Oakland: Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong
August 16th, 2010It’s right out of Snow Crash. Where are the Kong Bucks?
Via: New York Times:
In a basement office that serves as a police headquarters and community center, Oakland Chinatown leaders pored over maps of the neighborhood with representatives from a private security firm last week.
“Many of our merchants are already installing cameras,” said Carl Chan, the chairman of the Chinatown Chamber of Commerce, outlining in highlighter the several blocks that form the core of the area. “Eventually, we will be hiring security guards to patrol Chinatown.”
In the wake of the city’s laying off 80 police officers last month, Chinatown is leading a new trend in the crime-ridden city: an increase in privately financed public safety. Mr. Chan has asked every business owner to install a street-facing camera. A new Chinatown security force, perhaps staffed by armed guards, could be on the streets as soon as next month, he said.
The layoffs, which helped close a budget deficit of more than $30 million, eliminated a community-policing program that assigned officers to walk their beats and attend neighborhood meetings. Now some residents are pooling resources to restore a law-enforcement presence. The affluent Montclair District in the Oakland Hills and the Kings Estates neighborhood in East Oakland are also looking into private patrols.
Experts say the combination of police and private security that Chinatown is pursuing reflects a new approach to public safety.
“We’ve been doing policing more or less the same way for a couple hundred years,” said Barry Krisberg, a criminologist at the Center for Criminal Justice at the University of California, Berkeley. “We’ve reached a point financially where we have to start exploring new ways to deliver law enforcement.”
“As the government, with its policing and law enforcement functions, atrophies, private, improvised security measures cover the security gap it leaves behind. In Russia, there was a period of years during which the police was basically not functioning: they had no equipment, no budget, and their salaries were not sufficient for survival. Murders went unsolved, muggings and burglaries were not even investigated. The police could only survive through graft. There was a substantial amount of melding between the police and organized crime. As the economy came back, it all got sorted out, to some extent. In a case where there is no reason to expect the economy to ever come back, one must learn how to make strange new friends, and keep them, for life.”
(p.18, Post-Soviet Lessons for a Post-American Century, by Dmitry Orlov, backup copy available at: http://nosedive.org/backup/soviet.pdf )