by Jan Haldipur
Later on, Israel, Tony, and Gordon had a particularly telling exchange concerning their experiences with stop-and-frisk policies:
Tony: I think there should be a better way they can go about it. Not just to stop you and say, hey, I’m going to stop you because you got a hoodie on. If you wanted to be like, “Where you think you going around this time?” and ask questions before you actually start going into the frisk then . . .
Israel: Where do you think you at? They’ll pull a gun out and shoot the cop right in they face . . . people don’t shoot cops now? Just imagine. We thinking like civilians. Think as you being a cop. You walk up on a person with a hoodie in the middle of the night. What, you just going to talk to him? [acts out]. “Get on the wall!” . . . Think of you as a cop. Think about it as you got kids and you that cop. You can’t think like that. You thinking regular like you from the hood. You being someone from the hood you don’t like someone doing that to you.
Gordon: But think about all the people they doing that to that’s just walking to the store!
One of the young men who best exemplified this complex relationship with the police was Rick. Upon moving to the United States, Rick and his family settled in an apartment in Mitchel Houses, a public housing complex in the 40th Precinct. Having spent his early years in the Dominican Republic, Rick had frequently seen officers try to extort people—“dame lo mio” [loosely translated: “give it to me”], he recalls, was a common refrain among officers. Yet by his late teens he found himself on the other side of the law, selling drugs with a neighborhood crew in America.
In time, he abandoned this endeavor, securing a job working security at a bar while taking classes at a local community college. In a journal entry Rick wrote for a class and shared with me, he documented this shift in vantage point, capturing the precarious position he then occupied on the street:
Once I turned 17 I became a corner boy, and began to have a lot more encounters with police officers. Being corner boys brought a lot of attention to me and my friends because the police would know we were up to no good and causing damage in the neighborhood. Even though I knew that what I was doing wasn’t good, I still felt safe that the police were around, and that my encounter was with them and not with other street guys who only wanted to harm us so that they could take over. So in reality with the cops there I knew I would still live to see another day. I know it was a weird theory but I would rather go to jail and have my mom visit me there then have her visit me at a cemetery. Guess this is the mentality of a lot of kids who grow up in the rough conditions of the projects.
“It Ain’t Never Gonna Stop”
Many of the young adults involved in the criminal justice system whom I spent time with discussed a social distance they often felt from law enforcement officials but also, and increasingly, from other members of the community. They are keenly aware of how they are viewed by the police, school administrators, employers, and even their neighbors. Years of being turned away or failed by local institutions, or both, have conditioned them into accepting their liminal position in the community’s social order. Facing seemingly insurmountable barriers, some have come to rely on alternative means to get ahead, fully aware of the additional loss in social status that could result.12As a young adult named Larry reflects:
I think being poor is depressing in itself. Just to think about it, like, know what I mean? Light’s going to get cut off, you ain’t got no food. You starving, you got to feed your kids, like “what am I to do?” Like, I know if I do this, these are the outcomes of that. I know if I do that, those are the outcomes of that. Just thinking about everyday things and it being so hard, that’s enough to depress anybody. . . . Trying to still do the right thing at the same time. That’s a lot.
The lives of justice-involved young adults are marked by few, if any, second chances. The southwest Bronx, like other “high-need” areas around New York City, is a second-chance desert. Whereas their white and affluent contemporaries in other parts of the city are continually granted second chances, seemingly at every juncture of the criminal justice system, young adults in this community are often defined by their worst act. Tactics like stop and frisk often serve as an early entry point into the criminal justice system, with some residents establishing an arrest record before they even hit puberty.
One such youth is Cam, now 17, who can recall his first trip to the 44th Precinct for breaking a car window in the fourth grade: “We was young. They ain’t put handcuffs on us even, they just grabbed us and threw us in the car.”
Only a few years later, at the age of 14, he received his first felony conviction for an assault charge and spent a few weeks upstate at a juvenile detention center. He caught his most recent case at the age of 16, this time for assault and robbery, again a felony conviction.
In trying to understand the plight of Cam and other young men like Justin and Grams, it is important to broaden the way we look at punishment in America—in a sense, to shift, as sociologist David Garland notes, from viewing punishment as a mere instrument and regard it as more of a complex social institution and cultural agent.13 It is hard to ignore the impact the various tentacles of the criminal justice system have had in shaping Cam’s young life. Sometimes, it’s easy to forget that he is still a child. Still, at present, current practices seem not to be effectively addressing the underlying causes of his actions.
Cam is currently on probation supervision and must report to his probation officer weekly. Any time he is outside of his home, whether he is spending time with friends, on his way to GED classes, or just picking up his younger brother, he reports that he is frequently stopped by police. In the summer, this happens at least once a day. Still, given this overwhelming criminal justice presence in his day-to-day life, these stops haven’t prevented him from participating in a series of neighborhood conflicts with his section of Clay Avenue in the 44th Precinct. There is a sense of urgency in Cam’s voice as he tries to explain why his block is currently at odds with crews that live less than 50 yards away:
Cam: Since young niggas walking through your hood, they just, they say something smart, they go get they brother, they come back, they gonna handle it, because niggas ain’t gonna . . .
Jan: Why?
Cam: Just ‘cuz. ‘Cuz of respect. Just because of the name.
Jan: It sounds like you lost some friends, why keep going with it?
Cam: That same reason why . . . because you lost friends. That beef ain’t never gonna stop. It ain’t never gonna stop . . . it’s just gonna continue.
The New York Police Department persisted with an aggressive policing agenda in large part because the agency was convinced that it worked. The prevailing belief among city officials has been that aggressive policing tactics went hand in hand with the decline in crime. In an op-ed essay published in the Washington Post in August 2013, toward the end of his final term, Mayor Bloomberg continued to endorse the ability of “stop, question, and frisk” to save New Yorkers’ lives:
Our crime reductions have been steeper than any other big city’s. For instance, if New York City had the murder rate of Washington, D.C., 761 more New Yorkers would have been killed last year. If our murder rate had mirrored the District’s over the course of my time as mayor, 21,651 more people would have been killed.14
Yet, as the stories of Cam and Grams vividly illustrate, these policies hardly seem to detract young people involved in the criminal justice system from engaging in criminal behavior. Research by criminologists Richard Rosenfeld and Robert Fornango further supports these claims, as their work suggests that stop and frisk has had a much smaller, and short-lived, effect on crime than initially anticipated.15 Instead, the excessive reliance on aggressive policing tactics seems to do nothing more than introduce more young people to the criminal justice system, thus contributing to a form of net-widening.
As the data suggest, stop-and-frisk tactics have produced limited results when it comes to actually getting guns off of the street. As a result, des
pite an overall downward trend in gun violence, guns still remain accessible to those who need or want them. Moreover, for young people like Reese who are trying to “go legit,” these policies do little more than pull them back into the tangled web of the criminal justice system.
3
Parenting the Dispossessed
Y’all good for stopping him, but I’m the one who’s paying for his crime!
—Glenda
I’m impatiently pacing in front of a brick nursing home on a tree-lined block on the Bronx’s once-celebrated Grand Concourse thoroughfare. Today is the 44th Precinct’s monthly community council meeting. It is roughly 7:10 p.m. and there is still no sign of Glenda. But within a few minutes, I see her waving from the passenger seat of a tan Chevrolet Malibu. The car parallel parks, and her friend Leslie climbs out of the back seat. Glenda and her husband, Todd, whom I haven’t seen in more than a year, join us.
Todd is brown-skinned, with neatly cropped hair. His shoulders are hunched and his eyes glassy. He is wearing dusty blue jeans, Timberland boots, and a worn blue T-shirt from his construction job.
He shakes my hand and begins to take out a cigarette before realizing that we’re late. “Man, I just got out of work,” he says in his gravelly voice as he tucks it back in his pocket. “A man needs a cigarette, you know?,” he adds with a laugh. “Aw, shit, we gotta go inside, huh?”
We make our way through the front door of the drab brick building and sign in at the front desk. Glenda and Leslie seem to take this seriously—writing out their names neatly. Glenda writes Todd’s information for him as well.
Arriving on the second floor, we make our way to a large conference room that is almost fully packed. At the front of the room sits an elderly black woman wearing a Yankees cap. She is flanked by a middle-aged Latina and a skinny white male officer whose white button-down shirt is adorned with his badge and an array of medals and decorations.
On one side of the room a number of teenage Explorers, a New York Police Department–sponsored youth group, are busy readying materials for the meeting. There are approximately 15 rows of chairs, with 10 chairs in each row, all of them filled. After we grab some paperwork and sign in at the front, Glenda picks out a row near the back where the four of us sit.
The older woman opens the meeting, which starts with the Pledge of Allegiance and a moment of silence honoring the victims of the September 11 attacks. Leslie remains seated for the first part of the pledge, before Glenda yanks her by her arm. “Leslie, get up!,” she whispers loudly.
The older woman, who seems to be running the session, introduces a terrorism specialist from the New York Police Department. He begins to expound on who terrorists are (“they can be anyone”), and identifies some Puerto Rican and black nationalist groups as terrorist organizations. Seemingly out of the blue, Todd stands up and makes his way down the aisle, muttering under his breath, “Y’all are the goddamn terrorists!” I initially assumed he was just heading to the bathroom, but then Glenda whispers to me, “He couldn’t take it. He left for good.”
Roughly 20 minutes later, Glenda and Leslie followed suit. They are tired. After working a full day, they do not wish to hear officers from the 44th Precinct boast about how crime has declined in the neighborhood. The more important questions have to do with why their sons are so often thrust into the middle of situations that can prove deeply troublesome and sometimes dangerous. They would rather hear solutions.
Although the three are long-time residents of the neighborhood, this was their first time attending a precinct community meeting. The decision to attend was not part of some grand plan to become more civic-minded. Rather, it was fueled largely by how their own sons, now in their late teens and early twenties, have systematically been mistreated by local police officers.
When I first met Glenda, a few years earlier, we sat on a cement segment of space near the entrance of her building in the courtyard of her apartment complex. It was hot out, and we were clinging to the shade. As we made small talk about the neighborhood, she proudly pointed to the perch on which we were sitting and then motioned to the ground, “This is my porch,” she said with a smile. “And this,” she added with a laugh, pointing to a space a few feet in front of her, “is my veranda.”
Combined, Todd, Glenda, and Leslie have lived in their South Bronx neighborhood for nearly a century. It is their home. Each has created family here, both through blood ties and kinship networks. Recently, however, the physical space, the apartments and houses where they lay their heads, and the public parks, stores, and streets where they spend much of their time, has been compromised by police efforts to make the community more “livable.”
Figure 3.1. A mother and her child attempt to beat the summer heat. Photo courtesy of the author.
While so many of the residents I’ve spoken to in the course of my research recognize and appreciate the decrease in specific crimes, such as homicide, they are quick to acknowledge the profound social consequences taken at the expense of the community as a result of aggressive policing tactics like stop and frisk. In other words, while only a select few are actually committing crimes in the area, in many ways the community as a whole must endure the policing regime, experiencing a form of collective punishment. And nowhere has this phenomenon become more abundantly clear than among neighborhood parents.
In talking with the partners of men serving time in California’s San Quentin Prison, the sociologist Megan Comfort concluded that the lives of these families are disrupted and consequently reshaped by the experience of incarceration.1 They, in turn, experience a form of “secondary prisonization.” Using this theoretical framework, I argue that although the parents in the southwest Bronx are often not the direct subjects of aggressive policing tactics, they experience an acute form of trauma vicariously through their children, a “secondary policing” of sorts, and must often endure both the emotional and financial burden of their children’s interactions with the police.
A Crash Course in Parenting the Policed
For Glenda, the stresses of having a teenage son in the neighborhood have been lifted, at least in part. Although it is still only fall, this is the first time in years she can recall not being anxiety-ridden about the forthcoming spring and summer months. It is during these warmer months, when her oldest son, Richard, and his friends spend their time playing basketball or passing time on the front stoop, that they also experience a great deal of harassment from police. Richard is now working two jobs and has moved out of the house, and, perhaps more significantly, out of the neighborhood he has called home for the entirety of his young life.
Although Glenda has fond memories of times with her children in the neighborhood, more recently, given local violence and aggressive police tactics, the neighborhood has become a source of frustration and even anguish. Glenda is unhappy that she can no longer see her son as often as she would like. Still, she feels that his new apartment in the North Bronx, away from family and friends, is a safer haven for him at this point in his life:
It was for the better, you know—him and his father wasn’t getting along too well, you know . . . working down there, he don’t have to worry about people coming in and messing with him. He don’t know nobody that live down there, so it’s good for him. When he comes back up here now, he’s not involved with all that stuff going on in the courtyard. It’s just “hi” and “bye.” He comes over to see his momma and his brother and that’s it.
According to Glenda, Richard’s first interactions with police began in his early teens. She is quick to point out, however, that they may have actually begun long before that. “As far as I know,” she says, “it could have been 14. It could have been younger, because like . . . the young men now, or the adolescents or young teenagers, and especially the men. I found out, that it became a thing with them, that it was normal. To them, it was normal. It was no need to tell Mom.”
When Richard turned 14, Glenda had bought him the once highly popular Sidekick cellphone. One d
ay, on the way back from school, the police stopped him and his friends. During the search, his phone fell out of the pocket and broke. Only then did he tell his mother what had happened:
He was on fire, he was like, “He [the officer] gonna break my phone and then start laughing!” I was like, who? He said the cops. I was like, what he stop you for? He was like, “Mom, c’mon!” He getting frustrated, like, “Mom, they always do that! That ain’t the first time that they did that!” I was like, wait a minute, that ain’t the first time? He was like, “Mom, this ain’t the first time. They been doing that . . . I’m just mad about my phone!” I’m talking about, they been stopping you for what? So, I’m like, oh, wow. Then you feel bad because if something happens, you as a parent want to defend your kid. So, that’s like a bully messing with my kid and it’s nothing I could do about it because it’s on a day-to-day basis.
Both Richard and his mother felt paralyzed by the interaction. While Richard was more immediately concerned about his cellphone, Glenda realized the significance of this series of events and how they might continue to affect her son and undermine her role as a parent. From this point forward, she said, she began to focus on how the police had begun to shape Richard’s everyday movements.
This was her introduction to raising heavily policed children. Routine events like walking to and from the subway, the park, or the store became much more of a challenge for Richard and his friends. Upon seeing boys in groups larger than four, police would quickly break up the pack, splitting them off into pairs, and, in the case of an odd number, forcing them to travel on their own. Because her son was often the tallest in the group, Glenda believed that he was unfairly ostracized and pushed to go places by himself, using routes he might not have been familiar with, at the insistence of the officers. In Glenda’s eyes, this type of police intervention could potentially jeopardize her son’s safety and well-being.