By Mark David Blum, Esq.
Congratulations to the City of Syracuse for closing another neighborhood market. Zaks Market on the southside of Syracuse was officially closed for a year. The sole reason for doing so was that people were hanging out in front. Police call the loiterers ‘drug dealers’ and punished the business owner for the independent activities of criminals.
In a community sorely lacking in jobs and growth, one from where people are fleeing as fast as the taxes are rising, we find City Government working overtime to shut down another business. This is the same community that is funding the nation’s largest white elephant, clamoring for jobs and taxpayer funds for welfare, and is constantly bemoaning the lack of community growth. Even our former governor referenced this region as ‘the Appalachia of New York’. (For the record, the economy of Appalachia is doing far better than are we here in Upstate).
For what reason did City Hall take this action? Because of what police allege is loitering and drug sales going on outside the store. Again, let me write it twice: The store was closed because of what private citizens were doing OUTSIDE the store and which activities had nothing to do with the business or the community it serves. For some reason, City Hall and its minions think that it is the responsibility of the business owner or home owner to take responsibility to the behaviors of other people outside their property. Syracuse wants private citizens to do police work and when they do not, the City will come and take your property. With due respect; if you want to enforce the law, send the police -- not plywood.
Now, in one of the poorest sections of the City, an area otherwise ignored by government, residents, including the elderly, the infirm, and young children no longer have access to a local market. Thanks to the ignorance and failed social policy, folks in this neighborhood have to walk farther just to secure the basic staples and necessities of life. It is the poor who lack resources to drive to another store. Children will have to walk farther. Those who cannot walk the extra distance and do not have a car, will just have to starve. This should be seriously felt in the cold winter.
It is all part of the overall plot by City Hall and the Syracuse Police Department management to continue to abuse and target the weakest among us. Somehow they have to justify their existence and in targeting those who cannot fight back, the City gets to put on a face that they are accomplishing something. In reality, they are knifing their own citizens for the glory of a few moments on television and a pat on the back from a friendly judge. It is an unabashed open policy of ethnic cleansing and nobody rational seems to object.
Here is how it works: You wake up one morning, as you have 1,000 times before, and as you sip your coffee, you see on the news a story about a large drug arrest with pictures of drugs and money and guns all displayed in front of a cadre of uniformed officers. They gloat and bleat about the numbers of people arrested and assure the community that our drug problem is over. Next, you start to hear stories in the news about killings and attacks that are “drug related” which is nothing more than competition to fill the market void created by the earlier arrests and crackdown. Eventually, the violence dies down as a new distribution network sets up in place. Then comes the Weed and Seed crowd complaining about drug activity. Police commence a two year long investigation which results in another sweep and another mass arrest. Ahh yes; such goes the cycle of life in Prohibition America.
As someone who likes to garden, when I pull weeds and debris from the beds, they are thrown into a mulch heap. Query now that Zaks Market has been closed, where the “weeds” that were dislodged from the area go. No doubt, some of them will be composted in our Department of Prisons. The rest … where do you think they will go?
It is always easier to target the poor and especially Black and Hispanic communities for these types of Prohibition attacks. Setting aside the political impotence of the poor and the blind eye of their elected legislators; the culture in those neighborhoods is turned outward. People there live their lives in their front yards. Children play together in the street. Folks who live in crowded public housing projects need somewhere to go when they tire of sitting in a concrete box all day. Compare this to the affluent neighborhoods and White culture which by contrast tend to turn toward their back yard and living rooms. Thus, folks in the poor neighborhoods find themselves more exposed than their suburban or affluent counterparts.
Additionally, there is the question of youth. When you are a teenager, where do you go after school – especially when you live in a small apartment? Most folks go outside and hang out with their friends. Back in the “old days”, it used to be the malt shop or the pizza shop, or some local hang out where you can buy a soda and do teen stuff with your friends.
In Syracuse, a group of teenagers of a certain skin color standing together outside a market automatically draws the attention of police. Instead of making friends, police will swarm the group and anybody who runs is arrested. All are searched and is consistent with our failed policy in managing drug misuse in society, drugs will be found in a certain percentage of those stopped. I have called it Ethnic Cleansing and the statistics bear that out.
“Arrest rates and corresponding arrest ratios that were calculated for Onondaga County were then compared with statewide averages with a few nearby counties. … Specifically, the arrest rate ratios indicate that the chances of arrest for black residents in Onondaga County are substantially greater in Onondaga County than nearby counties or the state as a whole. … During the years of the study, the arrest rate ratios indicate that chances of being arrested for drug felonies or drug sales are 20 to 40 times greater for black residents.”
“According to the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Statistics, arrest rates for black residents within New York State as a whole are about 4 to 5 times higher than that for white residents. … The unique nature of street drug markets in urban areas has sometimes been offered as an explanation of why minorities experience higher drug arrest rates than whites. Statistical evidence indicates that drug use patterns within these two racial groups are similar. However, the corresponding arrest rate ratios in Onondaga County are significantly higher than the arrest ratios in Erie or Monroe counties and also significantly higher than those for NY State as a whole. … These large differences in arrest rate ratios for Onondaga County have persisted over the time period included in this evaluation (1995-2004).”
In 2000, 2002, 2004, 2005, and 2006, studies, reports, and neighborhood evaluations of Syracuse Police activities show a rising effort of energy concentrated in low income minority neighborhoods. Significant numbers of Citizens and scientists have decried ‘profiling’ as being the basis for the disparate impact of police activity upon Blacks in Syracuse and Onondaga County. Racial profiling is not the issue; but instead, it is racial stereotyping that is causing the problem.
Low income neighborhoods are presumed to be rife with violence against persons and property and hence, stepped up police patrols are concentrated in those areas. An evaluation of the distribution of Level 1 offenses (violence against persons and property) shows that such crimes tend moreso to be occurring in more middle class neighborhoods than in the Southside or near Westside of Syracuse. The types of crimes that show up on activity reports for police in the poor neighborhoods are either on the spot observations by officers or crimes that do not exist absent the presence of police.
Yet local, State and Federal officials keep concentrating their energies and manpower in low income neighborhoods and on drug crimes. Using such high minded language as Operation Impact and the Organized Crime Act, we see that Blacks in this County are the ones who are at greatest risk of arrest, prosecution, and incarceration. They are being rounded up an entire neighborhood at a time; an entire generation at a time.
In the end, what we as citizens get is a closed market, a worsening hardship in the neighborhood and a shift in the so-called crime problem from one street corner to another. Can the Mayor, the Police Chief, the Corporation Counsel or anybody in City government assure the community that closing Zaks Market will have a substantial impact upon drug use and distribution? Is there anybody alive (whose income does not derive from continuing to fuel this failed policy) who still believes it is effective? As a reader, ask yourself whether you really think we can rid of drugs completely from society.
Supposedly this entire discussion is about quality of life issues. There is going to be violence associated with prohibition forever and always. Two reasons provoke this: One is demand which is never going to go away. The second is the necessity to use high powered weapons on street corners because there is no access to use high powered lawyers in court rooms. Police and prohibitionists create a world that keeps them employed, keeps the public in fear, and just keeps sweeping the problem under the rug. There is no courage in closing down a market, putting someone out of business, and disturbing the lives of thousands of people. Collective punishment is not American justice.
What is really going on is that white folks and old folks just don’t like kids hanging around. Drive down the street and see a group of young Black people and the first thought is criminal activity. Add to that mix “that music”, and “those clothes”, and “that hair” and the next thing you know, some old white lady is on local WSYR radio thanking the police for ridding the neighborhood of that “vermin”. You don’t see this in Manlius because folks have backyards and big houses and living rooms and basements with swimming pools and so nobody complains.
If Syracuse police and City Hall are truly concerned about the health safety and wellbeing of the folks who live in the Zaks Market neighborhood, perhaps the Department can put one of its fancy schmancy Neighborhood Policing trailers out front. But, like with the homeless, police and Syracuse City government prefers to use the fist and to destroy instead of building neighborhoods and communities.
So, congratulations Syracuse. You have another failed and closed business on your hands. Get out the adding machine because the costs to social services are about take a massive jump. Last year, your Mayor only raised your taxes by 6%.
To the citizens of the affected neighborhood: Make some noise. The rights you give up are your own. How much more blood of your youth and neighbors must be spilt?
