A Murder Committed in View of Almost Everyone--and No One

In one of America’s most controlled environments--the sort of place social historian Mike Davis would call “carceral” because of its prison-like vigilance--Sherrice Iverson died as a result of the brutally flawed presumption that security guards and video cameras are enough to keep the innocent safe.

As Sherrice stepped inside a women’s restroom, she was watched by the casino’s elaborate surveillance system. She was only a few feet from plainclothes security officers in a place that never goes dark. It was a very public place, filled with hundreds of responsible parents and other adults.

Jeremy Strohmeyer had been playing hide-and-seek with Sherrice before he followed her into the women’s restroom, where she had gone to get another wet towel wad to toss at his head while she dodged him among the video games in the Primadonna Casino arcade near Las Vegas. Perhaps it had only been a game that accidentally ended in a restroom stall, where Strohmeyer snapped the little girl’s neck, according to a taped statement he made later to Las Vegas police.

Leroy Iverson, playing the slots at 3:30 a.m., had trusted surveillance to take the threat out of leaving his 7-year-old daughter in the care of his 14-year-old son. Perhaps, in an equally misguided way, he had assumed that anyone encountering his daughter in so public a place could only have wished her well and offered her aid if she was in distress, and would never have seen her as an object in a scenario that blended sex and death.

Perhaps Iverson remembered that working-class people once valued public places precisely because they tempered the risks of being among strangers with the reassuring presence of potential neighbors.

Now he knows that he was mistaken.

And we know that places as ruthlessly distractive as a casino leave no room for the public obligations to scold, protect or be ashamed. In gaming halls, isolated consumers focus on the effects of liquor, hope, adrenaline and greed in the same way other consumers in other places focus on the effects of owning a brand of athletic shoes or acquiring a new lifestyle. Such self-absorption makes the idea of “public” almost meaningless. Little girls die in the abandoned space between such self-absorbed individuals, even when their every moment is watched.

Communities used to have public places that weren’t so ineptly regulated by the carceral values of surveillance and enforcement. They weren’t perfect places; they accommodated prejudice and discrimination. They weren’t completely safe, either. But, within these limits, these places roughly balanced individual rights and collective responsibilities and marked out a domain for leading an ordinary life in the company of other people.

These places--Main Street and the town square--also were understood to be the first classrooms of our flawed, hopeful democracy. Sherrice Iverson’s death wasn’t needed to teach her father, or us, what might be gained and lost in neglecting to acquire the public habits of the places in which we live.

Main Street and the town square are rapidly morphing into casino-like replacements for the kind of public places they should be. They look more and more like the place where Sherrice Iverson died because they are in competition with it for our disposable income. They are also in competition with our fear, and it’s not the relatively vague threat of crime. We fear the habits of conviviality because they might distract us from our consuming distractions and restrain our perpetual adolescence.

Patience, deference, compassion and the other positive values of being in public have always been a grown-up burden, a promissory note between strangers that carries unknown risks. You might have to give your life to save another or only re-frain from littering the sidewalk. You never know what other people might ask of you or what messy and permanent obligations might come with sharing your life with people you don’t know.

We can try to defer our burdens to security cameras and armed response teams. We can try to cocoon behind guarded suburban gates. We can narrow our public lives to affinity communities regulated by age, race, gender or social status. But at some point, all of us must occupy the periphery of the remade town square, where casual predators roam among preoccupied consumers.

Sherrice Iverson died of a commonplace neglect, the same neglect of modest habits and shared obligations that is fast killing America’s public places.