No Place on the Corner

by Jan Haldipur

  In recent months, a handful of shootings have occurred in the area and a robbery took place in a first-floor apartment in their building. They see a noticeable difference in how the neighborhood is policed compared to other neighborhoods they’ve lived in. This they attribute to a number of factors, including its proximity to the courthouse and Yankee Stadium. Now that the couple is expecting their first child, these factors have begun to weigh on their decision to remain in the neighborhood. As Trevor said:

  I feel like I’m ready to move. I just don’t like the fact that . . . me, just knowing that all the time, I always get the second look, the second glance from cops. They want to do U-turns and stuff like that, you know? I want to move somewhere where I don’t have to worry about police like this, the “stop and frisk.” . . . I came home and lived in a decent neighborhood where it wasn’t a lot of things happening so they didn’t fly around like that. Like, over here, it brings back shades of growing up in the projects, the way they are. I just came here in January [back to the Bronx]. But, I’m looking to move. I don’t want to stay here any longer.

  Like many of the young adults I spoke to, Trevor has adopted something of an “isolationist” strategy as a way of adapting to his circumstances. After work, he leaves the apartment only when absolutely necessary, preferring to stay indoors, even in summer, away from any potential danger.

  Kym echoes this sentiment: “I just feel like, we go to work, we come home, we close our door, we stay to ourselves, and there’s no real sense of community or socializing. . . . It’s like, go to work, come home, groceries, like, it’s all basic day-to-day things you need to do. If you need to leave the house, you do, if you don’t, go home. Just avoid trouble.”

  With a baby due in a few months—they are expecting a son—the couple has begun to discuss their immediate future:

  Jan: How do you feel about preparing him to deal with police?

  Kym: I’m so scared about that. I have no idea. I just feel like I’m going to read a lot of books and not let him go out until he’s 18! [Laughs]

  Trevor: I mean . . . depending on how we . . . I don’t plan on living here, so, depending on where we’re living, up until he has an interaction with them, I don’t feel the need to tell him.

  Although Trevor and Kym are lifelong Bronx residents, they feel that the neighborhood, and even the borough itself, presents too many potential land mines for children. While other neighborhoods may present similar obstacles, the pair feels that life on the whole may be more manageable away from the city. As Kym puts it:

  I have my heart here in the Bronx, but as far as raising my child, I want my kid to go to a good school district and have a fighting chance. I don’t want him to think that it’s normal to drop out of high school or to be stopped and frisked. I don’t want to worry about that . . . or at least worry about it less.

  The Second Shift

  In the 1989 book, The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home, a seminal work on the division of labor in the home, Arlie Hochschild and Anne Machung talk at length about the so-called second shift, or the “job after the job,” when parents must attend to housework and child care. In the southwest Bronx, this second shift often takes on an entirely different meaning for parents as police add another layer of complexity. Many of the parents I spoke to have cultivated a set of coping skills used both to 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 instances occur.

  When Glenda’s son, Richard, was still living in her apartment, for instance, he was instructed to check in periodically, as most parents require of their children. In instances when he failed to check in or arrived late, however, instead of calling the parents of a friend, Glenda began to call the 44th Precinct to make sure he wasn’t being held there. This decision came after repeated occasions when her son was brought in and often unable to call and notify his mother until a few hours after the initial police contact. As she explained, “You know . . . after a while you lose count. I can count the times I had to get him. I can’t count the times I ain’t know he was there. I’d say in a year . . . at least 20 in a year. At least . . . AT LEAST. To pick him . . . to see if he even in the station. I’ve walked, caught cabs, stood there.”

  During the summer, Leslie took it upon herself to restrict the movements of her son, Albert, to a set of previously defined places so as to avoid police contact. For days at a time, her teenage son was forbidden to leave his apartment’s courtyard. “I mean he can go to the store for me during the day,” she said. “But when it gets dark, uh-uh. He knows he has to be in the house. When he’s at his girlfriend’s place, I tell him to take a cab back. It’s not worth it.”

  Even while on the apartment grounds, both mothers see it as important to keep on “parent patrol.” With her eldest no longer in the house, Glenda’s day-to-day routines have begun to shift. For starters, she no longer feels obliged to spend her after-work hours monitoring her children:

  I don’t be out like that. I come on upstairs. Since my kids done got older and I don’t have to . . . well, the oldest one has gotten older and moved away, I don’t feel like I have to protect him and be there on parent patrol because that’s what I be doing, parent patrol. My youngest one [Cliff], he don’t hang in here, he’s got his little friends and he’s at their house. And to be honest, it’s a color thing too, because my oldest one, it was black and black. He’s [Cliff] black, and he’s got Dominican and Puerto Rican friends so, they don’t . . . it’s when you get a group of this one right here, or group of that one.

  Glenda feels that the obligation to monitor the behavior of her children has been lifted in part due to which children her youngest son associated with. In her worldview, race and ethnicity play a critical role in how young people of the neighborhood are policed, with black children in the neighborhood receiving a disproportionate amount of police contact, even when compared to Latinos in the area.

  Given what they have experienced over the past decade, Leslie and Glenda are hopeful that their sons will “age out” of being police targets. These past few years have proved to be taxing for both mothers, as each arrest often takes a substantial amount of time out of their schedules, can be costly, and, perhaps most important, could compromise their children’s ability to live normal, healthy teenage lives. Both Glenda and Leslie actively contested all of the charges levied against their sons. They take each contact with police seriously, worrying how it may negatively affect their sons in the future. In Leslie’s case, after nearly two years of contesting a case involving her son and a friend, the matter was finally dismissed after a new assistant district attorney took on the case:

  We were out there, we came out to the courthouse the other week. The line was stretched all the way out here! [motions to 163rd Street and Morris Avenue, two blocks away from the courthouse.] So we waited and waited. We saw people we knew and let them cut, I mean we might as well wait together, right? [Laughs] So we waiting for some hours and I’m calling my lawyer, and she finally tells us that the case was going to be thrown out. They wanted them to cop to another charge, but we wasn’t doing that. You’re not gonna have my son copping to something he didn’t do. So we took it to trial and they finally threw it out! After all these years going back and forth to court.

  In another incident, Glenda’s son was arrested for trespassing while at a friend’s apartment up the block. Richard spent the night in jail until he was able to see a judge:

  Glenda: They tried a lot of stuff, but, I guess they tried to scare him and make him . . . like, they caught him one time out there without me, for trespassing. He was 16, so—

  Jan: So he pleaded by himself, you didn’t even get to talk to him about it—

  Glenda: No, I wasn’t even there. So you know, he was like, Mom—

  Jan: Was it an ACD [Adjournment in Contemplation of Dismissal]?

  Glenda: No, I had to pay a fine and an ACD. He said, they told
him, this how they got him . . . they said, “Could you pay $25?” You know, he want to come home, so he like $25, yeah! This is something he could do without me. $25. Then they say the surcharge is this, $145. Now it’s too late [laughs]. Then, I’m like, OK, don’t you ever do that again.

  Tired and homesick after spending the night in a holding cell, Richard was eager to get back home and accepted the fine, unaware of the gravity of the charges. While he would have to see out the ACD for the remaining six months, his mother was forced to pay off the hefty ticket.

  Glenda, who works at a child-care center, openly questions how things might have been different if she had worked elsewhere. Her office is in walking distance of both her apartment and the precinct. As a result, she can leave and check in with her children with relative ease and without a substantial loss of earnings. Had the situation been different, she wonders if she would have been able to put in the hours necessary to fight the charges levied against her son:

  I have a job that I can just run out and run back to. You really have to, because you don’t know how long it’s gonna take. So, yeah, you had to take off. You had to because then you don’t know if your child . . . you telling me that he’s old enough but he . . . if you tell him he can go home and there’s an ACD, six months out of trouble, he ain’t paying no fine. He gonna take that. But eventually, it’s not gonna look good once some judge opens it up.

  “I Know It’s Gonna Change”: Dislocation in the Southwest Bronx

  For Glenda, the neighborhood has changed a great deal since she moved up from Maryland in the early 1980s. Initially settling with an aunt in the southwest Bronx, she ended up moving several times, each time within a few blocks of where she currently lives. She knows the area well, and from time to time she will reflect on just how much the neighborhood has changed over the years.

  Although the Bronx of previous decades is vividly remembered as a powerful symbol of social disorder, defined by crime, drugs, and widespread civic indifference, many older residents remember these years as having a greater sense of cohesiveness and community. As part of this collective memory, mothers like Glenda often yearn for the “community policing” of old:

  The people who were in the area here, they were close-knit. Everybody knew everybody’s kids. We knew people that lived in the courtyard that still live here now. Some of my cousins and them stayed across the street. It was just totally different. I seen it when, you know, police, at a point, you didn’t mind. They were out there and it was like, that was their beat. They knew the officers that you was familiar with. Even if you didn’t know his name, you knew that was the officer that was coming there. That’s the police right there! The kids know the policemen and you had a conversation with him. When you was going to the store, you felt protected.

  While some visible remnants of this form of policing remain, the statistics-driven CompStat revolution has pushed policing in the southwest Bronx further away from this standard. A direct result of this shift is families leaving the neighborhood. In my time in the community, countless residents told me about their aspirations, some distant and some already realized, to leave. For many, the tension between wanting to stay and having to leave was all too real.

  Most mornings, before the sun makes its way over the horizon, Leslie will take a stroll around the neighborhood. A close friend, who also lives in the building, will join her on some days as they make their way through the maze of streetlights and stop signs. There’s never any defined destination. Sometimes they’ll stop for coffee, but usually they’ll just walk and talk, enjoying the calm before the rest of the city wakes up. These are the moments Leslie misses the most.

  In the spring of 2013, her Section 8 transfer went through, allowing her and Albert to move out of the neighborhood and to an apartment in Westchester County, to the north of the city. Although she sees the move as necessary, she misses the old neighborhood. They still visit as often as they can. She, to see her sister and friends, Albert, to see his newly born son, who lives with the mother of his child in the neighborhood. Still, Leslie tries to remains optimistic about the move and the changes it set in motion:

  Leslie: It’s really not bad. Albert is still up here all the time. His son is here and all of his friends, you know. . . . I just bought him a new bed and he hasn’t slept in it yet! I’m going to return it if he doesn’t spend the night here soon [laughs]. I spent good money on that! . . . It’s real quiet there. I’ve been there for a few months now and I still haven’t seen anyone who lives in our building!

  Jan: Do you wish you stayed at all?

  Leslie: [Shakes head] Uh-uh, not at all. It was too much going on. I had to get out.

  As for Glenda, although she sees the rapidly changing composition of her block as somewhat of a natural progression, she is sad to see so many of her friends leave, and not by choice:

  Well, I’m glad mine’s [Richard] gone. I mean, whether it was the police or not, it was time to grow up and be on your own to become a man, because you a father now . . . you have to. But, to see families picking up, mothers picking up to take their kids, their young men out, because you’re scared . . . both ways you’re scared. It ain’t like I’m scared of the street and I can call “Officer Joe” and he’s gonna help you. Officer Joe is a big part of the problem. So, it bothers me . . . people that I’ve been with for years. Our kids grew up together. We still . . . it’s a whole new . . . when I walk into the courtyard, it’s all different faces.

  With Richard out of the house, and her youngest seemingly able to avoid persistent contact with the police, Glenda holds tight to the notion that things will change again, and this time for the better. Along with a handful of her remaining friends, she has built a foundation in the neighborhood, and would prefer to see her commitment to the area through:

  I’m not leaving. I mean, I work in the area, I walk to work. . . . I don’t pay no carfare. My son was born up the block and raised here and went to school all around. The little one. Hopefully, it doesn’t become the O.K. Corral, or the cops really get out of hand, or people just knocking your door down robbing you. I’m not gonna leave because I know it’s gonna change. It’s gonna change and it’s gonna be a better place. I’ve been here for years, so I’m going to have to have this little apartment once it turns to condominiums. I’m going to be the little 1 percent! [laughs] I gotta have that 1 percent! You can’t just kick me out! I’m that 1 percent and they better just build around me!

  Still, for many of the people I spent time with, the damage has been done. Given the often-prohibitive costs of raising a child in New York City, aggressive police tactics pose yet another barrier for poor and working-class families trying to get ahead. This policing regime continues to undermine their roles as parents and has caused countless mothers and fathers to rethink what it means to raise children in the neighborhood.

  4

  Policing Immigrant Communities

  Them over there, and we over here.

  —Adriana

  Having just ordered, Kwesi and I sat opposite each other in a nearly empty Benihana’s Restaurant in Midtown Manhattan on a July afternoon. It’s 4 p.m. and outside it is a humid 90 degrees. The air conditioner, which was blasting directly above our heads, provides a welcome breeze, helping to dry our already sweat-soaked shirts.

  Weeks earlier, Kwesi and I had decided to meet for an early dinner to celebrate our July birthdays (his early in the month, mine toward the end). At Kwesi’s insistence, we settled on Benihana’s. He had discovered a few years ago through a friend from his church that if you sign up to be on the restaurant’s e-mail list, you’re entitled to a free $30 meal during your birth month. This is the third consecutive year Kwesi has taken advantage of this deal.

  After we’re finished, we exit onto West 56th Street, where a slew of cabs speed by us. As we make our way toward the subway, Kwesi tells me he wishes he still had an unlimited MetroCard so he could make more trips like this. It’s nearing rush hour as we walk down Sixth Avenu
e. In the shadows of the skyscrapers towering above us, neatly suited men and women just getting out of work whisk by us.

  Every few steps, Kwesi stops to look up at the buildings, awkwardly dodging oncoming foot traffic. Occasionally, he would break his silence by asking me questions about when particular buildings were built, or “who works there?” As we near the subway entrance, Kwesi slows his pace, seemingly taking a few extra minutes to soak in his surroundings. Then he smiles, explaining, “I’m not sure when I’ll be back again.”

  Kwesi lives with his father and an older brother and sister in the 42nd Precinct, just six miles, or 25 minutes by subway, north of our dinner destination. But despite this proximity, this is only the second time he has left the Bronx in four months. Although he considers the borough home, unlike many of his American-born neighbors, his sentimental attachment to the community is much more limited. In many ways, the neighborhood is nothing more than a place to lay his head.

  Kwesi moved to the United States from Ghana permanently when he was 15. He is a United States citizen because he was born in the United States, but shortly after his birth he was taken back to Ghana to live with his mother. Four years ago, with his brother and sister already having returned to the States, his father, a taxi driver in Manhattan, had sent for Kwesi. But although he was excited about seeing his siblings again, leaving his mother behind proved unsettling.

  Kwesi has accepted the challenges involved with securing the proper paperwork needed to allow his mother to return to the United States, so the family can be reunited. “We always hope that it will be in the next year, but they never make it that simple,” he says. “It costs money, it costs time . . . so that’s going to be tough to put a concrete day on it. But we’re always working on it, trying to get our options together . . . if not, keep trying to get more time and more money to do it.”