Tomgram: Judith Coburn, On the Mean Streets of America | TomDispatch

Judith Coburn, On the Mean Streets of America

Step aside, Sam Spade.  Move over, Philip Marlowe.  You want noir?  Skip the famed private eye novels and films of the 1930s and 1940s and turn to our present American world and to neighborhoods where the postman doesn’t ring even once, but the police are ready to shootmore than once, often on the slightest excuse.  It’s a world that TomDispatch regular Judith Coburn, whom I’ve known since the Vietnam era when she was a war correspondent, enters regularly. It’s her job. It may not be Afghanistan or Iraq, but in its own way, it’s close enough.

Think of Coburn as today’s Sam Spade and let her take you deep into an American world in which justice couldn’t be blinder. Tom

America’s Criminal Injustice System 
The Annals of a Private Eye 
By Judith Coburn

Once upon a time, I was a journalist, covering war in Indochina, Central America, and the Middle East. I made it my job to write about the victims of war, the "civilian casualties." To me, they were hardly "collateral damage," that bloodless term the military persuaded journalists to adopt. To me, they were the center of war. Now, I work at home and I’m a private eye -- or P.I. to you.  I work mostly on homicide cases for defense lawyers on the mean streets of Oakland, California, one of America's murder capitals.

Some days, Oakland feels like Saigon, Tegucigalpa, or Gaza. There's the deception of daily life and the silent routine of dread punctured by out-of-the blue mayhem. Oakland's poor neighborhoods are a war zone whose violence can even explode onto streets made rich overnight by the tech boom. Any quiet day, you can drive down San Pablo Avenue past St. Columba Catholic Church, where a thicket of white crosses, one for every Oaklander killed by gun violence, year by year, fills its front yard.

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