'Cop cities' are on the rise. Catholics should be concerned. [View all]

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https://www.ncronline.org/opinion/guest-voices/cop-cities-are-rise-catholics-should-be-concerned?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR0NdK8zlLBw2h_jSW6WTTbeLBhIlfkFT7KiQ__K_ZqfYPQRseYnti_M1UE_aem_ASsGpPgHZH9sJr5CdttN0MWbkQvtvdDWNC6PywszIV_bYOuA9xGYYVoFakHThXF8xxTNtwzouyKmi10vrspYXU4R

In the decades after the Civil War, one of the most popular American boogeymen was the so-called "tramp" or "hobo." From about 1870 to 1910, newspapers were littered with pieces fear-mongering the collapse of society they'd usher in, or cheering police and mob violence against them.

A 1875 New York Times blurb, "How to Treat Tramps," for instance, gleefully recounts how cops threatened two young men with the horrors of a prison labor camp they could be sent to as part of this invading hoard until "their ready tears plow[ed] little furrows down their dirty visages."

In truth, the subjects of the "tramp panic" were working-class men who had been transformed from artisans and small farmers into social problems by the depression of the 1870s and the Industrial Revolution. These itinerant workers were usually without wives and land — things requiring a stability that neither the times nor public policy provided. The problems created by this tumult were "solved" instead by police and incarceration.

With the rise of so-called "cop cities" today, I fear we are at the start of another chapter of the mass criminalization of human need.