A Colony in a Nation

by Chris Hayes

  The landlord later told the remaining tenants that they’d better take the (now $4,000) buyout offer, because he was planning to renovate the vacant apartments, which he threatened would be hazardous to the health of the remaining tenants’ young children. The renovations seem designed explicitly to harass the tenants, including knocking down parts of the ceiling in one apartment. There is dust and debris throughout the building, and holes and cracks in all the walls. The renovations may have even made the building structurally unsound. And the landlord has flouted stop-work orders from the Department of Buildings to continue his harassment by construction.

  It’s not just this one building—stories like this are commonplace throughout the borough. “Brooklyn is in the midst of a gold rush,” Ruttenberg says, “and true to the Wild West metaphor, there is plenty of illegal activity and very little policing happening.”

  I laughed when he said that. Of course, there’s a whole lot of policing happening in those neighborhoods—just not of this particular kind of activity.

  The signature achievement of the reign of order is that a person can live in the Nation and never know what hardship may befall the Colony. “I like to tell people that there is a war going on,” Ruttenberg says, “which most of us in New York are dimly aware of.”

  Maintaining ignorance of life in the Colony was a good deal harder in the New York of my youth, when disorder imposed itself on you. The problems of the poor tugged at your attention. Today new wealth created in the “revitalized,” “reborn” American metropolis has put that unpleasantness out of view. An endless cultural conversation swirls about the lives of the young, highly educated citizens of America’s hip urban neighborhoods. TV shows and articles discuss what they like and don’t like, where they eat and don’t eat. The city as an entity now means a different thing entirely. Fort Apache has given way to Girls.

  All the while, deep poverty, routine lethal violence, and epidemic levels of trauma persist in the Colony. There citizens find themselves pushed further toward the geographical margins, squeezed both by the punishing arithmetic of poverty and by the ceaseless surveillance of a police force tasked with corralling that poverty and keeping order in places the Nation has not yet annexed.

  In 1997 I went to college, then moved to Chicago and D.C., and when I’d come back to visit New York, I found the old borders had been erased. White people were venturing everywhere! On my train rides from Manhattan back uptown to my parents’ house in the Bronx, I used to have a trick that would always ensure me a seat. I’d find a white person and stand right in front of them, certain they’d get off the train before Harlem and Washington Heights. But now my method no longer worked so well. I’d lurk over some white guy with a backpack, sneakers, and a paperback and would be shocked when he didn’t get off until 181st Street.

  On the weekend nights when I visited the city, my friends who lived in the new New York would take me out to bars in Bushwick and Alphabet City, precincts that had once been part of the Colony but were now being absorbed into the Nation. For the relatively affluent, the hip, the privileged, the young and white and restless, the borders of the city had massively expanded. New York had essentially doubled in size! And in a place as crowded as this metropolis, the promise of more space was enticing. Those years of Rudy Giuliani and then Michael Bloomberg were marked by a kind of frontier euphoria among a certain (quite influential) set of New Yorkers. And for those less adventurous, it meant they could drop the cloak of white fear.

  I cast it aside as well. I can’t remember when exactly, but I have distinct snapshot memories of moments in New York, walking around some neighborhood that might have been a foreign land in my youth and experiencing the sense of freedom that came with no longer attuning myself to every single last little bit of perceptual stimulus. A sense of being present fully and gloriously where I was, without looking over my shoulder.

  I live in this city now, again, after being away for a long time. Our neighborhood is quiet, just a few blocks from the leafy parkside apartment where I last called the cops. There’s no graffiti on the trains, and no homeless on the streets where we live. There are cheese shops and yoga studios and farmers’ markets and playgrounds. For the small percentage of New Yorkers rich enough to enjoy it, life in the city has never been better. It’s still hard in its own bracing way, but it’s all so orderly now.

  It’s also a heck of a lot safer and not just for people who live in the more rarified blocks of the Nation. Defenders of the “broken windows” approach, who include former NYPD commissioners Bratton and Ray Kelly, former mayor Giuliani, and the current liberal mayor Bill DeBlasio, argue that it was the central, key factor in the historic drop in crime, and as such its own kind of civil rights victory. Because people of color, particularly poor black city residents, were the most common victims of crime, and because they were the greatest beneficiaries of crime’s decline, the argument goes, all of the increased enforcement was actually on their behalf.

  President Bill Clinton’s 1994 crime bill put many more cops on the street under an explicit “broken windows” theory of order and deterrence. In the spring of 2016 he defended that law to a Black Lives Matter heckler this way: “Because of that [crime] bill we had a 25-year low in crime, a 33-year low in the murder rate, and listen to this, because of that and the background-check law, we had a 46-year low in the deaths of people by gun violence,” he said. “And who do you think those lives were that mattered? Whose lives were saved that mattered?”

  But it’s deeply unclear that this is true. Crime started falling before the crime bill was passed, and also before Rudy Giuliani was elected and Bill Bratton installed.

  Why? We have no idea.

  THE DROP IN CRIME in the United States from 1992 through today is one of the most stunning statistical and sociological mysteries of our time. A number of things are distinctive about it. First, crime dropped across all categories, from larceny to assaults to rape and murder. It dropped across all geographic areas, from the Deep South up to Maine. It dropped in rural areas, in midsize cities, and in big ones. It dropped in places with lots of racial diversity and in places with almost none. Perhaps most perplexing, it dropped in good economic times and in bad. You’d expect that in the wake of recession and economic crisis, at least certain categories of crime—property crimes, for example—would spike. But during both the relatively mild recession of 2001 and the historically awful Great Recession of 2007–9, even property crimes continued their decline.

  As you might expect, this apparent victory over crime has a million self-proclaimed fathers. Literally dozens of theories claim to explain what “caused it,” but none of them definitive. Simple demographics played a large role: The baby boom meant that beginning in the late 1960s, a huge number of men entered into their peak crime-committing years. And indeed, crime spikes in developed nations (Canada among others) followed a similar trajectory (though not quite as pronounced as in the United States).

  Mass incarceration also played some role in reducing crime. A society that put, say, every man aged 18 to 24 under carceral supervision could expect to see a reduction in violent crime, since that population commits a disproportionate amount of it. We also understand that that would be a tyrannical, indefensible slave state, but in large swaths of black and brown America, that’s not too far from what has happened.

  But the best research seems to indicate that while the initial increase in incarceration did have an effect on crime reduction in the 1980s, the two million more put behind bars thereafter did nothing to further reduce crime. And the states that have moved most swiftly to reduce prison populations haven’t seen a crime bump.

  Certain tantalizing theories on the drop in crime have literally nothing at all to do with policing, crime, or even economics. For instance, some public health experts argue (persuasively) that the postwar car boom dramatically increased the amount of lead in the atmosphere; then with the elimination of lead in gasoline and paint, crime rates fell. According to propo
nents of this theory, the varying levels of environmental lead alone accounts for nearly all of the boom and bust in America’s postwar crime rates.

  Another explanation involves the changing structure of the drug war and drug markets. The launch of the War on Drugs in 1971 drove an ever-burgeoning black market worth billions of dollars that played, according to those who have studied the matter, a significant role in the rise in crime. In the late 1980s, as crack flowed into America’s poor, urban neighborhoods, it unsettled existing markets, creating new winners and losers. Violence exploded over turf and market control. During the Crack Years of the mid-1980s to mid-1990s, homicide rates more than doubled for black boys aged 14 to 17 and nearly doubled for black men aged 18 to 24.

  As for “broken windows” policing, its connection to the crime decline is murky. Legal scholars Bernard Harcourt and Jens Ludwig tracked different populations in five different cities and found “no support for a simple first-order disorder-crime relationship as hypothesized by Wilson and Kelling, nor for the proposition that ‘broken windows’ policing is the optimal use of scarce law enforcement resources.”

  But recent research has lent a bit more credence to the basic causal theory about the relationship between crime and disorder. A 2015 meta-analysis of thirty different studies of “disorder policing” found that such strategies “are associated with an overall statistically significant, modest crime reduction effect.” But it also concludes that “aggressive order maintenance strategies that target individual disorderly behaviors do not generate significant crime reductions.”

  In short, despite reams of literature on the topic, we simply have reached no broad-based consensus about what “caused” the crime decline. “If you take every paper that says this factor explains x percentage of the crime drop,” jokes law professor John Pfaff, who studies mass incarceration, “and add them up, you get 250 percent. That’s a huge red flag.”

  The crime drop was almost certainly the result of a dynamic combination of factors. But in the absence of a rock-solid case for one specific explanation, anyone with a pet policy can plausibly claim it was that policy that did the trick. And obviously those who worked in law enforcement during the period have every incentive, both political and psychological, to argue that their innovations, reforms, and sustained methodological improvements should get the credit.

  Elected officials, for their part, have powerful incentives not to alter the machinery, not to do anything that might draw too much attention. Since no one actually knows why crime is down (though many think they do), the cargo cult of white fear requires certain rituals be maintained, and when they are flouted, a visceral collective anxiety results, stoked unfailingly by demagogues. Everyone tasked with keeping crime from returning has developed deeply held, near-religious beliefs about What Works. We are farmers begging the Gods to keep the drought away; we will give them what they want, if they will spare us their wrath.

  Any political momentum to reduce mass incarceration, strengthen police accountability, and rethink our approach to justice rests on the continuation of the oh-so-delicate status quo, in which crime continues at historic lows. But what happens when that changes? In Baltimore, which experienced a horrific surge in murder and violent crime after Freddie Gray, the apparent vengeance of the crime gods ripped the entire city’s political order apart. That same fate hangs over any politician who would take bold steps toward decolonization and integration, if such steps also correspond with an increase in crime. Just ask New York’s mayor.

  By the time Bill DeBlasio took office, “stop and frisk” had become a widely deployed tool under Ray Kelly, who helmed the NYPD under Mayor Bloomberg.* In Bloomberg’s final years, grassroots activists exerted increasing political pressure against the policy, then were joined by politicians representing the millions of the city’s black and Latino residents who were being robbed of their constitutional freedoms. As a result, “stop and frisk” started to decline, and DeBlasio made ending it one of the signatures of his campaign. When a federal judge ruled its implementation in New York unconstitutional, DeBlasio did not appeal.

  Kelly and the police union fought like mad to preserve the practice, warning in increasingly dire, apocalyptic terms of the hell to which the city would return if random young black and brown men could no longer be detained routinely on a whim for no discernible reason. We will anger the crime gods! they practically shouted. We shall see drought for a thousand years!

  But the drought never came, and the vengeance never arrived. The numbers are in. They show essentially zero relationship between “stop and frisk” and crime in the city. But the superstitions live on in other forms.

  A few months after the protests following Mike Brown’s death in Ferguson, St. Louis police chief Sam Dotson spoke of what he called a “Ferguson effect”: cops were now demoralized, hesitant, and exhausted, he said, while the “criminal element” was feeling empowered by the environment.

  In 2015 the conservative pundit Heather Mac Donald wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal asserting that the Ferguson effect had gone national, that cops around the country were now so afraid of protest and criticism they’d stopped doing their jobs, and as a result a “new national crime wave” was beginning to crest. Before you knew it, the “Ferguson effect” became a known phenomenon, accepted by cops, prosecutors, mayors, pundits and others as gospel truth. The moment any crime happened anywhere, local tabloids and national right-wing media ran stories about the “Ferguson effect.” Even Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, a Democrat, said that police were now so terrified of the onslaught of public scrutiny brought about by cell phone videos and Black Lives Matter protests, they had been reduced to a “fetal” position.

  As a hypothesis, the “Ferguson effect” was, at least in a national sense, way out ahead of what the data could plausibly show. It was a thesis in search of data, identified before anything definitive had been concluded. (Later, data would show that homicides in 2015 had their biggest jump since 1971, driven mostly by a few major cities.) Under Mayor DeBlasio, crime in New York is at a historic low, despite the 70 percent decrease in “stop and frisk” encounters between 2011 and 2015.

  Nonetheless the mayors and pundits charged ahead. This is what happens when you question the cops, they argued, and when you tug on the strings of the tough-on-crime consensus. The entire thing unravels, and we find ourselves hurled down back into the bad old days of rampant violence and criminality. The jungle returns. That’s precisely the warning that foes of Mayor DeBlasio had been offering since before he was elected. And now with each shooting, stabbing, and gruesome crime in the city, they pointed to it as the moment when everything slips back, when all the progress is forfeited and constant anxiety returns.†

  If I’m entirely honest with myself, I have to admit that I, too, fear the bad old days’ return. I enjoy the orderliness of the current city. I own a home. I have kids. I don’t want them encountering addicts on the corner. I don’t want a lot of disorder on the streets.

  And here is the awful implication of this seemingly innocent desire for order: people like me who reside in the Nation enjoy the benefits of increased real estate values, tranquil urban streets, and poverty quarantined out of view. We directly, materially, personally benefit from the status quo, no matter what awful costs it imposes on those in the Colony. This is the dark magic of the politics of order: fear lurks in the hearts of the Nation’s citizens that if the Colony were ever liberated, if the police were withdrawn and rights restored, life in the Nation might grow much, much worse. Crime, it turns out, is more easily subdued than fear.

  * Like Bill Bratton under DeBlasio, Ray Kelly had been on his second tour of duty under Bloomberg. Even the fact that mayors are reluctant to appoint new people to the job shows how powerfully politicians avoid risk in managing crime in New York.

  † When, in 2015, a microtrend of topless, painted women started charging tourists in Times Square to take photos with them, the voices of reaction in the city cried out
: Here we go again. The bad old days are back! (The mayor quietly moved to get rid of the women.)

  VI

  America is a wrathful land. Americans like to humiliate wrongdoers. We like to heap marks of shame upon them, to watch them groan and writhe beneath their sins, as far back as the scarlet letter and the stocks. We like, in short, to punish. It makes us feel good. By every conceivable metric—prosecutions, duration of sentences, conditions of imprisonment—the United States is by far the most punitive rich democracy. No one else really comes close.

  And we are, of course, the only rich democracy that hands out the ultimate punishment: death. Year after year, when the dead around the world have been tallied, the beheadings and the hangings and firing squads and lethal injections, we join Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Somalia, North Korea, and China.

  This isn’t simply a manifestation of the democratic desires of Americans, our collective desire to see “them” pay. Surprisingly, public opinion data from Europe shows fairly strong popular support for the death penalty, despite the fact that the practice is banned in the EU. In Britain 50 percent support the death penalty. In France it’s 45 percent.

  Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising. Bloodlust from the crowd is a common trait; every country on earth has experienced some form of it. In a democracy, the politics of crime present the possibility of vigilantism by other means. Imagine a referendum, Pontius Pilate style, for every person convicted of, say, child molestation. How many would vote for death? We insulate criminal procedure from direct democracy precisely because of the corrupting force of the will of the people. We don’t give child molesters death sentences, but that’s not because such a sentence wouldn’t meet, under the right conditions, with majority approval.