In addition to the essay by Brent Staples (available in the Seagull Reader), please make sure you have read the following essay, by Bruce Shapiro, for class on October 13th. Please print it off (you might want to copy and paste it into a word document) and bring it with you to class. Thanks, and enjoy your weekend.
Selected Feature
One Violent Crime
By Bruce Shapiro
New Haven, Connecticut
Alone in my home I am staring at the television screen and
shouting. On the evening local news I have unexpectedly encountered
video footage, several months old, of myself writhing on an
ambulance gurney, bright green shirt open and drenched with blood,
skin pale, knee raised, trying desperately and with utter futility
to find relief from pain.
On the evening of August 7, 1994, I was among seven people stabbed
and seriously wounded in a coffee bar a few blocks from my house.
Any televised recollection of this incident would be upsetting. But
the anger that has me shouting tonight is quite specific, and
political, in origin: My picture is being shown on the news to
illustrate why Connecticut's legislature plans to lock up more
criminals for a longer time. A picture of my body, contorted and
bleeding, has become a propaganda image in the crime war.
I had not planned to write about this assault. But for months now
the politics of the nation have in large part been the politics of
crime, from last year's federal crime bill through the fall
elections through the Contract With America proposals currently
awaiting action by the Senate. Among a welter of reactions to the
attack, one feeling is clear: I am unwilling to be a silent poster
child in this debate.
The physical and political truth about violence and crime lie in
their specificity, so here is what happened: I had gone out for
after-dinner coffee that evening with two friends and New Haven
neighbors, Martin and Anna Broell Bresnick. At 9:45 we arrived at a
recently opened coffeehouse on Audubon Street, a block occupied by
an arts high school where Anna teaches, other community arts
institutions, a few pleasant shops and upscale condos. Entering, we
said hello to another friend, a former student of Anna's named
Cristina Koning, who the day before had started working behind the
counter. We sat at a small table near the front of the cafe; about
fifteen people were scattered around the room. Just before 10, the
owner announced closing time. Martin stood up and walked a few
yards to the counter for a final refill.
Suddenly there was chaos -- as if a mortar shell had landed. I
looked up, heard Martin call Anna's name, saw his arm raised and a
flash of metal and people leaping away from a thin bearded man with
a ponytail. Tables and chairs toppled. Without thinking I shouted
to Anna, "Get down!" and pulled her to the floor, between our table
and the cafe's outer wall. She clung to my shirt, I to her
shoulders, and, crouching, we pulled each other toward the door.
What actually happened I was only able to tentatively reconstruct
many weeks later. Apparently, as Martin headed toward the counter
the thin bearded man, whose name we later learned was Daniel Silva,
asked the time from a young man named Richard Colberg, who was on
his way toward the door. Colberg answered and turned to leave.
Without any warning, Silva pulled out a hunting knife with a
six-inch blade and stabbed in the lower back a woman leaving with
Colberg, a medical technician named Kerstin Braig. Then he stabbed
Colberg, severing an artery in his thigh. Silva was a slight man
but he moved with demonic speed and force around the cafe's
counter. He struck Martin in the thigh and in the arm he raised to
protect his face. Our friend Cris Koning had in a moment's time
pushed out the screen in a window and helped the wounded Kerstin
Braig through it to safety. Cris was talking on the phone with the
police when Silva lunged over the counter and stabbed her in the
chest and abdomen. He stabbed Anna in the side as she and I pulled
each other along the wall. He stabbed Emily Bernard, a graduate
student who had been sitting quietly reading a book, in the abdomen
as she tried to flee through the cafe's back door. All of this
happened in about the time it has taken you to read this paragraph.
Meanwhile, I had made it out the cafe's front door onto the brick
sidewalk with Anna, neither of us realizing yet that she was
wounded. Seeing Martin through the window, I returned inside and we
came out together. Somehow we separated, fleeing opposite ways down
the street. I had gone no more than a few steps when I felt a hard
punch in my back followed instantly by the unforgettable sensation
of skin and muscle tissue parting. Silva had stabbed me about six
inches above my waist, just beneath my rib cage. (That single deep
stroke cut my diaphragm and sliced my spleen in half.) Without
thinking, I clapped my left hand over the wound even before the
knife was out and its blade caught my hand, leaving a slice across
my palm and two fingers.
"Why are you doing this?" I cried out to Silva in the moment after
feeling his knife punch in and yank out. As I fell to the street he
leaned over my face; I vividly remember the knife's immense and
glittering blade. He directed the point through my shirt into the
flesh of my chest, beneath my left shoulder. I remember his brown
beard, his clear blue-gray eyes looking directly into mine, the
round globe of a street lamp like a halo above his head. Although I
was just a few feet from a cafe full of people and although Martin
and Anna were only yards away, the street, the city, the world felt
utterly empty except for me and this thin bearded stranger with
clear eyes and a bowie knife. The space around us -- well-lit,
familiar Audubon Street, where for six years I had taken a child to
music lessons -- seemed literally to have expanded into a vast and
dark canyon.
"You killed my mother," he answered. My own desperate response:
"Please don't." Silva pulled the knifepoint out of my chest and
disappeared. A moment later I saw him flying down the street on a
battered, ungainly bicycle, back straight, vest flapping and
ponytail flying.
After my assailant had gone I lay on the sidewalk, hand still over
the wound on my back, screaming. Pain ran over me like an express
train; it felt as though every muscle in my back was locked and
contorted; breathing was excruciating. A security guard appeared
across the street from me; I called out to him but he stood there
frozen, or so it seemed. (A few minutes later, he would help police
chase Silva down.) I shouted to Anna, who was hiding behind a car
down the street. Still in shock and unaware of her own injury, she
ran for help, eventually collapsing on the stairs of a nearby
brownstone where a prayer group that was meeting upstairs answered
her desperate ringing of the doorbell. From where I was lying, I
saw a second-floor light in the condo complex across the way. A
woman's head appeared in the window. "Please help me," I implored.
"He's gone. Please help me." She shouted back that she had called
the police, but she did not come to the street. I was suddenly
aware of a blond woman -- Kerstin Braig, though I did not know her
name then -- in a white-and-gray plaid dress, sitting on the curb.
I asked her for help. "I'm sorry, I've done all I can," she
muttered. She raised her hand, like a medieval icon; it was covered
with blood. So was her dress. She sank into a kind of stupor. Up
the street I saw a police car's flashing blue lights, then
another's, then I saw an officer with a concerned face and a
crackling radio crouched beside me. I stayed conscious as the
medics arrived and I was loaded into an ambulance -- being filmed
for television, as it turns out, though I have no memory of the
crew's presence.
Being a victim is a hard idea to accept, even while lying in a
hospital bed with tubes in veins, chest, penis and abdomen. The
spirit rebels against the idea of oneself as fundamentally
powerless. So I didn't think much for the first few days about the
meaning of being a victim; I saw no political dimension to my
experience.
As I learned in more detail what had happened I thought, in my
jumbled-up, anesthetized state, about my injured friends --
although everyone survived, their wounds ranged from quite serious
to critical -- and about my wounds and surgery. I also thought
about my assailant. A few facts about him are worth repeating.
Until August 7 Daniel Silva was a self-employed junk dealer and a
homeowner. He was white. He lived with his mother and several dogs.
He had no arrest record. A New Haven police detective who was
hospitalized across the hall from me recalled Silva as a socially
marginal neighborhood character. He was not, apparently, a drug
user. He had told neighbors about much violence in his family --
indeed not long before August 7 he showed one neighbor a scar on
his thigh he said was from a stab wound.
A week earlier, Silva's 79-year-old mother had been hospitalized
for diabetes. After a few days the hospital moved her to a new
room; when Silva saw his mother's empty bed he panicked, but nurses
swiftly took him to her new location. Still, something seemed to
have snapped. Earlier on the day of the stabbings, police say,
Silva released his beloved dogs, set fire to his house, and rode
away on his bicycle as it burned. He arrived on Audubon Street with
a single dog on a leash, evidently convinced his mother was dead.
(She actually did die a few weeks after Silva was jailed.)
While I lay in the hospital, the big story on CNN was the federal
crime bill then being debated in Congress. Even fogged by morphine
I was aware of the irony. I was flat on my back, the result of a
particularly violent assault, while Congress eventually passed the
anti-crime package I had editorialized against in The Nation just a
few weeks earlier. Night after night in the hospital, unable to
sleep, I watched the crime bill debate replayed and heard
Republicans and Democrats (who had sponsored the bill in the first
place) fall over each other to prove who could be the toughest on
crime.
The bill passed on August 21, a few days after I returned home. In
early autumn I actually read the entire text of the crime bill --
all 412 pages. What I found was perhaps obvious, yet under the
circumstances compelling: Not a single one of those 412 pages would
have protected me or Anna or Martin or any of the others from our
assailant. Not the enhanced prison terms, not the forty-four new
death penalty offenses, not the three-strikes-you're-out
requirements, not the summary deportations of criminal aliens. And
the new tougher-than-tough anti-crime provisions of the Contract
With America, like the proposed abolition of the Fourth Amendment's
search and seizure protections, offer no more practical protection.
On the other hand, the mental-health and social-welfare safety net
shredded by Reaganomics and conservatives of both parties might
have made a difference in the life of someone like my assailant --
and thus in the life of someone like me. My assailant's growing
distress in the days before August 7 was obvious to his neighbors.
He had muttered darkly about relatives planning to burn down his
house. A better-funded, more comprehensive safety net might just
have saved me and six others from untold pain and trouble.
From my perspective -- the perspective of a crime victim -- the
Contract With America and its conservative Democratic analogs are
really blueprints for making the streets even less safe. Want to
take away that socialistic income subsidy called welfare? Fine.
Connecticut Governor John Rowland proposes cutting off all benefits
after eighteen months. So more people in New Haven and other cities
will turn to the violence-breeding economy of crack, or emotionally
implode from sheer desperation. Cut funding for those soft-headed
social workers? Fine; let more children be beaten without the
prospect of outside intervention, more Daniel Silvas carrying their
own traumatic scars into violent adulthood. Get rid of the few
amenities prisoners enjoy, like sports equipment, musical
instruments and the right to get college degrees, as proposed by
the Congressional right? Fine; we'll make sure that those inmates
are released to their own neighborhoods tormented with unchanneled
rage.
One thing I could not properly appreciate in the hospital was how
deeply many friends, neighbors and acquaintances were shaken by the
coffeehouse stabbings, let alone strangers who took the time to
write. The reaction of most was a combination of decent horrified
empathy and a clear sense that their own presumption of safety was
undermined.
But some people who didn't bother to aquaint themselves with the
facts used the stabbings as a sort of Rorschach test on which they
projected their own preconceptions about crime, violence and New
Haven. Some present and former Yale students, for instance, were
desperate to see in my stabbing evidence of the great dangers of
New Haven's inner city. One student newspaper wrote about "New
Haven's image as a dangerous town fraught with violence." A student
reporter from another Yale paper asked if I didn't think the attack
proved New Haven needs better police protection. Given the random
nature of this assault -- it could as easily have happened in
wealthy, suburban Greenwich, where a friend of mine was held up at
an ATM at the point of an assault rifle -- it's tempting to dismiss
such sentiments as typical products of an insular urban campus. But
city-hating is central to today's political culture. Newt Gingrich
excoriates cities as hopelessly pestilential, crime-ridden and
corrupt. Fear of urban crime and of the dark-skinned people who
live in cities is the right's basic text, and defunding cities a
central agenda item for the new Congressional majority.
Yet in no small measure it was the institutions of an urban
community that saved my life last August 7. That concerned police
officer who found me and Kerstin Braig on the street was joined in
a moment by enough emergency workers to handle the carnage in and
around the coffeehouse, and his backups arrived quickly enough to
chase down my assailant three blocks away. In minutes I was taken
to Yale-New Haven hospital less than a mile away -- built in part
with the kind of public funding so hated by the right. As I was
wheeled into the E.R., several dozen doctors and nurses descended
to handle all the wounded.
By then my abdomen had swelled from internal bleeding. Dr. Gerard
Burns, a trauma surgeon, told me a few weeks later that I arrived
on his operating table white as a ghost; my prospects, he said,
would have been poor had I not been delivered so quickly, and to an
E.R. with the kind of trauma team available only at a large
metropolitan hospital. In other words, if my stabbing had taken
place in the suburbs I would have bled to death.
Why didn't anyone try to stop him?" That question was even more
common than the reflexive city-bashing. I can't even begin to guess
the number of times I had to answer it. Each time, I repeated that
Silva moved too fast, that it was simply too confusing. And each
time, I found the question not just foolish but offensive.
"Why didn't anyone stop him?" To understand that question is to
understand, in some measure, why crime is such a potent political
issue. To begin with, the question carries not empathy but an
implicit burden of blame; it really asks "Why didn't you stop him?"
It is asked because no one likes to imagine oneself a victim. It's
far easier to graft onto oneself the aggressive power of the
attacker, to embrace the delusion of oneself as Arnold
Schwarzenegger defeating a multitude single-handedly. If I am tough
enough and strong enough I can take out the bad guys.
The country is at present suffering from a huge version of this
same delusion. This myth is buried deep in the political culture,
nurtured in the historical tales of frontier violence and
vigilantism and by the action-hero fantasies of film and
television. Now, bolstered by the social Darwinists of the right,
who see society as an unfettered marketplace in which the strongest
individuals flourish, this delusion frames the crime debate.
I also felt that the question "Why didn't anybody stop him?"
implied only two choices: Rambo-like heroism or abject victimhood.
To put it another way, it suggests that the only possible responses
to danger are the individual biological imperatives of fight or
flight. And people don't want to think of themselves as on the side
of flight. This is a notion whose political moment has arrived. In
last year's debate over the crime bill, conservatives successfully
portrayed themselves as those who would stand and fight; liberals
were portrayed as ineffectual cowards.
"Why didn't anyone stop him?" That question and its underlying
implications see both heroes and victims as lone individuals. But
on the receiving end of a violent attack, the fight-or-flight
dichotomy didn't apply. Nor did that radically individualized
notion of survival. At the coffeehouse that night, at the moments
of greatest threat, there were no Schwarzeneggers, no stand-alone
heroes. (In fact I doubt anyone could have "taken out" Silva; as
with most crimes, his attack came too suddenly.) But neither were
there abject victims. Instead, in the confusion and panic of
life-threatening attack, people reached out to one another. This
sounds simple; yet it suggests there is an instinct for mutual aid
that poses a profound challenge to the atomized individualism of
the right. Cristina Koning helped the wounded Kerstin Braig to
escape, and Kerstin in turn tried to bring Cristina along. Anna and
I, and then Martin and I, clung to each other, pulling one another
toward the door. And just as Kerstin found me on the sidewalk
rather than wait for help alone, so Richard and Emily, who had
never met before, together sought a hiding place around the corner.
Three of us even spoke with Silva either the moment before or the
instant after being stabbed. My plea to Silva may or may not have
been what kept him from pushing his knife all the way through my
chest and into my heart; it's impossible to know what was going
through his mind. But this impulse to communicate, to establish
human contact across a gulf of terror and insanity, is deeper and
more subtle than the simple formulation of fight or flight, courage
or cowardice, would allow.
I have never been in a war, but I now think I understand a little
the intense bond among war veterans who have survived awful
carnage. It is not simply the common fact of survival but the way
in which the presence of these others seemed to make survival
itself possible. There's evidence, too, that those who try to go it
alone suffer more. In her insightful study Trauma and Recovery,
Judith Herman, a psychiatrist, writes about rape victims, Vietnam
War veterans, political prisoners and other survivors of extreme
violence. "The capacity to preserve social connection. . ." she
concludes, "even in the face of extremity, seems to protect people
to some degree against the later development of post-traumatic
syndromes. For example, among survivors of a disaster at sea, the
men who had managed to escape by cooperating with others showed
relatively little evidence of post-traumatic stress afterward." On
the other hand, she reports that the "highly symptomatic" ones
among those survivors were "'Rambos,' men who had plunged into
impulsive, isolated action and not affiliated with others."
The political point here is that the Rambo justice system proposed
by the right is rooted in that dangerous myth of the individual
fighting against a hostile world. Recently that myth got another
boost from several Republican-controlled state legislatures, which
have made it much easier to carry concealed handguns. But the myth
has nothing to do with the reality of violent crime, the ways to
prevent it or the needs of survivors. Had Silva been carrying a
handgun instead of a knife on August 7, there would have been a
massacre.
I do understand the rage and frustration behind the crime-victim
movement, and I can see how the right has harnessed it. For weeks I
thought obsessively and angrily of those minutes on Audubon Street,
when first the nameless woman in the window and then the security
guard refused to approach me -- as if I, wounded and helpless, were
the dangerous one. There was also a subtle shift in my
consciousness a few days after the stabbing. Up until that point,
the legal process and press attention seemed clearly centered on my
injuries and experience, and those of my fellow victims. But once
Silva was arraigned and the formal process of prosecution began, it
became his case, not mine. I experienced an overnight sense of
marginalization, a feeling of helplessness bordering on
irrelevance.
Sometimes that got channeled into outrage, fear and panic. After
arraignment, Silva's bail was set at $700,000. That sounds high,
but just 10 percent of that amount in cash, perhaps obtained
through some relative with home equity, would have bought his
pretrial release. I was frantic at even this remote prospect of
Silva walking the streets. So were the six other victims and our
families. We called the prosecutor virtually hourly to request
higher bail. It was eventually raised to $800,000, partly because
of our complaints and partly because an arson charge was added.
Silva remains in the Hartford Community Correctional Center
awaiting trial.
Near the six-month anniversary of the stabbings I called the
prosecutor and learned that in December Silva's lawyer filed papers
indicating he intends to claim a "mental disease or defect"
defense. If successful it would send him to a maximum-security
hospital for the criminally insane for the equivalent of the
maximum criminal penalty. In February the court was still awaiting
a report from Silva's psychiatrist. Then the prosecution will have
him examined by its own psychiatrist. "There's a backlog," I was
told; the case is not likely to come to trial until the end of 1995
at the earliest. Intellectually, I understand that Silva is
securely behind bars, that the court system is overburdened, that
the delay makes no difference in the long-term outcome. But
emotionally, viscerally, the delay is devastating.
Another of my bursts of victim-consciousness involved the press.
Objectively, I know that many people who took the trouble to
express their sympathy to me found out only through news stories.
And sensitive reporting can for the crime victim be a kind of
ratification of the seriousness of an assault, a reflection of the
community's concern. One reporter for the daily New Haven Register,
Josh Kovner, did produce level-headed and insightful stories about
the Audubon Street attack. But most other reporting was
exploitative, intrusive and inaccurate. I was only a few hours out
of surgery, barely able to speak, when the calls from television
stations and papers started coming to my hospital room. Anna and
Martin, sent home to recover, were ambushed by a Hartford TV crew
as they emerged from their physician's office, and later rousted
from their beds by reporters from another TV station ringing their
doorbell. The Register's editors enraged all seven victims by
printing our home addresses (a company policy, for some reason) and
running spectacularly distressing full-color photos of the crime
scene complete with the coffee bar's bloody windowsill.
Such press coverage inspired in all of us a rage it is impossible
to convey. In a study commissioned by the British Broadcasting
Standards Council, survivors of violent crimes and disasters "told
story after story of the hurt they suffered through the timing of
media attention, intrusion into their privacy and harassment,
through inaccuracy, distortion and distasteful detail in what was
reported." This suffering is not superficial. To the victim of
violent crime the press may reinforce the perception that the world
is an uncomprehending and dangerous place.
The very same flawed judgments about "news value" contribute
significantly to a public conception of crime that is as completely
divorced from the facts as a Schwarzenegger movie. One study a few
years ago found that reports on crime and justice constitute 22-28
percent of newspaper stories, "nearly three times as much attention
as the presidency or the Congress or the state of the economy." And
the most spectacular crimes -- the stabbing of seven people in an
upscale New Haven coffee bar, for instance -- are likely to be the
most "newsworthy" even though they are statistically the least
likely. "The image of crime presented in the media is thus a
reverse image of reality," writes sociologist Mark Warr in a study
commissioned by the National Academy of Sciences.
Media coverage also brings us to another crucial political moral:
The "seriousness" of crime is a matter of race and real estate.
This has been pointed out before, but it can't be said too often.
Seven people stabbed in a relatively affluent, mostly white
neighborhood near Yale University -- this was big news on a slow
news night. It went national over the A.P. wires and international
over CNN's Headline News. It was covered by The New York Times, and
words of sympathy came to New Haven from as far as Prague and
Santiago. Because a graduate student and a professor were among
those wounded, the university sent representatives to the emergency
room. The morning after, New Haven Mayor John DeStefano walked the
neighborhood to reassure merchants and office workers. For more
than a month the regional press covered every new turn in the case.
Horrendous as it was, though, no one was killed. Four weeks later,
a 15-year-old girl named Rashawnda Crenshaw was driving with two
friends about a mile from Audubon Street. As the car in which she
was a passenger turned a corner she was shot through the window and
killed. Apparently her assailants mistook her for someone else.
Rashawnda Crenshaw was black and her shooting took place in the
Hill, the New Haven neighborhood with the highest poverty rate. No
Yale officials showed up at the hospital to comfort Crenshaw's
mother or cut through red tape. The New York Times did not come
calling; there were certainly no bulletins flashed around the world
on CNN. The local news coverage lasted just long enough for
Rashawnda Crenshaw to be buried.
Anyone trying to deal with the reality of crime, as opposed to the
fantasies peddled to win elections, needs to understand the complex
suffering of those who are survivors of traumatic crimes, and the
suffering and turmoil of their families. I have impressive physical
scars: There is a broad purple line from my breastbone to the top
of my pubic bone, an X-shaped cut into my side where the chest tube
entered, a thick pink mark on my chest where the point of Silva's
knife rested on a rib. Then on my back is the unevenly curving
horizontal scar where Silva thrust the knife in and yanked it out,
leaving what looks like a crooked smile. But the disruption of my
psyche is, day in and day out, more noticeable. For weeks after
leaving the hospital I awoke nightly agitated, drenched with
perspiration. For two months I was unable to write; my brain simply
refused to concentrate. Into any moment of mental repose would rush
images from the night of August 7; or alternatively, my mind would
simply not tune in at all. My reactions are still out of balance
and disproportionate. I shut a door on my finger, not too hard, and
my body is suddenly flooded with adrenaline and I nearly faint.
Walking on the arm of my partner, Margaret, one evening I abruptly
shove her to the side of the road; I have seen a tall, lean shadow
on the block where we are headed and am alarmed out of all
proportion. I get into an argument and find myself quaking with
rage for an hour afterward, completely unable to restore calm.
Though to all appearances normal, I feel at a long arm's remove
from all the familiar sources of pleasure, comfort and anger that
shaped my daily life before August 7.
What psychologists call post-traumatic stress disorder is, among
other things, a profoundly political state in which the world has
gone wrong, in which you feel isolated from the broader community
by the inarticulable extremity of experience. I have spent a lot of
time in the past few months thinking about what the world must look
like to those who have survived repeated violent attacks, whether
children battered in their homes or prisoners beaten or tortured
behind bars; as well as those, like rape victims, whose assaults
are rarely granted public ratification.
The right owes much of its success to the anger of crime victims
and the argument that government should do more for us. This appeal
is epitomized by the rise of restitution laws -- statutes requiring
offenders to compensate their targets. On February 7 the House of
Representatives passed, by a vote of 431 to 0, the Victim
Restitution Act, a plank of the Contract With America that would
supposedly send back to jail offenders who don't make good on their
debts to their victims. In my own state, Governor Rowland recently
proposed a restitution amendment to the state Constitution.
On the surface it is hard to argue with the principle of reasonable
restitution -- particularly since it implies community recognition
of the victim's suffering. But I wonder if these laws really will
end up benefiting someone like me -- or if they are just empty,
vote-getting devices that exploit victims and could actually hurt
our chances of getting speedy, substantive justice. H. Scott
Wallace, former counsel to the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on
Juvenile Justice, writes in Legal Times that the much-touted Victim
Restitution Act is "unlikely to put a single dollar into crime
victims' pockets, would tie up the federal courts with waves of new
damages actions, and would promote unconstitutional debtors'
prisons."
I also worry that the rhetoric of restitution confuses -- as does
so much of the imprisonment-and-execution mania dominating the
political landscape -- the goals of justice and revenge. Revenge,
after all, is just another version of the individualized,
take-out-the-bad-guys myth. Judith Herman believes indulging
fantasies of revenge actually worsens the psychic suffering of
trauma survivors: "The desire for revenge...arises out of the
victim's experience of complete helplessness," and forever ties the
victim's fate to the perpetrator's. Real recovery from the
cataclysmic isolation of trauma comes only when "the survivor comes
to understand the issues of principle that transcend her personal
grievance against the perpetrator...[a] principle of social justice
that connects the fate of others to her own." The survivors and
victims' families of the Long Island Rail Road massacre have banded
together not to urge that Colin Ferguson be executed but to work
for gun control.
What it all comes down to is this: What do survivors of violent
crime really need? What does it mean to create a safe society? Do
we need courts so overburdened by nonviolent drug offenders that
Daniel Silvas go untried for eighteen months, delays that leave
victims and suspects alike in limbo? Do we need to throw nonviolent
drug offenders into mandatory-sentence proximity with violent
sociopaths and career criminals? Do we need the illusory bravado of
a Schwarzenegger film -- or the real political courage of those
L.I.R.R. survivors?
If the use of my picture on television unexpectedly brought me face
to face with the memory of August 7, some part of the attack is
relived for me daily as I watch the gruesome, voyeuristically
reported details of the stabbing deaths of two people in
California, Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. It was relived
even more vividly by the televised trial of Colin Ferguson. (One
night recently after watching Ferguson on the evening news I
dreamed that I was on the witness stand and Silva, like Ferguson,
was representing himself and questioning me.) Throughout the trial,
as Ferguson spoke of falling asleep and having someone else fire
his gun, I heard neither cowardly denial nor what his first lawyer
called "black rage"; I heard Daniel Silva's calm, secure voice
telling me I killed his mother. And when I hear testimony by the
survivors of that massacre -- on a train as comfortable and
familiar to them as my neighborhood coffee bar -- I feel a great
and incommunicable fellowship.
But the public obsession with these trials, I am convinced, has no
more to do with the real experience of crime victims than does the
anti-crime posturing of politicians. I do not know what made my
assailant act as he did. Nor do I think crime and violence can be
reduced to simple political categories. I do know that the answers
will not be found in social Darwinism and atomized individualism,
in racism, in dismantling cities and increasing the destitution of
the poor. To the contrary: Every fragment of my experience suggests
that the best protections from crime and the best aid to victims
are the very social institutions most derided by the right. As
crime victim and citizen what I want is the reality of a safe
community -- not a politician's fantasyland of restitution and
revenge. That is my testimony.
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