Murder by Public Policy

Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago centers on the heat-related deaths of at least 700 Chicago residents during a week in July 1995 when the heat index reached 120 degrees Fahrenheit. The city’s health department, paramedic staff, and hospitals were all overwhelmed by frantic calls for assistance, many of which were answered too late to save a victim suffering from heat exhaustion or a related condition.

In his remarks at the forum, Eric Klinenberg, the book’s author, noted that both the deaths themselves and the public policy response highlighted the disturbing ramifications of the widening social and class divisions in urban America. The victims were mostly poor, elderly, and black people who lived alone, behind locked doors in blighted neighborhoods. Some were so socially isolated that no one claimed their bodies in the days after their deaths.

The city’s response, meanwhile, was belated and inefficient—partly because, according to Klinenberg, there was little public pressure to act more aggressively given the poverty and social disengagement of the victims. Despite mounting evidence of a crisis, Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley (D) did not declare an official emergency, instead choosing to challenge the city medical examiner’s interpretation of the events (including the scientific criteria used). A community-policing unit, which could have helped identify at-risk elderly people in poor neighborhoods, was not deployed early on, and health officials failed to coordinate with overly burdened hospitals in hard-hit areas.

Although the heat wave killed more people than most other natural disasters in the United States in recent years, it received little press around the country and was “forgotten soon after it was over,” Klinenberg said. The deaths were ultimately “invisible,” he added, because the victims were so thoroughly marginalized and out of the mainstream of public consciousness. He argued that this response is indicative of a contemporary waning of civic responsibility and that people now often fail to recognize “disaster in slow motion of everyday life.”

According to Klinenberg, Mayor Daley and other city officials denied responsibility instead of acknowledging at least a semblance of public policy failure and candidly outlining policy changes to ensure that such an event never happens again. Klinenberg said that one of the lasting images for him was when Daley released a report on the tragedy with the euphemistic title of “Mayor’s Commission on Extreme Weather.” On the cover of the report—which was about a deadly heat wave—was a snowflake.

In her talk, Samantha Power (author of A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide) also focused on the concept of denial when discussing the action of the U.S. foreign policy establishment during and after the mass genocide of Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994. The killings were largely orchestrated by Hutu leaders who in April of that year began exhorting their followers to kill as many Tutsis as possible. The bloodbath did not end until more than three months later when a Tutsi militia drove the Hutu leadership out of the country and reasserted control. At no time during the genocide did any powerful outside force, such as the United States or the United Nations, seriously consider intervening to stop the slaughter.

For the most part, Power asserted, U.S. government officials and the American media failed to treat the crisis responsibly or humanely from the very beginning. Their behavior was a textbook example of the power of denial, she said, which can be seen at four different levels (and, she added, was evident in the way officials dealt with the Chicago heat wave crisis).

First, there was the denial of fact: It can’t be possible that such widespread and calculated genocide is occurring or has occurred. Second, there was the denial of interpretation: Who started the killings—and do they really represent genocide? Third, there was the denial of implication: So what if there was a genocide; it doesn’t affect us. And, most importantly, there was the “denial of denial” in which the forces that prompt the denial prevent policymakers and others from analyzing the catastrophe, acknowledging their lack of involvement, and trying to determine how to prevent such events in the future.

Power also touched on three other concepts that she said were important to understand in terms of why the United States and the world refused to intervene during the Rwandan genocide:

1) Leadership. Genocide must be made a priority among leaders in a top-down manner, Power contended. If recognition of and prioritizing genocide and other major crises are initiated from the bottom-up, the message is diluted and remote by the time it percolates up to those who can directly order major change. In Chicago, for instance, aggressive action was finally taken to help those in need only after Mayor Daley cut through the bureaucracy and ordered his subordinates to respond.

2) Framing the Situation. In Rwanda, U.S. government officials often made statements (and acted as though they believed them) indicating that there was really nothing that could be done about the situation—as though the Rwandans were genetically hardwired to kill each other. According to Power, the government currently remains the major source of information and the moral arbiter for most citizens and can thus exploit officials’ statements to the detriment of the truth. (Power said that the news media no longer have the capacity to frame the situation because news outlets have become “so derivative.”)

3) Imagination. Few Americans knew a Rwandan at the time—or had much conception of Africa—thus making it difficult for them to wrap their minds around the ongoing death and demand action to stop it. Power noted that when people cannot put themselves in another’s place, they are less inclined to empathize. The “otherness” of Rwandans prevented the triggering of extensive “moral imagination” in the United States.

Since there was no voting bloc demanding action, Power argued, there was no compelling political reason for government officials to intervene meaningfully in Rwanda. As in Chicago, where the heat wave victims were poor and powerless, the Rwandan victims lacked a constituency to advocate on their behalf. The level of moral and social indignation therefore never reached the point at which change would be demanded and accepted as necessary.

Klinenberg agreed with Power, adding, “My genocide is urban poverty.” He said that most Americans (including the contemporary media) have a “collective urge” to not know anything about—or discuss—the reality of poverty in the country. As a result, disasters such as the heat wave deaths are likely to continue to occur, representing a “return of the oppressed.” But unless policy makers have learned from the mistakes made in Chicago in 1995 and regarding Rwanda in 1994, it is as if such deaths had made absolutely no impression on our moral psyche at all—a truly worrisome development.