The Las Vegas Metro police department has a new mobile gang of cops devoted to a saturation strategy in targeted inner city neighborhoods:

Before setting out, the team goes for dinner, and that’s where Palmer explains the mission of the Metropolitan Police Department’s saturation teams, or sat teams for short.

It’s an innovative, proactive approach to policing. Don’t handle calls for service. Leave that to the regular patrol cops. Talk to as many citizens as possible to find out who the bad guys are. Get people off the street who don’t belong, [sic] and maybe prevent a robbery or burglary, or worse, from happening.

We’re not worried about turning in tickets, he says. We’re trying to get the bad guys off the street.

— Lawrence Mower, Las Vegas Review-Journal (2008-11-30): Las Vegas police use saturation strategy to cool hot spots of crime; A bright light in a big city

Here are three things that you ought to know about how Metro decides who doesn’t belong, and how they get the bad guys off the street.

First, cops in the saturation team gangs pick and choose whether or not to come down on any given person who is breaking the law. They openly state that they make these decisions based on who they want to hassle and bust and pull off the street, and they openly state that they decide that based on where you’re from, how much money you make, and other proxies for racial and socio-economic status.

Sat team officers have to make constant judgment calls. They won’t pull over and arrest someone in Summerlin, for example, who doesn’t have bike reflectors. But if the area has seen a rash of burglaries, and the person on the bike has prior burglary convictions and doesn’t live there, they will. [Summerlin is a rich suburb of Las Vegas. –R.G.]

If you see a guy who jaywalks, and he’s a 42-year-old man who works at the Fremont casino and is heading home … shake his hand and let him go, Dixon said. If you stop a guy who jaywalks, and he’s a thug and he’s got a history of burglaries and he’s got a crack pipe in his pocket, you take him into jail.

— Lawrence Mower, Las Vegas Review-Journal (2008-11-30): Las Vegas police use saturation strategy to cool hot spots of crime; A bright light in a big city

Second, as you may have already guessed, if one of Metro’s sat gangs decides that you’re the sort of person they want to lock in a cage, rather than the sort of person they’ll shake hands with and let go, they will use any chickenshit charge they can make up in order to justify getting in your face, demanding that you explain yourself and justify your existence to them, and, if they aren’t satisfied, grabbing you off the street and throwing you in jail.

They use whatever laws are at their disposal: jaywalking, riding a bicycle without reflectors, outstanding warrants. They work together, swarming hot spots around the valley.

— Lawrence Mower, Las Vegas Review-Journal (2008-11-30): Las Vegas police use saturation strategy to cool hot spots of crime; A bright light in a big city

They use whatever laws are at their disposal because, of course, they don’t actually give a damn about the law. This is outcome-driven policing, and the law is just an excuse to bust the people that they’ve already decided don’t belong. That’s because the purpose of these teams is not to stop or respond to crimes; it’s to control people, and in particular to force the the socio-economic cleansing of undesirable people from the cop-occupied neighborhoods. For exmple:

It’s past 9 p.m., and officer Robert Boehm turns down a street near the Cheyenne Pointe apartments. He sees an 18-year-old on a bicycle rolling through a stop sign on a residential street.

The young man looks familiar. It’s because Boehm and other sat team members busted him the week before for stealing a BB gun from a Kmart.

Boehm says that BB guns have been the weapon of choice for making drug-related robberies right now.

He was released from jail just a few days ago.

This is the perfect example, Boehm says. What is he doing out here?

The man says he lives near Washington Avenue and Nellis Boulevard, about four miles away. His uncle lives at the Cheyenne Pointe apartments. He isn’t heading there or to his home, however, and can’t explain where he’s going.

Boehm searches him. No drugs. No weapons. But he is a person that is probably up to trouble, Boehm says.

He handcuffs him, stuffs his bike in the trunk of his patrol car and takes him down to the Clark County Detention Center. The charges are failing to obey a traffic control device and not having lights on a bicycle.

— Lawrence Mower, Las Vegas Review-Journal (2008-11-30): Las Vegas police use saturation strategy to cool hot spots of crime; A bright light in a big city

This kind of arbitrary rousting of someone, based on absolutely nothing other than a paper-thin pretext and the cop’s conviction that somebody’s probably up to trouble, is dignified by Las Vegas Metro cops and their sycophants at the Review-Journal as old-school policing with professionalism and an innovative, proactive approach to policing.

Third, here is how members of the saturation gangs talk about themselves to a sympathetic press:

The first week, the criminals were like deer caught in the headlights, he said.

Eyes opened, he said. Criminals said, Oh my god, what is this?

— Lawrence Mower, Las Vegas Review-Journal (2008-11-30): Las Vegas police use saturation strategy to cool hot spots of crime; A bright light in a big city

And:

Twenty people were booked this night during the shift. Nine were for felony crimes, including one for a stolen moped.

Honestly, best job in the world, Boehm says. I’m living the dream.

— Lawrence Mower, Las Vegas Review-Journal (2008-11-30): Las Vegas police use saturation strategy to cool hot spots of crime; A bright light in a big city

And:

We’re like wolves, officer Justin Gauker says. We travel in a pack.

— Lawrence Mower, Las Vegas Review-Journal (2008-11-30): Las Vegas police use saturation strategy to cool hot spots of crime; A bright light in a big city

Well. I feel safer already.

I should say that when I refer to cops as a street gang or Gangsters in Blue or what have you, I’m not indulging in metaphor. I don’t mean that cops act kinda like gangsters (as if this were just a matter of personal vices or institutional failures); I mean that they are gangsters — that is the policing system operating according successfully to its normal function — that they are the organized hired muscle of the State, and that the outfit operates just like any other street gang in terms of their commitments, their attitudes, their practices, and their idea of professional ethics.

— GT 2008-11-26: Professional courtesy, part 2: thugs on patrol

And let’s just say that Metro’s new roving wolfpacks have not done very much to make me reconsider that analysis.

See also:

• GT 2008-06-05: Neighborhood Safety Ghettoes in D.C.
• GT 2008-09-25: How cops see themselves
• GT 2008-08-22: No, seriously, I could swear the water in this pot is getting a little hotter (#5)

So here is the latest action alert for the I.A.R.B.. (I fear that this is going to be a long-running series.) As a reminder of why we fight:

Bad writers, and especially scientific, political, and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones, and unnecessary words like expedite, ameliorate, predict, extraneous, deracinated, clandestine, subaqueous, and hundreds of others constantly gain ground from their Anglo-Saxon numbers. The jargon peculiar to Marxist writing (hyena, hangman, cannibal, petty bourgeois, these gentry, lackey, flunkey, mad dog, White Guard, etc.) consists largely of words translated from Russian, German, or French; but the normal way of coining a new word is to use Latin or Greek root with the appropriate affix and, where necessary, the size formation. It is often easier to make up words of this kind (deregionalize, impermissible, extramarital, non-fragmentary and so forth) than to think up the English words that will cover one’s meaning. The result, in general, is an increase in slovenliness and vagueness.

. . . As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier — even quicker, once you have the habit — to say In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that than to say I think. If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don’t have to hunt about for the words; you also don’t have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious. When you are composing in a hurry — when you are dictating to a stenographer, for instance, or making a public speech — it is natural to fall into a pretentious, Latinized style. Tags like a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind or a conclusion to which all of us would readily assent will save many a sentence from coming down with a bump. By using stale metaphors, similes, and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself. This is the significance of mixed metaphors. The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a visual image. When these images clash — as in The Fascist octopus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot — it can be taken as certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming; in other words he is not really thinking. Look again at the examples I gave at the beginning of this essay. . . . In [the example from a Communist pamphlet], the writer knows more or less what he wants to say, but an accumulation of stale phrases chokes him like tea leaves blocking a sink.

— George Orwell (1946): Politics and the English Language

Now here’s an example of exactly that kind of writing, which I’ve taken from an article recently printed over at LibCom. I take it that the article has something to do with radical feminism, gender identity, and sex-reassignment surgery. Beyond that–well, let’s just try to read it.

What matters, then, is the practical implications of the best insights of feminist theory. Clearly, the violence and intimidation transgender people routinely face is unconscionable. But the question again boils down to the contradictions between the politics of affirmation and the politics of negation. This may at first seem strange. As Slavoj ?@c5;bd;i?@c5;be;ek amongst others has argued, the difference between the politics of oppressed and marginalised groups seeking to defend themselves and the politics of class struggle is that class struggle seeks as its end point the abolition of class. "Class pride" is a reactionary concept, and though class relations can and do express themselves through communities and class identities, if class struggle is to be part of a revolutionary project rather than the affirmation of the working class within capitalism then it must abolish capitalism and with it abolish class. Class is furthermore a material position within capitalism – those who have nothing to sell but their labour and who must work for the money necessary to live, those dispossessed of ownership of capital and who must sell their labour time and labour power to those who have or administer it. It is not a sociological category, but a condition and a social relation. The struggles of women, ethnic minorities, gays and lesbians insofar as they are organised around the marginalised group must struggle for recognition of various kinds. But this, as so often, is an oversimplification. The various marginalised roles are themselves constituted within the process of their marginalisation – and though the material proletarian condition which is the prerequisite for capital accumulation is demonstrable in a different way to the constitution of various marginalised identities, we can still see the issue in terms of affirmation or negation: in the case of gender, either liberal feminism's affirmation of women as bourgeois subjects with equal legal standing, or the radical project of the negation of gender binaries and with it gender identity.

So what would this look like in practice? I don't pretend to have the answers. In the case of negating the proletarian condition, the answer is relatively straightforward: the direct communisation of the means of production, the abolition of wage labour and the replacement of the state by the construction of real human community through linked councils. Gender cannot be negated in the same way, though the same processes of seizure and transformation growing out of class antagonism. Its fairly easy to imagine that a society where the production of the entire social environment is no longer alienated would allow for a new kind of society and more radical possibilities, but its not enough to talk abstractly of revolution as being the cure-all we must invest our faith in.

But we do know where it can't start – certainly not from the reification of binary gender identities. The task must be to destabalise and desacralise gender, and this cannot be done whilst upholding a belief in the ability to "match" bodily organs to gendered behaviour. The critique of gender cannot be held back because it offends the sensibilities of marginalised groups, and whilst we recognise the difficulties transgender people face, we can't let those difficulties be an excuse to suspend critical thought.

— Django @ LibCom.org (2008-11-28): The Stonewall/Bindel affair, and the politics of transsexuality

I’d like to know what to say about this passage, or the point that the author is trying to make. But I’m not sure whether or not I can, because I’m not sure whether or not I even know what point the author is trying to make. I’m setting aside, for the moment, the fact that nothing after the eighth paragraph even attempts to connect the author’s points to the ostensible topic of the post — the radical feminist journalist Julie Bindel and her expressed views on sex-reassignment surgery. Because, even at a more local level, I think I understand most of the individual sentences, or at least clauses in the passage, but the way that it is written makes it nearly impossible for me to figure out what those parts add up to, or where that whole is supposed to be going by the end of the post, to the extent that I honestly don’t even know whether or how strongly I disagree or agree with what the author’s trying to say.

I suspect that the only way to understand it is for us to dig in and try to rewrite it, so that the author’s point, if he has any, isn’t lost beneath the dull, thudding drumbeat of his language. In any case, even if it turns out that there’s really nothing much, either good or bad, to find in this passage (a conclusion I haven’t yet drawn, but which I haven’t abandoned either), then it’s worth trying as an exercise, if nothing else. If we want to talk about the things we need to talk about, then we need to find better ways of saying things than this.

If you were going to try to rewrite a passage like this to try to make it more clear — especially to those who haven't spent years reading and writing in Marxian jargon — and more enjoyable to read even for those who have, how would you go about it? Just what is going on here? What conclusion does it seem to you he’s trying to get to, and what reasons is he using to get to that conclusion? If you were trying to say what he’s saying, how would you say it well?

See also:

• GT 2008-09-20: Internet Anarchist Revision Brigade: how Burt Green tried to write about statist anti-imperialism and blocked his sink with tea leaves

In some neighborhoods in North Portland, where the gangs are gone and the worst of the development is not yet arrived, there are a number of attempts to organize local defense against the displacement of businesses and residents. Small, independent business and poor residents are, naturally, particularly at risk. People of color will bear a disproportionate burden as previously “bad” or transitional neighborhoods start to look good to developers. Some of the efforts are pretty obviously too little, too late. We’re talking about trying to secure property with rising values, at a time when pocketbooks are pretty bare for the at-risk segments of the population. And securing property has not necessarily been a priority among activists, many of whom have some basic issues with property in the first place. In Portland, motiveSpace, a radical architectural collective, promoting citizen-driven development, seems to be one of the more interesting voices in the conversation, with at least a general sense that this sort of civilian defense is going to require a variety of skills not necessarily found in the average radical toolbox, along with an ability and willingness to bring in some cold, hard cash to get things done. And they have been eager to reach out to other radical community groups. Only time will tell, I suppose, what can actually be accomplished, and to what extent the creation of new urban refugees can be stemmed.

Citizen-driven development–counter-development–is a skillset that counter-economic activists, of whatever particular school, are going to have to acquire, if we not simply to cede vast portions of the country to the other side. If we can’t find a way to make securing property a part of our strategy, then all our debates about the elasticity of land supply and the like will be essentially academic. Mutualist occupancy and use is precisely pie in the sky until we can secure territorial control somewhere, and any sort of homesteading is as unlikely as it is likely to be a mere stop-gap, given the dimensions of the broader housing crisis. There are probably still places where stands can be made, but we should be trying to identify them, while they remain.

— Shawn Wilbur, In the Libertarian Labyrinth (2008-11-08): Counter-development or Bust!

Read the whole thing, if you haven’t already.

See also:

• GT 2008-11-03: Strategery for the post-Bush era #2
• GT 2008-05-22: Strategery for the post-Bush era

Fellow workers,

The Blockheads of the world may insist that unions survive only through violence, and win only through either the intervention of the State or vigilantism against non-unionized fellow workers. Yet somehow, today, I find this message from the Coalition of Immokalee Workers — and a similar e-mail from their allies in the Student/Farmworker Alliance — a southern Florida farmworker’s union that uses nonviolent protest, secondary boycotts, and other creative pressure campaigns on behalf of Florida tomato pickers, and which (because it is a farmworkers’ union) has no access at all to the government labor relations bureaucracy. Somehow, they have survived. Somehow, they have won — again.

From: Coalition of Immokalee Workers
Date: 11:29 AM
To: announce@lists.ciw-online.org
Subject: [CIW News] SUBWAY SIGNS!

Subway, the third largest fast-food chain in the world and the biggest fast-food buyer of Florida tomatoes, reached an agreement this morning with the CIW to help improve wages and working conditions for the workers who pick their tomatoes!

Be sure to visit http://www.ciw-online.org for a photo of the signing and check back soon for more details about this exciting development in the Campaign for Fair Food.

If you are planning a protest as part of the Northeast tour, we ask you to stand down. The tour will still be hitting the road to visit Northeast with news of this newest victory and information on where the Campaign for Fair Food will head next. An updated schedule of events will be posted on the website soon.

Thanks,

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers

For those keeping track at home, here’s the timeline of C.I.W. victories in the penny-per-pound campaign:

• April 2001: C.I.W. launches the Boycott the Bell campaign against Taco Bell, the first campaign to pressure a fast food restaurant into joining the penny-per-pound pass-through program to improve the piece rate for Florida tomato pickers.

• March 2005 — 4 years later: The C.I.W. announces victory in the Taco Bell campaign after four years of negotiations, boycotts, protests, and, finally, a hardball campaign to enlist sympathetic student groups to Boot the Bell by pressuring their colleges and high schools to cancel or call off food-service contracts with Taco Bell. Taco Bell now becomes the first fast food provider to voluntarily pass through money to increase farmworkers’ wages. The C.I.W. announces that it will now turn its attention to getting similar agreements from other large fast-food chains like McDonald’s and Burger King.

• April 2007 — 2 years after that: The C.I.W. announces victory with a penny-per-pound agreement from McDonald’s. It takes two years of negotiations and a low-intensity pressure campaign; just after the C.I.W. announces it is about to escalate with another Taco Bell-style boycott and Truth Tour, McDonald’s signs on for the agreement. The C.I.W. announces that it will organize its next campaign, focusing on Burger King.

• May 2008 — 1 year after that: The C.I.W. announces victory with a penny-per-pound agreement from Burger King after a year of negotiations, some very dirty dealing by Burger King (most of which came back to haunt them when it was exposed), public protests by the C.I.W. and its allies, and national press attention from journalists who supported the C.I.W. and opposed Burger King’s union busting tactics. 13 months after the C.I.W. began its Burger King campaign, Burger King announces that it will sign on for the penny-per-pound agreement. The C.I.W. announces that it will organize campaigns to get new agreements from fast-food restaurants and grocery stores like Whole Foods, Subway, and Chipotle, which sell themselves as healthy, sustainable businesses.

• September 2008 — 4 months after that: The C.I.W. announces victory with a penny-per-pound agreement from Whole Foods. The C.I.W. announces that it will turn its attention to escalating their campaigns to win similar agreements from Subway and Chipotle.

• December 2008 — 3 months after that: After seven months of negotiations, and three months of a low-intensity pressure campaign (focusing on getting supporters to send postcards to Subway’s CEO), the C.I.W. announces plans to launch a multi-city protest Truth Tour in the northeast. Just before the tour begins, Subway agrees to sign on to the penny-per-pound agreement.

If the accelerating trend continues, we can expect the next C.I.W. victory to be announced some time around late January or February. (Except for Whole Foods being two months early, the time it takes for each new victory has consistently followed a geometric decay curve. That can’t last forever, but here’s hoping it holds for a while yet.) In any case, this is a big win, and it's hardly the end. The C.I.W. is still fighting to get an agreement from Chipotle, and is preparing to organize pressure campaigns for other supermarkets and food service outfits. There's a lot more yet to come.

Fellow workers, the C.I.W.’s ongoing series of inspiring victories for Florida farmworkers are both an inspiration and a reminder. We should never forget the power of creative extremism and wildcat unionism — a power that needs no government, no ballot boxes, no political bosses, no Officially Recognized labor bureaucrats, no lawyers, and no Changeling political parties. It’s the power that fellow worker Joe Ettor reminded us all of, as he and his fellow workers struggled to a hard-won victory in the great Bread and Roses textile strike of 1912, when he said:

If the workers of the world want to win, all they have to do is recognize their own solidarity. They have nothing to do but fold their arms and the world will stop. The workers are more powerful with their hands in their pockets than all the property of the capitalists. As long as the workers keep their hands in their pockets, the capitalists cannot put theirs there. With passive resistance, with the workers absolutely refusing to move, lying absolutely silent, they are more powerful than all the weapons and instruments that the other side has for attack.

Yes, we can do it–ourselves. And we will.

¡La lucha sigue–victory to the farmworkers!

See also:

• GT 2008-09-10: ¡Sí se puede! Coalition of Immokalee Workers announces another victory in penny-per-pound agreement with Whole Foods
• GT 2008-09-08: Slavery in Florida’s tomato fields
• GT 2008-07-03: ¡Chipotle, escucha: estamos en la lucha!
• GT 2008-05-27: Even better than I thought: victory for the Coalition of Immokalee Workers against the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange, too
• GT 2008-05-23: ¡Sí se puede! Victory for the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in the Burger King penny-per-pound campaign
• GT 2007-12-06: Solidaridad
• GT 2007-11-30: Coalition of Immokalee Workers marches in Miami
• GT 2007-04-19: ¡Sí se puede! The CIW wins a groundbreaking wages and conditions agreement with McDonald's
• GT 2005-03-31: Anarquistas por La Causa
• GT 2005-03-23: ¡El pueblo unido jamás será vencido!
• GT 2001-08-30: ¡Sí se puede!

As part of its ongoing campaign of socio-economic cleansing, the city government of Las Vegas has taken a bold step against vandalism and graffiti. The problem with graffiti, you’ll remember, is that no matter how artistic it may be, it defaces somebody’s private property without their permission. So now the city of Las Vegas will force you to paint over the graffiti, without your permission, and fine you $900 and up if you choose to leave it up on your own wall.

Well, thank God, says I. If the city government weren’t sending around a bunch of professional busybodies and armed thugs to make sure that Ted Marshall’s walls stay painted the way he wanted them painted — even if he doesn’t want to pant them that way anymore — well, who would? Not Ted Marshall, that’s for sure. Why, it’d be sheer– well, you know.

See also:

• GT 2008-07-09: Well, thank God #10: Got Milk? edition
• GT 2008-05-14: Well, thank God #9: Income Taxi edition
• GT 2008-01-16: Well, thank God #8: Civil Tongue edition
• GT 2007-09-19: Well, thank God #7: sagging and the new sumptuary laws
• GT 2006-08-31: Well, thank God #6: Raed Jarrar and ostensive definitions
• GT 2006-07-18: Well, thank God #5: the Director’s Guild triumphs over insurgent customers
• GT 2006-06-27: Well, thank God #4: Unauthorized Erections edition
• GT 2006-02-23: Well, thank God #3: National Caffeine Awareness Month
• GT 2005-12-05: Well, thank God #2: We Are The Champions edition
• GT 2005-10-27: Well, thank God: The Bluest Eye edition