by Jan Haldipur
No Place on the Corner
No Place on the Corner
The Costs of Aggressive Policing
Jan Haldipur
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York
www.nyupress.org
© 2019 by New York University
All rights reserved
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Haldipur, Jan, author.
Title: No place on the corner : the costs of aggressive policing / Jan Haldipur.
Description: New York : New York University Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018012213 | ISBN 9781479869084 (cl : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781479888009 (pb : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Police-community relations—New York (State)—New York. | Urban youth—New York (State)—New York—Social conditions. | Immigrants—New York (State)—New York—Social conditions. | Community development—New York (State)—New York. | Citizenship—New York (State)—New York. | Crime prevention—New York (State)—New York.
Classification: LCC HV8148.N5 H35 2018 | DDC 363.2/3097471—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018012213
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For Anneka, Simon, Damien, and Maddox
Contents
List of Figures
Preface
Introduction
1. The Invisible
2. Growing Up under Surveillance
3. Parenting the Dispossessed
4. Policing Immigrant Communities
5. Losing Your Right to the City
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Index
About the Author
List of Figures
Figure I.1: The 40th, 42nd, and 44th Precincts of the New York Police Department
Figure I.2: 161st Street near the Bronx Hall of Justice
Figure I.3: 138th Street in the 40th Precinct
Figure I.4: New York City murders, 2002–2016
Figure I.5: NYPD stop and frisks, 2002–2016
Figure 1.1: Two boys play basketball using a makeshift hoop
Figure 3.1: A mother and her child attempt to beat the summer heat
Figure 4.1: A neighborhood corner store
Figure 4.2: A group of men play dominoes on the sidewalk
Preface
Window air-conditioner units and fire escapes dot the red and tan brick apartment buildings on College Avenue, a street located just a few blocks east of the Grand Concourse in the southwest Bronx. Thursday afternoons in this area are often a very tense time for neighborhood residents. On what have become known as “Thirsty Thursdays,”1 a weekly event in which officers from New York City’s 44th Police Precinct flood the neighborhood in the department’s trademark blue and white vans, young people from the community can disappear for hours and sometimes days at a time.
Young adults, primarily men but also women, in this and other neighborhoods in the South Bronx are transported in this vehicle to the nearest police precinct and held there until a family member can pick them up. The explanation for whisking away these young people is typically vague or even nonexistent—at best, sometimes nothing more than the comment that the youth was causing trouble or disturbing the peace. The crime prevention program under which these young people are rounded up and abruptly herded away is known as “stop, question, and frisk,” or, colloquially, “stop and frisk.”
In the early 2000s, New York City began to experience a surge in the use of this strategy, an aggressive police tactic that became a distinctive feature of the New York Police Department. Young black and Latino men disproportionately became the focus of this approach, which targets residents of selected neighborhoods throughout the five boroughs. Although the number of documented stops began to decline in 2012, aggressive policing has not disappeared and its impact continues to be felt by both the individual and the community.
This book draws from three years of intensive ethnographic fieldwork conducted before and after the landmark court decision Floyd, et al. v. City of New York, which was handed down by a federal judge in 2013 and ruled such stops unconstitutional. My research was conducted in and around the 40th, 42nd, and 44th Precincts in the western portion of the South Bronx, the latter of which was recently recognized by the New York Times as having one of the “highest use(s) of force” in the entire city. 2
Relying primarily on participant observation, informal interviews, focus groups, and life-history interviews, this book examines how local residents make sense of aggressive policing tactics and explores the strategies and sources of resilience these individuals use to cope. I take a close look at residents’ conception of what it means to be a citizen and how their right to public space has been transformed by aggressive policing tactics.
My findings suggest that this approach to policing has led to a substantial erosion of faith in local and state institutions. My research also shows that these aggressive policing tactics discourage the formation of social ties in the neighborhood, the very networks residents need to thrive and get ahead.
Aggressive policing, most visible through the department’s highly publicized stop-and-frisk program, results in a number of negative consequences. Although high-profile cases of police misconduct often dominate the headlines, they are only a part of the story. Missed classes in school and missed shifts at work can put a strain on a young person’s financial situation and are among the more visible collateral costs of this mode of policing. Less visible but also destructive is the severe emotional toll that results when members of the community are forced to make sense of the experience of growing up under surveillance.
With New York City widely hailed as a success story in its ability to reduce street crime and with other cities having begun to replicate the New York Police Department model, I believed it was essential to analyze the effects of aggressive policing strategies on communities in New York. Much of what we know about the impact of this form of policing comes from statisticians and policymakers, who are typically examining the issue from a distance. Using a more grounded ethnographic approach, I wanted to look more deeply at the unanticipated consequences of the use of this tactic to better understand how residents of the South Bronx, particularly young adults, make sense of policing in their community.
Much of the existing literature on policing and its impact on local communities focuses almost exclusively on justice-involved black and Latino individuals or, at the other extreme, recounts the stories of the community’s highest achievers. By contrast, my goal was to expand on these narratives to gain a greater understanding of the effects of aggressive policing on the everyday lives of a broad range of local residents.
Specifically, I explore how different groups maintain a sense of community in the face of a looming police presence. I examine the ways that local residents remain resilient, along with the coping mechanisms and strategies they use to deal with this situation. I also examine the effects of this form of policing on residents’ day-to-day live
s—for example, how employment and education prospects may be affected. Perhaps most important, I examine residents’ conception of what it means to be a citizen in such an environment and how the right to public space has been transformed by aggressive policing tactics.
In the Introduction, I begin by defining what aggressive policing means in New York City by focusing on the rise and subsequent decrease in the use of stop and frisk. I also provide a historical account of the role of the police in New York City communities, documenting the transformation of police practices over the decades.
Chapter 1 examines the experiences of the more achievement-oriented young people of the neighborhood, those “invisible youths” who may not be found out on the street, playing in the parks, or occupying other public spaces. These young adults have effectively been driven indoors through a combination of neighborhood violence and an aggressive police presence. In particular, I highlight the experiences of two groups of young adults in the neighborhood: “The Achievers,” a group that often avoids creating community ties as a protective mechanism, and the “Line-Toers,” those who try to reconcile community ties with their own personal aspirations.
In Chapter 2, I explore the experiences of young adults who have been involved with the court system and who often experience some of the harshest treatment from police. Subsequently, in Chapter 3, I discuss the experiences of local parents, who, although they are generally not the targets of aggressive policing, experience an acute form of trauma vicariously through their children. Many of these parents have developed a set of coping skills to help them deal with the emotional toll of having a son or daughter handcuffed and taken away and, on a more pragmatic level, to navigate the system when these situations occur.
In Chapter 4, I focus on the experiences of recent immigrants in the neighborhood, exploring how a lack of social capital coupled with the strength of ethnic group ties can provide a protective buffer between immigrant groups and police. Finally, in Chapter 5, I discuss the impact of aggressive policing on outcomes such as securing a conviction in court and offer some policy recommendations.
The impact of stop and frisk is of critical importance because of the dilemma inherent in aggressive policing in high-need communities. The very people who are typically victims of this approach are those who arguably need the most protection from the police. A humane and nuanced analysis of the implications and social and economic costs of this regime can only help policy makers address the issue with greater depth and understanding.
Introduction
I got a daughter. Luckily I don’t got a son. But what I think it does to little kids coming up—in they mind it becomes regular. Like when they get older, cops stopping them, they gonna remember when they was little they always seen that. It’s not going to be out of the norm for them.
—Lance
In June 2011, I began spending time in the South Bronx, where, as a graduate student in sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, I worked as a research assistant for a local community-based research project. It was around this time that media coverage of the New York City Police Department’s stop-and-frisk policy, an approach in which police officers would stop and question residents whose behavior struck them as “suspicious,” began to spike.
This was also the year that frisks, disproportionately effecting black and Latino youth in low-income neighborhoods, would reach their peak, with 685,724 stops documented, in a city with a population of approximately 8.5 million residents. Local newspapers such as the New York Times, the Daily News, and the New York Post, as well as national publications like the Atlantic and the Wall Street Journal, had begun covering the phenomenon, thus helping to shape a broader discussion of the subject.
New Yorkers seemed largely divided on the issue. For some residents, the city did indeed feel safer thanks to this approach—a stark contrast to the urban blight associated with parts of the city in the late 1980s and early 1990s. But at what cost, I wondered? The South Bronx neighborhoods in which I was spending time were experiencing some of highest frequencies of stops in New York City,1 and I became curious as to how peoples’ lives were shaped by this form of aggressive policing.
This curiosity served as the impetus to embark on this research project and begin spending time with local residents in and around parts of the 40th, 42nd, and 44th precincts of the South Bronx, which cover the Melrose, Morrisania, Highbridge, and Concourse Village neighborhoods. Some residents refer to the area as Morris, a reference to the avenue that bisects much of the borough’s southwestern portion. But since the name is not in widespread use, and since neighborhood names in the Bronx can be tricky in any case, I refer to the area, which lies roughly west of Bruckner Boulevard and south of the Cross-Bronx Expressway, as the southwest Bronx or simply as the neighborhood.
Borrowing from the term made popular by the sociologist Robert K. Merton,2 I sought to examine the so-called unanticipated consequences of Bloomberg-era stop-and-frisk policing. In areas like the South Bronx, aggressive policing creates yet another unneeded barrier to getting ahead. How, then, do families affected by this tactic manage? Are they able to maintain a sense of community? What is the impact of aggressive policing on residents’ daily lives?
Figure I.1. The 40th, 42nd, and 44th Precincts of the New York Police Department. Map courtesy of Will Shaw.
Due to the types of questions being asked, ethnography was the most appropriate approach to my fieldwork. This method is particularly useful when seeking to document the so-called lived experiences of members of such a neighborhood. These were questions that could not be answered in a survey or a brief interview on a college campus. I had to immerse myself in the community—spending time in residents’ apartments or houses, at local gatherings, at pickup basketball games, on park benches, in bodegas, at court hearings, and at meetings with probation officers. And while I had a number of initial research questions in mind when I went into the field, I realized that many of these questions might shift over time. As part of a more “grounded” inductive approach, I was open to allowing my data to inform my hypotheses, as I spent more and more time in the community.3
Because of heightened attention from police, some residents were leery of outsiders in the community. For this reason, it was extremely important for me to spend time familiarizing myself with the neighborhood, and, even more important, for local residents to feel that they could trust me with their stories. Having lived and worked in the Kingsbridge section the Bronx for a time in my early twenties, I had some familiarity with the area. I often visited the neighborhood around Yankee Stadium, sometimes for a ball game but more often for a drink or to meet friends. Later on, I began mentoring high-school students as part of the Bronx Brotherhood Project, at a local community center near where I began this research. In many ways, however, I was starting from scratch with this endeavor.
It wasn’t until my teens that I began to more fully cultivate my own ideas about the police. Toward the end of middle school in Syracuse, New York, where I grew up, I began noticing how police officers can alter or interrupt people’s lives, particularly the lives of young men of color. Although I grew up in a solidly middle-class household to immigrant parents from India and the Netherlands, my community did not always reflect my own circumstances. Syracuse, a mid-sized “Rust Belt” city, fell on hard times as I was coming of age in the 1980s and 1990s, as many of the factory jobs the city once depended on began to leave. In 2015, the Atlantic famously declared that Syracuse had the “highest rates of both black and Hispanic concentrations of poverty in the nation.”4 By the time I had graduated high school, a number of my peers had negative interactions with police, in some cases resulting in long-term prison sentences. To that end, particular moments still resonate with me and played a key role in my personal, and sometimes complicated, understanding of the police.
Despite my own sometimes negative experiences with law enforcement, I often shy away from being overly critical of the police. Fo
r every friend or acquaintance I’ve seen locked up, another has fallen victim to neighborhood violence, ostensibly underscoring the need for effective police work. It is at this critical juncture, the delicate balancing of community safety and fundamental human rights, where the primary dilemma lies.
In some respects, I came into this project selfishly seeking to make sense of what I had seen and experienced in my formative years. I sought to discover how others had themselves come to realize the role of police in their lives and, perhaps more important, how these experiences had shaped their trajectories. I was prepared to encounter a bevy of polarizing opinions, of which there were many.
I was unprepared, however, to discover how many people shared my complicated and occasionally contradictory attitudes toward the police. It just wasn’t that simple. There were times when we shared a “fuck the police” attitude, and other moments when the presence of police brought a sense of calm and security. Moreover, although the criminal justice system is among the more visible prisms through which to view inequality in America, it represents only a small piece of the larger systems at play.
The Southwest Bronx
Many of the statistics typically used to describe communities such as the one I focus on do little justice to the human ecology of the neighborhood. Human, or “community” ecology, loosely defined, refers to the relationship involving people, their material conditions, and the physical space they inhabit.5 Among some of the Ghanaian immigrants I spent time with, for example, the neighborhood is little more than a place to lay one’s head, and consequently police harassment is often something of an afterthought. For others, like Glenda,6 the neighborhood represents much more. It is a place to raise a family as well as a source of memories both fond and painful, the latter prompted largely by her teenage son’s recent interactions with local law enforcement officials. Simply put, the neighborhood means different things to different people.