Post

Yesterday we received a "public safety survey" being circulated by the Asheville Chamber of Commerce and it's a doooozy. It's also worth taking a closer look at since it shows how the crime panic propaganda sausage is getting made...

"How has crime or public safety affected your business during the past 12 months?" Survey questions provide leading answers and conflate safety with law and order. In this one, there's no clear way to disagree with the authors' perspective; even the outlier option is qualified by "directly."

"Rank your top three public safety concerns" This question isn't marked required, but there's no way to opt-out or select "none of the above," so anyone who submits the survey is required to agree with the authors on the premise that these are (to varying degrees) valid concerns.

Safety concerns that don't make the cut: underfunded social services, lack of affordable housing, bike and sidewalk infrastructure, NC's deadliest jail, de facto cooperation with ICE, insufficient disaster preparedness, racial disparities, etc. They don't appear because they don't serve the agenda.

"What changes would have the greatest positive impact on your business?" Response options are written to boost specific Chamber of Commerce policy goals—and those goals are uniformly carceral. We don't get healthcare, opportunities for youth, traffic calming, mediation programs, etc.

And which nonprofit service providers should face "consequences" for not providing security? The Chamber of Commerce is stoking a narrative that harm reductionists and shelters are driving social decay, and should be acting (more) like extensions of the policing and surveillance apparatus.

We also get prosecution of crime "regardless of the cause"—a not subtle hint that poor and marginalized folks are being punished too infrequently for survival behaviors. The authors want less consideration of economic / social determinants and more "boot stamping on a human face" (to quote Orwell).

"Identify up to three things government leaders are currently doing that are working well." Two thirds of the suggested responses are just variations on "policing and surveillance," because that's what the Chamber of Commerce is hoping to reinforce.

And here we find a self-serving opportunity to boost the Downtown Improvement District (previously, BID) that city elites rammed through city council. Notice how the BID gets elaborated as a "cleanliness and safety" initiative, but there's no equivalent pitch for the Continuum of Care.

The euphemism "hot spots" is used here by the authors to avoid saying what they really mean. APD deploys this language to justify the use of LRAD and pepperballs against patrons of Black clubs, council members regularly argue that disproportionately Black housing residents should be surveilled, etc.

And finally we get the Chamber of Commerce policy proposals, stated clearly for the respondents to accept as their own: more funding, less tolerance. Local businesses are ready for daddy government to bring some order to Asheville's house.

It's not breweries on every corner, it's someone getting high on the corner to numb the pain of displacement. It's not city leaders meeting in secret, it's activist being disruptive at city council. It's not TDA funds unspent on neglected infrastructure, it's cops who aren't getting enough praise.

In short, it's not them and the city they've created that's driving precarity, anxiety, and abandonment. And when the resulting misery threatens the stability of their own profits, the solution is jail cells, zero tolerance, ALPRs, drones, private security, better response times, and camp sweeps.