Crook Manifesto (Ray Carney, #2)(84)
Carney had heard of the RAND Corporation. On 60 Minutes, something about the Soviet Union. Nuclear war? Pierce explained it came out of World War II—engineers, physicists, and military planners who started a think tank after the Axis surrendered. “They had to find something to do with themselves, right? They call themselves ‘systems analysts’ but they’re just the usual gang of egghead white guys who want to run shit. The U.S. government is their main client, and they’re plugged in everywhere. Nuke scenarios against the Russians, how to fuck over Castro. In Vietnam, they analyzed Viet Cong attacks and troop patterns and told the army where to drop the bombs and send soldiers. All done by computer. Mayor Lindsay—you remember—he’s walking around Harlem in ’68 during the riots, looking at Detroit and Watts and getting the willies and he’s like, what if we took all this American know-how that can send a rocket to the moon and use it to solve the problems of the urban city? He makes some calls and that’s how we get the New York City–RAND Institute, studying the police department, fire department, health, housing. All paid for by your tax dollars.”
“How’d you get so up on all this?”
“How do you think? I sued their asses.” He toasted: to billable hours. “I’m an expert on this shit now. RAND moves in, the city gives them carte blanche, they wheel in their charts and big mainframes and start looking at the city the way they looked at fallout patterns and the NVA. What to do about the fires, they’re asking each other.”
“Didn’t they close down fire stations?” Carney asked. He caught the protests on Eyewitness News. Part cutbacks, part “efficiency.” They did all these studies on how to fix the fire department, and ended up closing station houses in the very neighborhoods most afflicted by the runaway fires. Which led to more fires and more destroyed blocks.
“Rich neighborhood,” Pierce said, “they hear the city wants to shut down the firehouse down the block, next day they’re on the phone nipping that in the bud. South Bronx doesn’t have that kind of juice. We got hired by community organizations to stop the closures.
“I sued them three times. First two times, the judge dismissed the cases once the city trotted out those RAND studies. Numbers can’t be racist, right? But the data can be dumb or wrong, though, and if you feed shit into the computer, it gives you shit right back. The whiz kids got their heads up in the clouds so they can’t see street-level shit—like traffic. What if the reasons two firehouses have different response times isn’t bad performance but traffic? Some neighborhoods got it, some don’t. On Park Avenue, the hydrants work. A mile up in East Harlem, the pipes are still disconnected from unfinished road work from ten years ago. You can’t see it from the clouds. Wrong assumptions, they add up, and everything gets worse.”
He took a sip of his whiskey. Sitting before Carney was the Pierce that he hadn’t seen for years, the civil rights crusader, Black David standing up to the White Goliaths. Pierce shared the closing arguments he’d rehearsed but never got a chance to deliver. “Third time I sued them,” Pierce said, “I was working for Uptown Gardens. Run by Kwame Miller, this Black Panther who continued with the grassroots stuff after the big split in the party a couple of years ago.” Pierce named some good works—a school-lunch initiative, a sports program. “Solid stuff.”
One day Uptown Gardens finds an envelope on their doorstep—whistleblower from inside the institute. “Remember Daniel Ellsberg? He’s the RAND guy who slipped the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times. It was like that. It was all in there—their own internal study on urban policy over the last thirty years, all the shit I was just talking about. The system is broken. The firehouse closures were going to make it worse. They buried the report, and went ahead.”
From Pierce’s tone, the story wasn’t going to end with justice served. “They get to Miller,” Carney said. “Some hush money?”
Pierce lit another cigarette. The ashtray was a huge crystal knob on top of a pedestal, a solid piece of ash disposal. “We had it in black-and-white. Moynihan’s ‘benign neglect.’ In ’68, Lindsay’s planning commission says it outright—if East Harlem and Brownsville burn up, think of how much money we can save on slum clearance before we redevelop it. Cheaper to let it burn and they can rebuild. We had them dead to rights on the race angle.” He glanced around to see if implicated parties were enjoying a Friday-evening drink. “But then we get a call. Uptown Gardens has dropped the suit. Mr. Kwame Miller moves to fucking Bimini, and a couple of weeks later the city terminates the RAND contract. Not saying it’s all connected but—yes, that shit is definitely connected.”
Carney made his hands into fists as Pierce talked. He was getting angry but didn’t know what set him off. Pierce wasn’t describing anything new. Was it the kid? You see things from up in the clouds and you miss how it plays out in the street. What puts the Ruiz boy in the hospital—the fire, or everything that made the building empty in the first place?
“That’s how the city works,” Pierce said. “Look at Oakes—last time we were here we were opening our checkbooks for him. But when he was a prosecutor, I didn’t see him taking down these slumlords and crooked insurance agents. Arson case hits the DA’s office, that’s the last you’re going to hear about it. City buys up that dead property, or seizes it outright through eminent domain, and sells it to a developer for cheap, or an organization like Homes 4 Harlem assumes control—there’s a lot of money in ‘urban renewal.’?”