More Swearing Fun Downtown

Mark Nimigan is now publicly crediting Rudy Giuliani as inspiration for his anti-swearing vendetta. Rudy Giuliani's policies, as can be viewed here, bring to mind a certain F-word, and I don't mean fuck. He launched an all-out war on homelessness, including shutting down services, limiting stays in homeless shelters and arresting people attempting to sleep in parks. His administration seriously strained race relations in the city, and his legendary police crackdown including the shooting deaths of black men like Amadou Diallo and in-custody sodomy and torture of Abner Louima by a police officer. He ran a policy of excessive privatisation, slashed school funding (while promising to "fix" them) and even campaigned hard to maintain a ban on ferrets, comparing them to pythons or lions. As one wikipedia article puts it,

"Litigants filed several civil liberties violations lawsuits against the mayor or the city. Giuliani's administration lost 22 of 26 cases. [83]

Some of the court cases which found the Giuliani administration to have violated First Amendment rights included actions barring public events from their previous location at the City Hall steps, not allowing taxi drivers to assemble for a protest, not allowing city workers to speak to the press without permission, barring church members from delivering an AIDS education program in a park, denying a permit for a march to object to police brutality, issuing summons and seizing literature of three workers collecting signatures to get a candidate on the presidential ballot, imposing strict licensing restrictions on sidewalk artists that were struck down by a court of appeals as a violation of artists' rights, using a 1926 cabaret law to ban dancing in bars and clubs, imposing an excessive daily fee on street musicians, imposing varying city fees for newsstand owners based on the content they sold..."

Luckily, not everybody is as easily convinced as Mark Nimigan. A Spectator Editorial is showing a fair bit of sense. Still, this raises a lot of terrifying questions about the willingness of certain civic leaders to go along with policies which seek to demographically cleanse the city core. "Foul language" is far more common as one climbs downward on the class ladder, which is plainly showed by the spectator's comparison of swearing between Gore Park and Limeridge, demonstrating how targetted this kind of policing is. This definitely wouldn't be the first time such things have been attempted, I remember back when I was younger police would arrest my punk-rock friends on prohibited weapons charges (what you get if you're caught with a switchblade or a sawed-off-shotgun) for having spiked leather wristbands, which they bought at nearby downtown shops. Marginalized people downtown have hundreds of stories like these, and it all comes back to the idea that a downtown free of underprivliged people would be more inviting to overpriviliged people with strong class-based prejudices.

There are ways to clean up the downtown. We could deal with crack by starting more addiction treatment centres. We could deal with mental illness by restoring years of cut funding to psychiatric programs in the city (as well as taking a deep look at the effectiveness of some of those programs). We could deal with homelessness by providing more social housing, something this country has virtually abandoned in the last decade or so, and we could lower panhandling rates by increasing welfare rates to significantly above their 1995 levels, around which they still hover. Those changes are neither as cheap nor easy as police harrasment of dirty people downtown, but they might just result in real changes.