Jeff and I have the police scanner on almost all the time. The constant stream of information passing between dispatchers, police officers, firefighters, medics and tow-truck drivers is weirdly compelling, especially when you hear a familiar address, or can look on Google Maps to contextualise an event that catches your attention. Sometimes what’s exceptional is not the event itself but when something more than information is passed over the radio; human values. They can be detected in a sarcastic tone or an inflection indicating surprise. Or in a judgment call made by a supervisor (commander?) in exceptional circumstances (e.g. on icy nights when accidents outnumber medics, they might decide to respond only to accidents with known injuries and ignore the rest, even when they involve multiple cars).

One recent glimpse into the culture of law enforcement in Pittsburgh involved a reported burglary in progress in an abandoned house on Fisher Street, which straddles the Mount Oliver and Saint Clair neighborhoods on the South Side. It was sometime after midnight, and every officer on duty in Zone 3 was responding to emergency calls, including a chase with an attempted homicide suspect. Still I was surprised when a supervisor followed the dispatcher’s announcement with the remark that “if it’s abandoned it’s not really a burglary so we’re not going to worry about it.” Really?

It seems to me that ignoring crime in vacant (abandoned) properties is not a victim-less crime. At the very least, it’s scary for the people who live nearby — especially when they don’t see law enforcement responding with any urgency to crime in their neighborhood. In a nearby property owned by the Housing Authority (The 456-unit St Clair Village) where an amenity featured on their website is that “each apartment has it’s own front and rear door; no common entrances,” it’s pretty clear that feeling safe in your own home is something that is not taken for granted in this area.

When things settled down, an officer asked for the Fisher Street address to check on the (broken-into) house. Predictably, the actors were GOA. On Google Maps Street View, the only property on Fisher Street that looks “abandoned” is number 713 (pictured). It’s a neighborhood with a number of vacant lots, but most homes appear occupied and maintained. In fact, according to the Allegheny County Assessment records, the mailing address of the owner of the house is just a couple of houses away, at number 512. Would the police have responded sooner if they thought the house was “vacant” but not “abandoned?” What if they only knew it was a burglary in-progress? In this case, it may have been to the neighborhood’s advantage to give the 911 operator less information.

While the supervisor’s “judgment call” may have been totally justifiable, it’s invisible to the person who made the 911 call. In neighborhoods where people (at best) feel neglected and (at worst) are openly hostile towards law enforcement, it may be these types of incidents that discourage citizens from engaging with public and private agencies, and promote the engineering of “alternative” solutions (like having a pit bull in the yard) that tend to isolate people from each other rather than engage people with one another.

On my block, there is an alternating parking ban on garbage/recycling pick-up days, which most people forget/ignore. This week was no different, except for one thing: the yelling.

It was a woman who got caught behind the truck who didn’t want to wait. She suggested - loudly - that the truck pull over to let her by (”I have to catch a PLANE!”). The truck didn’t move. So she leaned on her car horn. The crew picked up recycling bags from the curb, and the truck moved along with them, inch by inch. Finally, the woman turned her car around and addressed the crew one more time with a hearty “fuck you!”

What made this interaction interesting was that is that instead of turning around to begin with, or going down a side street (there were two), she chose to escalate a predicable situation (when the recycling gets picked up sometimes you get caught behind the slow moving truck on a narrow street) into a confrontation. My neighborhood is relatively affluent, and it was kind of embarrassing (although not surprising) that this woman (who I presume lives nearby) acts like people (i.e. city workers) should just do what she wants because she tells them to. And if they don’t, she is going to throw a tantrum. That will show them!

In contrast, people in other (less affluent) neighborhoods have another way of “negotiating” - with cash money. It makes perfect sense that people in blue collar neighborhoods know the economics of getting what you want. Got illegal dumpers leaving mattresses and tires in the alley behind your house? Twenty bucks to the guy who picks up the trash on the curb will make it go away. That’s what people in Larimer do, and I am positive that similar neighborhoods have similar practices.

I would love to know how the recycling/waste collection crews view the “character” of different neighborhoods or different types of residents. What about the glimpses of trash they might see? Are there neighborhoods where they receive greater acknowledgment or recognition from residents as they do their job? What is their schema of the social and spacial urban environment? What does the city “look” like from the back of a garbage truck?

I went back to the The Mall at Robinson to look for the “storefront” police substation and find out what they do there. As it turns out, you have to go down a long hallway, make a turn, and keep walking. It’s an office with a white board, some two-way radios, a desk with a phone, another radio and a few papers, a file cabinet, and a few chairs. There is a framed poster and a mirror (!) leaning against one of the walls. There are no posted hours, and no one was there. It was 6 p.m. and no one was in the management office either (across the hall) so I took a few pictures to capture the “inviting” feel of this “community outreach” effort.

I also got a picture of the National Guard Recruitment Office next to Sears as I was going up the escalators.

Jeff and I have been shopping conducting informal ethnography at all the malls we can find in the greater Pittsburgh area. Predictably, they all borrow elements from the proverbial “town square” to soften the commercial edges of their essential decorated shed-ness. And of course, it’s been observed that shopping malls have actually replaced the town square or city marketplace they quote with props (like “gas” street lamps) and events (like holiday carolers). Stuck in a recursive loop, city and town planners try to re-fashion actual town squares and marketplaces to look and feel more the staged mall version. Okay, but what about the fact that this de facto “public space” (in the mall) is actually privately owned? At one local mall, groups of more than three people are technically violating “the rules of etiquette” (as the mall puts it). I’d like to know if this rule is enforced, and under what circumstances.

At the same time, public institutions are responding to the mall as “public space” and moving in. The Mall at Robinson has an Army National Guard Recruitment Center (it’s next to Sears and Aeropostale; it highlights the “money for college” deal) and a Police Substation (next to the Mall Management Office and across from H&M). The mall is considered a “hub of the community” according to the press release about the opening of the substation, a “storefront office” that will “facilitate a variety of community-related activities” such as neighborhood crime watches. I would like to know more about how it functions in practice. Do people actually “stop in” and pick up information about D.A.R.E.? Does the substation sponsor events that might increase awareness of and participation in public safety-related programs, or improve (sometimes adversarial) relationships between law enforcement and the communtites they serve? How actively are they protecting the private property of the mall vendors and “legitimate” visitors (i.e. shoppers)? What do they really do all day in the mall?

Public life is moving onto private property, and it goes beyond mall-sponsored trick-or-treating. Some quick research reveals that malls have post offices (e.g. at The Galleria in Houston), museum branches (e.g. Orange County Museum of Art’s Orange Lounge at South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa), farmer’s markets (check out the Circuit City parking lot at Crossroads Bellevue on Tuesdays; they accept WIC and Food Stamps and give out helium balloons), and libraries; the one in Bellevue targets foreign-born residents who are unfamiliar with free libraries and the array of supportive services they offer; they issued 900 new library cards in the first three months after they opened a branch in the mall. At the same mall, there is a “Mini City Hall” that is a “fully equipped satellite office” with volunteers that can interpret/translate for Chinese, Korean, Russian, Spanish, Tagalog, Bengali, Hindi and Urdu speakers. It is becoming an an agora in a lot of ways. But. While I think it’s great that public institutions are meeting people where they are to connect them with services, I also wonder about things like freedom of expression and freedom of assembly that are moderated by the owners and managers of the space.

For example, at one local mall, two girls in their late teens (?) were laughing and carrying a homemade poster that read “free hugs. really!” They were stopped by mall security almost immediately, and we overheard the guard say something about “soliciting.” He didn’t take the poster, but they agreed to stop. And as you look around the mall, you see that there is no place in the mall dedicated to public expression of…anything. I didn’t even see any graffiti in the bathrooms. The only messages are commercial or “public service” oriented. And don’t even think of taking a photograph of the food court or escalators. It’s really no wonder that people “express” themselves through selecting what to buy since that is the primary mode of expression offered/allowed at the mall. Are you more Abercrombie & Fitch or Hot Topic? More Mc Donald’s or more Subway? The mall manages to be both diverse and homogenous.

The mall is open, as in “for business” not open “for discussion.” It’s too bad.

I find that in my conversations with clients, there are some assumptions that make it difficult to align goals and manage expectations. One assumption is that the logo should “illustrate” the product, service, or mission of the organisation. I completely disagree.

Think about the most well-known logos. From just their logos, could anyone tell me what FedEx, Nike, Apple, Coca-Cola, Ford, Google, McDonald’s, Starbucks, or UPS do? No way. But they are memorable — you know them, without me reproducing them here. They give a “face” to the something complex: an organisation that is (hopefully) always evolving its products and services. IBM still makes servers, but they also do business consulting; if their logo was a punchcard…that might evoke “quaint” more than “innovative.” Not cute.