White Space, Black Hood

by Sheryll Cashin

  In Baltimore, between 2010 and 2014, the DOJ reported that police conducted over one hundred thousand stops in the Western and Central Districts. The least populated police districts in the city, comprising only 12 percent of Baltimore’s population, endured 44 percent of all stops recorded citywide. Poor hoods in East and West Baltimore were disproportionately targeted. Descendants told the DOJ about repeated encounters with the police, in the street and on sidewalks. One said he had been stopped thirty-four times. Several hundred residents said they had been stopped at least ten times. Some were stopped multiple times in the same week without being charged for any crime.17

  Cops lawed and ordered, telling descendants to clear corners where they congregated and talked. One officer directed youth to disperse because “it looks bad.” The DOJ concluded that these frequent dispersal orders lacked any legal basis and that they were not effective in fighting crime. Overall, the Baltimore Police Department’s pedestrian stops uncovered slight criminal activity and the rate of finding criminal activity when Black Americans were stopped and searched was lower still.18

  The DOJ’s investigation of the Chicago Police Department examined a legendary police tactic called the “jump out.” Plainclothes officers in unmarked vehicles would jump out of their cars and advance on young men, sometimes with guns drawn. At night, not surprisingly, individuals often fled, not waiting around to find out that the aggressors were in fact police officers. The inevitable chase led police to shoot innocent people running in at least two circumstances.19 The CPD deployed tactical gang or narcotics units that do not answer service calls but conduct stops and look for reasons to arrest people. The DOJ talked to Black citizens in targeted neighborhoods about their relations with the police. One youth said he felt like he lived in “an open-air prison.” Another said, “They patrol our streets like they are the dog catchers and we are the dogs.” One officer admitted to the DOJ that “kids” on the North Side of Chicago who get caught with marijuana receive a citation while those on the South Side would get arrested.20

  Boys in the hood were presumed to be thugs—that is, presumed guilty—while others were presumed innocent. Some officers used words in their interactions with young Black men that attested to this differential attitude. In its report, the DOJ wrote:

  Black youth told us that they are routinely called “nigger,” “animal,” or “pieces of shit” by CPD officers. . . . Such statements were confirmed by CPD officers. One officer we interviewed told us that he personally has heard co-workers and supervisors refer to black individuals as monkeys, animals, savages, and “pieces of shit.” . . .

  Our investigation found that there was a recurring portrayal by some CPD officers of the residents of challenged neighborhoods—who are mostly black—as animals or subhuman. One CPD member told us that the officers in his district come to work every day “like it’s a safari.”21

  Jump outs were not exclusive to Chicago. In his unflinching book Chokehold: Policing Black Men, Paul Butler describes how the tactic was deployed in poor Black neighborhoods in Washington, DC, especially those experiencing an influx of white residents. It didn’t matter that many of the police chasing young Black men were also Black men. They were frontline soldiers who did the job assigned to them, which in gentrifying neighborhoods, Butler asserted, was catering to whites’ desires and fears.22

  In 1994, the New York Police Department adopted “zero-tolerance policing” of minor quality-of-life offenses. Two academics had theorized in a magazine article entitled “Broken Windows” that physical and social disorder created the perception that no one cared about a particular neighborhood, therefore inviting more serious crime.23 In ensuing decades, New York’s zero-tolerance policy entrenched a practice of aggressive order-maintenance policing in certain neighborhoods. “Broken windows” policing broke lives as the number of encounters between police and citizens multiplied exponentially, producing stops, summonses, arrests, and occasionally death, sometimes for trivial offenses.24 Eric Garner, the large Black man and father of six who said he could not breathe as multiple officers tackled him, had allegedly been selling “loosies,” or untaxed single cigarettes. He died for the “crime” of trying to make some extra money to support his family, in a gentrifying neighborhood in which police had been tasked with stopping such cultural side hustles.25

  At its height, New York City’s zero-tolerance program ensnared one-fifth of the Black population of the city. One study estimated that a Black male age eighteen to nineteen had an 80 percent probability of being stopped. And yet a successful class-action constitutional challenge to stop-and-frisk, Floyd v. City of New York, revealed that police rarely recovered any evidence of crime, and nearly 90 percent of these stops did not result in arrest.26

  Whatever the intentions behind the broken-windows theory, analyses of zero-tolerance policing in New York City at its height show how segregation facilitates differential policing. The NYPD could not police minor infractions everywhere, so specific neighborhoods and populations were targeted. Suddenly, a young man standing on the sidewalk with his bike became a target. He and others like him could no longer move about as if they were free; behavior that most people would consider ordinary was criminalized and led sometimes to an arrest. Even when charges were dropped, the arrest record could lead to a kind of civil death. Descendants living in targeted hoods quickly learned how difficult it was to succeed and thrive.27 Meanwhile, true physical disorder in those neighborhoods—litter, abandoned vehicles, and actually broken windows—were not being remedied.

  While New York’s zero-tolerance program was abandoned under Mayor de Blasio, separate and unequal policing continued. In 2018, the New York Times conducted an investigation of arrests for petty marijuana use and found the NYPD almost always made arrests at higher rates in areas with more Black citizens. In Queens, for example, majority-Black Queens Village experienced an arrest rate ten times that of Forest Hills, which has only a tiny Black population, even though the rate of complaints about marijuana use was the same for each precinct. Across very segregated New York City, the police arrested Black people for low-level marijuana violations at eight times the rate of whites over the three years that the Times investigated.28

  Where segregation endures, anti-Black policing habits do not seem to die. New York City was the nation’s hotspot in fighting the COVID-19 pandemic in the early spring of 2020. COVID deaths soared within Black communities, but punitive policing continued. The Brooklyn district attorney released data on arrests made in the borough for violations of social distancing rules between mid-March and early May. Police arrested thirty-five Blacks, four Hispanics, and one white. One-third of these arrests occurred in the predominantly Black neighborhood of Brownsville. No arrests were made in whiter Park Slope. Elsewhere, in videos in which whites could be seen flouting social distancing in parks in lower Manhattan, police handed them masks. Mayor de Blasio initially defended the NYPD, distinguishing their actions from the zero-tolerance era. A crescendo of complaints was generated by a video of officers tackling and arresting Kaleemah Rozier after stopping her for not wearing her mask properly; de Blasio pledged to reset police involvement with social distancing, focusing them on dispersing large crowds rather than issuing summonses.29

  Breaching social-distancing rules was not a crime, but routine behavior was criminalized in instances of arrest. Only Black people, it seems, were targeted for systemic policing. They constituted 88 percent of those arrested in this sample from Brooklyn, a borough that was only a third Black.30

  George Floyd’s slow execution brought 20/20 focus on racist policing in the United States. Less clear in that radical moment was the role of segregation in his death. Map 8.1 in the insert marks the spot where Floyd died in south Minneapolis with a black star. He departed this earth near the intersection of Thirty-Eighth Street and Chicago Avenue, in racially mixed Powderhorn, not far from dividing lines to white space. One green dot on the map equals one hundred Black people. One red dot equals ten po
or people. Like every other segregated city, Minneapolis’s stark segregation was constructed with great intention—a history of racially restrictive covenants, redlining, urban renewal, and exclusion similar to that of other cities.31 This produced segregation helps explain why the Twin Cities region has one of the highest standards of living in the country and among the nation’s highest rates of racial inequality—on dimensions like income, wealth, employment, life expectancy, and educational attainment.32 Racial disparities were also endemic in policing. The Minneapolis Police Department was perennially accused of racist misconduct. Police in Minneapolis and the region killed Black men: Jamar Clark in 2015. Philando Castile in 2016. Thurman Blevins in 2018. Mario Benjamin in 2019. George Floyd in 2020. Protest and ineffective “reforms” were familiar rituals even before George Floyd died. Criminologist Philip M. Stinson told the New York Times that the data on the department’s use of force since 2015 suggested police in Minneapolis “routinely beat the hell out of black men.”33

  Powderhorn is due south of some of the “Blackest” and poorest neighborhoods on the southside, and it is buffered by an interstate from the very white, affluent Southwest neighborhood. My research assistant lived in Southwest and in Powderhorn at different stages of his life. He tells me that police in Powderhorn tended to be “hunters” and that in Southwest they acted as “protectors,” if they were seen at all. His anecdote accords with social science about differential policing between Black and white neighborhoods.34

  According to recent data, Minneapolis police used force against Black people at seven times the rate of whites. The New York Times published a map that encoded the spots where force was used since 2015; the map showed a pockmarked density of purple circles in the very same hoods dense with Black folk and poverty. Police wielded guns, chemical irritants, Tasers, chokeholds, body-pins, fists, and other brute force in the hood. Meanwhile, the white working-class Northeast quadrant, across the Mississippi River from very Black areas, were spared such intense use of force, as was the affluent white Southwest.35

  Powderhorn is not a poor Black neighborhood, though at the time Floyd was killed it was majority nonwhite and gentrifying. Researchers have found connections between gentrification and heightened order-maintenance policing.36 Anti-Black policing habits incubated in the hood in Minneapolis apparently were brought to Powderhorn, though in the Times map not with the same density of violent encounters.37

  Like so many other white police officers, Derek Chauvin did not live in the neighborhoods he hunted. He resided in a suburb of St. Paul that was over 80 percent white and owned a second home in Florida, where he was registered to vote, in a suburb that was 85 percent white.38 George Floyd, son of the historically Black and proud Third Ward of Houston, grew up living in Cuney Homes public housing. The world views and possibilities of both men surely were shaped by their very different environments.

  What explains separate and unequal policing, the dramatically different style of policing in Black and white neighborhoods? Academics have theories. One argues that policing in Black neighborhoods is thinly disguised suppression, “a direct instrument of racial and ethnic control.”39 Others similarly, though less bluntly, associate excessive, violent policing in the hood with broad, errant perceptions of threatening racial minorities.40 Paul Butler argues that police, political leaders, and even ordinary people are afraid of Black men. The system is working precisely as it was designed to do, he reasons: Treat Black men as violent threats and thugs that need to be forcefully restrained.41

  Others theorize that policing in the hood is spatial containment; the ghetto itself, with attendant massive police surveillance, is an institution of invasive social control.42 Sociologist Loïc Wacquant argued the iconic ghetto and the American prison are in a “deadly symbiosis,” asserting that the criminal justice system utilizes the “crime-and-punishment” paradigm as a front to cover for its more invidious goal: the controlling and containment of poor Black Americans.43

  James Baldwin had a similar view of the hood’s subordinating purposes. “This innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fact, it intended that you should perish,” he wrote to his nephew in The Fire Next Time. “[F]or the heart of the matter is here, and the root of my dispute with this country.”44 The prophetic writer, born and raised in Harlem before expatriating to France, knew the ways of ghetto policing. In 1960, Baldwin noted that for Harlemites the police “represent the force of the white world, and that world’s real intentions are, simply, for that world’s criminal profit and ease, to keep the black man corralled up here, in his place.”45

  As to the “world’s criminal profit and ease,” aggressive policing reaps revenues, and serious costs, for the localities that deploy it. Beyond containment, another function of anti-Black policing is economic plunder. In 2014 alone, New York City received nearly $32 million from fees, fines, and surcharges paid to the criminal courts by people facing misdemeanors, summonses, or other low-level violations. Researchers estimated that, over two decades of zero-tolerance policing, the city’s take from this program exceeded a half billion dollars. They concluded that most of these revenues were “extracted from relatively poor segments of the population, who live in heavily policed neighborhoods.”46

  Policing as revenue raising became infamous after police officer Darren Wilson shot and killed eighteen-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. The Black Lives Matter movement ignited. National and international press covered the story. Wilson was not indicted. But the Obama Department of Justice investigated Ferguson police practices and issued a scathing report, concluding that the city regularly violated the constitutional rights of Black citizens in order to help fund itself.47

  Whether in small suburbs like Ferguson, or a metropolis like New York City, the burdens of policing for so-called public-order crimes fell disproportionately on descendants. And the legal proceedings that ensued after a traffic stop, say for a vehicle defect or drinking an open container in public, could metastasize to enduring financial burdens, criminal stigma, loss of jobs, or housing.48 In places engaged in revenue-raising public-order policing, the state invested heavily in the bureaucratic regime needed to process and manage so many cases. With bureaucratic expansion, criminal justice became less about solving crime and transparently tied to cash flow.49 Another example: The District of Columbia issued $1 billion in traffic and parking citations from 2017 to 2019, according to the American Automobile Association.50 While the AAA did not suggest any racial disparities surrounding these fines, the DC-ACLU’s evidence of harsh racial disparity in traffic arrests suggest that these financial burdens, too, fell disproportionately.51 Scholars have connected the dots, theorizing that policing and other predation by cities of Black people in their neighborhoods is a result not only of racially discriminatory design but economic incentives.52 With the budget shortfalls of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a serious risk this predatory economic relationship between cities and Black neighborhoods will continue.53

  Though aggressive policing produces revenues for local governments, it harms taxpayers as well as Black citizens. A UCLA law professor looked at payouts by large cities to victims of police misconduct over five years and found they totaled nearly three-quarters of a trillion dollars.54 Perhaps the only beneficiaries of systemic, anti-Black policing are owners and shareholders of corporations that profit from mass incarceration. In Chicago alone, there are 851 city blocks in which taxpayers spend more than $1 million per block to incarcerate residents who used to live there. Those blocks are concentrated in the West and South Sides, in the hoods that Chicago built to contain descendants.55

  Children are also swept into the carceral state. As with segregated neighborhoods, segregated schools facilitate an entirely different relationship between police and young citizens. One legal scholar found that a school’s percentage of minority students and of poverty is a strong predictor of the use of strict security measures, even after controlling for actual levels of school crime
and disorder and neighborhood crime.56

  The euphemism “school resource officer” is misplaced. So-called “SROs,” a full- and part-time force of over fifty thousand in American public schools, are most likely to be deployed where there are large populations of Black or Latinx students. A December 2016 White House analysis concluded that rising numbers of SROs in Black and brown schools were not matched with a similar increase in school counselors.57

  In New York City, in 2017, 5,200 full-time police officers patrolled public schools while the schools employed only about 3,000 guidance counselors. The ACLU charged that students of color were arrested and detained for trivial offenses. SROs normalized policing in educational environments, particularly in Black and brown hoods; they approached students not as assets to be supported and developed but as potential criminals.58 Examples abound. A school police officer in Dolton, Illinois, confronted fifteen-year-old Marshawn Pitts in a hallway about a dress-code violation, failing to tuck in his shirt. After Pitts walked away, the officer slammed him against lockers, beat him, and broke his nose. In Columbia, South Carolina, an officer flipped a Black female student named Shakara from her desk and assaulted her; the viral video caused an outcry.59 Thankfully, in the revolutionary spring of 2020, some school districts began to take police out of schools.60

  Policing, like segregation, remains a dominant factor in Black American life. One organization asked descendants about their reality and desired solutions, mounting a survey of thirty thousand Black people in America. An overwhelming majority of respondents said that excessive use of force by police and police killings were a problem in Black communities. A large majority concluded that gun violence was also problem. Respondents agreed that police departments need to be held accountable and government must support alternatives to aggressive policing and mass incarceration to make Black communities safer.61 The good news in the wake of George Floyd’s killing was that a decisive majority of Americans also came to believe the police were likely to use excessive force against Black people, up from only 33 percent in the year 2014.62 With this altered consciousness and new political reality, the long-term work of transforming policing and investing in noncarceral approaches to public safety began.