During a recent visit to the Alderwood Mall, Krishanu Ray was informed by a kiosk operator named Malachi Raine that the mall was doing everything it could to cut costs. The maddening pressure to make money, to turn a quick profit, to squeeze every little penny out of the massive structure was even found in the smallest details. Ray:

He's noticed watered down hand soap in the bathroom and a switch to inferior paper towels. Even the Windex bottles that hang from the waists of custodial staff seem to him a lighter shade of blue: Everywhere, corners are being cut. "It's all these little things," he says, sounding like a microbiologist laboring to convey the catastrophic importance of a small change in algae count.

If these observations are correct, if the mall is indeed cutting any corner it can find, this should not surprise us one bit. Indeed, it's to be expected because we are after all living in an age where, in general, living expenses are rising, wages are mostly flat, and costs are being cut. In Alderwood Mall we find a microcosm of the whole country. Our society is one that's cutting corners all of the time and in all kinds of services—maintenance of transportation infrastructure, quality of health care, and, of course, policing. One result of the last, underfunded policing, has been the recent deaths of unarmed black males. For many, the explanation for the tragedies is racism. This is correct, but only because blacks (as with poor whites) tend to get and so are more exposed to the cheapest kind of policing money can buy.

Eric Garner—himself trying to make a little money in the cheap economy (the economy the rich have forced malls, whole governments, and ordinary people into)—was more exposed (and lost his life) to the main form of policing his budget-strapped state provides. Economists call this state of things austerity, but what it comes down to is exactly what the managers at Alderwood Mall are said to be doing—being cheap.

Anyone who looks at the case involving the death of Micheal Brown realizes he was killed by a cheap cop. Officer Darren Wilson worked for a department that, because of a lack of adequate tax revenue, survived on ticket violations (solving crimes does not pay the bills). As a consequence, Wilson was poorly trained, had no real idea what the meaning of police work involved, and certainly had no community skills whatsoever. Real policing requires a big investment, but we live in a society that no longer makes investments in anything meaningful—education, transportation, and even R&D in corporations. Investments demand a long-term view, but the supreme value of our society, shareholder value, has an oppressively short-term view. The logic of the shareholder has become the logic of management and the entire society. With Officer Darren Wilson, you get what you paid for: an unarmed dead kid.