rooster

the most generous statement i’m going to make about “rooster: what a homeless man taught a cop”, an unsurprisingly terrible book by local police hero nate schwiethale, is that for all its faults, it’s still the story of a man who believes in his work and the power of that work to change his world. i think that’s true, and i think that’s also a lie: schwiethale, or ‘officer nate’ as most people in busytown call him, knows too much to plausibly believe his own words. he’s seen it all on the hard streets of wichita, fiftieth largest city in the u.s., and while he’s come around to some more civilized ways of being, at his core he’s a cop and that’s about it.

this is an incredibly disheartening and pessimistic book, contrary to what its eventual boosters will claim (councilmember maggie ballard gushed over it at the end of a recent meeting, claiming it made her cry, presumably in the good way). throughout, schwiethale searches for the truth at the core of the so-called homelessness problem, but it’s an unserious quest–or, the search for truth is simply reduced to a narrative device, a container to hold the story of officer nate schwiethale, innovator. what results is a further entrenching of the trope of the horde of the individuated homeless person, a plague of singular mental health problems with no apparent systemic cause.

the book tells the story of both the creation of wichita’s homeless outreach team (h.o.t. cops lol) and the creation of officer nate schwiethale. a childhood friend, mack, opens the book with a flowery recollection of his rock bottom as an unhoused alcoholic, waking up in an abandoned train in the middle of the country. mack’s experience as an unhoused person has given him a few revelations, and these will loosely inform schwiethale’s later proclamations about homelessness. as mack notes

The homeless life entails three
categories: Those who choose to be homeless, those who lost control of their lives and became homeless, and those who were forced into homelessness. Homelessness does not always dictate one’s attitude; it is two-part. As with anything, there are assets and liabilities.

within these three categories, the homeless person can also hide their unhoused-ness:

The paradox of the homeless man is that he does not always look homeless. Many of those that I knew in the community had the appearance of the bourgeois. Some shaved every morning. Most I knew brushed their teeth. A good number washed their clothes weekly and some even did calisthenics an hour a day, with the bodies to prove it.

undergirding these assessments (which swchiethale shares) is a cynical authoritarianism: you either want to be homeless, or you are out of control or enslaved in some manner. this is authoritarian precisely because it refuses and obscures the role of systemic authority in the creation of housing insecurity. these are three categories of individuals, not communities. the paradox of the homeless man is that he is himself a blanket category and an unreplicable singularity. mack again: ‘but the one thing every homeless person has in common is that they all have demons hindering them from becoming what god has called them to be.‘

i should say that i’m referencing the ebook version, and there are some weird line breaks or slight typos throughout that i’m sure are artifacts of the ebook-process (i don’t know how that works. i probably don’t care.) the transition between mack ‘s introduction and schwiethale’s first chapter is one of those places i hope is easier to discern in the physical copy than it is in the ebook. however, there are plenty of strange stylistic choices, as well as just poor writing, that impact the readability of the narrative. one strange stylistic choice is what can only be an intentional refusal to ever name a chief of police. plenty of officers and even deputy chiefs appear named in the book, but the (or several) chief of police is always “the chief”, or even more bizarrely “the former chief” when it seems that schwiethale is intending to speak about a chief who is no longer chief today, but was chief at the time of the event he’s relaying. he is extremely inconsistent in this style choice.

time and geography shift and destabilize the narrative in funny ways that expose how little effort went into writing, editing and publishing this book. 9/11 appears with all the specificity of a wikipedia article, while when speaking of his father’s funeral, the best schwiethale can come up with is “i watched them put my dad in the ground near an old cemetery by wichita state university.” (emphasis mine) mack claims he woke up in an abandoned caboose, the picture in the book is of a freight car. oh well.

the wealth of celebrity quotes that lead off each chapter is similarly unmoored: trisha yearwood, heraclitus, albert einstein, “unknown,” abraham lincoln, tim tebow, picasso (not given his full name in the text for some reason), malcolm x (!). there’s something slightly endearing going on here: we’re meant to see a breadth of knowledge, a wide range of influential people mingling with each other in the service of schweithale’s story, but it’s all the stupidest, most vapid quotes. they mean nothing, they disappear from memory before the sound of the last word fades from our ears. and of course, as in the whitewashing that martin luther king, jr. endures every year, so are these artists and radicals pressed into service upholding the blue line.

it’s easy to bully this book, and it deserves every ounce of it for the inattentive writing alone (try to parse the insane reunion timeline between schweithale and childhood friend mack, to name the strangest example of unforced gobbledygook). but below the tepid, greasy surface of the book’s narrative, the same logic of puritan accountability, relationships as transactions, and punitive and carceral regimes of justice prop up the progressive revelations that schwiethale hopes will distinguish him from his colleagues.

the central claim of this book is two-fold: first, that there is a homelessness problem, and second, that it can appropriately be addressed by police. the first issue is completely ambient and assumed. during training, schwiethale notices that “the one topic we never touched on was homelessness and how to deal with the problem from a police standpoint” (my emphasis). homelessness is an issue of concern for many municipalities, but the point here is that for police, every problem is first of all a police problem, nevermind that perhaps the issue of whether or not people have a house might not be best mediated by police with zero knowledge about housing or economics.

the central claim of this article you’re reading is one-fold: homelessness is an issue of property relations, which, when arranged as they currently are, can and do produce myriad social and individual effects on people experiencing homelessness, and the communities in which homelessness is occurring. as such, the “cure” for homelessness is first an acknowledgement of the material relations that create it, and second a systemic program to alleviate the consequences of imbalanced property relations: public housing, as a prominent and successful example.

police are particularly incapable of taking this approach for many reasons, most of which riff off of some version of “they tend to make everything worse for everyone.” cops and cop-boot lovers will bristle at this assertion, but even officer schwiethale would agree: describing standard procedure during his days as a downtown beat cop, he relates what it means to “feed the fish”:

What he meant was if you write a street person a ticket, they probably can’t afford it and won’t pay it, then in a month or so it will turn into a warrant. When you see the unlucky soul again, you smile ear to ear and make your arrest. He claimed that his formula was how you reeled in lots of tickets and arrests. Feeding the fish. I wanted to be a good cop, so this is exactly what I did.

working it out in his head, schwiethale understands intuitively that his quotas wouldn’t come from “lawyers and bankers and politicians,” but he’d need to farm “the drifers, the vagrants, the gypsies, the wanderers, my bread and butter.” he uses this terrible practice as a springboard for his vision of reforming the way police interact with homeless people, but never lets go of this distinction. even when actively pushing for what he considers to be more progressive police postures towards the unhoused community, schwiethale is incapable of making any kind of class-based evaluation of the situation.

it’s not that he doesn’t get tantalizingly close. during a meeting with homeless people in an attempt to ingratiate himself in exchange for an endorsement of his then-fledgling h.o.t. cops program, he writes: “they expressed that they were sick and tired of walking across the street and getting a ticket for jaywalking while the businessman in a suit does it all day long without legal consequence. i couldn’t argue this as i knew all to well it was true.” (emphasis mine) again, he knew it to be true because these practices were his practices. and although he has decided to move on from blatantly targeting homeless people, it’s notable that he chose to refine his attention to a more palatable harassment, rather than taking the fight to the abusive police practices that continue to this day. a more direct approach may have been to take on the role of a whistleblower, for example, calling out the toxic culture of a police force more concerned with quotas than justice. a perfect description of the idealist liberal reforms schwiethale promotes and their inability to actually address root causes is relayed in the form of a success story: as schweithale appreciates a client’s transition into housing, he remarks that “he still went dumpster diving for various treasures, but instead of pulling out cigarettes or food, he pulled out pictures and items to decorate his apartment, which looked great. it was a wonderful thing to see.”

schwiethale wants credit for bungling his way through a police career with just enough aplomb to make it to “progressive community police officer” and avoid “shot an unarmed child because i was frightened”, but his reform is only skin deep, betrayed by the ingrained misanthropy that police academy drills into their acolytes. a quick rundown of some of the more baffling, contradictory, inane, and mystifying phrases that make their way into the book will start with the way schwiethale characterizes people’s rights:

Most every officer felt frustrated that the homeless were allowed to take over small downtown parks and set up tents, thus taking away the civil liberties of people wanting to use the parks for their intended purposes.

that’s not how rights work, part one.

If Charley was content with his life and didn’t want to be bothered, live and let live, right? But I did not see it that way. I saw that the mental illness was undeniably violating his rights and that I was there to get him the help he needed.

that’s not how rights work, part two.

in this little missive, i’m giving quite a bit of effort into keeping this as even-keeled as possible, give the readers the facts about this pamphlet and let them come to whatever conclusions naturally form. it’s difficult, however, when confronted with a book this bad, a spokesperson so locally-lauded, and an issue of justice so central to many of the questions that so desperately need to be asked and demanded today. the question of control and authoritarianism that the defund movement has brought to our assumptions about police shape this narrative, as do the questions of property, wealth and economic alienation that are woven through the phenomenon of homelessness. we are unwilling to confront these questions head on, and so we end up with propaganda campaigns like the one driving the publication of this half-book.

this neglect of the root causes of homelessness runs through schwiethale’s narrative, and even appears ironically in inspirational quotes, literally the return of the repressed in action. schwiethale quotes from deuteronomy:

“If among you, one of your brothers should become poor, in any of your towns within your land that the LORD your God is giving you, you shall not harden your heart or shut your hand against your poor
brother, but you shall open your hand to him and lend him sufficient for his need, whatever it may be. Take care lest there be an unworthy thought in your heart and you say, The seventh year, the year of release is near, and your eye look grudgingly on your poor brother, and you give him nothing, and he cry to the LORD against you, and you be guilty of sin.”

schwiethale pulls this quote out to focus on the word “brothers”, as it reminds him of how rooster calls him “brother”. but isn’t the more interesting part of this quote the part that he didn’t even need to include at all? what happens in the seventh year in the time of the old testament? the year of jubilee, a society-wide flattening of all debts, property relations and power structures, a very particular kind of event that you would invoke when admonishing your fellow citizen to find more generosity for the downtrodden. without this sentence, the verse takes on a much more hallmark tone: wouldn’t it be nice to help the less fortunate? with the last sentence, the consequences of half-intentions become much more serious.

as a final demonstration of the gassed-out logic of schwiethale’s grand scheme to community police the homeless out of existence, we’ll go back to the beginning, when schwiethale was still working on getting the h.o.t. cops off the ground. it’s important to point out that when schwiethale was dreaming up his anti-homelessness ordinance, he knew that it was already likely to be unconstitutional law because there had been a supreme court case on exactly this issue. schwiethale:

I learned that most “sleeping in public” ordinances were enventually deemed unconstitutional because in an ACLU lawsuit against one city, they cited that banning life-sustaining activities is a civil liberties violation because if no one has a home to go to, they must still be able to sleep at some point.

of course, schwiethale is undeterred, but take a moment to consider his mission in his own words. he’s just run up against an issue with a rule he wants to subject other people to, because the courts have determined that “banning life-sustaining activities” would violate their rights. officer nate thinks he can still find a way to ban life-sustaining activities without making it look like that’s what he’s doing:

Another angle to look into was camping ordinances, which were fairly new. The only ones I could find that were being challenged were in cities that used their ordinances to target the homeless. In one case the courts showed that police had arrested some homeless people on a beach for camping but had left the all-night parties of college kids alone. In my mind, if we were to introduce a camping ordinance, we would need to assure that we used it with impartiality. In other words, if someone decided to camp at the park without getting a permit, they would need to be cited too. I didn’t want the homeless to be the scapegoats for prosecution. I envisioned putting protections in the ordinance that would try to divert the homeless to shelters rather than jail.

this is getting incredibly complicated. being homeless isn’t illegal, so we have to make things that most homeless people might eventually do illegal without accidentally making things housed people do illegal, but also without making it seem like we’re deliberately targeting homeless people. therefore, our anti-camping ordinance applies to the unhoused and those urban camping daytrippers alike. with all due respect, healthy people don’t think like this.

i don’t know how to end this. there is so much about this book that should offend anyone who lives in this city, and especially alongside the people that schwiethale has spent a decade persecuting to fulfill his own ambitions. there is a solution to homelessness, and it doesn’t require knowing anything in particular about any unhoused person in particular. it doesn’t require this because the problem is not a personal or individual problem. it belongs to all of us equally: those housed among us have our comforts subsidized by the economic sacrifice of those unhoused among us. that sacrifice, it’s important to note, is not made willingly, but demanded by the capitalist system of relations we are all living under. we all are made worse by our inattention and inaction, but the good news is that decades of research and practice have shown the simplest solution is the best: give people housing if they want it, and leave them alone if they don’t. give people services if they want them, and leave them alone if they don’t. there’s plenty of room for specific care and particular relations in there that never need to come under the control or purview of the police. keep them out of it.

that’s it. please don’t read this book.