A modest proposal re policing

I'm entirely sympathetic to the cause of defunding the police, although I think the language of defunding is probably incorrect. I think what's really being asked for is a reallocation of police budgets to prevent crime from occurring in the first place. Given that so much of what the police currently deal with is a result of poverty, drug addiction and mental health problems, it seems like a total no-brainer to go to the root-cause of those problems rather than expecting the police and the prison system deal with people who really shouldn't be there.

That said, I'm also sympathetic to the situation most police officers find themselves in - under-prepared for the situations they find themselves in, and often frightened for their own lives. I've known a fair few police officers and they've all been decent people, but that's not always enough.

But then I see stories like this, where a black family on a charity bike ride are pushed off their bikes by police and threatened with a taser for 'matching the description' given by a stabbing victim - a black male on a bike. That's disgraceful, tactless and inflammatory. This is in Tottenham, a couple of miles from where I live, and about 200m from where the police killed Mark Duggan. 

I think that the police will always exist in some form - people won't be willing to devolve stolen vehicle chases to social workers - but when I look at stories like those above, I think the big thing is how rare it is for the police to actually live in the communities they serve. Of the police officers I've known, they've all utilised their free travel and shift working patterns to live a long way from the areas they serve in largely white, rural neighbourhoods.

My modest proposal would be for a two tier police force as we see in the rest of europe, where there's a national police force for serious crimes, and then a local police force, staffed by people who live within that community, tasked with preventing petty crime. I would pay those local policemen and women the median salary for the borough, corrected annually, and I would only allow them to work on that force while they lived in the borough. I bet that issues like the racial profiling of young, innocent, black men would be quickly nipped in the bud if the officers responding to such crimes were local and known to the community. 

How is this still happening?

This is the year I turn 40. Most of the time I feel like a young man, though I’m not. The murders of George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery are the latest reminders that while I’ve been growing old, the world continues with the same old prejudices. 

The inhumane beating of Rodney King at the hands of the LAPD in 1991, and the subsequent riots that swept across LA made a thankfully non-physical mark on me; a year or two later, I distinctly recall the murder of Stephen Lawrence in London. The bleak inequity of it horrified me. It still does. And yet, almost 30 years later, people who don’t look like me are suffering the same dehumanising injustices at the hands of people who absolutely do look like me. 

Sometimes I feel like I live my life in the pages of a children’s book. The people I associate with on a daily basis are warm and open, generous, and they display no prejudices. I have the privilege of passing through the world associating only with well-meaning, kind and open-minded people. For a long time I thought that niceness was enough: that being unprejudiced myself was all I could possibly do. But it's not enough. I’m still unsure of what else I can do, but, as I get older, and I recognise that I’m potentially half way through my life, and that so far I’ve taken no proactive steps to put right the disgust I felt when I learned of Rodney King or Stephen Lawrence, I realise I need to do more.

I don't have much to offer, but I do have a voice and a vote:

I will actively seek out political parties that aim to obliterate the racial wealth gap by whatever means necessary (my personal feeling is that we need a wealth tax to re-balance society across races).

I will never vote for political parties that shy away from tackling race issues.

I will do my best to bring my children up to be allies in the fight against racism.

I will continue to educate myself as to what it means to be anything other than white in a white-centric society, and I hope to be brave enough to call out prejudice when I see it.

I have a platform and I will use that to raise others up. If you’re a runner or a track and field athlete and you have something to say, DM me. I’d love to help.

To create lasting change we need to persuade the broader white population to never again vote for dip-shit despots like Donald Trump. That's where the real hopelessness lies: how do you engage a population that has been radicalised into feeling pride in its ignorance and apathy to the lives of anyone outside its immediate circle? 

As Brexit showed, young white liberals no longer have the language to connect with this group. That needs to change, but how?

I'm at a loss. I'm eager to hear your solutions.

The Upset

The National Hero was a walking, running contradiction. Loved but unlovable; admired but unadmirable; too fond of the former, too naive to the latter to be aware that his reputation was waning. He was 35: not quite young, not quite old, but old enough to no longer be afforded the long leash of youth.

He had been contracted to run a race on the south coast of England. It was a half marathon and the timing worked well with his schedule. The money was good: a £400k appearance fee (which required him to appear at press conferences and some community outreach events - small fry), plus the opportunity to double that assuming he won. There would also be sponsor bonuses on the line for winning and running any kind of record - personal, national, European or world. All in, he was looking at a seven digit pay day.

There was no doubt he would win. As part of his contract, his business manager had insisted he choose the rest of the elite field, and with an eye on a European record and a sizable bonus for himself at stake, he had assembled a group of elite but anonymous Kenyans and Ugandans to shepherd The National Hero all the way to the finish line. They would give the impression of competition, but they would ultimately demure breaking the tape. The public wanted a race, but they wanted their man to win.

The Africans were each paid £8000, plus expenses, with the opportunity to earn more for those who stayed the course the longest. They were young, fast and motivated. They all agreed to do a good job. They all knew the rules.

The first kilometer went off in 2:52. A swarm of elites and sub-elites ran together, bumping and nudging each other, but steering well clear of The National Hero, who ran as if there was an invisible force field around him. Kilometer two was faster, 2:48. That was all it took to shrink the group to 16. By the time they reached 10km in 28:14, there were only seven runners remaining. Six Africans, one Briton. At 10 miles, which they passed in 45:29, The National Hero surged. He looked around and saw he was followed by only two of his handpicked competition. They went with him and went past, keeping the pace high, as was their job.

With just over a kilometer to go The National Hero began to feign exhaustion. The motorbike cameras zoomed in on the anguish and crusted mucus on his face. He steeled his expression, grimaced and fought back on. They were still three, a Kenyan and a Ugandan leading the way, wearing identical kit from their sponsor, the Briton wearing a National singlet, making him easy to distinguish.

With 500m to go, the Kenyan glanced back and pushed on, hard. Too soon. The Ugandan reeled him in at 300m to go, then accelerated himself. The second they passed, the Kenyan looked like he had run into a wall, his deceleration was so sudden.

The National Hero followed the Ugandan, their exhausted but exquisite strides in perfect harmony. At 80m to go, he made his move. He drifted out of the slipstream and began to sprint. But so did the Ugandan. For five or six seconds they strained, inseparably to the finish line. And then, in the final meters, just as the Ugandan was preparing to allow the Briton his rightful win, the Briton tripped and fell. The crowd gasped. The Ugandan’s momentum was too great and he crossed the finish line in first place with a look of horror, anguish and surprise on his face, captured forever by the photographers beyond the line.

The National Hero picked himself up and scrabbled the few centimetres across the timing mat. He had a record, but not the win. The public didn’t care much for records so much as they cared for winning. There were cheers, but they were muted; the usual euphoria was strangely absent.

The Ugandan reached out to his fallen foe, but The National Hero refused his hand and shot him a look, replayed endlessly on TV, that could only be interpreted as disgust.

The post-race press conference was a horror show.

The National Hero accused the Ugandan of tripping him, despite ample TV evidence that directly contradicted this. He went on to theorise that the Ugandan had done this as he was angry over some imagined sleight that had occurred at a training camp. Missing money, compromising photographs, drunkenness and angry wives trying to blackmail the Hero through their cuckolded athlete husbands: the story made no sense, but it was no less incendiary for it.

The Ugandan sat at the press conference, placid and bemused. No one asked him any questions.

No one quite knew what to make of the ruckus. It was sordid and strange, murky and mad. If this was the dirty laundry The National Hero chose to air in public, what did his dirty laundry look like behind closed doors? The public lapped up the scandal. And yet somehow, far from cheapening The National Hero, it raised his value even further.

The following year his manager demanded a seven figure appearance fee and he got it.

The National Hero pulled out of that race after 12km. Far enough to fulfill his contractual obligation, but not too far to interfere with his training.

The reigning champion, by contrast, did not receive an invite to defend his title. In fact, he hadn’t been invited to any races since the upset.

No safety net

Salaries haven't gone up in years. Inflation is a concept we have forgotten. Growth, as it existed for generations is over.

There's a lot of talk at the moment about why businesses are unable to see out the Corona crisis. To me it's obvious: in a zero growth economy, the only way to grow your business and your slice of the pie is to take market share from others. Given that consumers don't have any more to spend, the most likely way to grab their attention is to promise the same quality as the competition at lower prices. How do you do that? You live frugally, you cut costs, slash benefits for employees and contracted workers and you hope that when the market eventually turns, you'll have a market with money to spend. In the meantime you make the barest minimum of profit, or even accept that you'll be making a loss, all in the pursuit of market share.

From my ill-informed perspective, this is just as likely to happen in the tech world with businesses like Uber, as in the real world with clothing brands like ASOS or airlines like Virgin. Money has been so cheap for so long that having a treasure chest to delve into when times are hard, rather than putting every penny into gaining market share or inflating stock prices, has been plain stupid.

So of course businesses are failing. No one - individuals or businesses - has two pennies to rub together. Cash flow is king and with cash flow having ground to a halt, we're all fucked.

The Outgrown

Lockdown lasted so long
my children grew eleven shoe sizes
I had multiple self-inflicted haircuts
and finally went bald
My son graduated a high school
he never attended in person
My wife got a new job
and eventually retired remotely
A carriage clock delivered in the mail
Technology came and went
then came back again, rebadged
Our friends began to die
not from the illness
but natural causes

           Their funerals are yet to be arranged

Runners on the Storm: Part One

I'm really happy with this piece, exploring how runners across the world are dealing with the confinement of lockdown. If you get the chance, go and read it.

https://journal.tracksmith.com/runners-on-the-storm

Two running poems

Running poem #1
I’m so hungry I could eat a horse, I said when we
arrived home from our run. How do you stay so thin
asked Eliot. I guess it must be the cancer, I laughed.
He said, I’m so sorry, I didn’t know.
I’m only fooling with you I said.
That’s the way it always was with me and Eliot.
Always fooling with each other.
Just the other week he’d spread
a rumour round town that I was
going with one of my students
and her father came over to kill me.
The fear I felt, hiding under the sofa
  while he pounded at the door

    screaming blue murder (and worse)
      must have been enough
         to scare the cancer away.


Running poem #2
How many miles ya got, I asked Jim.
Just coming up to six he said. Six, I said. 

Jeez. I thought you’d say nine at least.
I'd left my watch at home and was regretting it.
It was one of those days where the miles tick by
in slow motion, like they've been rationed
and you'll only be allowed your fill if you earn
them the hard way, scrubbing the halls after class
or trading cigarettes for a half decent feed.
Of course, the war was over, rationing was long forgotten
and the supply of miles had returned to normal levels
I was just having a bad run and ol’ Jim was enjoying turning the screw.
It made me miss those days when you could inform
on a friend and they would disappear forever.

The Myth of Sisyphus

Whisper it, but I think I actually like this brave new world in which we live. Sure, it hasn't drastically altered my work-from-home, run-from-my-front-door way of life, but still, things feel peaceful. Neighbours are being neighbourly, people are sitting in their front yards enjoying the sunshine, there's virtually no traffic on the streets, and I can hear kids playing in gardens and birds singing in the trees. Dare I say it that this is actually idyllic?

I'm currently editing a piece for Tracksmith on the way runners around the world are coping with the crisis. It's interesting reading. The idea that some people are still training, running workouts and grinding through the uncertainty seems like a practical application of the existentialist ideas Albert Camus explores in the Myth of Sisyphus.

From the Spark Notes:

"Camus identifies three characteristics of the absurd life: revolt (we must not accept any answer or reconciliation in our struggle), freedom (we are absolutely free to think and behave as we choose), and passion (we must pursue a life of rich and diverse experiences)."

For his classifications, I think Camus would describe athletes as artists as we create our own worlds of meaning and then go about documenting them. In training for races that may never happen, we are embracing the Sisyphean ideal, finding meaning in our own self-imposed struggle.

The whole thing is clearly absurd, and yet, I find meaning in being able to run every day, and I find order in aiming for a completely arbitrary weekly mileage.

Sisyphus was condemned to spend his life repeatedly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, only to see it roll back again. The gods could think of nothing worse than such futile toil. And yet, here we are as runners, embracing the futility, and even finding meaning in it.

In this absurd situation, I think that's a good way to live.

C-30, C-60, C-19 GO!

What a time to be alive. There is no time to punctuate thoughts; information flows through without stopping to latch itself to anything resembling an opinion.

We are not good at doing nothing. It defies all expectations we have of each other and of ourselves. Late stage capitalism demands 'hustle', and the devil in our deep-seated Lutheran work ethic niggles at us until we get up and do something-anything-now! But this is a time when inaction is the only acceptable action.

Sit tight.

The news from Italy is disturbing. I listened to the Talking Politics podcast where a respected political commentator described being stopped by police for taking a stroll with her partner in the woods. She was threatened with a fine. Is there any scientific evidence that walking in the woods is a likely means of transmission? At the same time people are going to work in enclosed factories to create non-essential items. This seems upside down.

The Italian PM , Giuseppe Conte now has a 70 per cent approval rating.

Some version of a lockdown has finally arrived in the UK. We can go out to exercise once per day, non-essential shops are closed and we’re being asked to do grocery shopping as rarely as possible. We are asked to work from home if possible, and interact with no one outside of our own household.

As a runner, this is an interesting time. It’s making me realize how at odds we are with the communities we live and work within. When the authorities say ‘stay home’ they’re working on the assumption that leaving the house invariably leads to social interaction.

That’s not the way runners live their lives. We leave the house alone, begrudge stopping for anything, and limit social interaction to a curt nod, or a lifted finger as means of acknowledgment.

We have perfected the art of being alone, together.

Life under UK lockdown reflects my life pre-Corona pretty accurately. Get up, take kids to school, work from home, run solo, work from home, buy groceries, collect kids, spend the evening at home as a family. I never knew I was missing out on essential freedoms until the government told me my freedom was being sacrificed for the greater good.

The big difference is that I have the youngest with me now - the 3yr-old gets to go to pre-school as Laura is considered a key worker. He’s nearly 14 months old, not quite walking, but silly and adventurous all the same. It’s been nice to spend some time together with him, just the two of us. As a father, when your second child comes along they are naturally tied to their mother at first, so you find yourself spending more time with the eldest child. With their needs being so different, it’s not easy to break that routine, and natural division of labour becomes the norm. This disaster has given us the opportunity to bond in a way we never normally would.

I quit drinking at the end of 2019 and I’m so glad that I broke the habit in advance of a pandemic. I can imagine that if alcohol was still on my radar I would find it all too easy to justify drinking every night. If you’re interested in quitting drinking, Allen Carr’s Easy Way book helped me put it in perspective.

Speaking of alcohol, there’s a letter doing the rounds purporting to be from F Scott Fitzgerald on the outbreak of Spanish Flu. The author makes a gag that Hemingway has dismissed it as just flu. That was the giveaway for me. Having worked in a field hospital, Hemingway wouldn’t have been so flippant, surely?

Spanish Flu became known as such because Spain, which was neutral in WW1, was one of the only countries reporting properly on the pandemic - the partisan press in the UK, Germany and France was still censored under so covered up the deaths. The comparisons to Trump and his ‘Chinese virus’ are obvious, but even here in the UK, where testing is non-existent unless you end up in hospital, there’s a very real comparison. How can you know how widespread an illness is if you don’t test for it?

The sooner we have a cheap antibody test the better.

I was listening to a Radio 4 show on existentialism and cinema on Saturday night and it got me thinking about Dada, the deeply political, absurdist art movement that came about at roughly the same time as the Spanish Flu. In fact, Guillaume Apollinaire, the mentor to Andre Breton, one of the founding members of the group, died of the disease in 1918. Breton was a writer, poet and anti-fascist, and the group he was part of was staunchly anti-war, radically left wing, and anti bourgeois. What movements will this pandemic inspire? In the UK, the suffering of WW2 led directly to the Attlee government, social welfare and the NHS that we enjoy today. Will Covid-19 lead to a new era of as-yet-unimagined creativity and greater funding for socially just causes? Even from the confines of our homes, you can feel the mood changing - America is gradually beginning to demand healthcare as a human right and here in the UK, it’s beginning to be understood that you can’t pare services back to a minimum and expect them to be world leading in times of crisis.

Change is coming.

Now more than ever running is a privilege. Strava recently conducted a survey on why we run and I was asked to contribute. This current situation reminded me of one of the questions and my answer:

Sometimes running sucks – but we love it anyway. Can you tell me about a time when your relationship with running felt especially strained and how you managed to get back in the groove?

Honestly, I don't think I've ever felt like that. To me, running is a privilege. Not everyone has the capability or the time to do what I do - even if that's only a few miles at 9pm on a Saturday night when the boys have gone to bed, I can't help but feel grateful that my wife is happy to stay at home with them while I do something for me, or that I'm a middle class white man and I feel safe to go out running after dark, or that I'm nearly 40 and - touch wood - my body is still able to do this. The older I get, the more I recognise that I'm extraordinarily fortunate to be able to do this.

A month later, I feel even more fortunate.

I hope you’re able to feel so fortunate too.

Back on the blog

It's been a long time since I used a blog. I'm writing this on day 1 of the lockdown of the UK as a response to the Corona Virus and I have a lot of thoughts that I'd like to work through, and I don't think twitter is the place to do it. So, I'll be posting thoughts here sporadically, mostly for my own entertainment and sanity, but if you do end up reading them, feel free to comment.