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that's not what i was thinking about, comrade--i was wondering about missing correlations. my marxist self tends to equate violence and class conflict, absent other information--from there i tend to move to either confirm or falsify that linkage. it seems a more powerful explanatory variable than hip hop does.
the point is more that this county seems like many such--and many city neighborhoods--in that aggregated information doesn't really tell you much about any particular place--obvious enough point, really--so i wanted to see what i could find out. the washington post article seems written at a demographic that sees pgc through the aggregated image, as a nice middle class area beset with violence--and i just wonder if that is true in many, but not all, parts of the county, just as similar things can be true of many, but not all, parts of a neighborhood.
behind all this was my experience in logan square, which profiles in a very similar way in the aggregate but had considerable violence---less now than 5 years ago apparently--but still--in this fairly middle-class neighborhood, i heard gunshots more nights than i didn't. it wasn't terribly hard to work out that my predispositions in terms of trying to understand this sort of thing fit pretty well with the social reality of the area---but obviously it was only a general explanation, not providing any detail about why particular act x or y or z occurred.
that's more the direction i was thinking in.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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