The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap

by Matt Taibbi

  When Andrew talks now about his mentality in those days, he shakes his head. “I was in a no-caring zone,” he says. “I had so much guilt over everything, my mother.… I was just waiting for someone to put me out of my misery.”

  When he finally got out of jail on that charge, he didn’t know what to do with himself. His father sat him down and tried to talk him out of the life.

  “He said, ‘What if it was me who got robbed in the streets? How would you feel?’ ” Andrew took that talk hard, and he says he never robbed anyone again. But what else was there? He’d tried a few times to get a job, but it never felt real. One time he remembers working at a sporting goods store in his teens. “I think I cleaned a bathroom,” he says. “And a guy gave me a pair of sneakers.”

  The idea of getting a job still wasn’t serious to him. Plus, Andrew by now had a master’s degree in the streets. He’d been fighting pretty much constantly for almost a decade. It was a hard thing to turn off. And he still had ties to the neighborhood. When he got out of jail, his old mentor was still there, only now he was older, and heavier, and Andrew didn’t think he was so tough anymore. There was a public showdown, and Andrew told off his old mentor in front of the whole projects. The way Andrew tells it, the man was so shocked at being pushed around by his former followers that he ran off and holed up to get drunk somewhere, apparently to get his courage up. Then he came back to the spot on the street where Andrew was selling drugs, pulled out a gun, and fired.

  The bullet went through Andrew’s right arm. Andrew fell down, then staggered to a friend’s house, where his friend’s mother called an ambulance. When Andrew woke up in a hospital bed, he was under arrest, ostensibly for having a gun—the friend’s mother would later testify that police pressured her to say Andrew had hidden a gun in her house, threatening to arrest her and take her kids away. Andrew was acquitted of the charge.

  The man who shot him wasn’t so lucky. “I think he’s got like two hundred fifty years now,” says Andrew, shaking his head sadly. A lot of the people he grew up with have long sentences now, seven years, fifteen years, twenty. He knows that could have been him. He also knows he could have ended up dead or, worse, killed somebody else during this time in his life. “I consider myself lucky, that I got it straightened out in time,” he says.

  Looking back, Andrew doesn’t even remember there ever being anything real at stake in any of that violence and craziness. “There was all this testosterone, that’s all it was ever about,” he says. “You’d be getting in fights, people would be getting shot over nothing, and the crazy thing is, it was never about no money. Like you’d look at someone the wrong way, or someone would bump into someone, and people would be getting shot over that.”

  When his arm healed, and he made it through the gun case without being convicted, Andrew began to look at the world differently. He realized he had to change his life. He was twenty-three years old.

  Right around the time Andrew was shot, just as he was starting on the road back to a normal life, the city of New York was itself making a profound change in course, radically altering its policing policies. It was more than a minor strategic change, it was a revolutionary turnaround. But the amazing thing is, nobody noticed, at least not at first.

  Years later a City University of New York professor named Harry Levine would be poring through New York City arrest statistics for drug offenses when he would notice something fascinating. Interested in seeing what the impact had been since the city decriminalized the possession of small amounts of marijuana in 1977, Levine was shocked when he looked at the numbers for simple possession arrests.

  “From 1978 to 1988, about three thousand possession arrests a year,” he said. “From 1988 to 1998, about three thousand possession arrests a year. But then, from 1998 to 2008, it jumps to thirty thousand possession arrests per year.”

  What happened in 1997 and 1998? What changed?

  Levine pauses. “Howard Safir,” he says.

  Who?

  “Exactly,” he says, laughing. “You haven’t heard of him. I call him the colorless, odorless, tasteless Howard Safir. He was Rudy Giuliani’s second police commissioner. The first was Bill Bratton—Mr. Broken Windows.”

  Rolled out in 1994 by Bratton and the newly elected Mayor Giuliani, who had made “zero tolerance” the platform of his crime strategy, the much-celebrated broken windows policing strategy purported to control serious crime by getting police to focus on minor crimes like fare beating, jaywalking, littering, and loitering. The theory, and it’s not completely illogical, is that increased contact with the police leads to criminals deciding more and more often to leave their guns at home, lest they be swept up for jumping a turnstile or tossing a cigarette butt on the street.

  Marijuana arrests went up under Bratton, but they didn’t skyrocket. That didn’t happen until Bratton made the fatal mistake of becoming more of a national celebrity than the notoriously attention-hungry Rudy Giuliani. “Bratton made the cover of Time,” laughs Levine, referring to the January 15, 1996, issue that came with the headline “Finally, We’re Winning the War Against Crime.” Bratton, smiling a little, posed for the cover dressed with flair in a Bogartesque trench coat while standing on a dark, misty, conspicuously empty New York City street.

  “He didn’t sneer and snarl, and he wasn’t a complete and total unbelievable asshole, and everyone could see that,” says Levine, referring to Bratton. “So naturally, Rudy got rid of him.”

  The Time cover came in January; by April 1996, Giuliani had replaced Bratton with Safir, a nondescript, non-trench-coat-wearing, mostly unknown law enforcement bigwig who’d met Giuliani when the latter was a U.S. attorney during the Reagan years. Safir for most of his early career had been a narc. He made it as high as assistant director of the DEA in 1977. But the middle part of his career was spent with the U.S. Marshals Service, where he was the associate director of operations from 1984 to 1990.

  The Marshals Service, when it isn’t chasing Dr. Richard Kimble or cracking meth-dealer heads in Harlan County, Kentucky, is primarily involved with the dreary business of transporting felons. Levine believes that Safir learned an important lesson in his time with the marshals.

  “I think Safir saw that violent crime was dropping,” he says. “That there were fewer felonies.”

  And with that, he thinks, Safir decided to make a radical change in the way police did business, one that piggybacked nicely on top of Bratton’s broken windows strategy. “Policing in America from the very beginning was always about responding to reported crime,” says Levine. “You know, it’s ‘Help, I’ve been shot, I’ve been stabbed, I’ve been raped, somebody stole my car.’ ” There was enough of that to keep policemen everywhere employed for most of the twentieth century.

  But then in the early 1990s, for reasons that are still a mystery to cops and academics alike, crime started dropping. Some say it was the advent of computer databases and advanced policing methods. Others say it was because of changes in the drug trade. Still others say it was cultural or had to do with the behavioral tendencies of a new influx of immigrants. Curiously, for instance, the drop in violent crime is most pronounced in cities with high immigrant populations.

  Anyway, nobody really knows why crime dropped in the early 1990s, just that it did. In New York and in other cities where the policy was copied, the broken windows strategy may have had some impact, though plenty of academics dispute this. Undeniably, though, a few things happened. For one thing, the city early in Bratton’s tenure instituted a system called CompStat, which forces police precincts to take a quantitative approach to crime: each precinct has to submit weekly statistical reports to central command. Not only precincts but individual officers were now measured against one another not by the quality but by the quantity of arrests they made. Moreover, the computerized system allowed police to turn the simple act of writing a summons for peeing on a sidewalk or jumping a turnstile into part of a massive intelligence-gathering operation. Every contact between
a police officer and some kid walking down the street went into the big machine and made it a faster, more muscular weapon for finding and tracking subject populations.

  You add CompStat to stop-and-frisk—the policy instituted in the early 1990s that allowed police to stop and search virtually anyone at any time, even inside the hallways of a privately owned apartment building—and what you ended up with was a kind of automated policing system that incentivized officers to fan out into neighborhoods like commercial fishermen, throwing nets over whole city blocks and making as many arrests as they could. “It was a machine,” Levine says, “for writing tickets, making arrests, and collecting data.”

  Before long, police departments all over the country were using a form of CompStat. Los Angeles, Washington, Philadelphia, and San Francisco were major early converts. The city of Baltimore switched to a similar system called CitiStat in 1999, and this became the inspiration for the notorious ComStat system memorialized in the TV series The Wire.

  But the steep drop in violent crime presented police with a problem. If making arrests is the only way to advance in your career, but crime is dropping, what do you do? Furthermore, what to do if the only way to make a living wage is to rack up as much overtime as possible? In the Safir era, NYPD starting salaries were on the low end for professional police forces in America, beginning at about forty thousand dollars. How do you add hours in an era when crime is dropping?

  The answer turned out to be, you simply create arrests. By multiplying marijuana arrests by a factor of ten in the space of a few years, Safir’s police force drastically increased its workload. “One million police man-hours per year” is Levine’s calculation just for marijuana possession arrests in the years since Safir took over the NYPD.

  And that was just weed. By the mid-to-late 2000s, police stops had multiplied all across the board for a range of seemingly minor offenses. The numbers by 2012 would be 600,000 summonses a year, more than three times the levels from the late 1990s. Of those, “only” 50,000 were for simple marijuana possession. Another 140,000 would be open-container violations for carrying alcohol in public. An additional 80,000 summonses per year would be written for “disorderly conduct.” And an incredible 20,000 summonses per year would be given out for riding bicycles on sidewalks.

  Meanwhile, during the mid-2000s, a state arbitrator forced the NYPD to slash starting yearly salaries for new officers to a preposterous $25,100. The reduced pay forced some 4,500 officers to quit in a period of a few years in the middle of the decade. The ones who stayed on the job had to really scramble to make a living wage. They did so by inventing an entirely new way of doing the job. It would be a revolution in what Levine calls “sub-misdemeanor policing.”

  If, like me, you lived in New York throughout some or all of this time and didn’t notice, you’re not alone. The change took place almost completely outside the field of view of white, professional New York. The big change was in poorer neighborhoods. In places like Bedford-Stuyvesant, the change was profound.

  November 2003, a little after midnight. Andrew Brown was standing on a mostly deserted stretch of Bed-Stuy, at the intersection of Broadway and Lewis Avenue, selling weed. To his left, in the direction of Broadway, you could see the elevated subway tracks where the M and J trains would pass by from time to time. Directly in front of him, at 4 Lewis Avenue, was the project apartment building where he was then living with a girlfriend, someone he’d been seeing for years.

  Andrew was still in the life, but he was getting tired. He wasn’t a soldier anymore, just a salesman, trying to get by. He was worn down and thinking all the time of ways to get out. There had to be something better. He had little nieces and nephews and liked to spend time with them; that made him happy. In the back of his mind, he started thinking about wanting a family of his own. It didn’t seem all that possible, given where he was in life—how could he support kids?—but it was something to think about. His girlfriend at the time, though, didn’t even want to discuss it. Before Andrew, she had been with someone else, and that guy got locked up, sent away for many years. Andrew sensed that maybe she was waiting for him.

  Anyway, on that November night in 2003, the streets were mostly empty, business was slow. Someone approached Andrew, there was a quick discussion, and Andrew handed the man a five-dollar bill. He didn’t know that right at that moment an off-duty detective was driving by, and he got on his radio and called in a bunch of uniforms. “They came all the way from the Fort Greene projects, sirens blaring, running lights the whole way,” says Andrew. Fort Greene was just about fifteen or twenty blocks away on a map, but it seemed like a long distance to come and a lot of theatrics just to get a dude on the street who maybe had just sold a little weed.

  By the time the uniforms arrived, Andrew was standing alone on the street. He heard the sirens coming and instinctively started walking, not running, across the street, to the parking lot next to the 4 Lewis Avenue project building. A van screamed into the lot and a tall white officer jumped out.

  “Make me run!” the policeman screamed.

  Andrew frowned. “What?” he said.

  “Go ahead, run! Make me chase you!” the officer repeated, putting his hand on his gun.

  Andrew sighed. He’d noticed that there was a new type of policeman appearing on the streets lately, a kind who liked to act like he was in the movies. Those were always trouble. He slowed down.

  “I ain’t running,” he said calmly.

  It’s not like Andrew was looking forward to this encounter, but he wasn’t all that worried about it, either. He didn’t have any drugs on him, wasn’t carrying a gun. And even if they brought him in, he’d deal with it. It’s not like he’d never been arrested before. The way he saw it, he had a job, selling drugs, and they had a job, trying to bust him. He understood how this worked.

  But now the taller officer was lunging at him and grabbing him, hard, by the throat. He shouted at Andrew to get down, then used some kind of crazy karate move to sweep Andrew’s leg out from under him. Andrew fell to the ground, his face on the pavement, and felt himself being cuffed. Another officer jumped out of the van. Andrew felt the tall cop put a knee in his back. Andrew was lifting his face to try to get it off the asphalt when he heard one of them talk to the other.

  “Get the mace!” he heard.

  Andrew thought, Oh shit. Next thing he knew, he was having a can of mace emptied in his eyes. It was about 1:20 a.m. He howled. “I probably woke up the whole projects,” he says now.

  They took him away to the precinct, where he got charged with an “observation sale,” which is a kind of drug charge that’s a step down from a hand-to-hand or criminal possession. Nobody finds any drugs on anybody, but a policeman says he saw something happen. The case never went anywhere.

  In the summer of the next year, Andrew was in that same spot, the 4 Lewis Avenue project building, coming downstairs from his girlfriend’s place, when he saw some police milling around in the first-floor hallway. Not good. Andrew’s rule of thumb is, if you can avoid it, don’t be in an enclosed place with the police where nobody can see you, because you never know what might happen. He didn’t want to turn around and go back upstairs and attract attention that way, so he tried to just walk quickly to get out the front door.

  He didn’t quite make it. The police stopped him and tried to search him right there in the hallway. Andrew struggled a little and made it out the front door, but one hand was already cuffed by then. Outside the building, the gang of uniformed police cuffed him and searched him with half the projects watching. Andrew was wearing just a tank top and shorts. “They practically stripped me buck naked right there on the street,” he says. Then they pushed him forward toward a van that was parked out in front of the building and searched him again before throwing him into the back.

  The van took off, and Andrew went on a little tour of Brooklyn, speeding east up Jefferson Avenue, then north up Malcolm X Boulevard. Every now and then, the police would stop the van, and somebo
dy like Andrew would get tossed inside. “Once they full the van up, they bring you back to the precinct,” he explains.

  Back at the precinct, the police tried to tell Andrew that they’d found drugs on his seat in the van.

  Andrew protested: But you searched me twice before I even got in the van, pulled my pants down in front of all of Lewis Avenue!

  That case didn’t go anywhere either.

  There was a third incident right around that time, at exactly the same spot, 4 Lewis Avenue, right next to the elevated subway tracks on Broadway. Andrew, on the phone at the time, sees the police searching his friend’s car. He walks over. A policeman intercepts him, grabs his phone, and throws it on the ground, breaking it.

  Andrew frowns and points at the ground.

  “Man, that isn’t even my phone!” he complains. He’d borrowed it from a friend.

  Before he can say anything else, police have him cuffed and toss him onto the ground. He cranes his neck to try to see the plate number of the unmarked police car, but the plate is bent in at the corners, and he can’t quite read the number.

  “It’s a trick they use, so you can’t read the plate,” he says. When the police finish tossing his friend’s car, they uncuff him. Andrew looks at the bits of phone on the ground and says, “Aren’t you gonna pick me up?”

  “What?” the detective snaps.

  “Man, I didn’t get down here by myself,” Andrew says. “You ought to at least help me up.”

  The policeman rolls his eyes and drives away.

  All the same, things started turning around for Andrew at that time. His mind was unfreezing, waking up to new possibilities. He broke up with the girl and settled down with someone new, a petite, pretty girl named Shanette he’d known for years, who lived down the street closer to Myrtle Avenue. Shanette was different; she wanted to settle down with Andrew. Andrew hadn’t had too many good things in his life and committed to her immediately.