North Richmond: A Dangerous Magonia

When I ride my bicycle to work in the morning, it’s dark. The last leg of the journey is along Wildcat Creek, on a path that has intermittent overhead lighting. I depend on the fact that I know where I’m going and even enjoy passing underneath branches that occasionally blot out the light and leave things in mystery. It may be a paved public trail just a few yards away from the road, but it makes me feel as if it may lead to Magonia.

I had an extra-long lunch break and thought I'd use it to take a bike ride around the neighborhood where I work in North Richmond. There's creeks and trails and stuff like that. I like creeks and trails. The air was thick with smoke from the wildfires. The roadsides were lined with scattered garbage. Every so often there was a mound of garbage 10 or 15 feet high. Most of the trails turned out to exist only on Google Maps: they were County-owned land, but fenced off - at least to people who pay attention to fences.

Where a trail did run along a creek, it was obvious the creek beds were routinely used to dispose of more garbage. Wildcat Creek near Verde Elementary School is apparently the go-to place for illegally dumping tires (outside of West Oakland, that is). Three or four massive piles of tires stood along the public creekside trail, in plain sight of the school playground.

I suddenly realized I had grown up in paradise. I had a creek and an elementary school, but those were different.

Still in explorer mode, I looked for a way to get down to Wildcat Creek itself. Then I noticed a guy walking along the trees lining the creek. He was definitely not a birder. He wasn’t obviously homeless, but what the hell was he doing? Another guy emerged from the trees and started following him at a distance. I rode by on the path above the floodplain, clearly visible. They both disappeared back into the trees. I thought, "This is a dangerous place. I need to start thinking about bike safety in a whole new way" and didn't try to find the creek bed.

Thinking back on it, could it have been a couple of gay guys hooking up? Both of them definitely looked much better than your average guy who suddenly appears out of nowhere in North Richmond. I want to think they were gay and enjoyed a steamy, satisfying sexual encounter along the barely flowing creek as flycatchers flitted overhead snatching bugs out of the air.

I want to think that, because I’ve never NOT enjoyed riding my bike in my life until I spent half an hour riding around North Richmond. All I could see there was garbage, environmental degradation and suffering. I should never have started to read “To Place Our Deeds,” about the history of the African American community in Richmond, and then gone for a ride around North Richmond. I should never have started to learn about North Richmond and its history at all. I should never had cared. It’s tears all around.

Riding home, I passed the park along San Pablo Creek where people who use drugs like to hang out and socialize. They were whooping it up, and then I realized I couldn't actually tell if they were having a good time, were fighting with each other, or just didn’t know the difference.

The Oz Factor and the Freeze Response

 There are certain tropes that come up again and again in personal accounts of paranormal and/or alien encounters. A major one is that the person having the encounter has been rendered docile and/or mysteriously numbed, presumably by some advanced technology or extraordinary power wielded by the Other they are encountering.

You can find examples of this by listening to almost any Art Bell show that focuses on UFO encounters, but it was British ufologist Jenny Randles who noticed and coined a term for it: the Oz factor. Randles carries some weight as a writer and thinker on anomalous topics, so if she says she perceived a pattern in accounts of experiences, I’ll take her word for it. Although, not actually having any of her own books at hand, I’ll quote Lewis (2017) quoting Randles’ explanation of the Oz Factor: “a sort of inner tuning, as the percipient’s mind blocks out attention to all external sounds in order to note the message that is about to bombard his or her consciousness.”

Lewis goes on to say that in other writings Randles extends this into putting “forth this idea of Synchronistic Reality Mode and the ability for the human mind to take in this anomalous information in a parapsychological way and create a virtual reality telepresence experience.” I don’t really understand what that means and I don’t know if it’s a fair reflection of Randles’ own thought, but I do want to point out this: the Oz factor seems to involve a special mental mode which allows communication and contact with undefined, anomalistic Others.

People have bizarre, traumatic encounters they can’t understand and struggle to explain to others. But people also have completely mundane traumatic encounters they can’t understand and struggle to explain to others. A lot of peoples’ stories about UFOs focus on how they can’t get any one to believe in what happened or take them seriously. The same is true, though, about a lot of people’s stories about experiencing sexual assault or domestic violence. I’ve always wondered how ‘special’ the experiences of UFO experiencers are compared to normal human reactions in other extremely taxing, liminal or transgressive situations.

At this point I’d like to introduce Rory Miller, a veteran corrections officer and martial arts teacher who has written several books about the sociology and psychology of real-time violent encounters. In Facing Violence: Preparing for the Unexpected, Miller describes something close to the Oz Factor as one of several types of freeze responses a person may experience when faced with a sudden threat. Miller calls it the hard-wired freeze response and writes, “Know that the hard-wired freeze response is triggered by fear, but it usually doesn’t feel that unpleasant, kind of warm and floaty with a sound in your ears like the ocean. People who have been so terrified they couldn’t move have described this state and decided that they weren’t really afraid so they weren’t really frozen. It just seemed like a good idea at the time not to move.” Which is pretty much exactly how the Oz Factor is described on all those Art Bell programs.

I found Miller’s books after I experienced threat-induced altered sensory functioning during a community “Force Options” training held by my local police department. After classroom time studying use of force policies, hearing real-life stories from officers and discussing events unfolding nationwide, community members had to go alone into a staged scenario with a fake weapons belt and decide how to respond to a call. For real officers in Richmond, if they fail their scenario test, they lose their job.

Before I entered the scenario, a detective prepped me by telling me exactly what would happen and what I should do. “Distance is time. Remember that! You will get tunnel vision and not be able to see. You will stop hearing anything. To break out of that, move your eyes right and left. Then you will be able to hear.” I thought to myself, “That’s bullshit. I know how my mind works under stress. I’ve never lost hearing before.”

The detective pushed the door open and I went into the scenario. All I saw were two guys fighting. I told them to stop and advanced on them. One charged me. I fumbled over the weapons on my belt – OC spray, Taser, gun, baton. By then the guy attacking had come in too close for anything other than baton which, as a student of Filipino martial arts, made me very happy. I was now in my comfort zone - except for someone kept tapping me on my shoulder and another guy was in my face repeating, “It’s over. The scenario is over!” The guy yelling in my face was my role-playing attacker, and the guy tapping on my shoulder was the detective. He had walked beside me and I hadn’t even seen him.

Afterwards, the detective debriefed me. He told me what I had failed to hear. One guy was attacking the other, yelling his intention to kill him. The guy being attacked was yelling for help. I hadn’t heard any of it, although I had heard yelling. My hearing and vision had been restricted and I would have been completely unaware of what I was missing without the post-scenario feedback I got. It was a fascinating and sobering experience.

Is the Oz Factor the same as the what Miller calls the hard-wired freeze response? Possibly. Miller is not the first to write about the psychological and physiological effects of confronting violence and dealing with the Survival Stress Response. USAF Col. John Boyd, by observing thinking and response to combat conditions, pioneered the OODA loop model, showing how physiological response happens and where thinking can get hung up. UFO writers tend to think in silos where the experiences they report on are so special that there can only be one explanation. I submit to your consideration that the Oz Factor is in fact the Freeze Factor and that traumatic encounters with the paranormal work by the same rules as do life-threatening encounters with the normal.

Which brings me to a point made by Jack Brewer in his chapter of the book Robbie Graham edited. Reframing the discourse around UFOs to make it of greater general relevance would require addressing and taking seriously the trauma that experiencers undergo. “Demonstrating a willingness to acknowledge the relevance of trauma shows commitment to accuracy, concern for witnesses, and helps create an atmosphere more conducive to authenticity and good quality of discussion.” (p. 45)

UFOs: Reframing the Debate (2017) Robbie Graham, ed.

Facing Violence: Preparing for the unexpected (2011) Rory Miller

Crimes & Dog Whistles

Like so many others, I've been swept up in the true crime craze and immersed myself in books, podcasts and documentaries. Along with doing martial arts and the sheer fact of having survived until now, that's one of things that have made me reflect back on what I learned about crime and deviance in grad school.

My thinking has changed in significant ways since then. For instance, I'm reading Samenow's "Inside the Criminal Mind". He's a psychologist who works directly with offenders and describes their world view. At one time I would have felt his approach too essentialist, whereas now I find his observation-based conclusions valuable. (He also explicitly warns readers against putting an essentialist interpretation on his work.)

So the other day when a headline about "what criminologists get wrong and why" or somesuch popped up in my news feed, I read the article. Hoping for, I don't know, a thoughtful reappraisal of the field, some lessons learned, and possibilities for the future? I know, I know! That's not the stuff news feeds are made of.

The article started off reasonably enough and had me nodding my head at first. There was a misfire of logic here and a bit of a sweeping generalization there, but it cited academic literature, which is always good for seeming legit. It's true there's bias, fashion and fad in academia; social factors shape what counts as knowledge, which is something I've always found fascinating.

About half way through the article, though, it became clear that the author's analysis was very simple. Liberal research was biased and therefore wrong; it had largely silenced conservative research - which is unbiased and therefore right - for political reasons. So much for nuanced, thoughtful, or for that matter even informed reappraisal!

But there was more. Now that conservative voices were coming to the fore once more (Hi there, alt right!), there was hope for returning criminology to where it should have been all along in terms of theory and research. For instance, looking at factors like intelligence –

I'm going to stop right there. The mention of intelligence is classic racist dog whistle dressed up in cap and gown. A very old and tattered cap and gown in this case, because the scientific battle whether intelligence can be linked to race was settled a long time ago, and actual science has long since moved on (spoiler: race is a social construct). To mention intelligence as an important variable in studying crime is not just to highlight the fact that you're probably not conversant with the contemporary academic scene; it is to specifically reference a period in history when race, intelligence and criminality were all linked together by eugenic "science." Hence: dog whistle.

I finished the article, but came away with a distinct sense of having contracted a case of morgellons by reading it. The sad thing is that anyone who didn’t have my knowledge of that particular field might be taken in by the use of citations, miss the dog whistle and take the article as legit - while those who hear the dog whistle will see all those cool citations and think their opinions are now based in science.

There is still a valid question to explore in how the assumptions and biases of academe have shaped the field of criminology. (What I find most thought-provoking in this regard is what I see as the emerging field of the sociology of violence – which covers everything from the true crime craze to stuff like Rory Miller’s books to the course on Understanding Terrorism running on Coursera right now.) In the meantime, I like to think that persuasive arguments based on

~ Rejection of science
~ Disavowal of history of scientific discoveries up until now
~ Obvious promotion of a political agenda
~ Hope that no one will notice any of the above/counting on stupidity

are ultimately doomed to fail, and hopefully doomed to fail before they destroy the United States.

Former EPA head Christie Whitman in the NYT:

"The red team begins with his politically preferred conclusion that climate change isn’t a problem, and it will seek evidence to justify that position. That’s the opposite of how science works. True science follows the evidence. The critical tests of peer review and replication ensure that the consensus is sound. Government bases policy on those results. This applies to liberals and conservatives alike."

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/08/opinion/how-not-to-run-the-epa.html?mcubz=0