By Iggy Kim
SAN FRANCISCO, US — Overhead, a towering computer-image bull accompanies a gloating invitation to "Be Quick, Be Smart, Be Bullish".
Around the San Francisco Bay area, these new billboards for stockbrokers Merrill Lynch come across with tart arrogance. Here lies the dynamo of the world's information technology boom.
But, despite the conceit, neither California nor the US has programmed or traded itself out of an ever-growing wealth divide. In cruel mockery, beneath every Merrill Lynch billboard, handfuls of the homeless and destitute can be seen brandishing styrofoam cups to catch passing loose change.
Hence the continued paranoia and battle-readiness of California's ruling elite. Instead of basking in its starring role as capitalism's nerve centre, this state has begun a new war on what it sees as one particularly threatening section of the oppressed.
Proposition 21
On March 7, Californians are due to vote on a citizen-initiated referendum proposal, Proposition 21. Its prime mover is former state governor, Pete Wilson, infamous for a host of measures against affirmative action and immigrants while in office.
His latest proposition's basic thrust is to massively increase police control over young people, particularly African-Americans, Latinos and Chicanos, under the pretext of controlling gangs.
A key aspect is the lowering of the age for adult treatment by courts and police to 14. Provisions include trying and imprisoning those 14 years or older in adult courts and prisons, lowering the standard of proof for probation violations from "beyond reasonable doubt" to "a preponderance of the evidence", permitting police to release the name of any person 14 or older arrested for a major crime, and preventing the sealing or destruction of records for crimes committed when 14 or older.
So-called gang control measures include a police registry of those convicted of gang-related offenses, making "recruiting for a gang" a crime, widely expanding the definition of gang-related activity, lowering the criteria for what constitutes "participation in a gang", and massively increasing penalties (including life sentence and execution) for gang-related crimes.
Other frightening measures include expanding the list of offenses that qualify as "strikes" in the "three strikes and you're out" law (by which those convicted of three offenses receive automatic life imprisonment), making all the new definitions and offenses retroactive to January 1 1999, and turning any property damage worth at least $400 into a major crime.
Racist
The ultimate impact of this enormous escalation of police and court powers will be to herd many youth of colour, from the age of 14, into a constantly policed underclass for the rest of their lives.
It singles out for social control a supposedly ultra-violent, unreformable section of criminally organised youth. But such singling out has everything to do with constructing a racially charged fear of young people of colour who look and behave in a certain way.
For a number of years, the sub-cultures of black, Latino and Chicano youth have been demonised as violently anti-white and anti-social. Many white people now equate certain slang, attire and body language among non-white youth with violent gang behaviour.
Already, it is commonly accepted that police across the US target people of colour for special attention in an unofficial practice referred to as "racial profiling".
In California, this has become all the more intense since a 1988 law gave police considerable powers for "gang control". For instance, in Orange County, part of greater Los Angeles, less than 50% of youth are non-white. Yet, in 1997, 92% of those listed on the local police's gang database were youths of colour.
In Denver, in the state of Colorado, a 1993 investigation revealed that 80% of all non-white young people found their way onto the gang database. In one suburb, Aurora, police use any two of a racially slanted list of "slang", "clothing of a particular colour", "pagers", "hairstyles" and "jewellery" to determine gang membership. Not surprisingly, 80% of Aurora's gang list is black.
At one notorious shopping mall in Albuquerque, New Mexico, young people are prohibited from gathering in numbers of three or more. Offenders are booked, banned from the mall, and their details and photos turned over to the police gang unit for possible listing. But it turns out that about 90% of the youth harassed in this way are Latino or Chicano, even though they make up a far smaller proportion of all the young people hanging out at the mall.
Dividing workers
The racist and anti-youth character of Proposition 21 is most starkly exposed when seen against the context of actual crime trends. Last year, California recorded its lowest juvenile felony arrest rate since 1966 — despite the ongoing increase of police powers over the years. Nationally, homicide arrest rates dropped by 40% between 1993 and 1997.
In short, Proposition 21 is about deepening race and age divisions within working people, not about preventing crime.
Here, in the state that is the engine room of the celebrated US boom, the racial balance is at a turning point. California has the fastest growing population of non-whites and is on the verge of becoming a majority non-white state.
Proposition 21 seeks to step up racial branding and policing of young people of colour, the future non-white majority. White youth will eventually outgrow this targeting, but if passed, Proposition 21's racist component will ensure that young blacks, Latinos and Chicanos will continue to be policed.
Just as slavery gradually turned dark skin into a mark of natural servitude and inferiority, so too could the new form of "racial profiling" turn being black or brown into a sign of innate criminality.