It all goes back to the way it was
It all goes back to the way it was
A note on the book club, a word on the WPD
I started watching The Shield recently and it rocks. Set in LA and focused on a gang unit called the Strike Team, it’s a remarkably subversive critique of the cops dressed up like an endorsement. It came out on FX back in 2002 and it’s as good as anything I’ve watched at illustrating the room for criminality in urban police departments. The writers don’t beat the viewer over the head with lectures in the way a David Simon does, for instance. But the lectures are always there in the background, and they’re incisive.
There’s one little exchange that really tickled my writer bone—enough to open this post with it.
Over the course of Season 2, a civilian auditor produces a report for the City Council. In Episode 11, on her way out the door, she has an exchange with detective Claudette Wyms, a notably “not corrupt” character played masterfully by CCH Pounder. I clipped it:
The auditor tells Wyms her report is going to hit like an earthquake once it’s released. Wyms responds:
The truth is your report is only going to cause a few tremors. You’re not the first civilian auditor this department has had and in the end cops will protect cops. Outrage will turn to apathy, turn to ‘did something happen there once?’ It all goes back to the way it was.
The auditor suggests that a “good cop” like Wyms could change that if she was in charge. Wyms says only that she wouldn’t want the job. And that’s the end of it.
The idea that something like a civilian audit will not be an “earthquake” but rather a “a few tremors” that ultimately do not lead to change resonates with our city’s police department and the political climate around it. We just had a pretty damning outside audit report ourselves, and it seems like we’ve already forgotten about it. We have a Department of Justice investigation in the works and I’m increasingly pessimistic about it being anything more than a momentary tremor either.
As Wyms says, it all goes back to the way it was. Cops will protect cops.
More than the equity audit or the DOJ investigation, the continued enthusiastic use of Shotspotter drives the point home. There’s an ongoing national conversation about the patterns of racist and classist policing that the technology reinforces and facilitates. Other departments, like Chicago’s, are parting ways with it. But that conversation has not even entered the local arena. The opposite has happened. The department has leaned into its endorsement of the technology with no City Hall pushback. More than simply using the technology, the department incorporates the company’s marketing material into its communications. The terms “intelligent policing” and “intelligence-led policing” have appeared with increasing frequency in police department press releases and reports. In the most recent crime statistics report to the city council, released March 19, “intelligence-led policing” appears in a section dedicated to technology. The two pieces of “technology” referenced in said section are both products of SoundThinking, formerly known as Shotspotter.
Out of curiosity I searched the SoundThinking website for “intelligence-led policing” and surprise surprise it’s used quite a lot, and in the same exact way the police use it. I expected to find that, of course. I just wanted to confirm my suspicion the WPD were repackaging Shotspotter marketing material as official department policy.
What I didn’t expect to find, however, was that the term “crime gun intelligence center” is also Shotspotter marketing material. There’s a whole one-sheet on how to set one up.
Close readers of Worcester news will find the term familiar. A few days ago, the WPD put out this statement, which was dutifully copy-pasted by all the local outlets, of course.
Weird!
There’s no attribution of that peculiar term—”crime gun intelligence”—in the police’s press release. It appears to the reader as something the WPD dreamed up as a “response to recent gun violence.” Shtospotter isn’t mentioned at all. And, conveniently, neither is the fact the WPD was already in the process of adopting this thing they don’t explain before the “recent gun violence.” It was in the crime stats report from last month I quoted earlier.
I dug a little deeper on this “crime gun intelligence unit” idea and it doesn’t look like you can say for certain Shotspotter coined the term. But you can say that the company is deeply enmeshed in the promotion of the idea, and that where these “crime gun intelligence units” get adopted, Shotspotter is often a component. In its “guide for best CGIS practices” document, the ATF cites ShotSpotter:
On Shotspotter’s website, they offer a “how to” page for setting such a thing up and posit their product as one of a few core pieces of technology needed to do it right. Lots of evidence to suggest a certain “public private partnership” going on here. And, it’s important to remember, SoundThinking is a for-profit, publicly traded company.
While the WPD didn’t say anything about what exactly their new “Crime Gun” unit is, they’ve since confirmed it has a lot to do with ShotSpotter.
On Wednesday, a day after the announcement, the WPD published a release about the first gun recovered by the new unit. Shotspotter takes center stage, mentioned twice in the first paragraph. The way it’s written, the tech is more central than the detectives. Credit is given to the CGIS and its “production of precise, timely, and actionable intelligence.”
The term “actionable intelligence” appears on the SoundThinking website dozens of times, including that how-to page for implementing a Crime Gun Intelligence Unit.
It’s worth noting all this to say that we’re not just paying ShotSpotter for the technology, we’re letting ShotSpotter dictate police policy. That aspect isn’t in the press releases, and so it doesn’t make it into the local news stories.
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The above passage was supposed to be a quick couple paragraphs about The Shield to serve as a fun “cold open” before the customary intro you’re reading right now but it grew into something else and that’s cool.
It wouldn’t be a customary intro if I didn’t ask for money so I can keep living off this thing! Pay for this newsletter so someone, anyone, in this city looks closely at what the cops are up to!
Full transparency it’s currently late Saturday night as I’m writing this and my Sunday posts only get reach when they go up early in the morning. So this one is “short” compared to the usual “very long.”
It was a busy week, most of it dedicated to making sure the book club launch went well. And it did! It went so well I wrote a whole essay about it. But that’s all for this week. I’ll have another post mid-week that’s more newsy, after we see what the Supreme Court does with the homelessness question tomorrow. I got into that issue at length in this post. There will be much to discuss!
Having fun in a deeply unserious city
On Thursday night I hosted the first Worcester Commenter’s Union Local 69 Book Club! It went better than I could have hoped!
Like the open newsroom event I put on a couple months ago, this book club is an experiment to explore what the Worcester Community Media Foundation (WCMF) can do to build new bridges between the community and local journalism. Both ideas proved edifying in practice and I can’t wait to do more of them!
About a dozen people showed up in person and a few dozen more tuned in on Twitch for the first meeting. Everyone showed up prepared to engage deeply with the material and the discussion was a fantastic exploration of the social fabric of this city, its political problems, and what to do about them. It got deep! But stayed fun. You can watch it below. (The one thing we need to improve is the audio capture. Next time).
As a local journalist, there’s been no text more formative for my understanding of the city than Eight Hours For What We Will, the book we’re clubbing. A history of working class Worcester from 1870-1920, it’s a dense, difficult work. Not your average book club assignment. But I was blown away by the observations people brought to the table. And I was pleased to see that while the conversation in the room flowed along, a separate and equally deep conversation was happening in the Twitch stream comments. I came away from it with a lot, and I hope everyone else did as well.
The WCMF, and the way we approach it, is difficult to explain. It’s not an “outlet.” Local journalism doesn’t need more outlets! The press releases are getting rewritten just fine. There’s no point in competing for scoops and getting surface level stories up first. If I approached Worcester Sucks that way, it would have (drumroll please) sucked!
What local journalism needs, desperately, is new connective tissue with the community it covers, genuine buy-in and trust from said community, and a completely new financial model. We don’t care how we get there, or what “there” even looks like. The intent and value and function of local journalism need to be disentangled from form entirely.
This newsletter is making good use of a form that’s currently having a moment. But it’s foolish to think this Substack “era” is anything but fleeting.
The WCMF is a way to explore new forms, and the book club is such an exploration! It didn’t look like local journalism, but it did local journalism. It combined a stock book club format, a Twitch stream, a YouTube page, an academic text, an open meeting, and a journalist guiding the conversation. The end result was undeniably a piece of local journalism. A strong one, at that.
I could have spent the time the book club took me rewriting press releases. Could have put a dozen single-source 500 word articles on a website. And if I worked at any “real” outlet in this city, that’s exactly what I would have done. I wouldn’t be allowed to do a book club instead. Pitching the idea would get me laughed at. “Unserious” and “not journalism.” Unprofessional.
It’s that attitude that will kill the profession, ultimately. If I’m able to make a living off local journalism 10 years from now, it will have nothing to do with whether I’m “serious.” Just the opposite, I think.
The book club was innovative local journalism that engaged the community in a way an article on a website could never. It was informed by a thoughtful analysis of the craft. It was serious. But it was also fun.
Local journalism can and should be serious and fun at the same time. It shouldn’t be unprofessional to make fun a core objective. The affect of sober objectivity does not equate to serious work!
It’s funny, I’m just realizing, that this is the exact note on which we closed the book club discussion.
In the intro to Eight Hours, author Roy Rosenzweig addresses the sense among his colleagues in academia that studying leisure is somehow less serious than other elements of history. And how that’s limiting. There’s a lot to learn in the way people spend their free time, he suggests. It’s one of the book’s core positions, and the source of its enduring resonance.
At the end of the book club, we circled back to the idea. Liz, my copyeditor, was the one who brought it up. The notion of “who gets to decide what fun is,” she said. The rich people said fun means staring at a field, she said, while the poor people said no I think it’s getting wasted. It got a big laugh!
Then, Vicki, a local librarian, brought up the fact Rosenzweig went out on a limb in proposing the idea leisure time should be taken seriously. Before this book, no one did that. “It feels like it was such an oversight,” she said.
That made me say it’s interesting the author chose Worcester to make such a statement about taking the “unserious” realm of leisure seriously. “Because Worcester is a deeply unserious city,” I said.
It was a punch line and it got a nice laugh. But I didn’t craft it. The words just fell out of my mouth. One of the strongest points I’ve ever made, I think. Better than a lot of more earnest, conscious attempts at such a sweeping observation that I’ve labored over in this newsletter. Rosenzweig saw something in this place back in the early 1980s that he took great pains to trace back a century and illustrate in detail. Three years of work! He did so to find new universal truth in neglected peculiarity. The unserious nature of Worcester made for serious study.
When I said Worcester was a deeply unserious city, it wasn’t an insult. It didn’t get a laugh because it was rude. It’s just true! We’re a goofy city! And that’s great. Something to embrace.
We have an opportunity here to tap into what that unique goofiness can provide for the advancement of local journalism. Exactly what Rosenzweig did for working class history with Eight Hours!
If a new model for local journalism lies in exploration of the unserious, Worcester might be the best place to find it.
When you stop trying to be serious, it’s much easier to be fun.
The WCMF isn’t writing off fun. We’re chasing it down. Fun may well prove to be the solution.
All that to say, the book club is a good time. I’ll be sending out an email to set a next date soon!
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That’s all for today folks. Talk soon!
Oh here’s a funny cover that’s actually sick too.