by Jan Haldipur
5
Losing Your Right to the City
Why would I want to help you solve a crime or tell you anything . . . and you talking to me like I’m a piece of trash at the bottom of your shoe?
—Robert
Aggressive policing has affected residents of the southwest Bronx in myriad and punishing ways. In many cases, even momentary interactions with the police have triggered a series of events that can profoundly alter the course of one’s life.
For residents like Reese, a formerly incarcerated young adult, aggressive policing tactics acted as a means of keeping him engaged with the criminal justice system, despite his attempts to “go legit.” While others, like Kwesi, a Ghanaian immigrant, have managed to steer clear of police in their neighborhood using their immigrant “protective layer,” this behavior has come at a pronounced social cost. Fathers like Raheem openly discussed the humiliation of being stopped and frisked while going to the store with young children in tow, while mothers like Leslie have reluctantly made the increasingly common decision to move out of the neighborhood altogether.
Young adults in this part of the Bronx have grown up on blocks where the sight of a neighbor, friend, or family member being harassed by the police is a common occurrence. As children, they are often painfully aware that their turn awaits.
Herein lies one of the more profound unanticipated consequences of the city’s stop-and-frisk policies. The practice has effectively worked to reshape many New Yorkers’ sense of citizenship and belonging in the city, particularly for young adults. It is yet another reminder of just how the combination of race, class, and geography can conspire to further solidify social caste in America, reaffirming how the state perceives particular groups.
As a result of these policies, young black and Latino residents are losing their rights to the city. In the southwest Bronx, even the quintessentially New York act of sitting on one’s own stoop has become risky. Public spaces that were once relied on to allow people to socialize and create meaningful associations are no longer available. As a means of coping with an overzealous police force, my findings reveal just how common it is for residents to withdraw from the greater community. This, in turn, can have severe consequences on the individual and neighborhood. Aggressive policing continually discourages the creation of neighborhood-level social ties, the very ties that may aid in getting a job or further educational opportunities.
On a neighborhood level, these weakened social networks can have an adverse effect on a community’s ability to police itself. According to the criminologists Clifford Shaw and Henry D. McKay, social disorganization refers to the inability of a community to collectively identify and solve the problems of its residents.1 In addition to variables like residential mobility and poverty, “weak social networks decrease a neighborhood’s capacity to control the behavior of people in public, and hence increase the likelihood of crime.”2
The criminologist Todd Clear uses the term “destabilizing neighborhoods” to describe the impact that mass incarceration has had on communities. 3 To a similar degree, aggressive policing in the southwest Bronx has destabilized the neighborhood. When the young people of the community are continually forced to withdraw from its streets and public places due to fear of negative encounters with the police, the informal mechanisms of social control are weakened, ultimately affecting the community’s ability to collectively solve problems.4
Resilience
On a more micro level, most of the residents I encountered exhibited a great deal of resilience. Violence from the police as well as their peers is a part of the social world of many young people, especially those who live in poor communities, but they are reluctant to let this violence define them. In the wake of aggressive policing, some of the older members of the community found solace in organizing other residents and becoming more engaged in local politics and campaigns against stop-and-frisk tactics.
By contrast, many of the young adults I spent time with directed their energy inwards. They already experience high levels of anxiety in settings like school and in the home, as well as among their peers. Negative interactions with the police add yet another source of stress, one that is not universally experienced by their peers in other parts of the city.
Resilience for these younger residents is demonstrated by their remarkable ability to compartmentalize troubling and even dangerous incidents and events in a way that prevents them from “contaminating” other aspects of their social, educational, and work lives. Among those young people who had the most frequent interactions with the police, the topic would come up only rarely. Conversations typically centered on the more mundane details of their everyday lives, with the police seemingly mentioned only as an afterthought.
I was initially surprised by this considering the frequency of many young adults’ involvement with the New York Police Department. Over time, I came to realize that this was part of the compartmentalization process, a tactic that deflected the immediacy of the issue. For so many of the young adults I spoke to, to actually think about and process what happened in their encounters with the police can become overwhelming. As one young adult, Larry, had said, “Just thinking about everyday things and it being so hard, that’s enough to depress anybody.”
Ripple Effects
With other jurisdictions around the country already beginning to adopt elements of the New York Police Department’s approach, it is worthwhile to revisit the overall efficacy of the regime. For a number of sociologists and criminologists, a central question remains: Can the continuing decline in crime be attributed directly to policing tactics like stop and frisk? Additionally, what are some of the unanticipated consequences of this approach to policing?
Beginning in the early 1990s, New York City experienced a substantial drop in crime. This decline actually predates the first William Bratton administration (between 1994 and 1996) that is widely credited with being responsible for the decrease in crime. Data suggest that crime was already on the decline before this first term and continued to decrease even after the New York Police Department began to ease its reliance on “stop, question, and frisk” as a tactic.
Moreover, a growing body of research suggests that aggressive policing is simply not a sustainable policy because the social costs of this form of social control outweigh its potential benefits. Findings from the legal scholar Tom Tyler and his colleagues show a powerful connection between police legitimacy and compliance with the law.5 More specifically, they write, “when authorities are viewed as legitimate, they are better able to motivate people to comply with the law.”6 Moreover, research from Stephanie Wiley and Finn-Aage Esbensen suggests that being stopped or arrested may actually contribute to further delinquency, rather than reduce it.7
As is demonstrated by a 2013 report from the Vera Institute of Justice, a national criminal justice think tank, aggressive policing can have a profound impact on the willingness of local residents to cooperate with authorities:
Young people who have been stopped more often in the past are less willing to report crimes, even when they themselves are the victims. Each additional stop in the span of a year is associated with an 8% drop in the person’s likelihood of reporting a violent crime he or she might experience in the future.8
This reluctance to engage with police can extend into the courtroom as well, negatively affecting a district attorney’s ability to secure a conviction. “Thompson,” a high-ranking attorney at the Bronx District Attorney’s office, has been with the department for approximately 20 years. He arrived to the borough fresh out of law school in the mid-1990s, at the peak of the War on Drugs. With his docket in the 100s, he reports having felt overwhelmed by the sheer volume of his caseload, as he and his colleagues were forced to triage as a way to keep up with the demand. By the time the 2000s rolled around, things began to turn around:
[In] ‘96-‘97 . . . it was crazy busy. A lot of violence, shootings, robberies, assaults, guns, everything. I got promoted to a trial bureau like
this one in mid-‘97. My caseload then was very, very high. A lot of felonies. A lot of violence. As the 2000s came in, crime dropped. My caseload dropped. I felt it drop. I went from when I first started in trial bureau, from like 60 indictments, which is a lot. They’re serious crimes, there’s a lot of work that goes into them, to 30–35 indictments . . . and I’m not saying crime dropped by half, I don’t know. I’m just saying, we all felt it.
With caseloads beginning to subside, community relations continued to falter, due in large part to widespread mistrust of the NYPD across the borough. As Thompson illustrates, this can have tangible effects on the conviction rate:
The “stop and frisk” part . . . that might be what effects the conviction rate. And I don’t mean that by itself, but, like the Diallo case, Abner Louima in a different county. All these things that build up, because we read about it . . . if I read about it and it’s on the news, the jurors read about it. If I read the Post, they read the Post. . . . Listen, a lot of jurors don’t trust the police. I don’t even know if they trust me. I think they trust me, but I’m not so sure. There’s a lot of police officers—great, great police officers who are good guys trying to do the right thing and they get in front of the jury and the jurors are like “We don’t like him.” Because he’s a cop.
Here, one can see the divide between community members and local law enforcement on full display. This pervasive sense of mistrust also extended to the process of obtaining witness testimony, perhaps an attorney’s biggest asset when building a case:
So 18 years ago, I’m in that building, I have 80 cases, and I have my first, like, case that’s in the press. It’s a misdemeanor, but it’s in the press, whatever, it was an MTA driver that got assaulted and we had a witness who was on the subway.
I go out to her house, her apartment, it was a freezing, freezing day, like a foot of snow on the ground. I go with the detective. It was my first time ever at somebody’s house and I’m all, my eyes are wide open.
We walk into the projects, go up like five flights and we knock on the door and a woman says, “Who is it?”
We say it’s the DA’s office and a police officer. I show my ID through the peephole, she says hold on a second, hold on. She comes and opens a door, it’s an older woman. I say, hi, we’re looking for so and so, I think it’s your daughter. She goes, she’s not here. I said, it’s freezing . . . can we come in? She says sure.
We go into her kitchen, it’s freezing, and she said, what are you doing? So I said, she’s a witness to a crime, she’s not in trouble, but I really would like to speak to her. She said, are you sure she’s not in trouble? I said, ma’am, I’m telling you, she’s a witness, she saw a guy get assaulted, we’d really like to speak to her. She goes, hold on a second. She goes to the fire escape, opens the window and tells her daughter to come back in. Her daughter was on the fire escape. It had to be 10 degrees out. She was hiding. She comes in. She makes tea for us. The girl was 16. We sit down, we have tea. She’s the nicest girl in the world . . . distrusted anybody in a uniform. Anybody.
Repeat negative interactions with street-level bureaucrats9 like the New York Police Department not only produce damaging effects on a community level, but can also impact how justice is dispensed. In Thompson’s conception, due in part to aggressive police tactics, jurors and witnesses alike seemed less likely to sympathize with police officers, thus at times affecting his ability to secure a conviction.
Policy Implications
Two white vans with blue trim speed by Robert and me as we sit under the trees lining the edge of a deserted basketball court in the South Bronx’s Andrew Jackson Houses, a public housing complex in the 40th Precinct. The New York Police Department vehicles come to a screeching halt on a street corner a stone’s throw from where we were sitting. A group of officers exit the wagons and begin talking to some older male residents who are casually drinking in front of an empty brick building.
Robert, a heavyset African American man who serves as the tenant association president of the Jackson Houses, races up the block to better gauge the situation. He returns a few minutes later looking troubled. Just moments earlier, the same group of men had stopped by to say hello. One of the men, David, is a close friend of Robert who is currently on parole. Robert is worried this latest arrest may translate to another bid upstate for him.
Having lived in the same apartment for his entire life, Robert has an intimate, almost encyclopedic, knowledge of the Jackson Houses that stretches back decades. In this time, he has witnessed a great deal of change in the area. The one constant, however, has been continually deteriorating conditions in the buildings he calls home. In recent years, there have been small changes to the grounds, including minor renovations to the recreation areas. But modifications have only marginally improved the quality of life. As Robert explains:
We just had the PHAS, Public Housing Assessment Survey, that’s a survey where HUD [Department of Housing and Urban Development] comes out to see how you’re maintaining the building, how you’re taking care of the property. How you’re keeping the upkeep of people’s apartments, how people are taking care of where they’re renting from the government. I believe we passing, 65 is passing. We just got a 66 . . . the light fixtures in the hallways are out, and they wondering why people are getting robbed. Friday we had a gentleman get robbed, where the teenagers followed him from the store, saw the gold chain on his neck and he’s coming over here where we’re sitting at to sit down, until the senior citizen center opens up for lunch . . . they snatch his chain. Daylight.
In Robert’s opinion, the breakdown of conditions in the Jackson Houses correlates with residents’ feelings about safety. But while community members yearn for a safer neighborhood, he cautions that more aggressive policing tactics aren’t the answer. Instead, he advocates a return to a form of “community policing” that existed in decades past—a theme that has consistently come up throughout my fieldwork. Robert is among many local residents who share in the collective memory of a more grounded, community-friendly police force. With the help of his mother, Ann, he recalls a time when the neighborhood’s relationship with the 40th Precinct was much different:
Robert: There was a level of respect because the cop knew you. We had the community policing in effect. [He asks his mother, an elderly African American woman sitting with a friend on a nearby bench] What was the cop’s name that used to patrol when I was younger?
Ann: It was Jesse, it was Larry, it was Phil—
Robert: See, and they calling first names. Jesse, Larry, Phil, Smitty . . . this was about 30 years ago, right? Thirty years ago.
Ann: 25.
Robert: See, we had it . . . they knew the people and they took the time. The 40th Precinct had an initiative. [Points to Ann] She’s telling a story about how 25 years ago, 30 years ago, a kid ran across the street and a cop spanked the boy and took him upstairs to his mother . . . and the mother beat him. This man [the officer] walked up and down the block every day. He started to know the people. I mean, if the elderly people saw something, they said something. They felt comfortable with this man, here. Now he’s not here anymore and all we got is these little knuckleheads walking up and down the street killing each other. The police come after the fact. After everybody dead, gone, bleeding. They want to come in gung ho, swinging sticks and kicking asses, and taking names later . . . and then they wanna talk about, but this is why we treat y’all like shit. Because nobody never wanna say nothing. Why would I want to help you solve a crime or tell you anything . . . and you talking to me like I’m a piece of trash at the bottom of your shoe?
Given the reputation the New York Police Department had during the “Bronx is Burning” 1970s, and with allegations of corruption continuing through the 1980s, it is somewhat challenging to accept these claims at face value. Nevertheless, if not an actual “return,” there is something to be said about a move toward community policing.10
As things stand now, community-police relations are severely
strained across the five boroughs. As much of my data supports, there is limited faith in the New York Police Department and in the justice system on the whole. Thus, any plan to remedy this fast deteriorating situation would have to address a massive overhaul of the current policing culture.
Although stop-and-frisk policing is often the most visible tactic used by the New York Police Department, it is only a small piece of a much larger institution that has effectively deemphasized community relations as part of sound police practice. Most precincts simply no longer (or never had) the strong community ties necessary to do good police work—to be able to differentiate between “Johnny,” who works full time and attends night school, from his cousin, “Peter,” who sells heroin from a park bench. Many unnecessary stops could be avoided if the beat officer had even a modicum of the knowledge countless local residents already possess. Instead, what is in place is a system that incentivizes arbitrary frisks—further distancing officers from the actual people the New York Police Department sets out to serve.
As Adrian Schoolcraft and other former officers have revealed, while the New York Police Department may not acknowledge a formal frisk quota, any form of mobility within the department may hinge on an officer’s ability to make stops.11 To that end, in 2015, a lawsuit filed by Edwin Raymond and 11 other New York Police Department officers (Raymond et al. v. the City of New York) alleged that officers are required to reach monthly arrest and summons goals.
Alonzo, a former officer who agreed to speak to me, spent five years working at a precinct in Midtown Manhattan. He describes the challenges of his first year on the beat: