Submitted by megan on Thu, 08/20/2009 - 19:37
It's a little closer to NIMBY-ism than I'm comfortable with.
Here's my quandary.
In some ways, my street is very quiet. Because of traffic calming we, well, we only have a very few calm bits of traffic. Because the traffic calming is big planters full of leafy trees and bushy bushes, the street feels like a very private place.
What this has meant up to a few months ago is that a lot of kids play on the street most nights. That you feel screened in safe once you walk into the green. That a lot of neighbours and other people wander up our street.
The House Across the Street has never been great. The landlord, particularly, is an asshole. Most times he shows up, he yells at or hits his tenants. Gossip tells me he's currently trying to shunt someone out in a way that contravenes the Residential Tenancies Act. The rent is super cheap, so many of the people who have lived there for the past 4 years I've been here are hard on their luck. There's generally been a lot of drinking, which occasionally would lead to an argument or some leering. Kind of unpleasant, but generally pain in the ass material.
Though if someone had come off the front porch and followed me up the road, I might re-phrase that.
Something happened a few months ago to poison the pretty stable dynamic that was happening over there. I'm not quite sure what it was. The drunkenness seems to have increased both in duration and quantity; seems like there's a pretty heavy duty crack dealer in there now, whereas before the dealing was on the QT. Lots of people coming and going. Enough people regularly hanging out there that it's taken me weeks to even partially figure out who actually lives in the house. The occasional groups of white guys in their early 20s who are either in a gang or, worse, wish they were, hanging out on the planters in front of my house, smoking various smokable things. Lots of people hanging out in the backyard of the place.
Which would be fine except that they're often loud enough that I can hear them. In my bedroom. Across the street. I can also hear the people who come to buy crack at 3 am walking down the street talking loudly. Sometimes through closed windows and earplugs. And the cops who come in the middle of the night because someone inside the house has called something in. They wake me up too.
I think what's putting me, what's putting anyone within eye- or earshot of the HAS, over the edge is that the loudness regularly shifts into aggression. Seems like there's one or two main instigators. Heavy heavy drinkers. This past weekend, the tall skinny man on the first floor punched a woman in the face, and then, when I was inside getting my phone to call the cops, he kicked her hard in the stomach.
I have become the sort of person who calls the cops on people. There is no way to tell you how much I resent that man and the people who drink there and get high there and beat each other up on the street for turning me into that person.
Now, any good therapist would tell me that they can't make me that sort of person, but what the fuck do I do? What is my neighbour supposed to do when he looks down the street and sees three guys pushing yet another woman around? Do I wait until the stupidly drunk guy who is in a gang, or worse, looks like he wants to be in one, and is yelling motherfucker, that's my beer and pushing someone off the front porch, do I wait until he pulls out a weapon and really hurts someone? Do I make a bet that the guy wielding the metal post won't actually bash in the head of the man with the long stick?
Honestly, if you have better suggestions of how to deal with this as it's happening, I'm all ears.
Because maybe we're overreacting, us neighbours. In both cases where women were getting pushed around, they didn't want to press charges. Of course they didn't. We're bringing the police into a situation with people who probably list "cops" as the last category of people that they want to see. Or would trust.
And with fucking good reason.
But I can't do it. I can't not call.
The drug dealing only bothers me because it brings a lot of people onto a really quiet street who don't care that it's a really quiet street. Crack houses belong on busy streets. I lived across from a couple on Preston, but I only knew that through street gossip and then careful watching. But they never disturbed me,* so what did I care? The drinking I don't like at all because it's being done in big groups of mostly men who seem to have someone with an unstable and vicious temper as their ringleader. Drinking makes people really fucking emotionally unpredictable in a way that it seems crack doesn't.
Besides the constant fighting that has me jumping every time there's a loud noise, what is stressing me out in all of this is that I am reminded of just how incredibly privileged I am. For 15 years I have have chosen run with people who critique, and are critical of, the reigning power structure. I have wanted badly to disown, or at least ignore, the parts of me that fall on the powered side of any continuum.
And yet, and yet. I have the privilege not only of current money but of class behind me. It is my expectation - no, it is a ingrained belief that I have the right to live on a street whose quiet is not broken by other people's despair and addiction.** And that class-driven belief - along with my colour, along with my education, along with the genes that have blessed me with a non-addictive personality - gives me weight with the cops to probably push these people out. The way they've probably been pushed out of other places before.
I am owning my privilege. It is currently making me a little sick with myself.
The fact that this is the first time I've really had to come face-to-face with how fucking privileged I am and that I find myself now actively participating in a system that I think is corrupt at its heart, that makes me more than a little sick too.
*Washington's customers, on the other hand, regularly forgot his address and pounded on our window at all hours. Nothing like being woken up out of a deep sleep by someone banging on the window above your head at 5 am.
**I know lots of people who are addicted to stuff (mostly alcohol) and are able to function quite well on a day to day basis. The people in the HAS are not those people, for a variety of social, economic and probably genetic reasons.
Comments
9 comments postedWell said Megan. I'm with you. I like the idea of giving people supplies to help themselves avoid illness by handing out free crackpipes, but when they're left broken on my doorstep and kids here can step on them, I wonder whose health is being taken into consideration.
I call the cops, too. My daughter asked me once if I have the number programmed on my phone and was surprised to hear that I don't. I just have number memorized through frequent use. Does it help? I don't know. But I also can't pretend it's not happening and I can't not call when people are yelling out for help.
I think you are being too hard on yourself.
You can only control your own actions, not those of others. You aren't the one hitting women. You aren't the one dealing crack. You aren't the one out causing a disturbance on your street.
Fascist, and corrupt to the core the cops may be, but they are ones who can deal with this mess.
And a mess it is, because no one has a right to physically harm another person, regardless of "the system" in use, a concept the people in the HAS don't seem to grasp.
So as much as you think you are calling for your own selfish reasons (and perhaps they play a part in you calling as well), the times when you did actually call the cops, was when someone other than yourself was being harmed.
Good for you. That takes balls. So many other people would just look away because they "don't want to get involved" and turn a "blind eye". Sometimes apathy is the worst crime in the world.
I'm with Anonymous, Megan. If women are getting pummeled on your street and if your neighbours' behaviour has moved from suspicious to aggressive, you have every right to call the cops. It's not a contradiction to firmly believe in harm reduction while also alerting the cops to violence in your neighbourhood.
I feel quite privileged, because my neighbours dealt with this stuff on my street a decade ago. It makes me nauseous that poorer, more "undesirable" people got pushed off of my street. But as a woman who often walks home from the gym or from a bus stop alone at night, I am grateful that I don't feel threatened on my street.
You have every right to try and make your place a safer place for everyone, especially the women across the street.
I understand where you're coming from. I feel the same way when I'm put in the position of standing there with my phone in my hand, listening to the aggression escalating in an alcohol-fueled dispute on my street, trying to decide if or when to call the police. But usually there's something - some sudden change in the tone or quality of the dispute - that leaves me with no choice. A woman starts screaming and the sheer terror in her voice pushes me off the fence. Last time it was when someone started screaming "Not the dog, please, please, don't hurt the dog!" and the dog started yelping. I couldn't not call.
I only call when I have no choice, as opposed to the kind of people who look for a reason to call. I suspect you're like me. We don't like having to do it, but sometimes it's the right thing to do.
Agreed. I have in the past been on the fence about calling because I don't like to be a nuisance (how Canadian is that?), but there was this one time, back in a fancier neighbourhood, where I looked down at the street to find a woman screaming at her daughter from the driver's seat of a locked car, angry about something the girl had done. The girl was sobbing and shrieking and falling into puddles as she tried to get into the car, clearly terrified that she was going to be left on the street. I don't have kids, so I don't like to judge the parenting of others, but there was something so desperate about the whole scene that my lizard brain just said NO and grabbed the phone. I don't know who I would have called, exactly, but before I could get a licence plate or anything useful, a neighbour came out to deal with the situation and the woman bundled up her child and drove off.
Besides, I think the people associated with the HAS have the right to live a life unbroken by others' despair and addiction, too. Even if your call only prevents a single situation from getting just one degree worse, it's worth it.
A very lucid and responsible line of thinking, Megan. It's easy to use 'a woman got hit' as a trump, justifying all further action on the part of concerned citizens. And 'crack,' is such an ugly word these days, isn't it?
But crack was the subject of a massive, massive moral panic not too long ago. We can't think that the word itself isn't imbued with a whole lot of ugly, and terror. We also can't think that the meanings with which the word is imbued doesn't serve as a go-ahead justifying all sorts of intervention including calling in the brutal, racist, heavy hand of the police.
But you live downtown, and everyone who lives downtown has to expect the kind of dynamics you've got on your street in terms of noise and drugs and disruption.
Violence, for sure if you want to call the police to break it up, do it. No good somebody getting hurt. But the other stuff? The noise and 'creepy strangers' and disruption? That's part and parcel of living downtown and, for people who either live in large cities or live in cities that aren't Ottawa, part of life more generally. People who don't want such dynamics should consider moving to a nice, quiet suburb where people keep their violence, abuse and addiction behind closed doors like nice, civilized people.
Ultimately this is the argument that's being invoked by the concerned members of your street: appropriate versus inappropriate behaviour which coincidentally falls exactly along the lines of the 'civilized' versus 'uncivilized behavior' argument: civilized, in the strictest and most politically accurate (yes) use of the word, means 'pacified,' where drives are muted, people control themselves, and base, bodily actions (like yelling, like violence, like urination) are kept behind the scenes.
But when we set up this scene of 'desirable versus undesirable behaviour,' when we consider what the proscriptions for such behaviour are, when we see how people think of themselves as 'concerned citizens' when they make their proscriptions and call the cops in to enforce them, we can't deny the long, longstanding class and racial dynamics that we are invoking, or the currency of these dynamics that we're dealing in. I'm so glad you mention them in your post. The middle-class Victorians, had they not sequestered the undesirables in their own hell-holes, would have been saying the same things members of your street are saying, with as much fervour, with as much conviction and passion. And in both instances, what is actually going on is the same. The privileged cry 'NIMBY!' and plead for us to think of the children, of the vulnerability of women, ultimately using these intuitive arguments as cause for state intervention that says 'get out' under the aegis of 'keep our streets safe.'
Anyway, I'd say, keep thinking like you're thinking. It's a better, more critical, more humane way to move through the world.
Wow. Thanks everyone, for such thoughtful responses all around.
Meg, it's your RIGHT to live in a safe environment! What ever your personal feelings are toward the cops it is your tax money that pays their wages and it is their JOB to ensure all communities are safe places to be. Call the cops.
Your safety, the safety of your community, shouldn't take a back seat to someone else's hard luck story.
It's possible to overthink situations like this. Sometimes you have to go with your gut response because that's your basic human survival/self-protection instinct kicking in. Can we really be so afraid to make judgments or be so afraid not to be PC that we would stand by while people are hurting each other? One thing we did in a neighbourhood I used to live in like this was organize a neighbourhood committee - invite everyone, including the people from the crack house. Have it at someone's house or back yard, informal. Discuss issues, meet each other. That in itself can sometimes work wonders. If you want to take it further invite a rep from the police to give a talk/advice at the next meeting.
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