Democracy In Albany

Nothing like calling the police with a problem, only to have the responding officer(s) treat you like you're the one who did something wrong. How many of us have been told we should just move out of Albany if we don't like being victims of crime?

Hard to imagine how the T-U could write this story and the words "West Hill" don't appear anywhere.

It's just lazy shorthand to mention Arbor Hill repeatedly, when the crime maps show that West Hill is plagued by the greatest concentration of violent crime in Albany. Memo to T-U reporters: Just because both neighborhoods have "Hill" in their names does not make them synonymous or interchangeable. (I guess you would probably never make the same mistake with Pine Hills.)

The map of Albany's neighborhoods doesn't back you up that:

http://councilalbanyna.tripod.com/images/nbrhdassoc.pdf

It's the same map that the Albany Police Department uses for its crime mapping site, and  how it deploys resources:

http://www.albany-ny.org/freeance/Client/PublicAccess1/index.html?appconfig=NEIGHBORHOOD_PART1

Compare West Hill and Arbor Hill on a weekly basis, and you will learn (or be able to infer) two things: (1) There is more crime in West Hill. (2) Residents of Arbor Hill have a legitimate complaint in not wanting to be lumped in with a more crime-ridden adjoining neighborhood.

I would quibble again on this one. What about all of North Albany? It's a significant part of the city that doesn't share what you say is a common demographic in the "north" part of the city.

arbor hill and west hill are still next to each other and share similar demographics.

http://www.slaverybyanothername.com./

Please at least read Bill Moyers interview with Blackmon:

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/06202008/watch2.html

Blackmon is the Atlanta bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal.

"DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Well, there's no way that anybody can read this book and come away still wondering why there is a sort of fundamental cultural suspicion among African-Americans of the judicial system, for instance.
I mean, that suspicion is incredibly well-founded. The judicial system, the law enforcement system of the South became primarily an instrument of coercing people into labor and intimidating blacks away from their civil rights. That was its primary purpose, not the punishment of lawbreakers. And so, yes, these events build an unavoidable and irrefutable case for the kind of anger that still percolates among many, many African-Americans today."

If you need to view another perspective please read Jacob Riis' How the Other Half Lives.
Riis (1849-1914) was a muck-raking journalist who documented conditions in the slums of late 19th century New York.

Here's a passage about those poor who survived by eeking out a living scavaging garbage for the 'riches' the landfills and ash-cans held.

""The discovery was made by earlier explorers that there is money in New York's ash-barrel, but it was left to the genius of the padrone to develop the full resources of the mine that has become the exclusive preserve of the Italian immigrant. Only a few years ago, when rag-picking was carried on in a desultory and irresponsible sort of way, the city hired gangs of men to trim the ash-scows before they were sent out to sea. The trimming consisted in levelling out the dirt as it was dumped from the carts, so that the scow might be evenly loaded. The men were paid a dollar and a half a day, kept what they found that was worth having, and allowed the swarms of Italians who hung about the dumps to do the heavy work for them, letting them have their pick of the loads for their trouble. To-day Italians contract for the work, paying large sums to be permitted to do it. The city received not less than $80,000 last year for the sale of this privilege to the contractors, who in addition have to pay gangs of their countrymen for sorting out the bones, rags tin cans and other waste that are found in the ashes and form the staples of their trade and their sources of revenue. The effect has been vastly to increase the power of the padrone, or his ally, the contractor, by giving him exclusive control of the one industry in which the Italian was formerly independent "dealer," and reducing him literally to the plane of the dump. Whenever the back of the sanitary police is turned, he will make his home in the filthy burrows where he works by day, sleeping and eating his meals under the dump, on the edge of slimy depths and amid surroundings full of unutterable horror. The city did not bargain to house, though it is content to board, him so long as he can make the ash-barrels yield the food to keep him alive, and a vigorous campaign is carried on at intervals against these unlicensed dump settlements; but the temptation of having to pay no rent is too strong, and they are driven from one dump only to find lodgement under another a few blocks farther up or down the river. The fiercest warfare is waged over the patronage of the dumps by rival factions represented by opposing contractors, and it has happened that the defeated party has endeavored to capture by strategy what he failed to carry by assault. It augurs unsuspected adaptability in the Italian to our system of self-government that these rivalries have more than once been suspected of being behind the sharpening of city ordinances, that were apparently made in good faith to prevent meddling with the refuse in the ash-barrels or in transit."