No Place on the Corner

by Jan Haldipur

  In many respects, the South Bronx of today is a far cry from the “Boogie Down”7 of old. In the late 20th century, the area stood as a global symbol of urban blight, made infamous internationally by President Jimmy Carter’s “walk down Charlotte Street” and by films such as Fort Apache, the Bronx.8 Modern developments now stand where burnt-down buildings and decaying tenements once reigned. The neighborhood on which I focus is no exception, as it quite literally sits in the shadow of the recently renovated courthouse on 161st Street as well as the newly rebuilt, multibillion-dollar Yankee Stadium just blocks away.

  Although in some respects this section of the Bronx is similar to many New York neighborhoods, a few important markers distinguish it from other communities. As academics such as the Harvard sociologist Mario Luis Small have cautioned, it is important not to cast poor urban neighborhoods as a monolith.9 While parts of this neighborhood lack the desolate feel (as seen through a scarcity of stores and other businesses) that characterizes certain sections of Brownsville, Brooklyn, for example, it would be hard to compare 161st Street with more vibrant commercial districts such as 125th Street in Harlem or even Fordham Road to the north. Moreover, unlike a number of other high-need communities in New York City, the neighborhood is home to an extremely diverse population, spurred on, in large part, by its growing immigrant base.

  Figure I.2. 161st Street near the Bronx Hall of Justice. Photo courtesy of the author.

  Perhaps the most influential transformation of Bronx life in the 20th century, however, came in the form of a seven-mile stretch of superhighway. Built over nearly three decades beginning in the late 1940s, the Cross-Bronx Expressway bulldozed its way through large swaths of the borough, disrupting and sometimes destroying entire neighborhoods. The highway quite literally divided the borough, cordoning off the South Bronx from the neighborhoods to the north.10

  Around this same time, the labor market in New York City began to experience profound changes that would have a substantial impact on poorer neighborhoods. Although more closely associated with “Rust Belt” cities like Detroit, Buffalo, and Pittsburgh, rapid deindustrialization had a substantial impact on New York starting in the mid-20th century. Bronx residents, like their counterparts elsewhere in the city, could no longer depend on stable and well-paying union jobs to help support their families and ease them into the middle class.

  This shift took a devastating toll on the South Bronx, one exacerbated by resistance by City Hall and other public and private entities to investing money or other resources in the area. The South Bronx, it seemed, was the subject of financial quarantine. Possibly for this reason, the area has largely been able to resist gentrification in a way that other neighborhoods with affordable rents and proximity to Midtown and Lower Manhattan have been unable to, such as the Clinton Hill/Fort Greene/Bedford-Stuyvesant sections of Brooklyn and Harlem in Manhattan.

  For various reasons, the community has managed to maintain much of its black and Latino identity. As of 2010, approximately 46 percent of residents identify as black or African American, and 59 percent as Latino of any race.11 In the early 20th century, the borough was a destination for Italian, Irish, and Jewish immigrants who sought to escape the relative chaos of Manhattan and make better lives for themselves and their children. Decades later, as white flight accelerated, black southerners and West Indians began settling in northern Manhattan and the Bronx.12 Additionally, the Puerto Rican population of the Bronx experienced tremendous growth in the years following the passage of the Jones-Shafroth Act in 1917, which effectively granted Puerto Ricans (a limited form of) American citizenship. Although there was steady growth in the Puerto Rican population in New York City in the years following this legislation, migration began to surge during the post–World War II boom.

  In recent years, parts of the South Bronx have maintained a reputation as a destination for a wide variety of immigrant groups from around the world. The Concourse Village area in the 44th Precinct, for example, is among the city’s fastest growing immigrant communities, with approximately 41,748 foreign-born residents, or nearly 41 percent of the area’s total population.13

  Each block, it seems, maintains its own distinctive character, with the sounds and smells varying depending on exactly where you are—even on which side of the block you stand. Walking down Morris Avenue, for example, one can see English slowly give way to Arabic signage on storefronts, only to shift again to Spanish-only advertisements for a party or other event. This is part of the cultural complexity of the Bronx, blending its rich Jewish, Italian, African American, and Puerto Rican histories with those of relative newcomers from countries like Ghana, Bangladesh, Guinea, and the Dominican Republic.

  Near Yankee Stadium, on West 161st Street near River Avenue, one can find a number of bars, restaurants, and shops peddling Yankees-related gear. Passing Joyce Kilmer Park toward the Grand Concourse to the east, these businesses give way to a flurry of signs advertising legal services and bail bondsmen. The area is home to the New York State Division of Parole, the New York City Department of Probation, the Bronx District Attorney’s office, as well as a cluster of courthouses, the most visible being the Bronx Hall of Justice.

  The huge, steel-framed structure, which opened in 2007 and sits a few blocks east of the Grand Concourse, occupies nearly two square blocks in the heart of the neighborhood. Although sought-after semipublic space is located near the rear of the building, the mere presence of the courthouse provides a constant and unsettling reminder of where one can end up.

  Concourse Plaza, which is connected on one side to the Department of Probation, is the host of a Food Bazaar, one of the more prominent grocery stores in the area, as well as to a movie theater. Buildings in the rest of the plaza have begun to deteriorate, as clothing and electronics stores have gradually shut down, with signs advertising the promise of redevelopment prominently displayed over boarded-up doors.

  For local residents, 161st Street serves as something of an informal dividing line. Directly to the south are several housing projects operated by the New York City Housing Authority, specifically Melrose Houses, Jackson Houses, and Morrisania Air Rights Houses. To the north are private apartment buildings and row houses. Most residents use the street as the landmark of choice when giving directions or describing a scene. In addition, many of the young adults I spent time with police their own movements according to their geography in relation to 161st Street, sometimes refusing to travel north or south of the boundary, depending on their orientation.

  Figure I.3. 138th Street in the 40th Precinct. Photo courtesy of the author.

  Further south, parts of the 40th Precinct, in the southernmost part of the Bronx, have become something of a new frontier for real estate developers. In 2015, a sign near the Third Avenue Bridge proclaimed, much to the surprise of long-term residents, that the area was now the “Piano District,” a destination for “world-class dining, fashion, art, and architecture.”

  While this vision may still be a few years away, areas like the Hub, near 149th Street and Third Avenue, remain a vibrant commercial district. The Hub, sometimes referred to as the “Times Square of the Bronx,” has maintained an eclectic mix of retail chains and street vendors. Nonetheless, this part of the Bronx at times serves as a reminder of the borough’s gritty past. As recently as 2016, the New York Times began running a monthly series of articles titled “Murder in the 4–0,” examining how homicide has persisted in the 40th Precinct, which encompasses the Hub, despite a downward trend of homicides citywide.

  Historically, the South Bronx’s 16th Congressional District, home to the western portion of the neighborhood, has been one of the poorest in the nation. In the Concourse Village section, where a number of the people I interviewed live, about 36.5 percent of residents live below the poverty line. This figure increases to 50.3 percent among those 18 and younger.14 Fewer than 15 percent of residents (14.2%) age 25 or older have at least a bachelor’s degree. To put these numbers in perspective, along affluent Cen
tral Park West in Manhattan, less than 20 minutes away, about 7 percent of residents fall below the poverty line while nearly 77 percent have at least a bachelor’s degree.15

  Sociologists such as William Julius Wilson regard communities like this as symbols of social isolation16—areas in which residential segregation effectively works to concentrate economic disadvantage.17 Over the years, a number of sociological studies have focused attention on these communities. As many recent ethnographers have illustrated, in countless American communities the common denominator has been an intersecting web of blocked opportunities.18 These exclusionary practices manifest themselves in myriad ways, although in 2018 the most visible form seems to be a criminal justice system that monitors and incarcerates poor blacks and Latinos at an alarming rate.

  The New York Police Department

  Since its founding in 1845, the New York Police Department has undergone a series of noteworthy transitions and ideological shifts. The department itself is divided into 77 precincts (12 of them in the Bronx) stretching across New York City’s five boroughs and including specialized units such as the Transit Bureau, which focuses on the city’s extensive mass transportation system, and the Housing Bureau, which polices New York City Housing Authority buildings. Some 36,000 officers hold a number of positions ranging from posts in the department’s investigative units to administrative jobs at One Police Plaza, the department’s headquarters in Lower Manhattan. During my research, approximately 42 percent of uniformed officers identified as black or Latino.19

  Of course, the most visible arm of the New York Police Department is its patrol unit. This is typically the entry point for New York’s police officers, and it is these men and women who often serve as the face of the department.

  In the decades leading up to the increasing reliance on stop and frisk as a law-enforcement tactic, several important events transformed the department. The late 1960s and early 1970s were marked by corruption scandals culminating in the establishment, by Mayor John Lindsay, of the Knapp Commission, a task force that sought to implement a more rigorous system of checks and balances and to create a greater sense of accountability among officers.

  By the mid-1970s, New York City found itself on the verge of bankruptcy. The city began to cut corners where it could, letting go of some recent Police Department hires and freezing any new hires. As the city began to rebound in the early 1980s, the department hired more than 12,000 new officers, many of whom did not undergo thorough background checks.20

  In the early 1990s, yet another series of allegations of police misconduct ultimately led Mayor David Dinkins to create what was known as the Mollen Commission. Its findings revealed startling levels of brutality and exploitation. In the 75th Precinct in Brooklyn, for instance, police officer Michael Dowd and others were found to have committed crimes such as robbery and drug-dealing, with more senior officers often ignoring or failing to investigate allegations. As a 1993 article in the New York Times concluded, “The New York City Police Department had failed at every level to uproot corruption and had instead tolerated a culture that fostered misconduct and concealed lawlessness by police officers.”21

  As the public’s faith in the Police Department continued to ebb, crime increased steadily in the 1980s through the early 1990s, the peak of the crack epidemic. In 1994, determined to rehabilitate the department’s tarnished image, newly elected Mayor Rudolph Giuliani appointed William Bratton as police commissioner. After a stint as chief of the New York City Transit Police in the early 1990s, Bratton was selected to be commissioner of the Boston Police Department, only to be lured back to New York in 1994. Upon returning to the city, Bratton declared that “the entire culture of the New York City Police Department needed to be transformed.”22

  Mayor Giuliani’s predecessor, David Dinkins, along with Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, had championed a “Safe Streets, Safe City” program that emphasized community policing. Though appreciative of the infusion of new police force hires that accompanied this initiative, Bratton viewed their approach as largely ineffective.23 As he wrote in his 1998 book, Turnaround: How America’s Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic, written with Peter Knobler:

  In theory, that’s fine; beat cops are important in maintaining contact with the public and offering them a sense of security. They can identify the community’s concerns and sometimes prevent crime simply by their visibility. Giving cops more individual power to make decisions is a good idea. But the community-policing plan as it was originally focused was not going to work because there was no focus on crime.

  The connection between having more cops on the street and the crime rate falling was implicit. There was no plan to deploy these officers in specifically hard-hit areas (to win political support for “Safe Streets,” Dinkins had to commit to deploying cops throughout the city, in both low- and high-crime areas), and there was no concrete means by which they were supposed to address crime when they got there. They were simply supposed to go out on their beats and somehow improve their communities.24

  As part of his response to the city’s crime problems, Bratton implemented a multitiered approach designed to transform the police force. His focus was on getting illegal guns off the street, implementing a data-driven approach to policing, and renewing the focus on lower-level crime and social disorder. The highly publicized and frequently replicated “CompStat” (short for COMPuter STATistics/COMParative STATistics) system, developed by Bratton and Jack Maple, one of his chief lieutenants, was a management tool that used up-to-date crime statistics to help identify patterns and target areas for officers.

  Perhaps most notably, Bratton implemented a form of what was known as broken-windows policing (also known as order maintenance policing or “OMP”), a strategy based on the idea that focusing on smaller quality-of-life offenses such as fare evasion (“turnstile jumping”) and open-container violations (drinking alcohol in public) will lead to a decrease in more serious crimes.25 This approach served as the ideological precursor to the stop-and-frisk policing that would define the next several decades.

  As part of the metrics-driven policing ushered in by Bratton and Maple, the Police Department recorded street stops using a form known as the UF-250. This document, which has been slightly modified over the years, includes a range of data including personal information (name, age, gender, race), location and reason for the stop, and an indication of whether force was used during the encounter. Regardless of whether an arrest was made or a summons issued, UF-250s came to signify an officer’s productivity in the field.26

  It wasn’t until 2003, however, that stop-and-frisk data became more publicly available. That year, the court decision Daniels, et al. v. City of New York, which alleged that department officers selectively targeted residents based on race, required the New York Police Department to provide quarterly data on stops—creating a level of transparency that would ultimately inform future cases.

  In his 2005 memoir, Blue Blood, police officer Edward Conlon, who worked in and around the 40th, 42nd, and 44th Precincts of the South Bronx in the mid-1990s, praised some of the early effects of this policy that he witnessed after joining the force:

  The frequency of these “Stop and Frisk” encounters also changed the culture of how criminals carried their weapons: in the 1980’s and early 1990’s, many dealers would carry guns in their waistbands, and the decision to shoot someone—because he crossed into their territory, or he said something about their mother, or he looked at them funny, or just because—was a three-second decision. After Bratton, the dealers still had guns, but they were hidden under their beds or on rooftops, and the delay from impulse to act took five minutes or ten, allowing people to move and tempers to cool.27

  Stop and frisk was beginning to capture the public imagination. Even after Bratton left the Police Department in 1996, the tactic was already deeply embedded there. Under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Ray Kelly resumed his role as commissioner of the department in 2002 (in the early 1990s, he had enjoyed a two
-year stint under Dinkins). Just months earlier, on September 11, 2001, New York City had been devastated by the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. Upon assuming office, Kelly sought, among other things, to establish a Counterterrorism Bureau and incorporate counterterrorism training for all Police Department employees. This resulted in an increasingly militarized police force that was still committed to the principles of stop and frisk.

  Under Kelly’s watch, these stops escalated to a peak of 685,724 in 2011, and the public began to take notice. Pockets of resistance to the practice began to develop, and a vocal minority started voicing concerns about the racial disparities that defined this approach. Nevertheless, Kelly was unwavering in his support of the practice. “What bothered me,” he wrote, “what still bothers me—is that the stop-and-frisk controversy managed to undermine a valuable, appropriate, and legal—let me emphasize legal—tool of modern law enforcement, one that had helped to save literally thousands of innocent lives.”28

  In November 2013, Bill de Blasio was elected mayor of New York. De Blasio, who had openly boasted about his politically activist past during his campaign, represented for many New Yorkers a welcome breath of fresh air, a radical departure from the bottom-line approach that became the hallmark of his predecessor, Michael Bloomberg.

  One of de Blasio’s first orders of business was appointing a new police chief to lead the nation’s largest police force, fulfilling a promise he had based much of his campaign upon and one that, many hoped, would mark an end to the highly controversial practice of stop and frisk. In the end, as had happened nearly two decades earlier, William Bratton was ultimately chosen to succeed Ray Kelly.