Isegoria

American expat Patrick McGroarty was covering the Oscar Pistorius trial in Pretoria when his home in Johannesburg got burgled. They came back for more the next month. Around the same time, robbers killed the South African national team’s goalie — leading the nation to wonder “why South Africans take from each other, and why these desperate assailants are so quick to kill.”

In this discussion of “South Africans,” McGroarty brings up the touchy subject of race exactly once:

Though the murder rate has fallen by more than half since the end of white minority rule in 1994, the number of people killed in South Africa each year still ranks among the highest in the world.

McGroarty’s family moved into an apartment complex with 24-hour security.

Before becoming mayor of Cali, Colombia, Rodrigo Guerrero was a Harvard-trained epidemiologist. Once in office, he led a data-driven fight against crime:

When Guerrero became mayor in 1992, the conventional wisdom was that the vast bulk of Cali’s murders stemmed from disputes over cocaine trafficking — at the time, the Cali Cartel was overtaking the Medellín Cartel in control of the cocaine trade.

But Guerrero didn’t assume, he measured. The police, courts and every other institution that counted murders all came up with different figures. Guerrero had weekly meetings with these groups and academic researchers to find more accurate figures. Then they mapped homicides by time and neighborhood.

That took about a year — and his term was only two and a half years — but he found something important: deaths were concentrated on weekends, especially payday weekends. (On his first New Year’s Eve as mayor, there were 22 homicides in one night.) The same was true in Medellín, which was why El Mundo’s crime reporters needed dozens of ways to describe violent death, as the Eskimo people are said to have for snow.

“Things that happen on the weekend in our country are often associated with alcohol,” Guerrero said. So Cali started to look at alcohol in the blood of victims (few perpetrators were caught) — and found a large percentage of victims had very high levels. “My initial hypothesis was that this was drug trafficking,” he said. “But the traffickers were not going to wait for weekends to resolve their conflicts — and get their victims drunk.”

The astronomical murder rate was related to the cocaine trade, Guerrero concluded — but only indirectly. Cocaine created social disruption and intensified an already-violent culture. “Drug trafficking was like H.I.V.,” Guerrero said. “It interferes with the defense mechanisms — in this case police and justice.” Those institutions were corrupted and degraded to the point where practically no one paid a penalty for murder — a suspect was identified in only 3 percent of homicides and convicted in a small percentage of those.

Guerrero banned the sale of alcohol after 1 a.m. on weeknights and 2 a.m. on Fridays and Saturdays. (That 2 a.m. is considered early closing says a lot about the problem.) As he expected, bar owners — and bar patrons — objected. Guerrero asked bars to try it for three months, but success was obvious nearly instantly. The effects were big enough to overcome the objections.

The other decree banned the carrying of guns — enforced by checkpoints and pat-downs — on payday weekends and holidays. The army, which held a monopoly on the manufacture and sale of guns, fought the law. But again, success was persuasive. Researchers compared gun ban days to similar days with no ban in Cali and in Bogotá, which replicated the program. They found that neighborhoods with the ban saw 14 percent fewer homicides in Cali and 13 percent fewer in Bogotá than neighborhoods without restrictions.

Together, those two decrees cut the homicide rate where they were instituted by 35 percent.

There was more: Since the data showed that a large majority of offenders were under 24, Guerrero instituted a curfew for young people in high crime neighborhoods between 11 p.m. and 5 a.m. on weekends.

Carl from Chicago talks about his professional visit to a maximum security prison years ago, where he was performing an audit:

The first thing you noticed in the prison was how LOUD it was; everyone was screaming the word “motherf&cker” in about 250 variants. It was a cacophony of yelling and noise and very disconcerting. The prison cells were very small with 2 inmates each; one stood menacingly at the bars and one was usually on a bunkbed (there wasn’t really enough room for both of them to stand). If you walked too closely to the cell they might spit on you; if you walked below the high tiers they might throw urine down on you.

The prison was very hot and stifling. The prison was built in the 1860’s long before the concept of air conditioning even existed in practical terms. There was little air flow and the whole place stunk. This audit was conducted during a long, humid summer.

When you think of a jail you assume people are “locked up” all day; this wasn’t the case at the Joliet Correctional Center. During the day likely half the prisoners were walking around, either going to the yard or going from place to place for one reason or another. Guards and prisoners were intermixed and this was likely how they kept the whole place from exploding in the summer heat. I just walked around them intermixed too, in a suit. After a while they just checked me in and I would do my work independently without a guard escorting me as I found my way around the facility.

For me it was odd because everywhere I walked people would scream something unique in my direction which I couldn’t understand. It sounded something like “yoalwr” in one syllable. After a couple weeks I finally figured it out. The prisoners were very street smart; they knew I wasn’t a cop because the police strut in a certain confident manner and act like they own the place (which they do). They also figured I wasn’t a state employee (like an accountant or manager) because they didn’t wear suits and also acted with an air of quiet resignation. To them – I was someone else. A lawyer! That’s the only guy who would walk around the prison in their universe. After I thought about it a bit I realized they were asking “Are you a lawyer” which seemed like a positive thing to pretend to be because a lawyer could be seen as a friend to an inmate should they decide to take the place over and take everyone hostage which from my perspective could occur at any time (although it didn’t).

If you watch “Cool Hand Luke” or other movies you think that the guards own the facility and that they push around the prisoners. I didn’t get that vibe at all at the Joliet Correctional Center. The guards and the prisoners in a way were both serving their sentences in that ancient, broken down, hot hell. Both sides seemed to have a wary detente and likely the prison gangs kept the place in line, since an orderly confinement was best for their businesses. While I was there they busted a guard for drugs and assisting inmates and I wasn’t surprised; it seemed like many of them were from the same neighborhoods and being an entry level guard was a low paid, dangerous job that you probably didn’t want to make even more desperate by mixing it up with maximum security prisoners who are mostly gang members and hardened criminals many in for very long sentences.

If you watch the surveillance video of Tamir Rice, you see a “youth” in a hoodie, walking around with a handgun out, and then “10 minutes later,” that same individual getting up from a park bench as a patrol car comes screaming onto the scene — silently, because there’s no audio, and at a very low frame-rate, too.

It does look like Tamir reaches down to his waistband with his right hand — and then he’s down. We have no audio, so we don’t know if the cop yelled “Hands up!” or not — but if Tamir was reaching for a gun, it’s hard to blame the officer for shooting first, even if it turned out to be a replica.

It does raise the question of why they came roaring in like that though. Did they think they had an active shooter situation?

I don’t know the standard protocol for addressing a thug with a pistol, but I’d want my shotgun and some distance — and back-up, of course.

It turns out the real reason everything went sideways is likely pretty simple — the officer who shot Tamir Rice was unfit for duty:

The Independence police memo describes an episode in which a supervising officer suspended gun training with Loehmann after Loehmann had an emotional breakdown about a girlfriend.

“During a state range qualification course, Ptl Loehmann was distracted and weepy,” Polak wrote, naming the trainer as Sgt Tinnirello. “[Loehmann] could not follow simple directions, could not communicate clear thoughts nor recollections, and his handgun performance was dismal. Sgt Tinnirello tried to work through this with Ptl Loehmann by giving him some time. But, after some talking it was clear to Sgt Tinnirello that the recruit was just not mentally prepared to be doing firearm training …

“Ptl Loehmann continued with his emotional meltdown to a point where Sgt Tinnirello could not take him into the store, so they went to get something to eat and he continued to try and calm Ptl Loehmann. Sgt Tinnirello describes the recruit as being very downtrodden, melancholy with some light crying. Sgt Tinnirello later found this emotional perplexity was due to a personal issue with Ptl Loehmann’s on and off again girlfriend whom he was dealing with till 0400 hrs the night before. (Pti Loehmann was scheduled for 0800 the morning in question).”

Some of the comments made by Ptl Loehmann during this discourse were to the effect of, “I should have gone to NY”, “maybe I should quit”, “I have no friends”, “I only hang out with 73-year-old priests”, “I have cried every day for four months about this girl.”

In recommending Loehmann’s dismissal, Polak listed what he said were other performance shortcomings, including Loehmann’s having left his gun unlocked, lied to supervisors and failed to follow orders.

“Due to this dangerous loss of composure during live range training and his inability to manage this personal stress, I do not believe Ptl Loehmann shows the maturity needed to work in our employment,” Polak concludes. “For these reasons, I am recommending he be released from the employment of the city of Independence. I do not believe time, nor training, will be able to change or correct these deficiencies.”