In early 2008, a Seattle Post-Intelligencer columnist described a corner in the heart of what is referred to as Seattle's “Central area” thus: “Death has taken a holiday at 23rd and East Union, and with bullets and bloodshed now paused comes a cry for change” (Reference JamiesonJamieson 2008:B1). Citing residents, interviews with business owners, and conversations with police, Jamieson likened the Central area to a repository for social problems—ranging from the presence of unkempt people, smells of urine, and sidewalks decorated with litter to drug usage, drug dealing, and sounds of gunshots. Jamieson ended his column by calling for more police presence “sooner rather than later.”
Accusations of disorderliness, crime, and death are no stranger to the Central area. Jamieson himself recounts a 40-year history of crime and violence at the same intersection. Forty years ago, Seattle city authorities agreed with Jamieson's characterization of the Central area as a problem neighborhood but had a decidedly less macabre descriptive tone. Instead of the language of death, the opening statement of the grant application for federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) “Model cities” described the Central area as a place far different than other areas. City officials began:
Seattle is a city which is still short of the crisis situation of the older urban centers of the East and Southwest. The Model Neighborhood is in the initial stages of decay, not the final stages. Our minority population is still a small percentage of the total city population. We are several years behind Watts, Oakland, Hough and Harlem in the development of civic crisis; but we are catching up rapidly
(Urban Planning and Research Associates 1967:1).Unlike Jamieson's ominous description, city officials' characterization of the Central area was tempered by its hopeful forestallment of the conditions seemingly dominating the neighborhood today. Yet the opening statement also voiced fear that the Central area could develop into “the tightly institutionalized ghetto which grows on its own disease” (Urban Planning and Research Associates 1967:1). Part of this fear stemmed, as the above quote suggests, from city officials' concern that the “minority population” might increase in size over time.
Though both Jamieson and the Model cities grant application diverge significantly in their characterizations, both accord the Central area an exceptional status in the city of Seattle. As I demonstrate in this article, this status proved in the era of Model cities to foreclose the opportunities and possibilities for democratic governance over local crime control policies. Using a case study of records from two law and justice programs developed by the Model cities project—the Consumer Protection project and the Community Service Officer (CSO) program—I show how this exceptionality ultimately undermined neighborhood residents' attempts to redefine the purpose and practice of state institutions. Further, the foregrounding of this exceptional status in city officials' geographical imaginations of crime and “blight” remade the problems of state racial disenfranchisement and helped lay the groundwork for the politics of law and order on display in Jamieson's column.
Model cities' description of the Central area resonates with today's politics of crime because of homologous geographical representations of urban space. As Reference Fleury-SteinerFleury-Steiner (2004) shows in the context of contemporary law-and-order politics, a strong spatial imagination of criminogenic and law abiding neighborhoods pervades racialized assumptions about crime. Similarly, HUD premised Model cities on solving the problem of the “urban ghetto”—imagined most prominently as a dark, brooding, violent space ready to explode (Reference KeithKeith 1993; Reference MacekMacek 2006). At the program's inception the “ghetto” problem stemmed not from crime, as it does today, but from a concentration of poor black people. In the case of the Seattle Model City Program (SMCP), detailed below, instead of outright accusing residents of being unable to govern themselves because of their racial identity or the presence of crime, city officials suspended democratic control due to an extraordinary rendering of life in the Central area. From Model cities to contemporary examples of geographic crime control, the “riskiness” of an urban neighborhood acts as a key facilitator of the persistence—and permutation—of racialized state power (Reference BrownBrown 2007; Reference FaganFagan et al. 2003). Model cities, though premised on a citizen-oriented urban planning model, re-created the conditions of racial and economic disenfranchisement and provides a “history of the present” of contemporary racialized mass incarceration (Reference FoucaultFoucault 1990).
In this article, I draw on archival documents from the SMCP—including task force meeting minutes; administrative files; correspondence between city officials, administrators, and neighborhood residents; published documents including evaluations by local organizations; and newspaper articles—to show how both city agents and neighborhood residents conceived of the Central area. For participating residents, the “problems” of Seattle did not originate in the Central area but were the product of a larger geography of power in which the neighborhood received disproportionate rates of hostile policing and below par city services. Though residents did not create the same types of reports, publications, and documentation that city officials did, they engaged in a type of “counter-governmentality” that defined, evaluated, and planned for different manifestations of the state form. These plans, and the fundamental redefinition of “urban problems” that they responded to, however, never came to fruition.
This failure of Model cities to achieve its democratic potential, I argue, results from the imagination of the Central area as an exceptional space. Though Model cities premised itself on citizen initiative and direction, the structural setup of the program allowed little more than ground-level input from neighborhood residents. The idea of the Central area as an exceptional space prevailed, and the conditions of race, democracy, and urban governance existing in the pre–civil rights era were remade in the politics of crime.
Race, Space, and the Governance of Crime
The Prehistory of Mass Incarceration: Johnson's Great Society and Model Cities
Today, Seattle, like many other cities, contributes to what might be called racialized mass incarceration (Reference BeckettBeckett 1997; Reference GarlandGarland 2001; Reference SimonSimon 2007). Though Washington state's history of direct democracy tempers the politics of crime (with a 300 percent rise in prison population over the past 30 years compared to the 400 percent national rate; Reference BarkerBarker 2006:5–32), it imprisons racial minorities at a rate that exceeds national averages (Sentencing Project 2004). Racialized mass incarceration partly results, in Seattle and elsewhere, from what Russell has called a “criminalblackman” representation of crime in which nonwhite perpetrators possess a type of inhuman or supernatural force predisposed to criminal, predatory behavior toward safe, white, middle-class victims (Reference RussellRussell 1998). This representation also connects the persistence of crime and disorder with urban space.
Urban space in the era of law-and-order politics is often imagined through a crude duality, where inner city areas are seen as places where crime, violence, and incivility are ubiquitous and pervasive (and often the result of residents' own behavior) and whiter and more economically affluent areas are imagined to emanate peace and tranquility (Reference Bass, Milovanovic and RussellBass 2001; Reference BrownBrown 2009; Reference Fleury-SteinerFleury-Steiner et al. 2009; Reference KeithKeith 1993; Reference Kobayashi and PeakeKobayashi & Peake 2000). Claims of disorderliness and impending urban decline have been invoked in locations as large as New York to cities as small as Santa Cruz, California (e.g., Reference Lucas, Skelton and ValentineLucas 1998; Reference MitchellMitchell 2003). Thus when Jamieson described the Central area as the haven of death and called for more police, he joined others across the nation in “governing through crime” by drawing sharp and totalizing distinctions between the humanity and inhumanity of victims and perpetrators (Reference SimonSimon 2007).
When “governing through crime,” words like street, inner city, violence, and depravity provide social and cultural referents to neighborhoods of color (Reference HerbertHerbert 1996; Reference KeithKeith 1993; Reference Kobayashi and PeakeKobayashi & Peake 2000). Reference Fleury-SteinerFleury-Steiner et al. (2009:8) describe this as a “moral cartography,” where “the ‘war’ must be aggressively waged against the threatening outsiders (poor, non-whites) and their disorderly territories (ghettos, barrios, etc.).” Geographically based policing tactics re-create these narratives in everyday life through policies such as broken windows, opportunity reduction, and order maintenance. Broken windows is the most widely known of these types of tactics and shares an emphasis with opportunity reduction and order maintenance on manipulating space—by removing metaphorical and actual broken windows, reducing disorder, and decreasing opportunity for crime—in order to address social issues like crime. These tactics depend upon a superficial reading of space as a container of signs of crime and disorder, an orientation that targets policing resources at the communities and neighborhoods impacted most by the spatialization of poverty and racial inequality (Reference Herbert and BrownHerbert & Brown 2006). In the context of Seattle, the Central area is often a nagging reminder to city officials of what Reference MacekMacek (2006) has called the “urban nightmare,” or the dystopic imagination of what the city might become should “apocalyptic social decay” take hold.
Model cities, however, began in a different political climate than the law-and-order era. Model cities stemmed from President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs that sought to undermine poverty and social unrest through democratic and welfare programs (Reference BeckettBeckett 1997). As Beckett describes, “Johnson and other liberals argued that antipoverty programs were, in effect, anticrime programs” (1997:36). To this end, the SMCP funded a range of local redevelopment schemes thought crucial to counteract the problems of racial and economic disenfranchisement, including neighborhood health clinics, job training, and “slum” clearance. To ensure success, Model cities, like other Great Society programs, sought to engage citizens as state actors with a key role in conceiving, developing, and implementing solutions to urban blight.
Model cities also straddled the year of 1968, identified by several scholars as a crucial turning point in the development of racialized mass incarceration (Reference BeckettBeckett 1997; Reference GilmoreGilmore 2007; Reference SimonSimon 2007). In the 1968 national elections, conservative political platforms tried to convince the country that crime was the result of a permissive and lenient society, signified by the use of civil disobedience by civil rights protestors (Reference BeckettBeckett 1997). Model cities authorization predated these elections and formed a plank of President Johnson's Great Society, though the bulk of Model cities money distributed occurred under the Nixon administration, a fierce proponent of law-and-order politics. Seattle, though, seems to have departed from national trends and in 1969 elected as mayor Wes Uhlman, the first Democrat to ascend to office there in nearly 30 years (Reference LiebLieb 2009). Both the election of local Democratic leadership and city officials' description of the Central area in the initial Model cities grant application provided a rich opportunity for Seattle to stave off the politics of law and order. Or, as the Model cities grant application put it, if Seattle could not be “saved … no city can.” This article is thus part of my larger research project examining the relationship between crime control policies and neighborhood space that asked, “Why did Seattle, given its history of Democratic leadership, also embrace the politics of law and order?” (Reference BrownBrown 2006). To answer this question, I argue that the geographical basis of SMCP presaged today's examples of spatial governmentality.
The Geographical Imagination and Spatial Governmentality
Geographically based approaches to crime control—such as “banishment” ordinances or drug-free zones—are examples of what sociolegal scholars call “spatial governmentality,” or a “technique of government that aims to manage populations in place by joining technologies of population management and sociospatial control with discourses of community, risk and security” (Reference SanchezSanchez 2004:871; emphasis in original; see also Reference MerryMerry 2001). Geography is central to this process by providing a physical space that the visible signifiers of urban “risks” inhabit. Some sites and spaces are considered “riskier” than others, thus necessitating more policing, restrictions on mobility and access, and even shrinking Fourth Amendment rights (Reference Beckett and HerbertBeckett & Herbert 2008; Reference ColemanColeman et al. 2005; Reference MerrifieldMerrifield 2000). In some instances, whole areas are off-limits to those whose very presence threatens or undermines activities considered to be of primary importance, resulting in a wide range of racial, sexual, gender, and class exclusions in the modern city (Reference HubbardHubbard 2004; Reference RobertsRoberts 1999; Reference SanchezSanchez 2004).
Processes of spatial governmentality exemplify the “intra-territorial parallel to state war powers” and represent the “internal performances of state sovereignty” (Reference PerryPerry 2006:12). Sovereignty is an exercise of what Foucault has called “state racism,” in which a discursive “caesura” justifies the deployment of the state's sovereign force against some whose inclusion threatens the “biological life” of the population (Reference FoucaultFoucault 2003). Scholars writing on the intersections of humanity and citizenship likewise note how legal and extralegal mechanisms often mundanely distinguish between humanity and inhumanity, with life and death consequences (Reference AgambenAgamben 1998; Reference AndersonAnderson 2000; Reference ButlerButler 2004). Sovereign force is exemplified by executive displays of power, so forcefully present in the era of mass incarceration (see further Reference SimonSimon 2007).
Spatial governmentality justifies the display of sovereign force through the social production of space. As Reference LefebvreLefebvre's (1991) now seminal work on the production of space argues, “abstract space” is a type of representation that hides the power relations inherent within. In contemporary examples of spatial governmentality—such as prostitution-free zones, chronicled by Reference SanchezSanchez (2004); Native American reservation land, discussed by Reference PerryPerry (2006); and the use of restraining orders, demonstrated by Reference MerryMerry (2001)—abstract renderings of social life underwrite declarations of exceptional spaces and practices that subject inhabitants to extraordinary regulation. The story of SMCP I describe below also represents a type of spatial governmentality, albeit in a different vein than that chronicled by Sanchez, Perry, or Merry. Under Model cities, the spatial mobility of residents was not impeded, yet abstract rendering of space by SMCP created an exceptional understanding of life that nevertheless subjected residents to extraordinary state action. This abstraction served to both obscure the power relations producing this representation of life and undermine competing representations. Democratic processes were suspended in Model cities, much as they are in contemporary examples of spatial governmentality.
In the case of Model cities, both residents' and city officials' geographical imaginations of the city provide examples of how the production of knowledge creates certain possibilities for the manifestation and deployment of state power. The counter-geographical imagination produced by residents, though somewhat ignored by city officials, reveals the normative racial dimensions animating the extraordinary rendering of the neighborhood. As Njoh writes, the various plans that result in racial segregation often “masquerade [as] … perfidious schemes in less racist garbs” than those associated with outright racist ideologies (Reference NjohNjoh 2007:598). Though Model cities did not explicitly invoke allusions to depraved and predatory characters and spaces, it did interpret urban neighborhoods as places lacking the necessary accoutrements of “model” urban neighborhoods. Reflecting Great Society rhetoric, the definition of need did not seek repressive exclusion in the neighborhood, but rather the inclusion of Model neighborhood residents (Reference McFarlaneMcFarlane 2000).
Though not explicitly steeped in the language of war, death, policing, and crime, under Model cities the Central area was still envisioned as an exceptional space where modern pathologies, diseases, and crime lurked. Residents were seen as exceptional by their very residence in the neighborhood, and this exceptionality created a type of Foucauldian “milieu” that is central to processes of governance. Foucault writes:
[T]he milieu appears as a field of intervention in which, instead of affecting individuals as a set of legal subjects capable of voluntary actions—which would be the case of sovereignty—and instead of affecting them as a multiplicity of organisms, of bodies capable of performances, and of required performances—as in discipline—one tries to affect, precisely, a population. I mean a multiplicity of individuals who are and fundamentally and essentially only exist biologically bound to the materiality within which they live
(Reference FoucaultFoucault 2007:56).In the milieu, architecture, planning, and sovereign force act in concert to represent and craft a normative populace (Reference BlomleyBlomley 2007; Reference ValverdeValverde 2003, Reference Valverde2005). Through the regulatory mechanisms of urban governance, the city is cast as a biological organism capable of being fertilized, stimulated, trained, and grown into a model urban space. Though sovereign force is often associated with considerably more violent connotations, regulatory mechanisms also act to spatially distinguish and divide deserving from undeserving citizens (and everyone in between). In the case of Model cities, the democratic exclusions produced through state power happened not through the criminal legal system (as they often do today), but through the powers of city government (who shaped how the criminal legal system responded to residents). Model neighborhood residents were not cast as criminals first and foremost, but instead as those who cannot claim power over the form that state resources take.
While Model cities was decidedly more tempered in its rhetoric, it too re-created a chasm between deserving and undeserving citizens, a strategy that helped set the stage for the re-creation of the “peculiar institutions” creating and managing race in the U.S. state (Reference Davis and JamesDavis 1996; Reference WacquantWacquant 2000). Authorized prior to Richard Nixon's election on a law-and-order platform and one of the last vestiges of President Johnson's Great Society project, Model cities was situated at the cusp of the transition from the de jure to the de facto racial state (Reference BeckettBeckett 1997; Reference SimonSimon 2007; Reference Simon, Feeley, Blomberg and CohenSimon & Feeley 2003). Despite Model cities' premise of citizen control, it had a similar outcome to contemporary policing projects that engage the community only as the “eyes and ears” of law-and-justice institutions and do little to ameliorate the ongoing distrust between police and urban residents of color (Reference HerbertHerbert 2006). Even with democratic intentions, Model cities superseded the democratic process and concluded amidst rampant criticism from Central area residents. In the case of the SMCP that I describe below, Model cities is a platform through which the racialized power structure of urban governance is re-created. Before I describe how, in the next section I turn to the methodology behind this project.
Methodology
This article is the result of a larger “history of the present” that examined the development of local crime and justice policies in Seattle between 1895 and 1990 (Reference BrownBrown 2006). This project examined the role of urban space in the development of local crime control policies, and the SMCP represented one example of geographically based law-and-justice programs. Documents collected for this article come from the fully indexed SMCP archival collection at the Seattle Municipal Archives.
SMCP was the administrative arm to oversee and implement Model cities funds in the city of Seattle and was overseen by the mayor's office. SMCP was a broad-based planning and urban development program initially targeted at the Central area and covering a wide range of areas including education, health, and schools. Because my interests were in neighborhood crime control programs, I restricted my research to analysis of the law-and-justice activities. My initial survey of Model city documents included boxes related to the Law and Justice Task Force (LJTF), the body of residents created to oversee and implement solutions to the problems of crime and justice in the Central area. This included both documents from community meetings and documents related to the administrative activities of the LJTF staff members of the SMCP office. Next, I surveyed this batch of boxes to rule out any that were entirely composed of accounting, budgeting, and non-narrative grant reporting materials. This reduced the collection to more than 80 boxes. The final set of documents included fully transcribed community meetings, letters between community members and SMCP staff, staff reports, transcribed meetings between agencies, all staff communication including reports of phone calls, relevant research reports including notes and prior drafts of reports, and a host of other documents used in the SMCP offices.
Once this initial survey was complete, I began data analysis using a combination of ethnographic and textual methods (Reference EmersonEmerson et al. 1995; Reference Wood and KrogerWood & Kroger 2000). With the range of documents narrowed, I conducted several close readings of the documents to determine the themes and issues that arose in the program. This survey determined the chronological development of the law-and-justice programs, and inductively developed a list of key words. With a list of more than 200 key words formed from the files, I organized the key words into several themes, such as juvenile delinquency, care of youth, and control of institutions. This article is the result of SMCP documents that fit under the “police-community” relations theme.
SMCP developed several projects to address the problems of crime in urban neighborhoods but created only two projects to address police-community relations. Others provided assistance in the court system or fomented local community prevention organizations, but only the Consumer Protection program and CSO project directly sought to remedy strained relationships between police and the Central area community. Under this theme, I placed key words such as police responsiveness, role of police, police-youth relations, police misconduct, racial/resident makeup of police force, and police-civil rights relations. The documents related to these key words formed the basis for subsequent analysis of police-community relations.
My next step sought to identify the stakeholders in the SMCP project and their varying concerns about police-community relations. Stakeholders included neighborhood residents, city officials (generally from the mayor's office, though also from the city council at times), SMCP staff, and police officers. Primary stakeholders in police-community relations included SMCP head Walter Hundley, the mayor's office, the Advisory Council (an SMCP citizens' group that consisted of representatives from community agencies, local leaders, and local researchers from surrounding colleges and universities), LJTF members, LJTF Coordinator Charles Ehlert, and various Seattle Police Department (SPD) officers (including the chief of police). Each of these entities had various takes on police-community relations, which are described below. From the identification of themes, issues, and stakeholders in the Model city documents, I conducted another process of close reading to determine the historical progression in the creation, development, and implementation of SMCP goals and programs.
I identified first the original goals in the SMCP program, developed by city officials and broader community representatives (at this time, neighborhood residents were not involved in the process). As I discuss below, first-year planning funds facilitated direct involvement from neighborhood residents, which shifted the goals and types of programs proposed for SMCP. To remedy strained police-community relations (a topic forwarded by residents themselves), neighborhood residents proposed only one program—the observer program, which eventually morphed into the CSO program. The second program, the Consumer Protection program, developed because residents complained about business fraud to SMCP surveyors, but it was not explicitly proposed by neighborhood residents in the planning phase like the observer program was. Instead, neighborhood residents and SMCP staff developed the program in conjunction over the course of the planning stage. From this point, I traced the development of each of these programs, noting conflicts, contestations, and convergences within and amongst the various stakeholder groups. I trace these processes below through the planning, development, and implementation of the SMCP program.
In addition to Model cities documents found in the archives, I also collected local newspaper articles on SMCP. I analyzed these articles using “frame analysis” (Reference Gamson and ModiglianiGamson & Modigliani 1989) and sought to identify the various “interpretive packages” of articles on SMCP. Several frames emerged including SMCP as a success, SMCP as ultimately flawed, SMCP as corrupt, and SMCP as an exclusionary process. While the various frames developed often reflected the newspaper source (for instance, not a single article from the local black or Asian American papers saw SMCP as a successful process, while both the mainstream newspapers, the Seattle Times and Seattle Post Intelligencer, did), I use these frames only indirectly in this analysis to support the contentions contained in the SMCP documents or to provide context.
Imagining a Model Neighborhood: Seattle's Central Area
Seattle city officials identified the Central area as the “model neighborhood” from the inception of Model cities planning. In this section, I highlight how both city officials and neighborhood residents characterized the problems of the Central area. Furthermore, I show how residents' concerns contrasted with those of city officials and led to the inclusion of very different goals than those developed in the initial grant. In the sections that follow, I chronicle the creation, planning, and ultimate fate of the two programs developed to address police mistreatment and insecurity in the Central area (the Consumer Protection program and the CSO program). These programs developed in response to the question raised by neighborhood residents during the first-year planning phase: “Who polices the police?” As I show, the regulation and planning developed by SMCP answered this question by reinforcing the very same racialized power structures that have shaped the Central area from its inception (Reference TaylorTaylor 1994).
Seattle city officials had long considered the Central area a problem neighborhood. In the early 1900s, it contained the northern boundary of the tenderloin district and served a few years later as the beat of police “purity squads” dedicated to “cleaning up” Seattle (Reference PutnamPutnam 2008). After World War II, Seattle experienced a net influx of black Americans, many of whom settled in the Central area, and city officials frequently sought resources for this neighborhood. Taylor argues that Seattle city representatives long prided themselves on a less vitriolic politics of racial exclusion, but he shows that a neglectful attitude masked practices associated with more notorious places (Reference TaylorTaylor 1994). Seattle's racial exceptionality as chronicled by Taylor is heartily endorsed in the “Kramer report,” a publication cited often in SMCP publications (Reference KramerKramer 1969). The Kramer report argued that the Central area did not experience as severe incidents of race, violence, and civil disorder as other cities because of the smaller density of poverty and racial segregation (Reference KramerKramer 1969). Seattle's racial exceptionality thus also references a spatial exceptionality—the contention that the conditions of the Central area, though problematic in the context of Seattle, might be dismissed if elsewhere.
A key component of the SMCP grant application stressed that the “initial stages of decay” were evidenced by the growing rate of poor blacks in the Central area. Seattle city officials produced statistics that showed white and Asian residents moving out of the city center and concluded that there was a “strong implication from existing data, therefore, that the inner core of the Model Cities Neighborhood is losing the ‘community’ structure which existed in the 1960 census and is beginning to take on the homogenous, under-privileged, characteristics reflected in most major city slums” (Reference LaneLane 1968:13). Accusations of future “slumhood” in the Central area are an example of the power of race over the governmental imagination—in this context, city officials' projections of the racial future of the Central area channeled their anxieties about the racial future of the city as a whole (Reference EllisEllis 2001).
Planning for the Model Neighborhood
Federal authorities officially authorized Model cities planning in 1966, and the Seattle mayor's office immediately began planning for funds by convening city and community leaders to determine the most urgent issues facing the city. In 1967, Seattle was the first city awarded Model cities funding, which it continued to receive throughout the planning, implementation, and expansion phases until the end of the program in 1974. “Law and justice” was not one of the initial committees formed by the mayor, but its importance to every single committee eventually led to its inclusion.
In the initial characterization of the Central area, increased rates of crime and delinquency were coupled with an image of the neighborhood as a place with “a growing atmosphere of alienation and hostility” (Urban Planning and Research Associates 1967:36). The grant planning application indicated succinctly that the “area has the highest indices in the city of every dangerous social symptom” and that “potentially related factors, such as poverty, single-parent families, lack of adequate child care facilities, school expulsions, disorganized homes, illegitimacy, mental illness, and poor use of leisure time are in great evidence” (Reference BramanJ. Braman 1967:C2, G1). The first phase of the Model neighborhood survey (100% sample) described the area as experiencing an “in migration of economically and culturally disadvantaged persons” as a result of a net population loss (in part due to the construction of a freeway) and a “swing toward a concentration of black residents” (Model City Program 1969:10, 12). With almost every single indicator, Seattle city officials described an area of the city far out of step with the rest of the population—not least because it housed an almost exclusively black residential population in a city where the black population barely reached 8 percent citywide (Reference TaylorTaylor 1994).
Seven total goals were given in the grant application regarding law and crime issues, and three of them related exclusively to remedying the strained relationship between the Central area and the SPD. However, of the seven program areas listed for addressing these goals, only one related to the police. The other six were oriented toward fomenting changes in neighborhood residents through intensified casework, early identification, a youth crisis center, homemaker services, child care, community programs, and legal services. For the role of the police, the planning grant applications suggested integrating the activities of law enforcement with health and welfare, a specialized “social service training” for police officers working in “minority group areas,” a specially trained plainclothes unit operating out of a proposed welfare center, and increasing rates of nonwhite police officers (Reference BramanJ. Braman 1967:G7).
Right from the outset of SMCP, the problems of the Central area were defined in two ways. First, they emanated from the “types” of people coming into the area—impoverished, apparently wasteful with leisure time, hostile, and ultimately, black. In reducing the problems of the area to a range of caricatures including alcoholics, dropouts, unemployed adults, etc., Seattle city officials defined neighborhood residents within the language of individual—and not social structural—pathology, a key component of modern-day law-and-order politics (see further Reference BeckettBeckett 1997). Second, this move also provided the groundwork for a solution that focused on increasing the number of social workers, counselors, and police officers who worked in the neighborhood and undermined the potential for Model cities to act as an agent of transformative redress, even when justified from a social welfare perspective. Together, these characteristics coupled to form an image of the Central area as an exceptional space where “something must be done” if Seattle was to stave off the forces of urban decline. This characterization of the Central area undoubtedly stemmed from the decision by the mayor to include only city and community leaders in the convened committees, something made clear when Seattle finally did receive Model cities funds in 1968 for the yearlong planning phase.
Planning From the Model Neighborhood
Model cities aimed to be a citizen-directed endeavor, where ordinary residents from the model neighborhood could plan, design, and implement suitable programs. During the first planning year, Model cities funds were used to hold meetings and survey neighborhood residents. To encourage participation, Model cities paid neighborhood residents for time spent at meetings and crafting ideas and plans for the various program areas. The then-mayor of Seattle wrote that neighborhood residents were “pivotal” to the success of the project (Reference BramanC. Braman 1968:2), and in the development of the Model cities plan, city officials contended that citizen participation was an “essential” part of the SMCP operating philosophy because in order for “a project to succeed, it must ultimately belong to the area; this means, in most cases, that it is run by people in the MN [model neighborhood]” (SMCP 1968c:A5; emphasis in original).
According to city documents, residents were at first skeptical of the Model cities project and questioned whether the city was entering into a needless planning phase that would have few lasting results (SMCP 1968a). To help give the program legitimacy, the mayor eventually hired Hundley to head the project, though residents also purportedly complained that Hundley did not reside within the model neighborhood. Hundley did play a very visible role in the Seattle civil rights movement during the 1960s, though, and served as chair of the Congress for Racial Equality, a member of the Central Area Civil Rights committee, and a leader in the boycott of Seattle public schools (Reference TaylorTaylor 1994). Hundley's record and his appointment lent Model cities the legitimacy necessary to lure some residents of the Central area into its project.
During the Model cities planning phase, nine topical task forces were established, including one task force devoted to “law and justice.” Task force meetings convened in April 1968 and lasted until August of the same year. By the end of September, the results of task force meetings were prepared into a series of recommendations for law-and-justice programs in Seattle. During this first year, residents' testimony frequently highlighted the problem of police mistreatment in the Central area. At one of the first meetings, 14 residents testified about grievances with the police ranging from unfair traffic fines to the refusal of police to report complaints to incidents as serious as shootings (LJTF 1968c). At another meeting, residents presented the mayor with a list of signed grievances against police officers and called for an investigation into the recent events surrounding the arrest of a Black Panther Party (BPP) member (LJTF 1968a; see following paragraph). During this meeting, the minutes record that the “committee wanted to form a united front to get to the sources of the problems such as: police brutality, acts of irrationality by both races, and Prosecutor Charles O. Carroll's actions in relation to recent trouble” (LJTF 1968a:1). A survey of residents conducted during this year found that only 15 percent of residents felt that the SPD did an “adequate job,” and the negative comments far outweighed the positive (LJTF 1969:2). Given these comments, it is no surprise that residents initially defined task force goals as follows: “to provide Model Neighborhood residents with a sense of security for themselves and their property equal to the security enjoyed in other parts of the city,” and “to eliminate all actual or suspected racial bias from the law and justice system” (LJTF 1968d:1).
Several high-profile events provided the backdrop for the creation of the LJTF. In July 1968, the SPD served a warrant on the BPP's headquarters, arrested one of the leaders of the group for “wrongfully appropriating” a typewriter loaned to the BPP's Legal Services Project, and described the leader as a “danger to the community” (Seattle Times, 30 July 1968, p. 13). That night, the BPP held a rally at a local high school where, according to news reports, youth began throwing firebombs and blocking police activities (Reference WyneWyne 1968). Washington State officials eventually conducted an investigation into these incidents and recommended, like the Kerner Commission report before it, de-escalating tension between police and minority communities and increasing the representation of nonwhite individuals in the SPD (Reference KramerKramer 1969).Footnote 1 Once released, this report served as proof positive of the need for reformed policing, generally by increasing the rate of people of color on the force, in the Central area.
This first year of meetings demonstrates the salience of divergent conceptions of the problems facing the Central area in the Model cities project. While city officials defined the neighborhood as a place with high crime rates, increased rates of delinquency, and a population in need of counseling, residents described it as a place where the actions of a city police force provided neither neighborhood and personal security nor equal treatment under the law. While early documents discussed the growing “alienation and hostility” of youth, residents described encounters with police akin to living in occupied territory. This divergence led to the inclusion of priorities not set out in the grant planning documents.
At the end of the planning year, SMCP produced a statement of “goals, program approaches, and strategy.” At the conclusion of the report, under the heading “strategy,” SMCP revealed a distinction between Model neighborhood residents and the wider city as represented by SMCP, city officials, and the police. SMCP administrators wrote:
In the minds of many MN [Model neighborhood] residents, greatest priority would probably be placed on Goal II. However, this is too limited a view; the police are pointed out by residents as the source of their ills to a great degree because they, more than other components of the system, are highly visible …. Without emphasis on just legal representation, present hostility would merely be transferred from the police to the courts. While short-term benefits would certainly accrue first from prime emphasis on community relations, long-term interest rests evenly on action toward all three goals
(SMCP 1968b:135).Indeed, this orientation was reiterated throughout the report when SMCP administrators contended that to “many in the Greater Seattle area, the condition in the MN is equated with lawlessness” (SMCP 1968b:113) and listed three of four causes of this condition as “nonenforcement” of offenses leading to “a feeling among some that they won't be touched,” an “‘ad hoc’ lifestyle in which the future is not a well-defined and operable concept,” and a “we/they syndrome.” Only one of the four causes was devoted to factors outside the neighborhood's control—such as low wages, poor housing conditions, and education factors—and this was dismissed with the statement that “the causes usually cited are a host of socio-economic factors” that “pertain[ed] to the MN as documented elsewhere” (SMCP 1968b:114). While Model cities residents defined the central problem of the neighborhood as police mistreatment and state failure, SMCP administrators primarily defined it as the province of the Model neighborhood residents themselves. This conflict came to fruition in the two programs described in the next section that sought to provide Model neighborhood residents with a mechanism for “policing the police.”
“Who polices the police?”
Unlike many contemporary state efforts to engage communities in policing, Model cities expressly engaged citizens as active participants in law-and-justice programs theoretically able to create, develop, and approve projects ultimately funded through the city's general fund (for a review of contemporary efforts, see Reference HerbertHerbert 2006; Reference MillerMiller 2001). Task forces on each topic met regularly, and though anyone could attend the meetings, only neighborhood residents were given a vote. Model cities also created the citizens Advisory Council (AC). SMCP served as the administrative arm of Model cities and employed a planner for each of the task forces, as well as other administrative staff.
Theoretically, citizens' task force proposals would be written up by SMCP, returned to the task force for approval, and then go to the AC for a final review. Once completed, task force proposals would go to the mayor for approval, who would then forward the matter to the City Council to be written into law. In practice though, once proposals left the task force any number of paths could be followed—some projects were indeed referred back (sometimes time and time again) to the task forces for review, and others seemed to have very little citizen participation (Seattle Flag, 2 Aug. 1972, pp. 7, 33). Law-and-justice proposals related to the police also informally went through another layer of city government—that of the SPD.
Throughout the first few months of task force meetings, neighborhood residents frequently sought what they called an “observer” program. In one meeting, the observer program was articulated as a group of unarmed neighborhood residents patrolling with nightsticks. Residents also envisioned a program known as a “black observer” program, where “drafted” black youth would ride inside every police car in the model neighborhood “to be sure the policeman is doing his job, and to insure the rights of both the policeman and the citizen” (LJTF 1968b:1). In cases where disputes over the interaction surfaced, the observer could be called on as a witness to the proceedings. In the formulation of this plan, black youth would be drafted to serve the program and all jobs would go to model neighborhood residents.
In the final phase of planning, the observer program was described as a programmatic approach for meeting the goal of “easing racial and community tensions around law enforcement” (SMCP 1968b:129). The final articulation of the observer program was described thus:
Indigenous persons who would not ordinarily be attracted to a law enforcement career would act as independent “observers” of police activity in the MN. This is an independent program of 29 observers. One observer would be stationed in every recommended patrol area at all times, to record objectively police and resident interaction. The observers would be available to go to court as credible witnesses. This approach is a response to the MN residents' question, “Who polices the police?”
(SMCP 1968b:129).Though law and justice did not appear as a concern in the city-directed grant application, once planning funds involved Central area residents, the question of police treatment took center stage. Unlike early formulations of Model cities discussed above, Central area residents sought to use funds as a mechanism for answering the question, “Who polices the police?” Instead of trying to redevelop the Central area, residents sought to reform broader state services. In each of the programs proposed during the planning phase, resident sought to transform the police from an “army of occupation” in the neighborhood to “a part of the community” by employing model neighborhood residents in non enforcement positions, downplaying the authoritarian structure of the police (including uniforms) and increasing the degree to which model neighborhood residents and police officers were one and the same (SMCP 1968b:130).
In the case of the police-community relations law-and-justice proposals, by the end of 1969, neighborhood residents developed and actively debated two programs. These two programs sought to provide two services to model neighborhood residents: a system of neighborhood-based police that grew out of the observer program called (after SMCP, police, and city meetings)—the CSO program, and the Consumer Protection program. The fates of these two programs suggest that the answer to residents' question of who polices the police was nobody. In the case of both of these programs, the wishes of the LJTF were routinely disregarded by the mayor, SMCP, the Advisory Council, and the police. Ultimately, the CSO program became a permanent part of the SPD, and the Consumer Protection program never even came to fruition due to the outright refusal of police officials.
The organization of the AC showed some of the first signs of the political trajectory of the Model cities program. While some suggested electing one representative from each block in the model neighborhood, thus making it truly an advisory council composed of citizens, the mayor and director of Model cities decided to ask representatives of local churches, social service organizations, and the local university to sit on the board instead, perhaps because of prior dissatisfaction with citizen-led endeavors. One evaluation noted that from the outset of this power structure the input of citizens was significantly curtailed (Pro Bono Publico 1971). Over the coming years, attempts by residents to shape Model cities' law-and-justice projects frequently showcased how divergent conceptions of life in the Central area really were.
CSOs
Originally, the CSO program was developed as several different but related programs that sought to stem the criminalization and brutality directed at Central area residents. Residents sought a training program to increase the number of black youth interested in non authoritarian law enforcement careers, and ways to downplay the already existing authoritarian structure of the SPD (SMCP 1968d). These programs satisfied two goals of Model cities residents: They provided oversight of the police by residents of the Central area and jobs to the more than 47 percent of black youth unemployed in the neighborhood (SMCP 1974b).
Residents sought to design the CSO program in order to emphasize an agency devoted to the needs of Central area residents, as determined by the residents themselves. Residents wanted the CSO program to lie not under the authority of the SPD, but under the leadership of residents, and they called for an office located outside of the downtown precinct. Residents prioritized recruiting among Central area youth and insisted that the program not serve as a system of “spies and informers” for the police (LJTF 1970b:1). At one task force meeting, a resident questioned the “capitalist” nature of the police and another questioned the “education” police received (LJTF 1970b:1).
Resistance to neighborhood residents' understanding of life in the Central area started immediately upon commencement of the Model cities implementation phase. At one of the very first task force meetings, an SMCP representative reported that police were “resistant” to and “defensive” in communication. For instance, one of the first jobs the law-and-justice planning coordinator undertook was to send a questionnaire to the police to inquire about how the department handled complaints, what guidelines it had on the appropriate use of firearms, the percentage of minority officers on the force, the methods for minority recruitment, and what the police chief saw as the ideal racial makeup of the force (SMCP 1968a). Though the police initially refused to cooperate, they finally sent a list of the handling of complaints by race. Not a single complaint about the police by a black person had been sustained (Reference WoodWood 1968). One meeting even resulted in the task force passing a motion to write a letter to the mayor complaining about lack of cooperation from the police (Reference CarsonCarson 1969).
In 1969, the observer program morphed with the youth training program, and immediately, SPD Chief Frank Ramon indicated that it would not be supported by the SPD. At the end of 1969, Chief Ramon resigned due to an unrelated scandal and while leadership remained uncertain, little happened on the CSO project. This resignation happened amidst the charges against the BPP discussed above and directly preceding a year in which three black residents of Seattle were shot and killed by the police. These events undoubtedly provided greater urgency to the task force meetings amongst residents and city officials alike. Once police leadership stabilized, efforts to institute the program proceeded apace.
Given the eventual iteration of the CSO program as an offshoot of the SPD, residents generally expressed ambivalence about the program at task force meetings. Some insisted that this iteration of the CSO program would do little to change the dynamic of the police-Central area even if residents were hired. Even those who supported it did so because, as the minutes from one task force meeting recorded, “We have to do something so we might as well go along with the training program” (LJTF 1970b:2). At the end of this meeting, the proposal was unanimously voted down by the task force. One year later, a proposal again came before the task force, but this time Hundley and the AC instructed the task force that they could cooperate or the program would continue without them (LJTF 1971b).
During this time, the police proved to be frequent obstacles to Model neighborhood reforms. Assistant Police Chief Tony Gustin insisted that it would be impossible to allow observers to attend the police academy and not fall under the oversight of the police department.
Model neighborhood residents also wanted to ensure that CSOs not serve as “spies and informers” for the police, but police indicated that this could not be a requirement of the program because CSOs would have the civil service protections of the police department (LJTF 1971c:6). Though Chief George Tielsch responded to the task force that a felony record would not automatically disqualify a person, he sent his letter to the director of SMCP instead of to the chairman of the task force who had originally inquired (not a single CSO was hired with a felony record, however). Residents cited this as one of the innumerable instances of disrespect given to task force members by the police (LJTF 1971d).
Model neighborhood residents were also kept out of the selection process for the project coordinator of the program and the selection of CSOs. Initially, the Civil Service Commission, which oversaw police hiring, indicated that the law passed by the City Council did not specify a role for the LJTF. This meant that the Civil Service Commission planned to go ahead with hiring without task force input. Under the banner of nonpartisanship, though, the Civil Service Commission had refused to discuss the hiring process with SMCP administrators until after the City Council approved the CSO ordinance, thus making it unlikely that residents, SMCP, or city officials could have known about the commission's eventual interpretation of the law (Reference EhlertEhlert 1971c). Eventually, SMCP secured a place for two task force members on the selection committee, now also comprising two police officers who would work within the program, but neighborhood residents voted and passed a motion, 8-2, to boycott future meetings anyway (LJTF 1971a:3). Even at this point, residents still continued to question why control and authority over the program were given to the police in the first instance. Though two task force members did eventually sit on the selection committee for the CSO director, the Civil Service Commission contended that their input was only “advisory” and retained final say over the position (Reference EhlertEhlert 1971b).
Eventually five candidates were certified by the commission as eligible, but only one was black and resided in the Model neighborhood. The Civil Service Commission did not allow the committee to meet face-to-face with candidates, and when the committee did finally review the candidates' files, they voted unanimously to reopen the recruitment process (Reference McGeeMcGee 1971). Despite the committee's recommendation, eventually the one applicant who was both black and a model neighborhood resident received the job. Two members of the task force then threatened to “disclaim this project” on radio, file a lawsuit against SMCP and the SPD, and lead active community resistance against the project (Reference EhlertEhlert 1971d; LJTF 1971e). These threats led Ehlert, the Law and Justice Planning Coordinator for SMCP, to warn Hundley that unless task force members were more readily involved in the future selection of CSOs, “antagonisms and hostilities will increase.” When residents were finally invited onto the committee selecting the CSOs, their input was again merely advisory and the project coordinator of the program, chosen without their input, reserved final selection (Reference EhlertEhlert 1971e).
At the next meeting of the AC, one resident appeared and brought two resolutions passed by the task force to reject the hiring of the CSO candidate and to withhold funds from the project. At this time, Hundley reported that he and Chief Tielsch had met with the candidate, both said “he is the man,” and subsequently hired him to act as project coordinator without the input of task force members. After Hundley's revelation, the AC voted to carry the resolution (Advisory Council 1971:1–2). Two weeks later, the mayor sent a letter to the AC telling them what Hundley had told the task force just over a year earlier—that he ultimately “rejected” the advice of the LJTF and the AC, and that the program would go ahead with or without their support. He wrote: “My office has received too many heartrending supplications from residents of the Central Area for increased and more sensitive law enforcement assistance for my office to delay response any longer” (Reference UhlmanUhlman 1971:1).
In December 1971, three years after the observer program was proposed by residents, the CSO program went into operation. At this time, a majority of CSOs resided in the Model neighborhood. By mid-1973, none of the original CSOs remained and all but one lived outside the Model neighborhood. While the director of the CSO program attended some task force meetings at the inception of the program, by the end of the CSO affiliation with Model cities, the program and the task force were no longer in communication. In 1973, the director of the program proposed restructuring it to provide more “specialized” roles for CSOs, which required greater education and more consideration of “skills” than Model neighborhood residence. Eventually, the SPD assumed responsibility for the operation of the CSO program, which continues to this day.
Despite the premise of citizen participation, city officials in the case of the CSO program practiced a momentary tyranny that limited the impact that democratic processes could have over state institutions. This tiny tyranny helped re-create the conditions of racial and economic disenfranchisement of Central area residents as their vision of a just society—and a just use of state resources—was elided for the status quo. While neighborhood residents critiqued the authoritarian and violent power police held over neighborhood life, they did foresee a role for these policing qualities more broadly. In the next section, I explain how residents drew on these qualities in order to develop the Consumer Protection program, but again the authoritarian nature of the police trumped attempts at democratic redress.
Consumer Protection Program
Like the CSO program, the Consumer Protection program came from task force meetings where residents expressed concerns about the number of frauds perpetrated against the Central area by the business community, including price gouging and false advertising. Weekly meeting attendees told stories about the number of residents who fell victim to business scams and concluded that this incursion should demand greater attention from the police. Types of frauds included false and deceptive advertising, “selling cheap furniture through bait and switch schemes,” and comparative pricing that created a false impression that prices were reduced (LJTF 1970a). In contrast to interpersonal crime, the diffused nature of economic crimes demanded greater investigative resources than a single neighborhood could supply, hence necessitating state—and thus policing—oversight.
As originally conceived, the Consumer Protection program funded resources to establish a department that would serve directly under the police chief and would be responsible for initiating investigations into consumer fraud in low-income areas and creating a citywide consumer education program (LJTF 1970a). For an 18-month period, SMCP would provide funds for a team of legal and investigatory personnel comprising three police officers, three civilian investigators, two secretaries, and six CSOs. SMCP supplied an initial $50,000 allocation and secured matching grants from other funding sources such as the federal Law Enforcement Assistance Administration and the state agency on consumer fraud. The proposal listed as one goal the “development of a new respect for the law by ending the apparent tolerance of ‘white collar crimes,’ especially those against low-income consumers” (LJTF 1970a:4a).
The goals of the Consumer Protection program contrasted with traditional understandings of police as well. The grant planning application stated: “Police reports define crime in traditional terminology and convey the impression that consumer crimes do not exist” (LJTF 1970a:4c). The task force cited one consequence of this attitude:
The public, particularly those who are both victims of consumer crime and targets for vigorous law enforcement—especially youth and minorities, lose respect for the law, become cynical about the legal system and convinced that the legal system is not one of “equal justice for all” but that it is instead a system of control used for the benefit of only part of the community—middle-class property owners, merchants and businessmen
(LJTF 1970a:4p).Objections to the program were raised by both the mayor's office and the police. A memorandum between two members of the SPD outlined the primary complaints, including the critique that such a program needed to encompass the Greater Seattle area to be effective and thus should fall under the jurisdiction of the State Attorney General's office. A police official wrote: “To have vigorous and strict enforcement in the city and less in the county would create two sets of standards. This in turn would enlarge a hostile atmosphere and attitude of the business owners and their employees. Competition is keen today and any restrictions placed on one group without touching the other would make for more trouble” (Reference WubbensWubbens 1970:2). This statement perhaps reaffirmed residents' contention that the SPD served the business elite, but the mayor's office also resisted the proposal.
Like the police, the mayor's office wanted to move the program away from traditional law enforcement and instead house it in a city agency. While this revision may have been in part a response to traction on the part of police officials, this change undermined the integrity of the program and severely curtailed its target effects, something argued vociferously by Ehlert, the Law and Justice Planning Coordinator. Ehlert wrote that the intent of the program was “modifications and changes within the Police Department as well as within the community” (Reference EhlertEhlert 1970c:1). These changes, Ehlert argued, would encourage police responsiveness to residents' concerns and “enhance” the image of police careers in young people's minds. Ehlert also objected to the political winds that the program would inevitably be forced to deal with if it was located in another city agency. Finally, Ehlert protested placing the program outside the police department because it would jeopardize funding sources, a possibility further enhanced by the reality that the political party of the mayor contrasted with the political party that appointed the heads of prominent police funding agencies (Reference EhlertEhlert 1970c). In another memorandum one week later, Ehlert acknowledged that resistance on the part of the Mayor to housing the program in the SPD resulted in part from the “lack of enthusiasm within the department.” To this Ehlert wrote, “If we are to seek to achieve attitude changes by giving responsibility for administration to the police themselves, then perhaps we have to accept some reduction in consumer protection efficiency in favor of a longer range goal of attitude modification” (Reference EhlertEhlert 1970a).
Ehlert's arguments about the Consumer Protection program echo the sentiments of task force participants that the severity of business crimes demanded not only attention from the police but a revised understanding of who constituted “criminals.” Police intransigence persisted as SMCP continued to press the issues. Chief Tielsch reportedly feigned no knowledge of the program when SMCP representatives did finally meet with him and stated “unequivocally” that “he was opposed to having any of his men working for and responsible to another agency” (Reference EhlertEhlert 1970b). Ehlert revealed his frustration with the police at one meeting where he reported that the “Police Department refused to operate this project because the police don't believe this is legitimate police work and they tend to think that commercial practices that defraud and cheat people are only ‘technical’ crimes and that it would be better for people with complaints to hire a lawyer” (LJTF 1972a:3).
In May 1971, a meeting finally occurred between SPD representatives, Ehlert, and a representative from the mayor's office. Though Ehlert attended this meeting with the assumption that “we were all operating on the premise that some kind of unit would be created”, police officials immediately questioned the merit of the proposal (Reference EhlertEhlert 1971e). The meeting began with Assistant Police Chief Richard Schoener stating, “Most of our interest is in the felony end of crime. We cannot go out and find the violations; we can only act on complaints” (SMCP 1971:1). Later in the meeting, Ehlert attempted to challenge this understanding of policing:
Ehlert: One of the things this program is designed to do is give some kind of back-up and training in a legal area by policemen.
Schoener: Should we be involved in legal interpretations?
Ehlert: You are always involved when you make an arrest. I am just suggesting that you get involved in consumer fraud….
Schoener: In consumer fraud we are in an area of misdemeanors and must be practical in how much time we should spend on these cases.
Ehlert: I think part of the educational process is a growing awareness by the public of the deliberate cheating of consumers, and believe it is as offensive as people inside a theater watching a dirty movie. I believe a project like this would at least [allow] consumer frauds to compete with other types of abuses.
Schoener:… What can we do that the License Division cannot do?
Ehlert: Put people in jail.
Kretchmar [SPD Major]: The License Division can issue citations.
Schoener: There are not many of these frauds that can be said to fall into the felony areas. I think right now we are handling most of the felonies involved. I don't know what we should be doing that we are not doing right now.
Ehlert: There is an excellent booklet put out by your Department on security. I believe if literature could be put out on this field and widely distributed, that complaints would then come in.
Schoener: We are then in the area of consumer education.
Ehlert: You are already in the area of security education, etc.
(SMCP 1971:4–6).The back-and-forth dialogue illustrates both the resistance on the part of the police and, perhaps more important, the inability of Central area residents to utilize, to their own benefit, the coercive powers of policing. This dialogue continued with SPD insisting that a need for the program had not been shown and Ehlert restating that the report from the Model neighborhood showed a high volume of complaints and a need for this program.
At the follow-up meeting, police authorities again refused to acknowledge a need for the program, leading Ehlert to conclude that he “was also a little surprised to realize how totally indifferent to the community relations possibilities of this project the police were” (Reference EhlertEhlert 1971e:1). During this time, Ehlert continued to work on getting SPD cooperation to no avail, including asking other task forces, such as education and health, for help in placing pressure on the police department. In one letter, Ehlert vented about the lack of police cooperation and argued that the police could “build a healthier basis of public confidence and support by shifting their constituency somewhat so as to include more of the left-outs” (Reference EhlertEhlert 1971a:1). In February 1972, Ehlert recommended that SMCP not allocate any money in the fourth year to the program because of SPD recalcitrance. In March, two police officers contacted Ehlert and showed interest in getting the project off the ground. Ehlert suggested that they “rewrite the original proposal any way they liked,” but in August reported that he “never heard from them again” (Reference EhlertEhlert 1972a, Reference Ehlert1972b:2). The March 1974 termination audit of the program indicated that little had changed in more than one year, and SMCP money went to funding the creation of an office of consumer affairs within the Seattle department of licensing (SMCP 1974a).
The fate of the Consumer Protection program is summed up best perhaps by Ehlert in a memorandum to Hundley that reported on a questionnaire sent to members of the Central area querying their concerns about crime. He wrote that if patterns were consistent with the results determined by the survey, there were
some substantial differences in what citizens want from the Police Department and what the Police Department chooses to do. E.g. commercial crime ranks almost three times as high as marijuana and pornography in what people want, whereas the actual allocation by the Police Department is probably nearly the reverse. I suspect if this “police priority” question were submitted to different groups (such as SMCP task forces, community councils, Chamber of Commerce, etc.) the data would make it possible to prepare a demographic profile of the constituency whose expectations the Police Department chooses to fulfill
(Reference EhlertEhlert 1972b:1).This point was pressed by Ehlert in his meeting with police in June 1971—when police indicated that it was impractical to spend so much time on consumer cases, Ehlert charged that he believed the cheating of consumers was “as offensive as people inside a theater watching a dirty movie,” implying that police seemingly had few problems spending their time and resources searching out those types of infractions.
Early on, residents complained about the possibility for Model cities funds to be used against their wishes. Early resistance to the Model cities format cited concern about mayoral control and the housing of the program in the executive department (SMCP 1969). The Central area neighborhood task force even sent a letter to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in 1971 to suggest that revenue sharing was necessary for true citizen participation (LJTF 1971a). Residents tried repeatedly to change the course of SMCP direction in response to the unilateral actions of city officials, often to no avail. In addition to sending letters to HUD, they requested countless meetings with city officials. They also proposed, seconded, and unanimously passed an amendment to sue the city, and at another meeting, eight members volunteered to file a class action lawsuit against the city in response to the CSO program.
The implication of police and city refusal to implement the Consumer Protection and CSO program in line with Model neighborhood residents' goals is clear. Model neighborhood residents were deserving of neither the authority to determine what harms should be confronted by police officers nor the responsibility to define how state agencies like the police should best provide security. Recently, Herbert showed that this is a frequent contradiction in the realm of community policing—residents want police to respond to what they perceive as signs of disorder in the community, which police often disdain to do as these tasks fail to confront the “real” problems of crime (Reference HerbertHerbert 2006). In the case of Model cities, city officials had the opportunity to allow residents democratic control over state institutions, yet the idea that Central area residents did not know best either how to govern themselves or the most useful outlay of state resources prevailed. Like more explicit racial exceptionalities to democratic promises, city officials suspended democratic redress in favor of the banal tyrannies of selection committees, city government, and police officials.
Ehlert attempted to work on behalf of Model neighborhood residents and advance an alternative geography that would show just where and who made up the SPD's constituencies. In response to the events that transpired with both the CSO program and the Consumer Protection project, the at-large task force passed a resolution that declared:
We would like to remind the Advisory Council that it was the lawlessness and the injustices that created the need for the Model City Program, and the Law and Justice Task Force, recognizing that crime has no boundaries, developed their programs to attain the widest range of benefits for the total community
(LJTF 1972b:2).Despite these attempts to remind city officials of the goal of citizen participation, by the end of the SMCP residents expressed a “general attitude” of “disenchantment” because the “administration is demeaning citizen efforts by negating task force proposals and projects, thus creating the present citizen apathy and disenchantment” (Southeast Law and Justice Task Force 1972: n.p.). In the final year of task force meetings, attendance was so low that one at-large task force meeting reported only two attendees (Reference ScottScott 1972).
Instead of seeing the Central area as the site and source of crime perpetration as the police did, residents defined it as the source of crime victimization from those in the larger surrounding business community. Instead of seeing the police department as the agent of safety and security, residents saw it as the source of lawlessness and insecurity in the community. In the case of both the CSO and the Consumer Protection project, the intent of the residents of the Central area was clearly stymied by the efforts of the police and elected officials. While Model cities aimed to allow residents to practice citizen control over the institutions of law and justice, citizen participation meant little in the face of entrenched ideas among city officials about what constituted an appropriate response to conditions in the Central area. Police refused to relinquish control over CSOs, the selection of CSO personnel, and the nature of policing. City officials refused to relinquish control over the CSO program and allowed the SPD to dictate the terms of its involvement with the Model cities program.
Each time residents faced resistance to their plans, officials claimed to understand the needs and requirements of Model neighborhood residents better than them—indeed, police officers saw “no proof” that the Consumer Protection program was needed, deemed it “impossible” to protect against the usurpation of the CSO program, and would not allow CSOs to fall under the oversight of residents. Likewise, the mayor concluded that his knowledge of the Central area from the “heartrending supplications” of residents required some law enforcement response, even if that meant more of the same for the neighborhood. In each of these cases, the Central area was rendered an extraordinary space where the democratic production of the state as a function of citizen direction could be severed in favor of (sometimes benevolently reasoned) tyranny.
The irony of the Model cities program, however, perhaps lies in the somewhat innocuous goals of the residents. By all accounts, the Model cities participants were hardly revolutionaries, but they understood the frustration of militant groups (Afro American Journal, 27 June 1968, p. 2; 21 Nov. 1968, p. 1). They did repeatedly invite militant groups to join in task force plans and lobby SMCP and the mayor to put pressure on the SPD to make sure police did not provoke a confrontation with the BPP. Yet in both of these endeavors residents sought to quell the problems of violence and brutality they saw operating in their neighborhood, a goal seemingly apropos for a liberal democratic community. In both the CSO and Consumer Protection programs, residents envisioned programs that provided opportunities for the employment and education of neighborhood youth and a structure designed to provide a forum for neighborhood concerns as defined by the residents themselves. Though the Central area was represented as an exceptional neighborhood by city officials, the concerns and desires of residents were remarkably banal. In each case, residents wanted protection for their family and children, adequate housing, and employment. The difference, however, is that while to city officials the SPD represented the agency of safety and security, to Central area residents it provided the source of community insecurity.
Conclusion: Race, Space, and the Governance of Crime
Understanding the trajectory of the Model cities program, and how it impacts today's law-and-justice projects, requires understanding the role of spatial differences in motivating the project. When the city first applied for Model cities funds, it did so because it perceived precipitous decline to be occurring in the Central area. City officials noted increases in the rates of poverty, families with children, and numbers of people seeking federal aid. Local newspapers reported increasing rates of drugs among Central area youth, and the local police even instituted a task force to stave off narcotics trafficking (Reference ConantConant 1967; Reference TaylorTaylor 1994). These characteristics coupled to form an image of the Central area as extraordinary relative to other areas of Seattle and created the impression amongst city officials that “something must be done” about the neighborhood if the city was to stave off the forces of urban decline. This representation of the Central area draws upon the knowledge of the Central area created by a wealth of statistics and provides an example of Reference LefebvreLefebvre's (1991)“abstract space” in which spatial representations, like crime rates, poverty, etc., provide the lens through which the neighborhood is conceived and obfuscate the inherent power relations in these constructions.
The city's representation of the Central area failed to adequately capture what residents saw as the primary forces impacting the neighborhood—namely in the case of law and justice, inadequate policing, and increased police brutality. Residents, by contrast, fit with Lefebvre's notion of “representational spaces,” an understanding of space comprising the social relations that are lived within. While residents certainly saw instances of “lawlessness” in the area, these conditions were not the product of Central area residents but of the actions of the largely outsider-run police force. Rather than the city's characterization of youth as the source of prescient decline, residents saw youth confronted with an inability to get jobs, a decent education, and respect from the surrounding community. Whereas the city imagined the space of the Central area to physically contain the seeds of Seattle's decline, residents placed the central causes in the actions of political outsiders from surrounding neighborhoods. Model cities reduced conditions in the Central area to a composite of risk factors where the only logical solution was to continue with the law enforcement status quo.
The geographies offered by residents and city officials of the Central area illustrate a fundamental tension at the root of geographically based approaches to crime control. Today, these types of policing activities, like order maintenance, crime-free zones, and hot spots policing, are rightly critiqued for their failure to consider the social structural causes of inequality (Reference Herbert and BrownHerbert & Brown 2006; Reference Sanchez and GoldbergSanchez 2001). However, Model cities provides a poignant reminder that even in the context of the Great Society, a discourse of exceptionality persists that often forecloses the potentials of democratic governance. As Reference FoucaultFoucault (2003) shows in his discussion of “biological social racism” that pervades modern society, the assumption that some lives are “not worth living” obfuscates a normative conception of society. In a similar vein, Lefebvre's notion of “abstract space” suggests that the work of statecraft, including the mapping of crime and other social ills, elides power relations. As the case of Model cities showed, even though the Great Society ethos sought to undermine the conditions of racial and economic disenfranchisement, Model cities re-created this disenfranchisement by not allowing state institutions, like the police, to be reformed and reconsidered according to the representations of Central area residents. By attending to the geographies of power that lay at the heart of the representations of the Central area by the state, Model cities participants sought to reinvigorate the city's understanding of the geography of crime.
Though Model cities might be considered a failure by residents who participated in it, it nevertheless provides an example of the hopeful possibilities of democratic politics. Model cities represented a moment where funding and concerns about democracy came together, in this case so that the policing and safety needs of Central area residents might be addressed. Even further, it provided a moment when the hegemony of policing might have been challenged. Things might have turned out much differently. As the story shows, there were ample opportunities for this to happen—particularly in the case of the Consumer Protection program. As a case study, the story of Seattle's LJTF tells very little about general trends that prompted the transition from the logic of the Great Society to the racialized mass incarceration state. Yet by detailing the difficulties that those committed to undoing racial and economic disenfranchisement faced in Seattle, the banal tyrannies that are committed in the minute geographic representations of crime become a bit more clear.
Geographical approaches to crime control are yet another wave in the technological sophistication of policing (Reference NeocleousNeocleous 2000). Broken windows policing, order maintenance, and hot spots policing all assume that the geographical distribution of social ills, disorder, and crime are themselves justification for increased police presence. But, as I have shown in this article, there is a cautionary tale in taking space as a rational representation of the social world. Through the mapping of crime, the people who reside in these areas are represented in a strict duality between those who must be saved by the systems of law and justice and those who threaten society's continuation. When, in the case of the Model cities, residents' imaginations of the causes and consequences of neighborhood difference are taken under consideration, this strict duality cannot be maintained. Instead, residents' visions show a world that is ultimately more complicated, and a neighborhood space that is formed through spatial relationships rather than the rational and ultimately aspatial coding of geographical differences in crime rates. It is through the stories of the inevitability and the anticipation of urban decline that the logic of race and class difference continues in the era of mass incarceration. To move beyond the politics of crime represented by contemporary law-and-justice strategies, we must also confront the geographical imagination that pervades the politics of knowledge production in the modern state.
