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CounterPunch
February
14, 2003
Jacksonville in Crisis?
The
Case Against Consolidated Government
By ANTHONY GANCARSKI
As is typical of Florida metropolises, Jacksonville
has too many police cars and too little in the way of actual
neighborhoods. After a hard day working in a telemarketing mill
and braving traffic jams through the interminable span of stoplights
between home, work, and the strip mall, there isn't much incentive
to get to know one's neighbors. Besides, odds are that they're
narcs or hoodlums of one stripe or another.
Because that's all you see on the news.
Homicides in Springfield, Terror in Bali, agitprop for a war
that no one you know believes in. The scandals you read about
are nothing compared to the scandals you don't. The most undercovered
mayoral tilt in recent memory coincides with below-the-radar
gossip about spoiler candidates in the contest.
And the electable candidates might come
from different neighborhoods, backgrounds in city government,
or even races, but at heart they are all essentially the same.
Apologists for a consolidated city government that bowed down
to the NFL until they got their local concession; lackeys for
a crew of bandits that forces students to attend state schools
that don't even teach them basic skills. In Springfield, off
of Soutel, the locals get a little taste of Life In the Occupied
Territories at the will of a sheriff's office that has turned
the phrase Rule of Law into a punch line.
And a kick line, and a billy club line,
and a shot of mace. Folks in "nicer" neighborhoods
like Mandarin and Baymeadows [both of which were developed long
after Consolidation went into force in 1967] may not realize
this, but officers routinely drive through poorer neighborhoods
and searchlight the shrubbery, looking for evil doers, as if
Osama bin Laden passed out in the bushes after too much Colt
45.
The worst thing about how the Jacksonville
Sheriff's Office conducts its business of intimidation may not
be that it flagrantly violates the Constitution. The Constitution
lies shredded like so many unpaid bills at this point, and rumor
has it that 108% of those surveyed in a recent Fox News/Opinion
Dynamics poll are ready to give up "liberty for safety."
Liberty is being given up, all right. The liberty of the urban
poor is being sacrificed at the altar of overpriced, unnecessary,
and immoral infrastructure, and whether that sacrifice is worth
it is not even up for discussion. The choice has been made, and
the jails are flooded; between 1980 and 2000, adult incarceration
rates nationwide rose 220%.
Despite the wrecked lives on display
in our prisons, it could be argued that the worst thing about
the War on Drugs, as it is manifested in Jacksonville [and virtually
every other city of comparable size in the Southeast], is that
local, state, and federal governments essentially soak the rich
to pay for it. People who have bet their entire lives that they
will be able to meet their mortgage obligations on a riverfront
home have enough problems without subsidizing the hourly surveillance
of every home on a block. Factory owners worried about their
bottom lines chafe at having to subsidize the maintenance of
a criminal justice apparatus currently touching six million lives
in the United States.
$50,000 per prisoner, give or take, with
roughly two million in jail. All of this is a drag on free-enterprise
and a commensurate boon to the command economy that drives our
domestic concentration camps. Where people get locked in solitary
cages for years at a time, where newbies on the cell block find
themselves at the mercy of those bigger, stronger, and willing.
Wave the flag. Cover up the kanji with Made in USA stickers.
Meanwhile, the next few generations don't read or exercise enough,
but are better than any prior at ordering pizzas, cooking up
meth, and contracting social diseases.
It's time for a change, in Jacksonville,
and elsewhere. It is time to imbue the phrase "community
standards" with new meaning. It is time to break the city
up into self-governing zones roughly the size of city council
districts, and to finally repudiate the doctrine of consolidation.
Who has consolidation benefited except
for developers? I know I'd trade the benefits of it to be left
alone by a city government incompetent in all areas except the
enforcement of arbitrary laws. The false promise of resource
redistribution served as cover for the encroachments of a JSO
run amok, for the power moves of those who build subdivisions
and call them plantations. Bold new city of the south? A flat
out lie, underscored by the hundreds of thousands daily whose
primary experience of consolidated government is scoring bail
to get their children or brothers out of jail.
So, a modest proposal to close. Let each
neighborhood police itself. Maybe even work out a system so that
social services are neighborhood-based. Whether it takes a village
to raise a child or not, it's abundantly clear that a metropolis
simply can't get it done. It's long past time to say goodbye
to a discredited experiment and the political hacks that come
with it. Rest in Peace, Consolidation, and take your boys with
you.
Comments are welcome at Anthony.Gancarski@attbi.com
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February 8
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