For twenty years, I lived a very few miles from what the international media is wrongfully calling “Cop City,” which, fantasies of tree-sitters with six-figure Hampshire College degrees notwithstanding, has long been a police training center. It is in one of the most crime-blighted parts of the city, where elderly women cower behind barred windows and kick-proofed, metal-screened, barred doors. Believe me, the actual residents want nothing more than more public safety. I once found a little girl thrown from a car after a failed gang initiation, terrified and weeping in a field across from my dangerous neighborhood near “Cop City.” The child, who had been beaten by female gang members no older than she, was maybe 13. She wouldn’t do what the gang wanted her to do, so they beat her viciously and threw her out of a car. I washed the blood off her face and took her home, to her grandmother’s house, which was literally across the street from the disputed training center.
Her grandmother’s brick home was tiny but immaculate. Bars covered all the windows and doors. But in a small, heroic paean to hope, marigolds were neatly planted down the sides of the driveway and sidewalk. Those yellow marigolds, spaced perfectly apart beside crumbling concrete, say everything you really need to know about the planned EMT/fireman/police training center. The grandmother embraced her grandchild and pulled her deep into the house. ...
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