Two parts of a lecture by Professor Peter Lang, Royal College of Art Stockholm, Architecture. On the depiction of aliens in 197os film and television then a summary of work done in Taiwan on flexible spaces.
Urban Flashes Asia: New Architecture and Urbanism in Asia (2003) – Complete text as PDF.
I’m tired of bein’ poor and even worse I’m black.
My stomach hurts, so I’m lookin’ for a purse to snatch.
Cops give a damn about a negro? Pull the trigger, kill a nigga, he’s a hero.
Give the crack to the kids who the hell cares? One less hungry mouth on the welfare.
First ship ’em dope and let ’em deal to brothers.
Give ’em guns, step back, and watch ’em kill each other.
“It’s time to fight back”, that’s what Huey said.
2 shots in the dark now Huey’s dead. – Tupac Amaru Shakur “Changes”
Cops is an American documentary/reality legal series television show that has been on air since 1989. Cops follows police officers, constables, and sheriff’s deputies during patrols and other police activities. It is one of the longest-running television programs in the United States and in May 2011 became the longest-running show on the Fox Network.
The show has been criticized for its predominant focus on the criminal activities among the poor. Critics of this aspect of the show say it unfairly presents the poor as responsible for most crime in society while ignoring the “white-collar crimes” that are typical of the more wealthy. Controversial documentary filmmaker Michael Moore raises this tenet in an interview with a former associate producer of Cops, Richard Herlan, in Moore’s 2002 film Bowling for Columbine.
His response to Moore was that television is primarily a visual medium, requiring regular footage on a weekly basis to sustain a show, and police officers “busting in” on an office where identity theft papers are being created or other high-level crime rings are operating does not happen very often. It is therefore not likely to be recorded and thus not shown. The low-level crime featured on the show happens every day, providing large quantities of material suitable for taping.
Chicago Police Department Deputy Director of News Affairs Patrick Camden in 2005 stated in response to a request for Cops taping that “police work is not entertainment. What they do trivializes policing. We’ve never seriously even considered taping.”
While busting poor criminals may be visual and therefore defining of television as a medium, it does not answer the argument that Cops documents the interactions between poor people and the police in negative, derogatory and stereotypical ways.
There are more police being deployed in Tensta and “300 professional criminals” are being targeted with a tripling of the number of police in the area from 25 to 75 (http://www.svt.se/nyheter/regionalt/abc/fler-poliser-i-tensta-och-rinkeby). This could easily be understood as an extension of the kind of war on the poor depicted in the TV series Cops, and the realizing of a neoconservative liberal agenda that is mirrored in social policies and financing around Stockholm. The reasons for this is reflected in a recent text by Paul Krugman in the New York Times,
“The reasons for this war on the poor, sociologist Daniel Little suggested in a recent essay, is market ideology: If the market is always right, then people who end up poor must deserve to be poor. I’d add that some leading Republicans are, in their minds, acting out adolescent libertarian fantasies. “It’s as if we’re living in an Ayn Rand novel right now,” declared Paul Ryan in 2009.” Paul Krugman, A War on the Poor, New York Times
The new world is without the poor. They are an inconvenience. The inconvience is only growing with Norrmalm the highest average income per capita over 20 years of age in Stockholm with 397 000 SEK, closely followed by Östermalm with 376,000 crowns. Rinkeby-Kista, is the lowest average income, 182.000 SEK, followed by Skärholmen with barely 196,000 SEK (2011 figures). It is not surprising the other area of increased police presence in Stockholm is the Vårby-Skärholmen area.
Re-Mixed City 