Muggings in Park Slope?

Subject: Couldn't You Just Say Brooklyn?

Rushkoff, here.

Interesting thoughts, here. I'm honored to have instigated a mugging conversation. I'll attempt to fill in the missing info.

Indeed, I wasn't the one who drew the circle around the "rich white area," and explained that this area is targeted by criminals. But I don't think the detectives were suggesting that just because the targets were rich whites, that the criminals were necessarily non-whites.

As I understand it, he was attempting to let me know that Park Slope is filled with very rich people spending upwards of a million dollars on apartments, and 2 million on houses. It is a relatively new community of rich people who live on dark, quiet, low-traffic streets.

This wouldn't only be attractive to black criminals. And I didn't discuss the race of my particular mugger on my blog, anyway. I was more fascinated by the age - that he was at least in his 30's.

As for the switch from knife to gun, that's the most interesting part for me (other than my attempt to humanize myself in the mugger's eyes). I remembered it as a knife, but when I described the knife to the policeman, he asked what sort of knife has as "barrel" "handle," and "trigger." And that's when I realized I had *replaced* the gun in my mind with a knife. I really thought knife, until the questioning, and then realized, oh shit, it was a gun. That only happened once before, when my best friend died in a car accident when we were driving together. He fell asleep at the wheel and we hit a tree. But for days, I was convinced the cops were going to find drugs we were stashing in the car.

Of course, it turns out we didn't even do drugs, and had none with us at all. I had planted that false memory as a way of having something to 'work on' while my friend bled out. It was a minister who had me talk through the accident, and then helped sort out reality from brain game. He said it's really common in traumatic situations. So did the cop this time with the knife/gun replacement. (I explained this correction in the comments section of my blog. I don't like to change my original posts, because it feels a bit like lying. And it's an interesting artifact to me - my original misperception.)

As for money and such - thanks for the benefit of the doubt, but I'm not actually broke. I didn't mean to suggest that things were so bad. Only that I *will* be broke if I continue to rent in this neighborhood, and that I feel that I'm sacrificing certain aspects of my work, as well as whatever greater contribution I may have to make as a writer/thinker, in order to stay. Two bedroom apartments here cost between 3000-4000/month, or more, and that sort of expenditure forces other issues.

So I'm taking extra gigs, where I feel my contribution won't be best spent, in order to subsidize the rest of my career. And the money I make from the rest of my career would be more than enough to live in most other places.

So all that goes into the "can I afford Park Slope with a family?" considerations. And I'm thinking about all this, about how my friends in the neighborhood all send or will be sending their kids to private schools, or about how a 2 bedroom apartment costs over a million bucks, and I'm wondering, 'is it all worth it?' and then I go and get mugged while taking out the garbage.

And then a cop basically says, "you fool!" You're acting like this is the suburbs or something, when actually it's a gentrified enclave within the borough formerly known as Brooklyn. You guys are targets. "Open your eyes," he said to me, along with his (apparently incorrect assertion - according to contributors to the comments section of my blog) that muggings are shooting way up in the last few months in Park Slope.

So that all got piled on the same stack of thoughts. My sharing these thoughts and the cops' opinions lead to accusations of racism - as well as the charge that if one believes poverty contributes to crime, he is also a racist. So the discussion on my own blog got really out of hand. And maybe it's a discussion that can't be had too easily.

And, perhaps least surprisingly, it also led to some angry emails from homeowners in the neighborhood - claiming that my announcement of the location where I was mugged can affect their property values. "Couldn't you just say 'Brooklyn?'" one asked.

I don't hate Brooklyn. But I do feel certain parts have gotten too expensive, and that the super-expensive "communities" within Brooklyn that some of us are buying into aren't as substantive as ones that are more heterogeneous and less gentrified.

If there is an "us and them" thing that's annoying, I'd suggest that it is exacerbated by unnaturally accelerated gentrification.

Subject: hmm...

Someone simply has to tell the FBI about that class you took! They're still under a very different impression about the relationship of poverty to crime, as the NPR stories indicate. I'm not saying the FBI is correct - just that they seem to believe they are.

As for me, I'm just below Methodist Hospital. Some long term locals have since told me that these blocks are higher in muggings because muggers want to mug hospital employees as they walk back to their cars. (Muggers and hospital employees come in all races.)

(And, having just read through the whole comments list again, I'm still irked about being called racist and ugly for having quoted what the cops told me after I was mugged! But perhaps I shouldn't have shared that info.)

Subject: indeed

I buy that.
In the comments/post on my blog, I said something about having to look at true contributive factors, like gentrification, resentment, the penal code, or poverty. And then someone said I was making the poverty=crime argument which is racist.

But I see what you're saying, and do get its sense. If anything, the "modern tribalism" phenomenon could very well have racial components, making it difficult to talk about without raising some ire. (not an Irish slur)