Every day every day every day
A middle aged white man, witnessing that something, felt compelled to stick his head out the window
“Kill yourself kill yourself kill yourself.”
He shouted it over and over, his head and upper torso fully out the window of his SUV, his middle finger aimed at several dozen pro-Palestine demonstrators on the side of the road. The veins in his clean shaven head protruded. Hatred covered his face. He slowed down so he could shout it more times. Kill yourself kill yourself kill yourself.
By far the worst, but not the only. There was a “fuck you.” A “go to hell fuck you.” There were middle fingers. Heads performatively shaken back and forth in contempt. One woman parked her sedan at a safe distance, some hundred feet away, and waved an Israeli flag out the window. She idled there a long time, blinker on, halfway into the busy street as cars whizzed and swerved around her.
But those were the exceptions. Far more passing drivers honked supportively or raised fists of solidarity or simply smiled and waved. Each time, a chorus of cheers rippled down the line of demonstrators.
Otherwise they chanted. “Not another nickel, not another dime. No more money for Israel’s crimes,” was one.
The standout for Palestine at Institute Park on Wednesday afternoon was a small and short affair. A few dozen people gathered for a little over an hour and the chants were led by Tatiana Carrion of the Worcester Solidarity Coalition. She held a sign that read “Puerto Rico con Palestina.”
I asked her about Palestine and Puerto Rico—what the two peoples might share in their respective struggles.
“The injustices,” she said. “The struggle with water, light, health care, the schools being shut down. Puerto Rico can resonate with struggling in their own land that they’re native to.”
In organizing this demonstration, she acted on her beliefs. She did something. More than most people can say, frankly. But it was a “something” that had no negative impact on the life of anyone living in Worcester. A middle aged white man, witnessing that something, felt compelled to stick his head out the window. Slow down. Raise his middle finger. Point it right at a group of someones he doesn’t know, doing a something that has no bearing on his life. Kill yourself kill yourself kill yourself he shouted over and over.
It was pure chance his route took him past the demonstrators. It was a split second decision to roll down the window. A gut reaction to start shouting.
The anger on his face and the way in which he let those incendiary words fly calls to mind the CNN investigation this week of a counter protester at UCLA.
An 18-year-old high school senior was encouraged by his parents to go bully the campus demonstrators. He put on a white hoodie and a white hockey mask and he took a pole with him and beat people with it.
His mother proudly posted a video still of him doing so to his Facebook page. The last line of the CNN segment is him denying having been there. His mother said he was there, but only to defend himself. He said he plans to join the IDF.
This kid was just one of hundreds of violent counter protesters who went to UCLA to hurt people and did so for hours while the cops watched it happen.
More than the kid it’s the mother that makes the segment so striking. She was proud. She said that’s my boy right there. She posted it to her Facebook page like a graduation photo. Hard to imagine she was the only proud mom after that bloody night. Easy on the other hand to imagine how that screaming guy in Worcester would react if it was his son out there beating students. Easy to imagine he’d be just as proud. Easy to imagine he has a son. Easy to imagine that son showing up to a Worcester campus with a pole in his hand. Easy to imagine Worcester cops in the background watching on as he cracks that pole down on a protestor’s back. Easy to see them arresting that protester later in the night, long after the son got tired of swinging and left. Easy to see the local media call it a “clash.” Call it “campus unrest.” Call for an end to the protests lest another clash occur.
And then of course both these moments—in Worcester and in Los Angeles—have to remind you of stuff like this, from the Guardian (the real one):
Palestinian lorry drivers delivering aid to Gaza have described “barbaric” scenes after their vehicles were blocked and vandalised by Israeli settlers, preventing humanitarian supplies reaching the territory where much of the population face imminent starvation.
Scenes of which were widely video taped and would you look at that the cops over there did nothing too?
Israeli soldiers escorting the convoy did nothing to stop the attack.
It’s fine though because those trucks were... delivering aid.
Oh ok. Case closed.
So back to the Worcester guy. He couldn’t pass by these demonstrators in silence. That wasn’t an option. When a real man sees the enemy on his territory, he takes action. Only a coward keeps quiet.
In an instant, desire flew from his subconscious to language.
Kill yourself, he said.
He didn’t just want them to die. He wanted them to want it too.
Kill yourself kill yourself kill yourself.
He didn’t say anything else. He drove away. Demonstrators glanced at each other, acknowledging the uneasy feeling he left in his wake. It hung in the air for a moment. Then another driver honked in support. Another round of cheers. The uneasy feeling was gone.
“Free Palestine,” Carrion shouted into the mic. And everyone shouted it back at her.
Meanwhile, it’s important to remember, the genocide continues every day. Babies evacuated from under the rubble of their family’s house, for instance. Every day every day every day.
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Worcester Sucks and the Worcester Community Media Foundation featured heavily in a recent rundown of the local media scene in the Worcester Business Journal! Katherine Hamilton did a great job with this two part series. Here’s part 1 and here’s part 2. I stand by this quote from me by the way.
Others are more pointed in their criticism.
“Since the Telegram has been in decline … there is a space here, and that's what MassLive advertised itself as filling back when it launched,” said Bill Shaner, author of the Substack newsletter Worcester Sucks and I Love It. “But they're not acting like the Fourth Estate. They're just doing essentially PR work for the city.”
Also I’ll have some flyers to share soon but mark your calendars for two events coming up in June:
Wednesday, June 12, 6 p.m.: Rewind Video / Cordella’s Coffe ribbon cutting!! Featuring the wonderful District 5 City Councilor Etel Haxhiaj! One of our two maybe three good city councilors.
Friday, June 14, 6 p.m.: Worcester Sucks birthday party!!! At Redemption Rock brewery, 333 Shrewsbury Street. I’ll be doing a state of the newsletter type talk and an open newsroom and then Chris Robarge is doing a DJ set! (From what he’s shown me, gunna be sick.)
Ok up next in today’s newsletter: Book club, shotspotter, odds and ends
Book club Thursday!
Thursday! Thursday! Thursday!
Same IRL place (Rewind/Cordella’s Coffee, 116 June St) and same digital place: WCT3k Twitch page.
Same start time! 7 p.m. But this time we’re gonna have a coffee hour starting at 6 p.m. so we can all get settled in and chat more informally and get some high quality coffee. If you haven’t been to Cordella’s yet, do yourself a favor and get down there!
For more info on what we’ll be reading and such, as well as PDFs of the reading material, head on over to the Rewind Patreon.
Speaking of Rewind, I made a very adorable reel for the Instagram.
How can cold hard data be racist?
As Shotspotter’s problems get a fresh news cycle, interim Police Chief Paul Saucier continues to lie (or, at least, repeat the lies he’s been told) about its efficacy.
On Tuesday, Senators Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren, Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, and others sent a letter to the Department of Homeland Security to investigate Shotspotter.
“Several recent reports have cast substantial doubt on the accuracy and effectiveness of the ‘ShotSpotter’ gunshot detection system and have raised serious questions about its contribution to unjustified surveillance and over-policing of Black, Brown, and Latino communities...
They want the DHS to look into grant funding it gives the company, and also explore whether it violates the Civil Rights Act.
In Markey’s release, he cites a recent report from the ACLU that found Boston’s Shotspotter alerts led to evidence of gunshots only 30 percent of the time. The other 70 percent, it was dead ends.
This is in line with what we know about Worcester. As I went over in the last post, the WPD gave the Human Rights Commission some data on Shotspotter. In 2023, there were 517 Shotspotter alerts. Those 517 alerts led to 70 confirmed shootings. The other 447 were dead ends. That’s 86.5 percent of the time, no shooting; 13.6 percent of the time, a shooting of some kind.
But just a few days ago, Chief Saucier told The Telegram that Shotspotter is 95 percent accurate.
In 2014, the Worcester Police Department integrated ShotSpotter into the Real Time Crime Center. While ShotSpotter guarantees 90% accuracy in regards to shots fired, in Worcester, it has been 95% accurate, he said.
????
Your own numbers says otherwise, buddy.
I don’t want to get into the whole thing now, but this “95 percent” number comes from marketing material provided by the for-profit and publicly-traded company formerly known as Shotspotter and now known as Sound Thinking. Here’s a deep dive on it in case you haven't read it yet: “A streamlining solution for crime manufacturers.”
Anyway, Saucier got a whole article to himself pretty much to make this and other spurious claims. There was a little news hook about the statement from Markey et al. then a bit from the ACLU then it was all Saucier til the end. Even ran with a pic of Saucier pointing at a big fancy computer screen.
The data I referenced above didn’t make its way into that article. Saucier just gets to say it’s 95 percent accurate, despite the data he himself provided showing otherwise. In fact none of Saucier’s claims saw any pushback at all. Like this one…
“Everybody deserves a police response to gunfire,” Saucier said. “And it has already been established that 85% of the time nobody calls the police.”
In this “85 percent” data point, we see Saucier upping the statistical ante. Playing fast and loose with already suspicious numbers. Just last week, he told the Human Rights Commission that just 80 percent of the time no one calls the cops. This is a factoid ripped directly from Shotspotter marketing material, and let’s just say it’s not quite vetted. Over the course of a few days, Saucier tacked on another 5 percent, from 80 to 85, just to make it a better sell I guess. The Telegram doesn’t point this out.
In the actual Worcester data, that percentage of times no one called the cops is much lower. Of the 70 confirmed shootings that involved Shotspotter in some way, 40 were not called in, Saucier said last week. I’m no math wiz but that’s not 85 percent. Not even close.
What doesn’t make it into the story at all is the extremely low rate of firearm recoveries and arrests: Those 517 Shotspotter alerts played a part in 12 arrests and 8 seized guns.
Each time a Shotspotter alert comes in, the police dispatch two patrol cars and a supervisor. And only the supervisor can “clear” the scene. The vast majority of the time, the cops find themselves at a scene in which no shots were fired. But they’re still there. They’re still trying to find a shooter.
What hasn’t been quantified in any way is what happens when the cops show up to a false alert and try to find a shooter. What do they do once they’re there and there’s no shooter? How many arrests for things like drug possession or trespassing or disturbing the peace? How many of the people questioned about supposed gunfire got slapped with resisting arrest or assaulting an officer? How many people were hassled for no reason by cops compelled to prove the surveillance software wasn’t wrong? And did any of that make anyone safer?
That data could be collected if the cops wanted to collect it. But the cops don’t. And for anyone else to try, it would cost a lot of time and money that no one has.
And then there’s the other service Shotspotter’s parent company provides–predictive policing–which gets discussed even less, and for which there is less available data. But, from an over-policing perspective, it’s likely worse.
In an effort to “forecast crime,” an AI synthesizes data to decide where to send patrols. It calls them “crime hot spots.” Called Shotspotter Connect sometimes and ResourceRouter others, this AI tool is made by the same company that decided where to put the gun mics. The police provided the HRC last week a terse paragraph about this service, which is the most information we’ve ever gotten. It read:
Where are these “community engagement patrols” going? What happens once they’re there? Who was arrested? And for what? And did those arrests make anyone safer? Or did they just toss another person into the endless cycle of court feesand bail bonds and CORI checks and rap sheets for some low level offense? We have absolutely no idea about any of that. But we can pretty safely guess where the AI is dispatching those patrols. The safe bet is the same parts of town the company decided the mics should go. The part where people tend to make less money and be less white. The part of town the cops have always used to justify their existence. The part that the prisons and the courts need to stay in business. The part that serves to define the “nice” neighborhoods by being “not nice.”
Shotspotter gun mics and AI don’t stop crimes from happening. That’s not why the cops want them. That’s not what they’re designed to do. The real value of these technologies is the new pretexts they offer to send cops into the places where the crime is supposed to happen. Offer new, analytical seeming legitimacy for sending them to those places.
Shotspotter doesn’t make the cops suddenly over-police certain neighborhoods. It isn’t inherently racist or classist. It’s a reflection of the racism and classism that already existed in the project of policing. It takes that long tradition and runs it through code and spits it out as datasets. Launders it, in that way. Allows the police to claim a new sort of analytical objectivity.
At the HRC meeting last week, Saucier defended Shotspotter by saying “you can’t tell me that responding to a gunshot is racist.”
You’d have to be crazy to say so, right? The Left Will Call Anything Racist These Days. I’m sure the line resonated with people who don’t want to think too hard about it, and that’s most people. Gunshots are bad. Detecting them is good. Simple. Objective.
Similarly, the decisions made on where the detection mics got installed is based on a seemingly simple and objective dataset. The areas with the highest concentration of gunshots get coverage. The places where there aren’t many gunshots don’t. You can’t say that’s racist either. If you agree with Saucier that the cops are there simply to respond to gunfire as it happens, it just makes practical sense.
But when you start to consider why some areas have more gunfire than others, it gets tricky. The easy explanation is, of course, the racist one. It’s those people. The thugs and gangbangers and such. They’re just more criminal by nature. A fact of life. Why we need cops in the first place. Duh.
More people than would like to admit it accept this racist theory on some level. No one has to say it out loud. Those who do are only a little worse than the rest.
If you reject the “natural order” premise, you’re left to wonder what exactly made it this way. Why is violent crime something that happens mostly in the “bad neighborhoods.” Why is it mostly young men of color in these certain places doing all the gun violence? If you reject that it’s nature, you’re left with nurture. Who’s nurturing? And why?
Well, to answer that, you have to look at who benefits. The cops and the courts and the prisons all benefit. The more crime, the more money they get. That’s a unique position!
The cops, more than the courts or prisons, have the ability to dictate where the crime happens. Where criminals are made. The courts and the prisons ruin families and destabilize communities and create desperation, but the cops get to decide which communities. They can manage where the heat gets turned up and where it doesn’t. When it gets hot, people get desperate, and desperate people do crime. And desperate people who are victim to crime respond with more crime. And when there’s more crime the police have more to do. And more to do means more justification for more money. And the people who have the power to decide how much money the police get do not live in the places where crime happens. And they want to keep it that way. So it’s money well spent.
Responding to a gunshot isn’t racist, but managing where the guns are shot is very racist. For decades, that racism has been obscured by plausible deniability. Now, new technology like Shotspotter takes that deniability and turns it into data. The racism is buried deeper still. You can’t tell me that a computer program is racist. That’s more ridiculous than “responding to a gunshot.” How can cold hard data be racist?
Odds and ends
Thanks for reading yet another Worcester Sucks post! Please consider helping to keep me in this weird little independent local journalism business.
The drama over the city’s contract with Spectrum has been a big deal I understand but I just don’t really want to get into all that. My main takeaway is that it’s very funny Batista caused this whole shitstorm with his Substack. Great job! Otherwise, call me when we start talking about municipal broadband.
If you want to get pissed off, take a look at the internet packages Shrewsbury provides to its residents via its municipal broadband company SELCO.
Then after cross-referencing that with your Spectrum internet bill, read up on why Batista thinks municipal broadband is “impossible” in Worcester. (It’s not.)
Someone reported “very loud birds” to the Worcester 311 app which is amazing. Great catch by Saints Opossums over on Twitter.
Highly suggest downloading the Worcester 311 app and going over to the requests section. Always a good time.
And lastly GBH’s Tori Bedford did a video interview with comedian Chris Flemming about his hometown and its sooo good.
Ok bye bye!!
“How many arrests for things like drug possession or trespassing or disturbing the peace? How many of the people questioned about supposed gunfire got slapped with resisting arrest or assaulting an officer?”
Interesting that they don’t track any of those interactions and use them to pad their stats — I guess because they’d have to admit that the actual *ShotSpotting* isn’t really the purpose for the program’s existence…