Going out on The Wire to condemn Kyle’s “Hamsterdams”

To me, HBO’s The Wire is the best television series ever. And when I say “ever,” I really mean it — the best show I have seen in my lifetime and that covers a lot of ground. I vividly remember as a kid growing up in Manhattan’s Lower East Side and my dad coming home with the family’s very first television set. The year was 1948 and the set was a Philco, with what I thought was a magnificent 10-inch black-and-white screen. Some nights gathering around that TV were more special than others. Tuesday nights were always magical. They were reserved for a television show known as The Texaco Star Theater, hosted by Milton Berle. Perhaps some of you reading this might not know that name. That’s OK. But back then, Milton Berle was known as “Mr. Television.” Wednesday nights and Friday nights were set aside for my dad and me to watch the nationally televised boxing matches, the aptly named “Wednesday Night Fights,” sponsored by Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, and Friday’s Gillette Cavalcade of Sports, always originating from Madison Square Garden and featuring, as the TV fight announcer, our nextdoor neighbor and close family friend Don Dunphy. But Saturday nights were the best – three hours of superb prime-time television, beginning with the hour-long Jackie Gleason Show and the hilarious characters he invented and portrayed, including the millionaire Reginald van Gleason III; Joe the Bartender, who was always talking to the never-seen Mr. Dennehy (and who is not to be confused with the reincarnated Joe the Bartender who came along several years later and which became a two-person skit with the wrong-headed addition of “Crazy Guggenheim”), along with the silent and usually grief-stricken Poor Soul. That was followed by the zany and genius-propelled 90-minute Your Show of Shows starring Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca, Howard Morris, and Carl Reiner. The final 30 minutes was reserved for Your Hit Parade during which Dorothy Collins, Russell Arms, Snooky Lanson and Gisele MacKenzie sang the top seven hit songs of the week (plus two “Lucky Strike Extras”).

Those were my fondest television memories right up until I saw The Wire. What was so powerful about The Wire was the accuracy with which it portrayed the milieus it explored. Well, at least during the last three seasons: Season 3 which focused on Baltimore’s municipal politics, season 4 which concentrated on public education and season 5 which dealt with the print media. As a former newspaper reporter who covered municipal politics and later went to work for a municipal government as well as someone who taught high school and junior college journalism, it was delightfully painful (I know that seems like an oxymoron, but there you have it) to watch The Wire reveal the bitter truths in all those areas.

But the overall arc of the series concentrated on the local police trying and miserably failing in a war on drugs. In Season 3, Howard “Bunny” Colvin, a police major who is alienated by police bureaucracy and the detrimental effects the anti-drug efforts are causing, comes up with this idea that winds up being called “Hamsterdam,” three geographic zones in his district where low-level users can take drugs without facing punishment and where addicts and dealers can conduct their business under supervision, but without interference. This moves the drug trade into a controlled, uninhabited area to protect the rest of his district. It its patterned after Amsterdam’s liberal drug laws, but when Colvin explains this to one of the dealers, the dealer mispronounces it as “Hamsterdam” and the name sticks.

Last week, the Kyle City Council created its own Hamsterdam. But these zones are not going to be havens for drug dealers. They are going to be refuges for newly arriving residents to Kyle who are listed in the state’s sex offender database.

Now, if you ask anyone on the city council, they will probably scream that is not what they did. But that IS what they did. They just don’t realize it because, as usual, they didn’t look at all of the implications of the the ordinance they are passing. And that’s just one of the reasons I am taking what is unquestionably the unpopular stance of being completely and adamantly opposed to the city’s new sex offender ordinance, which is up for a second reading after being approved 6-1 on its first reading a week ago.

I have many reasons for opposing this ordinance. The first, and perhaps most overriding reason, is faith-based. I am Jewish and the most important teaching and tenet of Judaism is found in the Torah’s book of Leviticus, chapter 19, verse 18: “You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against your countrymen. Love your fellow as yourself: I am the Lord.” Hillel, a Jewish religious leader, sage and scholar responsible for the development of the Jewish laws and teachings found in the Mishah and the Talmud, was once asked to explain Jewish laws. He replied “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. Everything else is commentary.” I believe Christians have a similar belief, known as The Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” The city council completely ignored these tenets when it acted on this ordinance and anyone who supports this ordinance likewise rejects these religious teachings.

But, like all Jews, I am also seared by the knowledge of Nazi atrocities — Adolph Hitler and his Nazis who did exactly what the Kyle City Council did; they created specified zones where Jews were required to live before they were shipped off to the concentration camps. And Hitler told the German people exactly what the Kyle City Council members were telling us: “This is absolutely necessary to keep you safe and secure.”

There’s an extremely ugly word for what the council did last Tuesday (well, “ugly” unless you’re a white supremacist). It’s a word that’s used when a certain area is set aside for a certain segment of the population and that population is restricted to living in that area. You might have heard of the word I’m referring to. It’s “segregation.” Yes, folks, our city council wrapped themselves in their swastika emblazoned white robes last week, donned their white hoods and voted to legalize segregation in Kyle. In fact, I’m willing to bet that Kyle is the only city in the United States in which, during this century, a black city council member voted in favor of segregation. That’s quite a legacy. A shameful legacy, to be sure, but a legacy nonetheless.

The vote on this ordinance proved Kyle is distinguishing itself in another way as well. While much of the country, including the federal government itself, is seriously contemplating police reform measures, Kyle is moving in exactly the opposite direction — toward becoming a police state. I’ve always thought that Abraham Maslow had the police in mind when he conceived his “law of the instrument.” If you’re not familiar with Maslow’s law, which he first espoused publicly  in 1966, it goes: “I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” To the police, the non-uniformed world is a nail, a world populated by two kinds of people — bad guys and potential bad guys. To the police, it’s shoot or press a knee to the neck for 8 minutes and 15 seconds first, and ask questions much, much, much later, if at all. To those promoting police reform laws, words like “treatment,” “rehabilitation,” “compassion,” have replaced police terms like “isolation,” “confession” and “incarceration.” Instead of a world populated by bad guys or potential guys, reformers believe the world is populated by individuals, some of whom indeed do bad things. But those bad things don’t make them bad persons. Yes, the people the city has decided to banish, to segregate, to punish, did what many consider to be bad things; in most cases it was a person classified as an adult who engaged in consensual sex with person under the age of 15. But these people we’re talking about here — the ones the city council want to segregate — have already been tried and convicted for what they did and have served their punishment. But that doesn’t matter to our city council. Kyle doesn’t believe in extending these people a second chance.  It doesn’t believe in developing rehabilitation programs or other treatments that might benefit these individuals. It doesn’t believe in forgiveness. No. Kyle stands for banishment, for segregation, for isolation. It believes only in banishing these people to a form of purgatory and then forgetting about them completely as well as completely ignoring those who will be forced to be their neighbors. But I’ll get back to that in a bit.

So it’s no coincidence that this ordinance was the brainchild of the local police who actually (and I’m not making this up) sold the council on this by telling council members this is what such Texas cities as Leander, Pflugerville, West Lake Hills, Cedar Park, Cibolo, League City, Giddings and Fate are doing. Look, I have nothing against Leander, Pflugerville, West Lake Hills et al — I’m sure they are all fine little burgs inhabited by residents who love living there — but, c’mon! There are many really great cities in this land — there are even a few right here in Texas — so why can’t we aim higher and try to emulate them? The Kyle City Council recently spent two days at a “visioning workshop” in Galveston and now I’m terribly concerned they spent their time trying to find out ways “we can be more like Giddings.” That’s low-hanging fruit. That’s not visioning. That’s not aspirational. That’s settling. We should be setting our sights much higher than that. When he assumed the job of city manager here, Scott Sellers said his goal was to make Kyle a destination city. Personally, I don’t think that goal has been reached, but that doesn’t mean the city should stop looking for ways to reach it. At the same time, I doubt there are many husbands in this country who have said to their wives “Honey, grab the kids, put the bags in the car, we’re off to an exciting vacation in Leander,” or League City, or Fate, or any of the other cities the police department wants Kyle to emulate.

Here’s an idea. Why not try hot try to contact the deputy director of Sex Offender Programs, for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s Rehabilitation Programs Division to see if Kyle could import some of its ideas and programs? Here’s the Huntsville number for that office:  (936) 437-2882. Why not emulate that? The Federal Bureau of Prisons also conducts residential and non-residential sex offender treatment programs. Why not emulate those – learn what they are doing that’s successful and import that knowledge into similar programs here? In an article written for the American Psychological Association, Karen Kersting wrote that approaches like the one taken by our city council “disregards key information on the nature of sex offenders — statistics show most are not likely to repeat their crimes  — and on the increasing efficacy of offender treatment, largely due to a modern behavior modification model stressing relapse prevention through recognition and avoidance of criminal impulses.” Why not try something innovative such as a “modern behavior modification model” instead of simply being part of the herd with the other sheep bearing names like Pflugerville, West Lake Hills, League City and the like? Because that would take an intellectual and financial investment on the city’s part and that’s simply beyond the collective comprehension — the intellectual capacity — of the current city council. I’m betting they will, instead, choose the cop-out (pun intended): instead of investing in innovative rehabilitation programs that really might make the entire city safer, they will decide to spend that money on hiring more police officers to enforce their segregation laws.

Which brings me to another reason (the one I said earlier I would get back to in a bit) I so emphatically oppose this ordinance. And, from a public safety perspective, this might be the most important reason of all. When you “treat everything as if it were a nail,” you never consider that family living on Orchard Lane or Keegans Way or Masonwood Drive or Thicket Lane or Alpha or Voss or Voyager Cove or the small handful of other streets where newly arrived residents who are in the state’s sex offender database must be funneled into because of actions taken by a city council that’s been led by the nose by the city’s police department. If you believe that what the council did in passing this ordinance made a large section of Kyle that much safer, than you must also accept as undisputable fact that it made all these other places in Kyle far more dangerous. But not a single council member spoke up in the defense of those living in these sections of the city. What’s going to happen when a child living in a home on Wallops Street is raped and murdered by someone in the state database who was forced by the city council to live in this neighborhood? The lawsuit that will be filed will probably bankrupt the city. Which, I guess, is fitting. If the city has become ethically and morally bankrupt, it is only just that it leads to it becoming financially bankrupt as well.

But the clinching reason why I am so adamantly opposed to the passage of this ordinance is that while the police department provided council members many irrelevant figures to help convince them to pass it, when I asked the department to come up with relevant numbers — the numbers the council should have asked for — the department failed to do so. The only reason I can think of for this failure on the part of the police department is because the numbers would prove this entire exercise was a complete waste of time. Last week I asked for two sets of figures: First, the number of persons arrested in the last decade by the Kyle Police Department whose convictions led them to be placed in the state’s sex offender database and, second, the number of Kyle residents already in the database who were arrested in the last decade for sex-related offenses. When filing the request, I assumed the number for both was zero and that’s why the police department failed to volunteer those numbers in its council presentation. That was confirmed when I received this message from the city: “After talking to our KPD staff, it seems gathering this data will not be accessible by your due date if at all for a number of reasons.” Sure. Fine. Whatever. The reason it will not furnish the numbers is obvious. Because to provide them proves that,  in passing this ordinance, council members are finding a solution for a problem that doesn’t exist. I’m ashamed of every single one of them.