IN THE NEWS

It was 2011, and we were dropping my friend Don off at his spot after a late night out with friends in Brooklyn when we saw it: a giant, white booth with a spotlight perched on a mobile platform about 20 feet over his block. The booth was emblazoned with “NYPD” on the sides.

“Bruh, Is that…a guard tower?” I asked, WTF-ily.

“Yeah, it’s wild,” Don said, shaking his head. I immediately thought of how something like that had to change the climate of the neighborhood.

As it turned out, this tower was called a SkyWatch; the city would later roll out a grip of them out across the city. But the presence of that SkyWatch we saw felt like upping the ante on what was already constant, unrelenting surveillance for Black Brooklynites: In 2011, the peak of NYPD’s controversial stop-and-frisk program, the police recorded nearly 700,000 stops of civilians during that year and about 90 percent of whom were Black or Latino. (There were actually more police stops of Black men that year than there were young Black men in the city.) And while the city’s stated reason for all these police stops was to get guns off the streets, my colleague Ailsa Chang reported back then that only about one-tenth of one percent (0.001%) of all stops that year resulted in the seizure of a gun.

Seth Wenig/AP

But there’s a smaller detail from that era of random police searches and portable panopticons that seems darkly relevant to me again these days: the dudes in a lot of neighborhoods just …stopped dapping each other up. Many stopped walking with friends. Some of them stopped going outside at night altogether. They worried, quite reasonably, that any close physical contact with each other would be read by the cops who were always nearby — and the jump-out boys who almost never ID themselves — as some kind of drug deal. It’s a response that rhymes with the stories we’ve been hearing more recently as immigration raids have ramped up around the country: of children staying home from school, panic at playgrounds following rumors of nannies being targeted by ICE, people weighing whether to show up to otherwise routine immigration hearings or court proceedings. I experienced this chilling not long ago on a mutual aid run as I dropped off groceries to neighbors who asked for them. But our Spanish-speaking neighbors didn’t want to come to the door. They couldn’t chance it with a stranger who said he was a neighbor.

Whatever the ostensible upsides of this kind of policing and surveillance to public safety, the social costs are clear: a corrosion of the ligaments that hold communities together. On the most basic level, it matters whether you can expect that people are who they say they are — that the person walking by you on the sidewalk is a neighbor and not someone looking for probable cause to arrest you. It also matters that there are agreed-upon rules, that officials need to produce warrants to search you or to hold you. But it also just matters whether you’re walking around with contingency plans in the event your loved one suddenly vanishes into the machinery of our carceral system. “One person affects an entire web of people, an entire community,” one Nashsville woman said, after her mother was turned over to ICE after a routine traffic stop. “You take one person and it destroys the web.”

Newsletter continues after sponsor message

ON THE POD

Speaking of policing: next week marks the 40th anniversary of the MOVE bombing, in which the police in Philadelphia dropped a bomb on a middle-class Black neighborhood that killed 11 people — including five children — and left hundreds of other people homeless. It was a cataclysm for my hometown that has sort of disappeared from the national memory — even though it unfolded on live TV. On this week’s episode, we talk to two people whose lives have been shaped by that bombing — a journalist who had covered the Philadelphia police who was there that day and a man who grew up within MOVE, the radical group the police targeted that day.

Listen Here

WHAT WE'RE WATCHING

I finally saw Sinners, the new Ryan Coogler film set in the 1930s about two identical twins who return from up North in order to open up a jook joint back home in rural Mississippi. If you haven’t seen it, I don’t want to spoil it, but Sinners has a centerpiece moment that’s becoming something of a staple in Coogler’s oeuvre: a moment of surreality that encapsulates the movie’s big theme and also tends to heavily sway viewers’ feelings of the whole film. In Fruitvale Station, it was The Scene With The Dog. In Creed, it was The Scene With The Motorcycles. (I loved it; my friends didn’t.) And in Sinners, well…no spoilers. But you’ll absolutely know it when you see it, and since the movie has so many other supernatural elements, The Scene here is a fantasia that has to be bright and loud and vibrant enough to mark itself as somewhat elevated and outside of the rest of the proceedings. (My friends loved it; I didn’t.)

Have you seen Sinners? What are your thoughts? Email us at CodeSwitch@npr.org.

Written by Gene Demby and edited by Dalia Mortada

Stream your local NPR station.

Visit NPR.org to find your local station stream.

Subscribe to Code Switch+. Your support helps make our show possible and unlocks access to our sponsor-free episodes.

What do you think of today's email? We'd love to hear your thoughts, questions and feedback: codeswitch@npr.org

Enjoying this newsletter? Forward to a friend! They can sign up here.

Looking for more great content? Check out all of our newsletter offerings — including Music, Politics, Health and more!

You received this message because you're subscribed to Code Switch emails. This email was sent by National Public Radio, Inc., 1111 North Capitol Street NE, Washington, DC 20002

Unsubscribe | Privacy Policy