buyer beware. </p> <p>&quot;Tier 2&quot; includes women who charge up to $7,500 for a session. These women tend to be white, they may have a college degree (or be actively enrolled in school), and they usually require a referral before they will take on a new john. They also have a small, exclusive clientele, sometimes as few as a dozen men whom they service. Unlike Tier 1 workers, they do not rely on escort agencies, so they keep all of their money. </p> <p>Finally, there are the &quot;Tier 3&quot; sex workers, who can charge in excess of $10,000 per rendezvous. They may have only four or five clients, and they typically charge their clients an additional monthly surcharge for their various needs—rent, clothing, medicine.</p> <p>Both Tier 2 and Tier 3 workers can typically do more to safeguard a client's privacy. There are no guarantees, of course, but they tend to shun contractual relationships with agencies that advertise their services. There is less of a paper trail. They typically will only take a john via a referral, and even then, they may require that the john &quot;date&quot; them for weeks before deciding to offer up sex. I have heard of Tier 2 and 3 sex workers who vet prospective clients for months, sometimes hiring a private detective to see if the john is stable—psychologically and financially. As a former attorney general, Spitzer must have known all this.</p> <p>What high-end clients pay for may surprise you. For example, according to my ongoing interviews of several hundred sex workers, approximately 40 percent of trades in New York's sex economy fail to include a physical act beyond light petting or kissing. No intercourse, no oral stimulation, etc. That's one helluva conversation. But it's what many clients want. Flush with cash, these elite men routinely turn their prostitute into a second partner or spouse. Over the course of a year, they will sometimes persuade the woman to take on a new identity, replete with a fake name, a fake job, a fake life history, and so on. They may want to have sex or they may simply want to be treated like King for a Day. </p> <p>Melissa is a 38-year-old white woman living in Hoboken, N.J. (She asked that I not use her full name.) I met her in 2002, when she was in Hell's Kitchen trying to get her sister to stop turning tricks in local bars. Instead, she ended up entering the sex trade herself. She felt unable to advance in her corporate job and grew tired of watching men with less experience receive promotions. In the words of elite sex workers, she is currently &quot;on retainer&quot; to a partner at a Manhattan law firm—I love the irony of the phrasing. She receives $10,000 per month, which usually translates into three meetings. &quot;The last time I met him, I gave him a bath,&quot; she told me. &quot;I told him he was the most sensitive man I'd ever met. I never tell him he's a piece of shit; I make him feel like superman.&quot; Melissa estimates that she has sex with him about once a month, but as often he will simply masturbate in front of her. </p> <p>Although women may charge more for their services in New York, there is a burgeoning high-end sex market in most global cities, and men from the financial sector are an important part of the clientele. Spitzer got caught, but it is actually quite rare for either sex worker or client to be apprehended; usually, it's the low-end folks who get their pictures on the police department's Web site. While the street-based prostitutes I study report getting apprehended four to six times per year, the majority of higher-tier women seem to have relatively little trouble with the law. </p> <p>This doesn't mean the elite women have a great life. Melissa and other high-end workers routinely experience physical abuse at the hands of their clients—on average, they report getting abused twice per year, which is better than the six times a year that street-based workers report but still, clearly, troubling. Escort services (usually owned by men) often charge Tier 1 prostitutes various fees that reduce their take-home pay. If they work as independent contractors, as Tier 2 and 3 women tend to, they have to fight their clients to get paid on time. Plus, their lives are cash-based—they can't plan for the future or make any real investments. </p> <p>The moral of the story, I suppose, is that even in the black market, you can find a glass ceiling.</p> Wed, 12 Mar 2008 22:53:00 GMT Sudhir Venkatesh 2008-03-12T22:53:00Z Did Eliot Spitzer get caught because he didn't spend enough on prostitutes? Business Did Eliot Spitzer get caught because he didn't spend enough on prostitutes? 2186491 Sudhir Venkatesh The Dismal Science false false false Gang Leader for a Day <p>Dear Alex,</p> <p>There are quite a number of interesting lessons to be taken away from the transformation of public housing in Chicago.</p> <p>On the whole, I tend to agree with your sentiment: Losing the projects has led to a loss of awareness of poverty in the United States (a fact that is not going to be helped by the withdrawal of John Edwards from the presidential race). And you are right again in thinking that we are moving toward a European (or Latin American) urban landscape: the poor shunted to the outside while the middle and upper classes reclaim the central city.</p> <p>It is interesting to note how this movement to demolish distressed public housing began. The objective was to replace concentrated, highly segregated inner-city poverty with &quot;mixed-income&quot; housing in which the black poor would live with the nonblack middle class. Sounds noble enough. The problem was that there was no social science evidence that this kind of mixing was possible or even preferable. Hundreds of millions of dollars were given by HUD to mayors, with minimal oversight. All this rested on the hope that the poor would either live in newly designed mixed-income neighborhoods—or use vouchers to live among the middle class. </p> <p>Today, we face a difficult situation. As was the case with welfare reform, about a third of the families have been helped by this sea change. But these are small families who tended to have work experience and who were ready for a new home—in the words of Dorothy Battie, a tenant leader who helped her neighbors to relocate from Chicago's Robert Taylor Homes, &quot;These people just needed a little kick in the pants.&quot; </p> <p>But most families had greater needs: They were disabled, had many children, no private market experience, and so on. These folks lost a safety net when the projects came down, and few city governments took the time to help them relocate effectively. Chicago has been the unquestioned failure across the country—nearly 90 percent of families have moved to black and poor neighborhoods as bad as the projects; New York, and smaller cities like Tucson and Seattle have done better. </p> <p>It's hard to imagine that a family could be worse off than in the projects! But, in fact, as the poor migrate outward, they find communities that simply don't have the services to cope with the influx of needy households: There are not enough settlement houses and faith-based organizations providing food and clothing; there is minimal affordable housing; landlords tend not to have much experience with the travails of poor people; and schools can't provide remedial education or day care. Public housing was more than simply shelter for most families. It was a place in which a number of supportive services for the poor congealed. Policymakers have simply hoped that the private market would provide a similar safety net and, to date, it hasn't occurred. Look around Baltimore, Atlanta, Chicago, and Miami and you see a real mess. </p> <p>But, as I follow families, I find the same kind of resilience and creativity that I saw in the projects. Some of it is truly inspiring: Dorothy Battie helps a network of a dozen families stay together by reinforcing the kind of sharing they used to experience in the projects: They trade day care for free food, one family cooks while the other does the laundry… and these families may be traveling several miles to do this, where once they lived on separate floors. Even the squatters have come together by staying in touch with one another and helping one another deal with homelessness. </p> <p>Sometimes, however, the relocation of project tenants produces the bizarre: I will never forget watching hard-core street-gang leaders from the projects try to adjust to the loss of their housing development. This meant the practical loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars in drug money. They would pull up into suburban high school parking lots to meet with local kids, hoping to start up a gang in a new neighborhood. As they spiritedly made their sales pitch to a ragtag group of middle-class youth, inevitably one of the teenagers in attendance would ask, &quot;Does being in a gang mean I can buy a 10-speed bike&quot; or &quot;Will I have to give up my allowance if I join the gang?&quot; </p> <p>In these moments, I felt like I was tailing Willy Loman in Arthur Miller's play <em>Death of a Salesman</em>. Street toughs—self-described &quot;thugs&quot;—were trying desperately to hold onto a way of life, filled with prestige, violence, and riches, and they were met with an innocence that made one think of Spanky and Alfalfa from <em>Our Gang</em>. Most of these gang leaders eventually gave up. Some were arrested or killed, but many simply faded into obscurity by working part-time jobs in the service sector.</p> <p>This massive federal initiative to alleviate poverty was done with the best of intentions: namely, to create vibrant, economically diverse neighborhoods. And nearly every tenant I ever met agreed that the conditions of the projects needed to be changed. But, in the end, the pace of demolition and relocation was too quick, there were few watchdogs looking to see that government monies were spent effectively, and the stories were never sexy enough to sustain the attention of academics and journalists. So, not surprisingly, we now hear calls of &quot;land grabs&quot; on the part of developers and of mayors wanting to get rid of the poor.</p> <p>I think the next few years will be critical for Americans, because we seem to be facing a new kind of poverty, one that is largely out of sight. But the older and wiser among us would probably point out that, in the late 1950s, we were similarly awakened by the shock of deep rural poverty and entrenched urban ghettos. All this makes me think of James Baldwin's phrase &quot;The Fire Next Time.&quot;</p> <p>Sudhir</p> Thu, 31 Jan 2008 23:02:00 GMT Sudhir Venkatesh 2008-01-31T23:02:00Z Arts When You Close a Housing Project, Where Do All the Gang Members Go? 2183376 Sudhir Venkatesh The Book Club false false false Gang Leader for a Day <p>Dear Alex,</p> <p>Many thanks for the thoughtful summary. You really hit at one of the critical questions that motivated my desire to write <em>Gang Leader for a Day</em>. What can I possibly give back to some of the poorest people who opened up their homes and their lives to me? I think the kernel of the answer lies in your own comments: I'm not sure that there is an easy answer, but the point may be to simply embrace and struggle with the challenge as long as possible. More specifically, I think we all need to find a way to bring this struggle into our writing, research, and reportage.</p> <p>I don't mean to say practical things can't be done. I've certainly tried: I've hired public-housing tenants and trained them in word processing, data entry, and field interviewing—many have gone on to full-time jobs. I've directed philanthropic investment to the projects and organized social-service programs. And I've known many reporters who have done the same—and a whole lot more. But the fact of the matter remains that I have been blessed with a career, while most of the disadvantaged families I studied have stayed poor.</p> <p>Let me come at this question from a different tack. First, it should be noted that academics have different standards than journalists. I have two criteria that I must follow. On the one hand, my universities sponsor my research, and they are adamant that I limit the risk to &quot;human subjects.&quot; This usually means changing names, obtaining signed approval, and ensuring that subjects can pull out of my research projects (at <em>any</em> time, for <em>any</em> reason). The second set of guidelines stems from my role as an &quot;ethnographer,&quot; a fancy way of saying I conduct research through some combination of &quot;participation-observation&quot; and interviewing. My subjects aren't necessarily &quot;sources&quot; in the journalistic sense of the term. I am allowed to make relationships—indeed, ethnographers believe that participating in the world being studied is an excellent way of understanding that world. Now, we have to be careful: I can't kill someone to write about homicides, but I can work in a factory to produce a scientific study of factory workers. (One thinks of Barbara Ehrenreich's excellent book, <em>Nickel and Dimed.</em>)</p> <p>Even if we are not participating actively, we ethnographers don't believe in the &quot;fly on the wall&quot; posture, where researchers have no impact on&nbsp;their subjects. As a consequence, ethnographers tend to be deeply reflective about their relationships. I wrote <em>Gang Leader</em> in the first person so that people could understand the conditions in which I was working. Too often, I felt, academics and journalists write about the poor and never tell you about their role. </p> <p>I learned the limits of my role as a detached social scientist right away when the tenant leader, Ms. Bailey, scolded me for being naive enough to think I could hang around without helping, hurting, or otherwise affecting people along the way. She once told me, &quot;If you don't understand this, you will end up getting a Ph.D. in stupidity.&quot; This was the nice response. Others simply told me, &quot;We'll kick your ass if we don't like what you did.&quot; That was the beginning of a long road, in which people ended up thinking of me as a &quot;hustler,&quot; just like them. </p> <p>The important point is that, by construing me as a hustler, they made sense of me according to the rules of <em>their</em> world, not mine. This is why self-reflection matters: We learn that their mode of understanding my role was not just silly or bitter, but it reveals something about who they were. It revealed an important aspect of their world.</p> <p>In most poor communities, people pay a price for participating with researchers and journalists. Some folks can be shunned (or suffer physical harm) for being viewed as a source, interviewee, or snitch; conversely, however, others may experience status increases because they were important enough to be interviewed. I've seen plenty of cases in which journalists affected a community simply by asking questions, taking photos, etc. The problem is that they don't stick around to document the consequences of their presences. Since I was in the area for nearly a decade, I heard a lot of feedback—not always positive. But, I wanted to acknowledge my role—as naive as it was!</p> <p>Bringing this back to your question, maybe we should be more open about our work (as academics and journalists). In addition to being philanthropic, paying our subjects, etc., I think we would do them justice by reflecting on our own role. Again, part of the problem may be that most journalists and researchers don't have the luxury to stay around long enough to reflect on the impact they have had. But (as I think you would agree) it would be naive to give the impression that we have <em>no</em> impact. The question remains: How do we make this a part of our reporting and writing, without detracting from the story at hand?</p> <p>I don't mean that we should all write confessions into our stories—I've never found this to be altogether satisfying anyway. But we could all do a better job of noting our failures, foibles, and missteps along the way—especially when we study the poor, whose lives are often told through a litany of personal inadequacies. </p> <p>Sudhir</p> Wed, 30 Jan 2008 21:57:00 GMT Sudhir Venkatesh 2008-01-30T21:57:00Z Arts How I Became a Hustler 2183241 Sudhir Venkatesh The Book Club false false false