No Trespassing Signs: March 2014

Monday, March 31, 2014

On crazy signs

A few people around my neck of the woods have Confederate flags in their yard. Almost never will you see one displayed in a wealthy or middleclass person’s yard. Most folks who put up Confederate flags around here are clearly quite poor.

One home around here with a Confederate flag up doesn’t even look like it’s fit to house people. The driveway is muddy, there are two mangy dogs that live in the woods forever tethered to a short leash, and the house (a run-down double-wide) looks like it could fold in and crush its inhabitants any second. In the window that faces the road, they’ve tacked up a Confederate flag.

I felt bad for them. They have practically nothing. And when I first noticed the flag, I thought, Well, at least they have that.

I thought about all crazy signs: The “Armed crazy red neck lives here,” or the “Notice: If you are found here tonight, you will be found here tomorrow,” or even your basic “No Trespassing” sign. And it’s the same with all these signs: Well, at least they have that.

These people might be dirt poor and have next to nothing, but they do have the right to put up a crazy sign. One guy’s company’s CEO might be making 200 times more than he is, but hell, he can still raise a flag that’s offensive to most black people. His truck might need a new transmission, his unemployment might be running out, and he may be losing custody of his daughter, but hell, he can still put up a big, mean sign up in his yard that no one can legally take down.

The erection of a crazy sign validates a person’s existence as a free person. While that person does not have much and cannot do much, he can at least use and stretch his First Amendment rights as far as they will go. To get this sense of validation, he can’t just put up a mild “This is me using my First Amendment rights” sign; rather, he has to say something fucking crazy: he has to warn people that they’re going to get shot for placing their pinky toe on his property, or about how everyone should “Fear God,” or he might just post a giant picture of a dead fetus. To get a worthwhile sense of validation, you have to be bat shit crazy about what sort of sign you put up.

Surely there are some people who raise their Confederate flags for reasons other than a mere expression of their First Amendment rights. And surely there are people who have many good reasons for posting “No Trespassing” signs. But I think many people who post crazy signs do so out of desperation. They likely have inadequate social lives, they probably play no role whatsoever in their government, and they probably feel small, weak, and rundown. Because so many feel powerless and alienated by their government (aren’t we all to some extent?), posting a crazy sign may be some people’s only chance at participating in the marketplace of ideas. But the truth is, no one cares or reads about these signs. We either agree with it, or think, wow, that guy’s a whacko.

So the sign really isn’t doing anything to help this person participate in his society. Rather, if anything, it only reinforces his belief that he doesn't need society, broadcasting to passersby that he is a hardy individualist whose beliefs are not to be trifled with.

But individuals are not sovereign. Only citizens are. The individual rejects society, but still ends up, in large part, playing by society’s rules. The citizen, rather, has an important, albeit small, say in the making of those rules.

The cause behind the crazy signs might not just be poverty and the resulting sense of powerlessness, but the failure or corruption of the sign bearer’s local democracy. If a place doesn’t offer a sufficient forum for democratic participation (and there’s little debate about our powerlessness on the federal level), then a man must go to absurd lengths to feel validated as not just a free person, but a person--someone whose opinions matter and whose beliefs are respected. The sign is a desperate cry for democracy.

Sadly, the sign accomplishes nothing; it's a passing blip through the passenger window, as fleeting and offensive and meaningless as an Internet troll's message board comment, put there not to add to the debate, but just to be heard.

Sunday, March 30, 2014

Absolutely

Photographer: Ken Ilgunas
Location: North Carolina Piedmont

Tuesday, March 25, 2014

Trespasser shot in Albuquerque, N.M.

On March 16, a 38-year-old homeless man named James Boyd was shot and killed by Albuquerque police. The police confronted Boyd because he was illegally camped outside of the city in the Sandia foothills.

[Click here for link to video of shooting.]

Following a verbal confrontation that lasted three hours, Boyd chose to cooperate with the Albuquerque Police Department (which, since 2010, has shot thirty-six people, twenty-three of whom were killed). Boyd gathered his things and walked toward the police officers in a non-threatening manner. A police officer lobbed a flashbang and a German Shepherd attacked Boyd. Boyd pulled out two knives, and then turned his back to the officers. The officers let loose a barrage of gunfire.

Boyd was hit and immediately collapsed. Officers commanded he drop the knives, and Boyd softly called out, “Please don’t hurt me anymore. I can’t move.” The officers fired three bean bag shots into the motionless Boyd, and then unloosed the German Shephard again, which bit into Boyd's leg. Finally the officers cuffed Boyd, who was no longer showing signs of consciousness. Boyd died in the hospital the next day. Albuquerque Police Chief Gordon Eden initially justified the murder, claiming Boyd was a "direct threat" to the officers.

As critical as I am of the Albuquerque Police Department, I strongly doubt any of the officers consciously desired that Boyd be killed. Rather, I'm guessing the officers had in mind a rough but relatively harmless "takedown." Whatever their intended outcome, what's apparent to me is that the officers were not at all eager to abandon the script and deal with Boyd without a complicated military maneuver and discharge of weapons. Despite Boyd's calm gesture of surrender, the police showed no signs that they'd consider adjusting to new developments (Boyd's surrender), responding instead with a blitzkrieg of aggression: a flashbang, attack dog, and gunfire. They were going to get their military maneuver in no matter what.

While I don't pretend to be an expert on psychological dynamics of a lethal police response, a few things can be inferred if not observed:

1. The officers probably knew, by the third hour, that Boyd had assaulted an officer in the past.

2. The officers observed that Boyd was homeless, possibly suffering from mental problems, and was not a functioning, tax-paying citizen.

3. The officers had just engaged in three hours of frustrating discussion with Boyd.

4. The officers had clearly been militarized: they were outfitted with helmets, assault rifles, and flashbangs, and their maneuvers were not those of your typical county sheriff's department, but a squad of quasi-soldiers.

The officers' military training probably not only made them less capable of sensibly dealing with a possibly-insane person, but prepared them and got them excited for complex military maneuvers that they'd spent countless hours training for. Again, I don't think Boyd's death was the desired outcome; if the flashbang/attack dog maneuver had worked as planned, Boyd would have been on the ground and no live rounds would have been fired. But Boyd was killed because he deviated from the script, and because the officers' failed to recognize that a man with mental issues might not act in the way a normal person would. In sum, the cops likely knew Boyd had a violent past; they acknowledged that he was a less-than-human, police-assaulting scumbag; and when Boyd took out his knives and stood his ground, an officer recognized that this was his one chance to permissibly kill another human being, which is probably something of an initiation rite in some police departments. But this decision was made in the heat of the moment, in a split second, without the aid of deliberate thought. What may have seemed permissible in the moment, seems profoundly rash and stupid in the footage. Because of all these factors – the less-than-humanness of Boyd, the frustration, the military training, a culture that lauds assertive violence – a shot was fired and a man was unnecessarily killed.

It's hard to miss the absurdity of the situation: at least six heavily armed officers surrounded a homeless man who did little more than illegally camp on a hillside. Yet it's not the homeless man that seems terrified; it's the officers. Even after Boyd had been more or less killed and was lying on the dirt face-down, the officers are still so terrified of approaching Boyd that they proceed to shoot Boyd with beanbags and let loose the German Shepherd to savagely chomp on Boyd's right leg. Even as Boyd is being cuffed (and showing no signs of life at this point), the officers' guns are still trained on Boyd's head. It's as if the officers are worried that Boyd might spring to life at any moment and gracefully incapacitate a half-dozen men with lightning-fast martial arts. The two officers who fearfully inspect Boyd's transparent tarp (that covered little more than a rat's nest of clothing and bedding materials) do so as if they expect to be blown up any second by an artfully-placed landmine. They're acting as if they're in a movie.

Most pathetic of all is the casual use of military lingo: "negative effect," "on my right," "move it up!" It's apparent that these are not men, but little boys playing dress-up as soldiers. Any man knows that when putting on camo, a kilt, a football jersey, or any cultural symbol of "macho-ness," we tend to feel like we're a little manlier, like our muscles got a little bigger, like our dick got a little longer. And so it is with these officers in their military costumes. It wasn't just the gun that killed Boyd; it was the costume; it was the charade of a dim-witted police force play-acting as commandos; it was the desire to finally kill something so they could validate their manhoods. A local county sheriff's department would have sent a social worker, or a soft-spoken cop to deal with Boyd; not a whole platoon of police-soldiers who are eager to test out all the high-powered toys the federal government left under the police department's Christmas tree. I wouldn't have been shocked if they'd sent a helicopter to hover over the scene.

Boyd was shot not because he was a threat (how is a man holding a pair of four-inch knives twenty feet away from a whole squad of officers a threat?), but because the officers had grown up in a culture and worked in an atmosphere that fetishized weapons, assertiveness, and violence. Richard Slotkin, author of Gunfighter Nation, says in a Bill Moyers interview that, "[Americans] internalize a model of heroic behavior from the media that purvey the myths that shape your society." In other words, these officers reacted in accord with the expectations of our violent national mythology. John Wayne or Daniel Boone wouldn't dare reason with Boyd; no, that isn't how a "real man" reacts; rather, you got to stop thinking, smoke 'um out, and light 'um up.

Psychological underpinnings of the tragedy aside, what we have here is a man who's been killed for doing nothing wrong. Boyd "trespassed." He slept on the side of a hill in a public area. What might the officers' response have been in a country like Scotland or Norway, where there's nothing wrong with doing something as simple as sleeping on a hillside?

Saturday, March 22, 2014

Viny barn

Photographer: Ken Ilgunas
Location: North Carolina Piedmont

Monday, March 17, 2014

No public right of way

Photographer: Georgina Ivil
Location: Lamberhurst, Kent, England

Beware of Dog

Sign was repeatedly torn apart by wind, says photographer.

Photographer: Whitney Root
Location: West Texas.

RCYC

Photographer: Kerry Ragsdill
Location: Texas

Handcrafted No Trespassing

Photographer: Kendra Bragg
Location: Asheville, North Carolina, outside of an elementary school

Railroad Property

Photographer: Judy
Location: Pennsylvania

Saturday, March 15, 2014

To notice the unnoticeable

For months, there’s been a galvanized metal bucket sitting upside-down in my front yard. I try to keep things neat and in their place here, but I walk past the bucket nearly every day, as if it’s invisible.

And that’s because it sort of is. I don’t see the bucket. Well, maybe I see the bucket, but I don’t notice that the bucket is out of place anymore. The bucket has been there for so long it’s as if the bucket has been there forever and that it’s meant to sit a few feet from the porch steps.

Like the metal bucket, there are a lot of things that are out of place in my county. For instance, an outsider driving down our country roads might notice that many of my neighbors dump their trash into the woods next to their houses—old couches, used tires, a busted trampoline, heaps of crushed beer cans. An outsider driving past such a dump might wonder, “Why would they dump their trash there? Why don’t they clean it up? Aren’t they ashamed?” I used to think those same thoughts. But I’ve learned that my neighbors, to their credit, no longer see the trash the same way I no longer see the bucket. To them, that torn-up old couch has blended in with its surroundings—the home, the woods, the gravel road. And while these folks might once have felt shame for their carelessness, those feelings are as forgotten as the old couch. I asked my housemate the other day about one of these makeshift wood-dumps on our road, and even though he’s driven past that dump five days a week for the past five years, he didn’t know what I was talking about. Hell, I hardly notice the dump anymore, and it’s been ages since I felt the twinge of moral indignation that I felt the first time I walked past it.

My county has a ton of “No Trespassing” signs. I’d guess that two out of five properties on my road have a sign telling people to stay off their land, even though most of them have never had problems with "trespassers." And like the metal bucket and the old couch, I think most people no longer see their “No Trespassing” signs. Maybe the sign was there when they moved in. Or maybe they put it up years ago when they heard from their neighbor that someone’s been hunting on private property. And twenty years later, the sign is still up. It’s become unnoticeable.

My project to take pictures of “No Trespassing” signs in my county would strike pretty much everyone around here as strange. “No Trespassing” signs are a part of the landscape, like birdfeeders, mailboxes, and pick-up trucks. And because my neighbors can’t view things from the vantage point of an outsider, they can’t see that their homes are hideously decorated with unwelcoming warnings that, in most cases, serve no purpose whatsoever.

A “No Trespassing” sign seems like a good metaphor for all that we rarely notice but that is always within or around us: a deeply-rooted racial prejudice, the unethical treatment of the factory farm animals we eat, a bloated defense budget. The more normal the norm, the more difficult it is to notice. It seems the only antidote is to, if just for a moment, force ourselves to view the world as if for the first time, to bring all things new and old into focus, and to engage the world with a deliberate perspicacity.