"The Marginalized Should Just Be Allowed to Break the Rules" is Bigoted and Unworkable

yes I’m joking, kindof

Here’s a piece from New York’s Curbed vertical about the efforts of the Eric Adams administration to address ongoing community safety concerns about various types of motorized, two-wheeled vehicles. Favored by delivery drivers and related workers, these electric bikes, mopeds, scooters, and similar are very often driven in ways that are dangerous and, usually, illegal. The piece, by Mark Healy, is reported out and doesn’t arrive at an explicit thesis; it also directly reflects on why such a crackdown has come to pass - because these vehicles operate in a totally lawless fashion and make the city more dangerous and unpleasant. Still, the essay is identifiably a part of a very active genre in media these days, a genre in which liberals fret vaguely about issues of disproportionate enforcement in policing and impact on marginalized groups etc etc. It’s the kind of thing that urban left-of-center media thrives on.

Healy opens with an anecdote about a sympathetic delivery driver whose bike has been impounded because he was unlicensed, and such stories power the piece. Throughout, there’s swipes taken at the Eric Adams mayoral administration, which has earned a lot of legitimate criticism; it’s also the case that complaining about Adams has become a station of the cross for a certain kind of bourgie New Yorker. (It’s hard to believe that he won the election, until you remember a few things, and then it isn’t.) It’s an interesting piece and I appreciate the perspective. It’s also all very much a particular kind of 2020s New York thing, one that I find reliably unhelpful.

Healy writes,

On the day I visited, nearly everyone waiting outside the lot, hoping to be reunited with their two-wheeled inmate, was an immigrant — from Ecuador, Turkey, Colombia, Equatorial Guinea, Barbados, and Sierra Leone — who has come to rely on the motorized bikes to make a living in a class-divided city that is increasingly composed of people who make deliveries and people who have things delivered to them…. Naturally, [the impound system] effects are visited disproportionately on those like Rodriguez who have few other options.

I don’t want to minimize those challenges or their disproportionate nature. I do want to point out that this kind of implicit critique of policing does not imply what many people think it implies. (Typically, the logic is “the law is disproportionately enforced, so let’s just not enforce it at all.”) So here’s a list, from me, to point out a few things.

• Of course the lives of delivery drivers in New York City are hard

• Of course the guys who do that job are often suffering under various forms of identity-based oppression, related to race and poverty and language barriers and citizenship status

• Of course they’re exploited, by the delivery app companies and the restaurants and their customers

• Of course there’s this whole world of an urban underclass that labors hard for low wages and makes 21st-century comforts possible for the upper classes

• Of course we need fast, reliable, and cheap public transit options

• Of course we need a more equitable and just society in general

• Of course there are reasonable and unreasonable approaches to traffic enforcement, and often times the cops/prosecutors/city officials will default to approaches that are too heavy-handed or punitive or bureaucratic

• Of course we should look for policy solutions that pursue public safety while also not unduly burdening low-wage workers

• We still have to make and enforce laws regulating the conduct of people riding these vehicles because they’re crazy fucking dangerous and they drive everybody in the city insane!

For those who are unaware of what it’s like to live in the city these days, it’s difficult to overstate just how much these ebikes, mopeds, scooters, ATVs, and assorted motorized vehicles rule the streets in some neighborhoods. If you’ve spent any significant time in midtown Manhattan at all, you’ve come very close to meeting your maker at the hands of someone riding an ebike with their eyes glued firmly to their smartphone. But you don’t have to be right in the middle of the action to feel their effects; I lived a couple blocks away from Crown Heights for years and learned to keep my head on a swivel when I was on or near Nostrand Avenue. The bike lanes are choked with them, and they treat one-way streets, streetlights, stop signs, and essentially every rule of the road with a kind of joyful indifference. I’m someone who was going to NYC my whole life before living there for seven and a half years, and it’s genuinely incredible how much more pleasant and safe the city is now than it was in the 1980s and 90s. There’s plenty to reminisce about, from that era, but if you think it was overall better, you’re deluding yourself with nostalgia. (There was dogshit everywhere.) But besides how insanely expensive the city has become, in just about every way, I would nominate these fucking ebikes and scooters as potentially the worst change in my lifetime. They do whatever they want, whenever and wherever they want. And you’re not supposed to complain, again if you’re a certain type of person.

This is exactly the kind of thing that sophisticated liberal urbanite culture is deeply antithetical to, admitting that there’s something about city life that’s scary or unpleasant. But I’m not at all afraid to say that I found that these vehicles made navigating the city often unpleasant and frequently scary. These bikes swerve onto the sidewalks whenever they’d like, without warning. On several occasions I had a moment of absolute terror because it looked like they were going to hit my dog. (And if they had I would have gone to jail.) Plenty of times I came face to face with one barreling down at me on the sidewalk and only avoided them by inches. Crashes are common. A teenager was just killed after the scooter she was riding on got into a crash with an SUV; last year a 6-year-old was struck by a scooter driving illegally in Harlem, causing near-fatal injuries including multiple skull fractures. But NYC transplant culture dictates brushing off each and every threat to basic order as a tedious concern of the squares, inspiring the “lol crime” school of politics that such people endorse when on their web browsers. (I’m willing to guess that they embody a different philosophy when waiting at a low-traffic subway station late at night.)

During the 2020 moment, American left-of-center opinion briefly coalesced around defunding the police as an ideal for criminal justice politics. As I said then, and will say again, there are well-articulated and effectively-defended versions of police and prison abolitionism. I didn’t and don’t find them remotely convincing, as a matter of real-world policy, and I think defund becaming the most prominently-endorsed policy response to George Floyd’s murder was a profound strategic mistake. (Read all about it here! Makes a great gift!) But it was an idea. A specific and material idea, albeit a bad one. But over time, the difficulty inherent to actually dismantling the criminal justice system meant that there was nowhere, really, for the movement to go. Most of the people who had recently advocated for defunding the police stopped doing so. But antipathy towards the police remained and powered many lefty debates, understandably given how much there is to criticize in American policing. No particular vision of responsible and achievable criminal justice reform coalesced, though, because that’s hard and everybody mostly wanted to move on. (As I said recently, in an incredibly short time frame most people in media went from cosplaying as Black Panthers on Twitter to a stance of “look this is all very embarrassing, I’m tired, can we not talk about this?”) So we’re left in this space where there’s a reflexive anti-authority instinct, endless amounts of lol crime lol lol lol, and no actual, tangible, adult position on how to deal with law and order issues in a free society, all coming from people who self-identify as left-of-center, which means they should be inherently aligned with the concept of good government.

While I understand that this is all small potatoes in that context, it’s worth saying that it’s entirely unclear what Healy actually wants to do here. Like a lot of tongue-clucking liberals, he’s sure that what the authorities are doing is bad, but seems unclear on what an alternative approach might look like. Don’t destroy impounded vehicles that are seized thanks to illegal activity? I mean, sure. But since the explicit frame used here is to remind us of the social and economic challenges of the drivers, I feel compelled to ask how administrivial changes can do anything to address those core underlying structural issues. (This was, indeed, also an important criticism of defunding the police - whatever it might have done, defunding the police would not have changed the underlying distribution of money and power.) Many people I know, I’m sure, would simply say that the cops shouldn’t “hassle” delivery drivers at all, just look the other way, please. But a) the status quo is genuinely dangerous and unpleasant, b) it’s dangerous for the delivery drivers more than for anyone else, c) left-leaning people have a profound interest in creating a society that feels safe, well-run, and equitable, and d) ignoring the problem only ensures more backlash in the future. Sooner or later a sufficiently photogenic kid with sufficiently connected parents is going to be killed by one of these things, and then the cops are going to get really rough.

The question of ebike and scooter anarchy, and the type of low-information affluent liberal who enables it, is of a piece with so much else in contemporary liberal attitudes towards issues of basic public order. I’ve been fighting about the severely mentally ill and the need for involuntary treatment for a long time, and it’s the same exact thing - people are certain that they’re opposed to the “criminalization” of the mentally ill, they won’t countenance involuntary commitment, but they have no sense of what they want to do instead. Typically they refer to vague “programs,” presumptively voluntary, which in effect amounts to an endorsement of the status quo, which in turn amounts to severely sick people rotting under bridges and in parks and on subway trains. But, nope, we can’t force anyone to do anything, whether that’s to not smoke weed on a crowded subway platform or to use earbuds instead of blaring a loud Bluetooth speaker in a public space or to get medication and therapy when severely psychotic or to not act with total disregard for all rules when riding a scooter that’s capable of killing someone. Trying to enforce any rules, about anything, is “carceral,” or something. That libertarianism and liberalism/progressivism/socialism are entirely different ideologies has become an inconvenient truth and thus an ignored one.

Ultimately, there’s an implicit assumption that underlies widespread liberal assumptions that poor brown people shouldn’t be held to standards like “have a license for the vehicle you drive” or “don’t drive your ebike at 30 MPH down a crowded sidewalk” or “keep your eyes on your immediate surroundings and not on your phone.” That assumption is that those poor brown people are incapable of better behavior. And it is, of course, both racist and classist. Yet the current liberal addiction to vague permissiveness amounts to this exact belief, that asking the marginalized to conform to basic rules of social conduct is to ask them too much. We have a responsibility to understand the vast number of ways in which rules are unjustly developed and unequally applied, and we need to confront these various inequities in a way that makes the world more equal and more just. But we can’t achieve justice and equality by deciding to just stop enforcing rules, especially because (as with the delivery drivers) very often the people who suffer the most from lax enforcement of laws are the most marginalized themselves - ask a generation of young Black men who will never become what they might have been because they were murdered in Chicago, in the shadow of the neglect of a society that has stopped expecting better for them.

This is not a question of radicalism vs reformism; the Bolsheviks did not defund the police. It’s a question of whether short-term anarchism can somehow lead to long-term justice. I am profoundly, profoundly skeptical. Nor are the optics great here, guys. Are you telling me that a poor brown immigrant from Ecuador might find the bureaucratic lift of getting a driver’s license too difficult a bar to clear, and you want to reform the process? Great. Are you telling me that a poor brown immigrant from Ecuador can’t be expected to meet the standard of not driving their scooter at top speed the wrong way down a one-way street that’s thick with pedestrians? I’m sorry, but I don’t see any non-racist way to believe that.

Yes, it’s true: there’s a long history of respectability politics and petty authoritarianism that are fundamentally conservative. There’s a line of “pull up your pants” approaches to racial politics that rely on victim blaming. There’s social rules and laws that amount to a system of illegitimate surveillance and control over the lower economic classes. Bill Cosby, who identified the undeniably real phenomenon of the soft bigotry of low expectations, is indeed predatory and wrongheaded. But none of that means that, to be a progressive, you must be reflexively and thoughtlessly dismissive of low-level crimes and rejections of basic social rules. Indeed, if you care about those on the bottom of society’s totem pole, you should be concerned with minor crimes and social discord, as its the poorest and least-powerful who suffer the most from such things. Most people care a lot about crime. That’s just true. If you want to reform systems like New York City’s scooter impounding rules, great. You have to have a specific plan. You have to know what you want to decriminalize or loosen, what punishments you want to soften or do away with altogether. And you have to know what you actually think should be illegal. This isn’t Libertopia. Go live with the seasteaders and Alex Jones if you want total personal freedom.

The lefty Bill deBlasio administration wanted to solve the ebike and scooter problem. But there was big-time pushback from deBlasio’s own coalition, and nothing of substance got done. Now a “law & order” mayor is in office, and because nothing got done before, the issue was just sitting there waiting for him. So now we’re getting the more authoritarian version of a crackdown instead of a potentially more enlightened version. Tale as old as time.