Great Comment on the DTES

This comment was sent in this evening in response to Elizabeth James' posting and my post, "The Povertarians."

It was so good I felt it deserved a posting of its own:

William Simpson's story with the Carnegie is, sorry to say, not a rare example, they often bar people without due process of any sort. My favorite example is the head of security says "You're barred" the barred man says "what for?"Security explains: " Never mind that! Just get out!"

Power corrupts, and absolute power over an abject population tends to corrupt absolutely. When there is no accountability, no way for the common member to resolve his grievance, let alone get the grievance on a staff person's file, things get out of balance.

There is a "Incident Report Book" at Carnegie in which members can be written up by security. This can be done with out a person's knowledge. Incidents in this book will be automatically entered into the computer and will stay there for three years. All without them even knowing about it! How much sense does that make?

If you want someone to stop doing something, wouldn't you go ahead and tell them when they've crossed the line? Secret write-ups are so iron curtain, how in the world do they help to resolve anything? They are only good for building a case for a punitive strike.And then what happens when a member tries to get something on record and resolve a staff person's behavior? There's no way to get it on paper at all, and in fact, complaints could be dismissed out of hand because it turns out you're cpmplaining to the boss about his girlfriend! But how were you to know, unless you've read the DTESenquirer blog?

I'd like to see more people from outside the DTES write to Judy Bader, she's the boss of Jaquie Forbes Roberts, the woman from the City of Vancouver who wrote the letter that barred William Simpson.

I say from outside because so many inside live in 10x10 rooms without computers, and on the streets and such. The City knows exactly who they are picking on, and they know exactly how little resources they have to protect themselves against egregious abuses of power, like the barring of William Simpson.