LISTEN TO RESIDENTS OF PUBLIC HOUSING

The Listening Project, recently undertaken by the Peace Resource Center in
Frederick's "hot spot" public housing communities, was funded by a drug
elimination grant through HUD and the local Housing Authority.

In the last several years (since the Republican Congress? since Reagan began
the War on Drugs? since the CIA started importing crack cocaine into
American ghettos?), we have seen increased funding for police involvement in
poor communities under the battle cry of a war on drugs.

Locally, we perceived lots of HUD money, which had originally been intended
to provide decent housing and economic opportunity for poor families, going
into policing these communities or funding programs run by the police there.

These included the unconstitutional trespassing laws enacted by the local
housing authority and enforced by Frederick city's police.

The people living in these housing communities reported overwhelmingly in
the Listening Project the sense of being discriminated against in hiring
because the larger community sees them as drug involved due to where they
live; these communities are perceived to be riddled with police and reports
of drug activity; people who live there are seen as suspect. This
development we refer to as "the criminalization of poverty." The statistics
on a growing prison population, which include a huge increase in those
incarcerated for non-violent offenses (illegal drug possession or sales),
provide further evidence of this development.

Our whole society is riddled with drugs.

We have a cornucopia of mood-altering drugs available to those with access
to medical care; but poor people's drugs are criminal, not medical.

They are also a criminal but otherwise attractive economic alternative to
suffering the depression of inadequate wages in thankless jobs with few
benefits. It takes a lot of psychological strength to withstand
internalizing society's characterization of you, and if you're treated as
worthless and bad, what is there to lose? Use drugs to escape your despair,
or peddle them to avoid it.

Then there's the race issue.

We are not fingerpointing and branding individuals; we are acknowledging the
structural reality that public housing in Frederick is inhabited
predominantly by descendants of enslaved Africans, people who were legally
denied the economic fruits of their labor for over 250 years, then denied
educational opportunity and other citizenship rights, such as the vote, for
another 100 years.

Could this have anything to do with their economic status?

Many residents of Frederick's public housing communities are longtime area
families; their roots are here as far back as they know.

The PRC saw a need to intervene in some way, to provide an alternative to
the direction of so much funding toward policing the poor. The Housing
Authority had approached us to provide conflict resolution workshops for
residents, but few were interested. At the North End Coalition meeting in
which the Housing Authority director announced funding availability for the
PRC to provide such a workshop, the chief of police, sitting next to her,
responded by pounding his index finger on the table in front of her and
suggesting she obtain funding for the police.

The Listening Project allowed residents to speak anonymously and
confidentially about their lives individually and as a community.

The Housing Authority and the Police Department have been identified as
government agencies which use lots of effort and tax dollars in public
housing. Yet many residents feel things are getting worse.

Based on what we heard, the open, democratic process that is presumed to
undergird the operation of public housing is not functioning well there at
all. The residents expressed very little sense of involvement with the
Housing Authority (which characterized its role as "owner operator"), and
the police were felt by many to be imposing a largely ineffective and
somewhat counterproductive presence that disregarded the community's notion
of how effective policing could take place.

Some have suggested round-the-clock patrolmen who get involved in the
community and get to know the people living there, which would deter open
drug activities and enhance the likelihood of folks' willingness to share
information with them; what they have got is cameras placed at strategic
points, being monitored by police inside the substations, and substations
which are often unattended. These terrorist tactics on the part of the
police have the effect of banding the community together against them. A
zone of low-intensity conflict has been established.

The PRC is concerned about the violence, erosion of civil liberties and
encroachment of a police state attendant with all war, and in this case the
war is in our own communities, supposedly on drugs but seemingly against the
poor. The ideals of freedom and self-determination with which we were
brought up are being subverted for economic interests at a time of great
economic disparity.

Many public housing residents work at minimum wage jobs, which do not end
their poverty but complicate and confuse their lives, taking them out of
their homes and away from their children.

And here we find a great strength in these communities: they watch out for
each other, they support each other in the struggle to get by. They are true
communities, caring communities.

We do see solutions inherent in the Listening Project report.

Ours would require a radical restructuring of economic priorities. We
sincerely hope that as the mayor and City Council meet with residents of
these communities, there will be the political will to address a need for
fundamental changes, starting with solutions that come from the people
themselves.