After watching the whole first season of The Wire, I realized it had a lot of similarities to the Robert Taylor Homes of Chicago. If you've never heard of the Robert Taylor Homes heres a little background. It was a public housing development that tried to create cheap affordable housing for many low income families. The high-rise development soon enough collapsed internally and turned into a breeding ground for crime and drugs. As seen in The Wire, cops avoided certain areas of the Robert Taylor Homes. Initially the homes were built to accommodate 11,000 people, but soon enough peaked at 27,000 people within the community. Also seen in The Wire, "turf wars" broke out constantly within the area. In 2007 the high-rise buildings were demolished. Heres a website that gives you a little more information the Robert Taylor Homes if your interested.
http://wirednewyork.com/forum/showthread.php?t=7002&page=1
Its quite unbelievable how many connections you are able to make between the two areas. To think that there is an ideal type of community for crime to thrive, is an interesting aspect to look at. With so much known about where crime comes from and how it originates, why do we keep building areas that provoke this type of behavior? Obviously we cannot predict everything, but we can compare the similarities between the towns and cities that provide our country with the most crime, and act accordingly.
I agree with your post and have seen many problems depicted in The Wire that could be changed to maybe improve the type of living in these areas. In the first couple of episodes D'Angelo talks about changing the game so that police would have no need at all to come to those areas. Maybe the main problem is that the police presence is not apparent until something goes wrong. If the police are always visible in certain areas than maybe it would be less likely for this activity to begin in the first place. I know this would be a huge cost and probably unrealistic but changes need to be made in some way to impove house areas as seen in The Wire
ReplyDeleteI read a book "Gang Leader for a Day" and it specifically addresses the conditions and gang life that goes along with the Robert Taylor homes! very interesting and I also can see that parallel with The Wire's depiction of the projects!
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