03/30/2019
A little over a week ago, a local Seattle news station, KOMO News, released a documentary titled Seattle is Dying. KOMO is a Sinclair Broadcasting owned network, which shouldn’t matter, but they’re a creepy company with a reputation for producing some not so subtle rightwing propaganda. Anyway, back on point.
The film attempted to address topics of homelessness and drug addiction. I’ll be charitable and assume the documentary creators were likely operating from a good faith conservative lock’em-up-for-their-own-good perspective, an “arrest’em and jail’em to impose retribution for their transgressions/crimes” kind of worldview. Even in today’s scientifically “enlightened” and technologically “developed” society, these violent barbaric beliefs persist as a legitimate way to view present social ills or crime and punishment issues.
An alternative perspective from which to view this documentary is as a kind of propaganda film that is promoting a message of “tough love” or “law and order” approach to crisis management. The rationale goes something like this: Drug addicts are a blight on society and a danger to themselves and maybe others, so lock them up. Force them clean. This way of looking at the world likely plays well with older and/or more conservative audiences, as this conservative world view is basically repackaged talking points lingering around from the failed War on Drugs.
Increasingly, this older audience is the audience targeted by most local news outlets, as over half of most local news viewership today is over the age of 50. Rather than attempt to reach a younger audience, I think most local news networks are either on a kamikaze autopilot mode, essentially they’ll just go bankrupt when the clicks and money dries up. An alternative path is to be bought up by a media monopolist like Sinclair media.
Given all of these considerations that are baked in to the local news business model, it’s not a leap (maybe it is though, that’s up to whoever reads this) to suggest a local news network’s target audience is taken into account, to some degree, when that network decides what content to push or not push. It’s simple editorial control. After all, this is America, whatever you’re pushing better be entertaining and attention grabbing, so might as well cook in your audience’s biases to ensure they connect with the contetn that much more.
Of course this documentary’s message of criminalizing homelessness and addiction is a defunct way to think about either of these social problems as they exist in today’s modern American society. Seattle’s homelessness issues are a result of tech gentrification, people living as citizen-addicts in a broader American culture that routinely turns their addictive tendencies against them. In fact, addiction is cooked into today’s biggest tech monopolies’ business models! Google? Facebook? Twitter? Amazon? According to technologist and computer scientist Jaron Lanier, these companies are little more than empires of user manipulation, with google and facebook being the two most prevalent offenders. Mass surveillance and user manipulation is what gives these companies massive value.
I’m not trying to rob addicts or the homeless of personal agency here(their ability to make choices freely and independently), but there are powerful forces displacing and dispossessing people throughout American society and they’re real and must be acknowledged. Until these ideas (inequality, gentrification, lack of housing) are factored into the conversation, you’ve simply started a conversation around a false dichotomy leading nowhere as fast as you’d like. Now that some of the ideological stuff has been addressed, a brief overview of the film follows.
Sound from the opening scenes hits the viewer’s ears; two fingers tap rhythmically on a dull rawhide drum. In addition, every couple of seconds a startling high pitched digital alarm sounds off, putting the viewer in an instant state of alert. This combination of sounds is heard as a camera pans in for a close up of a homeless tent encampment, then moves up and out to a wider shot of the Seattle skyline. A bunch of office buildings…like every other major corporate city nerve center in the U.S., tons of erect concrete. I’ll never understand America’s obsession with skylines of tall concrete buidlings or why people created a world where sitting in traffic to go to and from “work” in those buildings to survive as a way of life was a thing. Weird world. Anyway, back to the film.
The documentary is deeply flawed and is essentially an ahistorical work made from a rightwing perspective. The first couple of guest interviews in the flick are middle aged business owning men. Their conversations can be summarized as follows: homelessness is a problem right now. We don’t care how it happened. We don’t really care why it happened. The homeless are a blight to a stereotypical middle-class Seattle resident or the Business Owner or someone other abstract Respectable Citizen™, and the homeless existing outside around all the concrete buildings and sidewalks of concrete Seattle is “just wrong.”
Again, it’s not that a society that produces thousands of homeless people in the same city where well known billionaires such as Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Howard Schultz, and other call home. No, the real problem, as presented in the film, isn’t homelessness per se; the real problem is that middle class and Upright People have to see the Undesirables. (Again, nothing really controversial or new here. Listen to Citations Pod to get a ton of examples of this type of implicit biases of local news outlets. It is what it is).
I’m not suggesting that these interviewees have no legitimate concerns of safety to property or person: They do. What I’m saying is that this pitting of small business owner vs. addicted homeless population with the police as the arbiter of “The Law” is a somewhat insidious perspective. But this is the view KOMO is pushing or at least appears to be based on my viewing of the video. The problem with this “enforce the law” approach is that we know how this story goes. We just wind up with a whole lot of people in jail, all the while nothing will be done to address the underlying societal aspects of modern U.S. society that produces so many addicts in the first place.
Early on in the film, the narrator says that local governments in the Seattle area spend close to a billion dollars per year fighting homelessness. Now there’s a story worth digging into a little deeper. How broken is this system that can’t house and feed between 10,000–15,000 people in a major metropolitan area with a billion dollars per year? Instead, the main message of this documentary is to use jail and prison spaces to house and treat homeless drug addicts. Sounds like that old rightwing schtick of “compassionate conservativism” or a tough love approach or some other b.s. This thinking is not much different that Joe Biden in the 1990s here. It wasn’t right then, and it’s not right now.
After stigmatizing homeless addicts and elevating small business and property owners to the status of Arbiters of What’s Morally Right & Upstanding™, the next evidence the film turns to are arrest records of the homeless population. The records are really best described as a subset of the homeless population. The narrator explains that the list consists of repeat offenders, roughly a hundred names is what he says is on the list. Just for a little context, Seattle has roughly 10,000 people in a state of chronic homelessness at any given time. Hence, this subcategory of repeat criminal offenders presented here as evidence and analysis is a very very non representative sample from a much larger homeless population.
My main point: don’t use this high recidivist (rearrest) info to make any general conclusions or to allude to general conclusions about the entire population. Again, this is a problem that could receive tremendous focus in it’s own. But what does the data “expert” proclaim: “The fact that this system could go on, with in effect 100% failure rate, for so long, without anyone raising questions, without city council holding hearings, without any action being taken, is something that is hard for me to explain.” I bet it is. Because it’s bullshit. And when you try to explain bullshit, it’s hard. The idea that no one has been debating homelessness or crime around Seattle is silly.
Maybe he’s referring to the 100 or so high recidivist homeless people with severe drug addiction problems. Kind of ambiguous, but even then, not to have public hearings on 100 people who are engaged in routine low level crimes in a metro area of millions isn’t really scandalous. It is problematic, and too many cities and towns across the US have poor and working people who do develop similar kinds of relationships with the criminal justice system. There is a problem there, but it’s not Seattle specific or some big governmental scandal.
Next, the film moves us on to a strange series of scenes detailing victimization of the Seattle Police by, I guess, the City Council. The narrator says the “Seattle Police are afraid to speak out.” “Cops are terrified of losing their jobs and retaliation.” KOMO surveyed the cops, and to the surprise of no one, many of them are Law & Order types. They are presented as Morally Upright Arbiters of the Law, with one officer being quoted as saying, “Yes, I am frustrated because I’m a law enforcement officer that is told not to enforce the law.” What does that even mean? On the one hand, like, in terms of being a law enforcer looking to enforce the law. It’s meaningless. On the other hand, this is a typical rightwing view of the world where the speakers is essentially speaking in code for: I want to lock up the undesirables until they conform to the dominant culture. I’m probably just reading too much into things….
I mean, the very next quoted cop states: “It’s simple, start keeping criminals in jail. Judges need to stop giving them ridiculously low sentences and prosecutors need to stop accepting cheesy plea deals and actually lock people up with they commit a crime.” Because if there is one thing America does well, it’s lock up people when they commit crimes. Just take a look at the zero criminal prosecutions Wall Street received when it destroyed the global economy through fraud and deceit. I guess with this track record, it’s no wonder Wall Street never really stopped being a safe haven for fraudulent, lying, deceitful bastards. Anyway, back to the rightwing documentary.
To end this rant: it’s a mediocre film. The primary message that came through to me, follows: homelessness and addiction are linked to crime and should initially be dealt with by cops arresting and jailing homeless addicts. Once the homeless addicts are in state custody, an “intervention” of sorts will take place to fix the addict of his current destructive behavior. And what about relapse? What about the addicts who are sitting quietly in their own home but still overdosing? Who knows. But then again, really addressing addiction and homelessness wasn’t the real point of this documentary. The real point was to push a message of addressing these issues with failed rightwing policy prescriptions. The current state of things has failed Seattle and the broader country. The prescription offered by the film makers is just old failed ideas. Pursue them like the propagandist here suggests to. Go ahead. They will fail.
One final point for clarity. I have no doubt that for addicts deep in the throws of addiction/substance abuse issues, very possibly support this course of action, but we are talking about a super small subpopulation of the overall homeless population. The methods proposed in the film are probably indisputably applicable to less than five percent of the general homeless population around Seattle.
A crude final summary of my views, but a summary nonetheless. To call the film lacking would be an understatement. The most valuable contribution the film might’ve done is to shine one more light on the continuing crisis of Americans who have no homes in which to live. It is also one more voice calling attention America’s addicts who essentially receive little, improper, or no treatment in our Second Gilded Age. It always helps to remember, this isn’t just happening in Seattle: homelessness and addiction are West Coast crises, as well as national crises.
