A Colony in a Nation

by Chris Hayes

As the Department of Justice would later show, the police much abuse this statute. Ferguson cops routinely issue orders that have no legal basis and then arrest citizens who refuse those orders for “failure to comply.” It’s a neat little circular bit of authoritarian reasoning.

Smuggling in the colonies was not so different from drug dealing in economically depressed neighborhoods and regions today. During the pre-Revolutionary era, smugglers created economic activity that caused huge knock-off effects: a cascade of subsidiary industries and cash flow that kept a whole lot of people in the colonies (not to mention lots of business back in merry old England) in the money. The same goes for dealers in, say, Westside Baltimore or the South Side of Chicago or the South Bronx, or northern Maine or eastern Kentucky or South Central

In other words: Eric Garner, like John Hancock, was a merchant trafficking in black market goods.

“While there is some variance by type of crime, the best rule of thumb for comparing the magnitude of New York City’s crime decline to that of the rest of the United States is that any crime drop for the rest of the United States is doubled in New York City,” criminologist Franklin Zimring observes. “In the same spirit that media were prone to choose a city as the ‘murder capital’ of the United States when crime statistics were issued, New York City was beyond dispute the Crime Decline Capital of the United States in the 1990s.”