THE NEW NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH

A number of years ago, I wrote a blog “The Second American Civil War” (2013-02-16).*  It is a dystopian vision, more military than political, of an America divided into not only hostile camps, but also belligerent combatants.  The 6 January assault on the U.S. Congress is a fine scenario add-on.  But, like all such visions, it had its astigmatisms, most notably, an omission filled in by an autocratic Trump.  Neither I nor anyone else imagined that a former president would urge, and continue to urge, intimidated minions and deranged followers in the Republican Party to believe his lie that the election was stolen from him.  Although I saw state governments under its control enacting legislation crippling the right and the means to vote—nothing new here—I did not foresee federal and state Republican officials legislating to overturn elections of Democrats receiving a majority of the votes.

What do these neo-fascist Republicans imagine the response will be?  What can we imagine their response to our response will be?  Will Democrats and others quietly accept second-class political status?  Probably, but who knows?  My revised vision of the civil war would also pitch neighborhood against neighborhood and neighbor against neighbor strife.  Such conflicts in urban areas have been commonplaces in American urban history, especially in cities which have experienced large influxes of “others” by immigration or relocation.  For instance, fights between Irish ruffians and Jewish thugs on the streets of New York were almost daily occurrences in New York in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.  They can be discounted as merely the energetic expressions of adjustments by newcomers in urban ethnic enclaves and minority groups.

But in this Second American Civil War, the battlefields will extend to the suburbs.  It will involve house-to-house hostilities, with many neighbors silently accepting attacks on the targets of the White Christian Republicans, even in Las Cruces.  A few doors down lives a couple of Trump-supporting bigots who do not like Jews.  Fine: I pass them by in contemptuous silence; they angrily berate me as an “arrogant shit.”  What they do not know is that I know that they are the anonymous callers who summoned police because, so they lied, I let my dogs out to run loose and let their feces pile up in my yard and stink up the neighborhood.  They represent the New Neighborhood Watch.

I am not going to regurgitate the details of the history of my case.  Instead, I relate the responses of my “neighborhood.”  Within a week of five false charges by a 10-year LCPD veteran who saw a Star of David over my garage door before he began his investigation, I did two things.  I filed a formal complaint with IA and sent an email suggesting an antisemitic motive to Councilor Gandara, Police Chief Gallagher, and two others.  I got no response.  In 21 blogs in the 22 months since, I mentioned antisemitism once and otherwise left this suggested motive to the LCPD to deal with by counseling.  So I pursued my complaint by challenging only the false charges to expose the LCPD for its shortcomings and trying to get them retracted and purged from my record.  To no avail.  Although an internal IA memorandum states that the charges lack evidence or proof of violations, the LCPD refuses to come clean and clear my record.  Instead, it uses specious rationales to justify spurious charges, to maintain them as if true, to keep them on file for some future opportunity to smear me.  The IA close-out letter says nothing about the false charges.  Meanwhile, I used blogs to keep my “neighborhood” informed.

An admission that the five charges are false would raise the question of motive, and, given concerted resistance to an admission, the answer of antisemitism looks irrefutable and looms large, ugly, and damaging to the reputation of the city.  Rather than deal with one antisemitic officer and isolate the stain, the LCPD, City Hall, and City Council, with the local media in cahoots, chose to resist or ignore the obvious and thereby strengthen suspicion of antisemitism.  In a meeting with the new City Manager (Councilor Bencomo and commentator Peter Goodman by Zoom), Pili said that I deserved a detailed apology, but, afterwards, Law Director Vega-Brown got him back in line and put the kibosh on it.  Bencomo and Goodman said and did nothing.

The “neighborhood” response supports this silence.  Neither the Mayor, Gandara, Bencomo nor other member of City Council has asked appropriate questions or taken appropriate action.  Peter Goodman, though he toyed with the idea of my appearing on his radio show to discuss my complaint and case in the context of police reform, did a bait-and-switch program to discuss dogs.  Only two of my “neighbors” have spoken to me; only one has spoken to Council, and it ignored him.  No one else wants to address what has evolved as a police cover-up and a “neighborhood” stone-walling.  This silent tolerance of likely antisemitism signifies its widespread support by my “neighbors” in the city of three crosses.

Now imagine those same neighbors—a new Neighborhood Watch—some time hence, when Republican neo-fascists are suppressing opposition, phoning in a complaint that I possess bomb-making materials.  You know what the ATF or FBI agents will do.  I shall let you finish the scenario.  Now imagine similar scenarios involving unreformed, even more politicized police targeting not only Jews, but also Muslims, blacks, Asian-Americans, LGBTQs, Hispanic immigrants; then “antifas,” Greens, Progressives; then members of ACLU, NAACP, NARAL, NOW, SPLC; and other “terrorist” or “un-American” groups, throughout the country.  These scenarios predict and depict local skirmishes in the Second American Civil War, the demise of democracy, and the death of the dream.

* Anyone wanting a copy of this blog should request one.