by Jan Haldipur
I began exploring this subject with only a rough idea of which people I wanted to include in my analysis. Over time, the subgroups mentioned began to materialize, and I found myself zigzagging across the 40th, 42nd, and 44th precincts. Because this project took on the form of a somewhat comparative ethnography, my geography in the neighborhood often felt scattered. Different groups spent time in different areas. When spending time with some of the more “achievement-oriented” young adults, I might visit the after-school college-preparatory center or shoot hoops at the Big Apple summer league. In the case of some of the young adults involved in the criminal justice system, I might meet them at a probation check-in or just hang out with them at their apartment. In all cases, the things we did and the space we occupied varied greatly depending on the individual. This ultimately contributed a great deal to my analysis, as I was given additional insight into how people’s pieces of the neighborhood were reshaped by police tactics.
Moreover, as I soon discovered, my relationships with certain community members often precluded me from associating with other residents. Most notably, my ties with area mothers and fathers occasionally prevented me from talking to their children. While strict confidentiality was preserved throughout the study, some young people were still cautious of the hypothetical risk that information could be shared with their parents. Although this initially frustrated me, I came to empathize with the young adults. After all, what teen really wants to run the risk of their mother and father knowing their business?
In doing ethnography, you often are allowed into people’s “backstage”61—the parts of their lives that the rest of the world may not ordinarily get to see. While this often provides for rich ethnographic data, folks occasionally take issue with how parts of their stories are represented. This is perhaps one of the greatest challenges of doing ethnography, but, unfortunately, it is one that is unavoidable. Given the topic of this book, I took particular care to change any identifying information in order to preserve the anonymity of those involved. Names, some locations, and other personal information were altered for the sake of privacy, although I went to great lengths to keep the character of the community intact. I am deeply thankful to the men and women whose stories fill these pages, who after a long shift at work, or lengthy exam, would find time to meet with me, even when it was the last thing on their mind. Without their participation and commitment, this project would not exist.
1
The Invisible
I don’t want this following me around, you know? It’s like they got my picture and fingerprints now. For what? They took them when they brought me in the precinct. I don’t want it to follow me like a stigma or whatever. I hate knowing it’s there and could mess my whole life up. I’m not no criminal.
—Los
On a cool June morning, I arrived on 161st Street in the Bronx. My watch showed 8:15 a.m. as I exited the subway turnstile, still groggy from waking up at 6:00 in the morning and making the trek from the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. The usually busy thoroughfare was much calmer than it is when games are being played at the ballpark just down the hill. Yankee Stadium was closed save for a handful of security guards manning the perimeter.
As I neared the Bronx Hall of Justice courthouse, on 161st Street and Morris Avenue, I could see a line beginning to form between two steel dividers, with people waiting either alone or in pairs. The line was filled with black and Latino faces, and the group was overwhelmingly male, although a handful of women were scattered about, many of whom seemed to be the partners of those waiting in line.
The courthouse is a modern, multilevel glass building with a new outdoor cement atrium toward the back. Armed officers in uniform monitored the line. About 40 people were already waiting to enter when I arrived, but because the building’s main doors were not yet open, the line was not moving. Within minutes of my arrival, however, the line began to grow quickly. A loud Puerto Rican man could be heard talking to a black man behind him; they did not seem to know each other but appeared to be swapping stories. Many of the faces looked anxious, and justifiably so.
Across the street, the Concourse Plaza shopping center looked almost entirely empty, devoid of cars and people. The few stores that were not boarded up for good had yet to open for the day. At about 8:30, the front doors to the courthouse opened up and those waiting in line began to file in.
***
Los texted me to let me know he was on his way. I anticipated he would bring a member of his family, but when he showed up, a shade after 8:40, he was alone.
Los is a dark-skinned Dominican male in his early 20s. He wears glasses and has an athletic build, with neatly cropped hair faded into a small Afro. He arrived to the courthouse wearing a pair of green army fatigues, T-shirt, a gray hoodie, and black and green Nike Air Penny shoes on his feet. As we waited to pass through the metal detectors, he apologized for his tardiness and looked visibly nervous. This was hardly surprising.
Today was Los’s long-awaited court date for an incident that had taken place six months earlier, in January 2013, near his grandmother’s apartment, a few blocks north of Yankee Stadium in the 44th Precinct. In addition to working full-time at a major department store in Manhattan, Los is a full-time student at a community college in Queens. It was on a break between classes that he decided to stop by his grandmother’s place.
Although Los lives with his mother and sisters in the nearby Morrisania Air Rights Houses, a public housing complex, he often stops by his grandmother’s home to check up on her. Near her building, he was stopped by police for the first time:
They patted me down and they actually found my pocketknife. In order for them not to injure themselves, I told them that there was a pocketknife in there. It wasn’t taken out, it was actually folded. I noticed that I had my knife that day, but, on January 1st it was New Year’s. I was working the whole day. I had a 12-hour shift from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m.
I was working with my knife [a blade used to open boxes in the stockroom] the whole day. It’s something that I always leave at home. I don’t carry it with me in public, I don’t take it anywhere because I don’t want to get stopped and all that. That day I intended, well I actually didn’t intend at all, I just forgot to leave my working knife at work. It was no intent for me to take it out in public to show off or nothing like that. On Thursday, I happened to have the same sweater in which I worked on January 1st. That’s how the cops got me with the knife. I was arrested. They actually charged me with possession of a weapon in the 4th degree, in which . . . the cop actually gave me a DAT, which is a “Desk Administrative Ticket” [Desk Appearance Ticket] in which I have to see a judge and confess my crime, to see what I plea.
Despite Los having a spotless record and insisting multiple times that his “weapon” was in fact a work knife, the police continued to process Los’s arrest. Shocked and embarrassed, he called me the day after he was released from the precinct. A few days later, I walked him over to the nearby office of the Bronx Defenders, a community-based organization that provides legal help for Bronx residents. As we walked down Courtlandt Avenue, toward his mother’s apartment, Los, who usually seems jovial and carefree, was sullen and withdrawn. He said:
Right now, I’m feeling like the criminal justice system is viewing me as a criminal. I’m not a—first of all, this is my first offense. I’ve never been arrested in my life before. I don’t think I should be treated this way because I’m actually studying criminal justice and it’s something that I love—and just because I forgot to leave my working utensils at work, I’m now being viewed as a criminal. It’s something that I don’t actually like to be viewed as, by the society or public. That’s not the kind of person I am. I don’t hurt people. I don’t rob people—I’m just not that kind of person.
In his seminal 2000 work, Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City, the sociologist Elijah Anderson makes a distinction between “decent” and more “street-oriented” residents in a P
hiladelphia neighborhood.1 Although no one truly falls neatly into a single category, it’s clear that Los aligns himself more with the former group. Still, many residents must endure a DuBoisian “double consciousness”2 that involves at least two primary categories: the way many of the young people in the community categorize themselves and the way others, namely the police, do.
In this chapter, I will focus on the experiences of those who fall on the more “decent” end of the spectrum. Because this group is by no means a monolith, I shall seek to reflect the rich diversity of their experiences. Their active schedules, combined with an aggressive police presence and conflicts in the neighborhood, often preclude these residents from frequently socializing in public spaces. Thus, to outsiders, they are largely invisible. These are the young men and women that I’ve identified as achievement-oriented, both in terms of the way they define themselves and by their actions.
The young people discussed in this chapter do not have a criminal history. They were typically enrolled full time in high school or college, or were working toward this goal. Or they had a job or were looking for one. It is important to separate so-called decent youths from so-called street youths, because the mechanisms used to make sense of and cope with police surveillance differ greatly among the two. Furthermore, many of the policy implications diverge in a similar manner.
Figure 1.1. Two boys play basketball using a makeshift hoop. Photo courtesy of the author.
During the first 20 years of Los’s life, he was able to remain out of the reaches of police in a highly monitored neighborhood.3 While many people have been able to avoid police contact in a similar manner, countless other “decent” young men were less fortunate. I met Octavius, or Tae, as he likes to be called, while playing basketball over the summer at a local junior high in the 44th Precinct, a site for the Big Apple Games.4 Tae, who is 18, is a tall and wiry light-skinned African-American male who prides himself on his basketball prowess. He lives up the street from the school with his grandparents. Although he dropped out of school when he was 16, he is currently attempting to get his general education degree (GED) while working part-time at a Target near his mother’s apartment in New Jersey.
Unlike Los, Tae had his first contact with police when he was in elementary school. “[I was] eight when I first got stopped,” he told me. “It was like five of us and they thought we was throwing rocks off the roof because someone was complaining. It wasn’t us, though.” According to Tae, such interactions became much more frequent in his teens. “Thirteen, 14, that’s when I get stopped at least three times a week,” he said. “Even if it’s not around my block, if I’m going to walk somewhere, I’m always getting stopped.”
Stories like Tae’s show just how common this type of police interaction can become for young men in places like the southwest Bronx. For some, police interaction in the early teens has become a rite of passage. Yet others who live in the same neighborhoods and attend the same schools remain largely out of the reaches of local officers. Why is this? How can we account for the different experiences of Tae and Los?
Is It the Shoes?
The excitement is palpable in Tae’s voice as he describes the newly released “South Beach LeBron’s.” Priced at a hefty $250 ($200 if you “got the hookup”), the sneaker is the ninth edition of National Basketball Association player LeBron James’s famed line, and the first to be released in pink, teal green, and gray—homage to the unofficial colors of the city of Miami, where James was playing at the time. At length, Tae explains to me what sets these shoes apart from the others, and regretfully explains that they sold out before he was able to purchase a pair. His disappointment is short-lived, as he then tells me excitedly about his newly discovered inside connection at House of Hoops, an athletic shoe retailer, which could aid in him getting a pair of “Foams” (Nike Air Foamposites, priced at $250).
I was 27 when I began this research project, still not far removed from my days as a “sneaker head.” Growing up, sneakers were a form of currency for me and my friends. To have a pair of Nike Air Jordans even just a few days before their official release date signified an increase, however brief, in one’s social status; to have a pair of “exclusives,” or hard-to-find sneakers, meant something even more. Regardless of where you came from or how much money you made, sneakers, in their own distorted way, were the great equalizer. How you dressed, and especially what you wore on your feet, could counteract nearly everything else about you.
The so-called sneaker culture is alive and well in the Bronx, as it is in most urban and increasingly suburban centers around the country. This is not a new phenomenon, however, and it is well documented as a form of personal expression.5 Young adults meticulously construct outfits from the ground up, coordinating sneakers with pants, tops, hats, and even belts. For some, the imperative is simply to match—green with green, brown with brown, and so on. For others, the goal is to set themselves apart, wearing more flamboyant color schemes, hard-to-find “vintage” pieces, or, in some cases, high-end brands.
Regardless, the common underlying factor is that most young people seem to understand the significance of presentation in how one is perceived by their peers and, increasingly, by the police. As a result, these young adults are forced to regulate and monitor their choice of clothing in ways that other Americans simply aren’t.6
A number of young men and women I spoke with emphasized the importance of clothing in explaining their perceptions on why police did or did not elect to stop them. Many were acutely aware of how personal choice in dress could draw unwanted attention from the police. Choice in color, style of accessory (for example, a beaded necklace versus one that was silver or gold), or even the logo on a hat or a shirt are all subject to misinterpretation and can serve as an entry-point for police contact. As Louisa, a Puerto Rican high school junior, said of her brother’s recent interaction with police:
My brother—I guess it was the way he was dressed, I think. He was just stopped for no reason. I mean, I was there and I saw him from across the street and I asked him, and he was like, “Oh, he just stopped me.” He was just walking because he was meeting up with me . . . and I guess it was just the way he was dressed.
Although this particular stop did not result in an arrest or a ticket, both she and her brother walked away angry and confused. Shelley, a classmate of Louisa, offered a more detailed attempt at an explanation. “It’s the sagging—the hoodies—the big coats they wear now,” she said. “Yeah, it’s called a ‘Biggie.’7 It’s like a big Merm . . . yeah, and it’s, like, yellow, bright colors.” In pockets of the South Bronx where there is greater perceived racial homogeneity, items like a “Biggie,” hooded sweatshirts, beads, and sagging pants can provide sufficient “reasonable suspicion” for officers to stop black and Latino youth.
A number of the young women I spoke to gave poignant examples of how clothing affects how they are perceived by police. Suzanne, a Puerto Rican woman in her late teens, often wears clothing more closely associated with contemporary men’s fashion. During summers, this consists of white T-shirts and shorts; come colder months, it’s hoodies and jeans. As part of her personal style, her hair is neatly braided into cornrows and often covered by a fitted hat. She described an incident that occurred earlier in the summer in which her choice in clothing led to her being both inappropriately stopped and improperly identified as a man:
I had this one time I was walking home when it was getting dark and these two officers jumped out on me and started asking me questions or whatever. This one officer asked me to turn around and started frisking me. I’m like, “You know I’m a girl, right?” I’m thinking, they think I’m a boy or something. So, he says, “Yeah, I know.” And continues searching me! He didn’t get a female officer or nothing.
Similarly, Tika, an African American high school senior in her late teens, recalls a recent time when she was frisked. In her opinion, the jean jacket she was wearing served as a trigger for the improper search of her and her friends:
Tika: Last year, summertime, I had a jean jacket on and when I dig in, I hold my jacket up [she put her hands in her pockets and lifted her arms in the air to demonstrate]. They jumped out—I was like—
Jan: You were by yourself?
Tika: Me and my friends. Females. They was like, “Don’t move!” I’m like, “Don’t move? What you mean don’t move? What I do? What did I do wrong?” “What you got in your hand?” [the officer said]. I let the female search me and then that was it. It’s just like—and in the area I live in, cops ride through that block all day. All day. So, it’s not really much they can do out there, but the cops take they jobs sometimes to the—it’s too much.