So now we bring all you fine blog-reading activists our second look at the Captain Al Croce Casciato rant at the Sudachi LPN meeting in September; when Captain Al dwelled rather obsessively upon the seemingly endless erotic possibilities of public surveillance for authoritarian bodies.
But first a question. What do cops read? Jane Jacobs. One of the greatest difficulties around organizing against the gentrification on Polk Street has been the lack of a clear unified target. When gentrification is caused by drastic rezoning measures the clear target then becomes City Hall, as with Manhattan in the 1990's under Mayor Giuliani. At previous LPN meetings it has been revealed that because Polk Street is fractured by many different zoning ordinances its not possible to round it up into one anti-poor zone, much to the endlessly stated frustration of Case + Abst Architects. LPN is comprised of a complex alliance of various gentrifying property and business interests with the help of the police and other city agencies. It's tough to conceptualize this species as a protest target-- a diverse culture of multiple significant targets. During his surveillance screed Al cited Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities, favoring individuals over city planning, as a strategy to surveil their business investments-- oops, I mean neighborhoods. This trend reveals another tactical quality of the privatization model: decentralization, here into multiple influential business interests on Polk Street-- this paradoxically is contrary to how capitalism tends to function. The extent to which City Hall influences such groups is difficult to ascertain, since LPN is not officially chartered by San Francisco, although clearly embodies the anti-poor spirit of Mayor Gavin Newsom. So, LPN itself has no single fixed target, but is a bunch of different nauseating components. Despite this, LPN's decentralization holds one notable advantage to anti-gentrification activists because it allows the opportunity to publicly reveal the threat against our lives as it truly is-- greater than Case + Abst, the Mayor or even City Hall-- the threat is capitalism.
Casciato marries this brand of free-for-all capitalism running amuck on Polk Street with military surveillance, and meeting attendees are mesmerized. Using Jacobs' do-it-yourself suggestions to craft pragmatic solutions for entrepreneurial fascism, the Captain praised sidewalk cafes. Jane Jacobs' book modeled the ideal urban space on Greenwich Village, er... I guess sidewalk cafes were prevalent there...? This is an example of crime-deterring genius, because sidewalk cafes create "eyes on the street," according to Captain Al. "Bad people don't like having eyes recording them," Al explained simply. I didn't realize that privacy was pathological. But private property has to be in the clear, since we're talking to a room full of property owners. In other words, it's okay to invade someone else's privacy to protect your own. Oh yeah that's right, that's what the cops are for! Apparently, Jacobs was also a brilliant war tactician, since Al mentioned that she advised against putting too many poor people in the same area. Captain Al diverges from this however, cautioning those "eyes on the street," to be vigilant for "that strange person [who] might be a parolee." Why does this conjure morning visions of sketched yuppies 911-ing a poor person while sipping wheat grass on the street?
Dryly, almost as if pretending to be cheerful, Captain Al offers the option for proprietors to pick up those small web cams with suction cups in lieu of expanding the police department's closed circuit grid. He loves them. "They're just about $1000," Al comforted LPN. "You can control the content of the private camera," Al added, "You can control what you want to give to the D.A.'s office."
