{"id":506,"date":"2006-06-04T23:24:38","date_gmt":"2006-06-05T03:24:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/?p=506"},"modified":"2007-01-22T20:41:23","modified_gmt":"2007-01-23T01:41:23","slug":"a-tale-of-the-city","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/?p=506","title":{"rendered":"A tale of the city, part one"},"content":{"rendered":"

Before a church meeting today, J— asked me why I hadn’t yet written about the recent gang violence in New Bedford [Link<\/a>]. I said because if I wrote right now, it would be too negative. But her question got me to thinking about violence in cities, and that got me to thinking about something that happened a couple of weeks ago. And if you bear with me, I’ll eventually get back to what’s going on in New Bedford right now.<\/p>\n

Back on May 20<\/a>, Carol and I were staying up in Cambrindge, and we walked from Porter Square to Inman Square, and then kept walking down Cambridge Street. All of a sudden, I felt funny, and I turned to Carol and said, “This neighborhood isn’t safe.” She didn’t understand why I said that, or why I felt that way — it was a beautiful sunny day, no one looked threatening, the neighborhood hadn’t really changed. And then I realized what was going on.<\/p>\n

Back in February, 1992, I got called for jury duty, and I was empanelled on a jury that was going to deliberate in a murder trial. It was actually a relief to hear the trial would probably take three weeks:– I was working for a carpenter, he had no work to speak of, I was already down to three days a week; and if I served on a jury, the state would pay me fifty bucks a day for the duration of the trial.<\/p>\n

On the first or second day of the trial, they took us all on a bus to go out and see where the murders had taken place. One of the two people murdered was Rigoberto Carrion. He was stabbed while walking through a housing project off Cambridge Street late at night, and managed to stagger out onto Cambridge St., and collapsed in the middle of the street at a set of traffic lights.<\/p>\n

I saw those traffic lights, and that’s when I started to feel funny, and that’s when I said to Carol that the neighborhood we were walking through wasn’t safe. I had seen those traffic lights for all of five minutes through a bus window at the beginning of that trial in 1992. But the memory was still clear enough fourteen years later to set my nerves on edge when I walked by….<\/p>\n

Part two of the story…<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Before a church meeting today, J— asked me why I hadn’t yet written about the recent gang violence in New Bedford [Link]. I said because if I wrote right now, it would be too negative. But her question got me to thinking about violence in cities, and that got me to thinking about something that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-506","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-boston-cambridge","category-justice-peace"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/506","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=506"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/506\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=506"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=506"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=506"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}