Zero Tolerance

Quality of Life and the New Police Brutality in New York City

Andrea Mcardle, Tanya Erzen, Andrea Mcardle, Tanya Erzen

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2001
• Print ISBN: 9780814756324
• eBook ISBN: 9780814764145
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Urban Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Amadou Diallo, Abner Louima, Anthony Baez, Patrick Dorismond. New York City has been rocked in recent years by the fate of these four men at the hands of the police. But police brutality in New York City is a multi-dimensional phenomenon that refers not only to the hyperviolent response of white male police officers as in these cases, but to an entire set of practices that target homeless people, vendors, and sexual minorities.
The complexity of the problem requires a commensurate response, which Zero Tolerance fulfills with a range of scholarship and activism. Offering perspectives from law and society, women's studies, urban and cultural studies, labor history, and the visual arts, the essays assembled here complement, and provide a counterpoint, to the work of police scholars on this subject.
Framed as both a response and a challenge to official claims that intensified law enforcement has produced New York City's declining crime rates, Zero Tolerance instead posits a definition of police brutality more encompassing than the use of excessive physical force. Further, it develops the connections between the most visible and familiar forms of police brutality that have sparked a new era of grassroots community activism, and the day-to-day violence that accompanies the city's campaign to police the "quality of life."
Contributors include: Heather Barr, Paul G. Chevigny, Derrick Bell, Tanya Erzen, Dayo F. Gore, Amy S. Green, Paul Hoffman, Andrew Hsiao, Tamara Jones, Joo-Hyun Kang, Andrea McArdle, Bradley McCallum, Andrew Ross, Eric Tang, Jacqueline Tarry, Sasha Torres, and Jennifer R. Wynn.

PART I

POLICING THE QUALITY OF LIFE

1
Turnstile Jumpers and Broken Windows

Policing Disorder in New York City

Tanya Erzen

IT IS RUSH hour in a crowded subway station in New York, and amid the jostling and general mayhem, a man bounds over a subway turnstile instead of swiping a card or paying a token. On the other side, a transit cop spots the fare evader mid-leap, and is waiting as he clears the turnstile. The officer slaps him with a fine and hauls him down to jail. When the suspect’s name is run through the system, the officer discovers that the turnstile jumper is wanted for robbery and assault. By nabbing him in the subway and cracking down on minor offenses in general, this officer has solved one more crime and locked away one more criminal. While this scenario is my creation, the Quality of Life campaign in New York credits itself with just this sort of crime busting. Its logic rests on the idea that New York is a city where graffiti taggers, turnstile jumpers, and kids in a public park are either already criminals or simply criminals in the making. Underlying New York’s Quality of Life campaign is the belief that leniency toward even minor offenses like fare beating in the subways reduces the city’s quality of life and creates a culture that encourages more serious crime.

It is the apparently seamless link between a decrease in violent crime, an increase in police officers on the street, and an intensified Quality of Life campaign that has justified an ongoing program of force and harassment portrayed as an integral, legitimate step toward reducing crime in New York. For everyone deemed capable of creating disorder, from panhandlers to neighborhood teenagers to the homeless, the Quality of Life initiative represents a concerted assault upon the right to exist in the city and to move in public spaces. The campaign’s premise is two-pronged. First, the same people who jump a turnstile or wash a windshield may very well be felons and robbers, rapists and burglars. Second, a broken window, a trash-strewn street, or a homeless person asleep on a bench symbolize disorder. This disorder initiates a snowball effect whereby drug dealers, vandals, and other urban predators begin to engulf a neighborhood.

These ideas are not inventions of the Giuliani administration, but the actual product of the “broken windows theory,” coined in 1982 by George Kelling and James Wilson in a widely cited article in the Atlantic Monthly. Kelling and Wilson believe that an area that appears disorderly implicitly sanctions more serious crimes. Thus, a causal link exists between physical disorder and actual crime.¹ Based on the premise that orderliness is equivalent to control, the theory assumes that visual disorder imbues people with a sense of fear and the menace of crime. With the Giuliani administration, the term “visual disorder” has become malleable enough to encompass people sleeping on benches, roaming public parks, washing windshields, and panhandling.

From the concept of broken windows emerged other studies that have come to serve as the operating manuals of the Quality of Life campaign. In 1990, Wesley Skogan conducted a survey of 13,000 residents in forty residential neighborhoods in Atlanta, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Newark, and San Francisco, buttressed by field researchers’ observations in ten of the forty neighborhoods. In his book , Disorder and Decline: Crime and the Spiral of Decay in American Neighborhoods, he established that disorder fosters social withdrawal, sparks concern about neighborhood safety, and plays an important role in urban decline.² His surveys found a broad consensus in these neighborhoods in identifying loiterers, vandalism, drug sales, gang activity, and public drinking as problems. Several forms of physical disorder were closely related to these disorderly behaviors: commercial sex shops; vandalism consisting of graffiti and damage to public spaces such as schools, bus shelters, street signs, vending machines, and dilapidated buildings. These findings have become fundamental texts in the oeuvre of quality-of-life literature. Yet, there are key questions that these theories do not address. Who is the community being protected? Who or what is disorderly? Does cracking down on quality of life offenses reduce crime? And, most importantly, does the Quality of Life initiative result in more daily police violence and harassment?

Proponents of the broken windows theory claim to speak on behalf of common, decent people in neighborhoods whose quality of life is being adversely affected by various forms of disorder. In the case of the campaigns to rid the New York subways of homeless people and graffiti, George Kelling and Catherine Coles, in Fixing Broken Windows , claim that it was not bankers or stockbrokers who demanded a safer subway environment, “it was working persons of all races who relied upon public transportation and craved decent and civil means of travel.”³Separating those who cause disorder from the community members who want a safe, orderly place to live, both books distinguish between the rights of “disorderly” individuals and broader community claims. Kelling and Coles assert that “bands of teenagers congregating on the streets” present a disorder problem without addressing how those teenagers might be part of that same community or neighborhood. They avoid dealing with why a gathering of people on the street heralds the breakdown of the social order. What are the social and cultural implications when residents of a neighborhood do not have the right to congregate in a public place?

While the centerpiece of the Quality of Life initiative is the concept of disorder, what exactly constitutes disorder remains somewhat ambiguous. Kelling and Coles define disorder as “behavior that violates widely accepted standards and norms of behavior, and about which a broad consensus exists, in spite of racial, ethnic and class differences”⁴and “in its broadest social sense, disorder is incivility, boorish and threatening behavior that disturbs life, especially urban life.”⁵Skogan tells us that social disorder is a matter of behavior such as catcalling, sexual harassment, drinking, and prostitution, while physical disorder includes ill-kept buildings, trash-filled lots, and alleys with rats.⁶According to the broken-windows theory, disorder is demarcated from more serious crimes like rape, murder, and assault to include “aggressive panhandling, street prostitution, drunkenness, and public drinking, menacing behavior, harassment, obstruction of streets and public spaces, vandalism and graffiti, public urination and defecation, unlicensed vending and peddling, unsolicited window washing of cars and other such acts.”⁷

The Quality of Life initiative serves a psychological function as well as a punitive one; enforcement against these “crimes” restores a feeling of safety even if actual crime levels remain the same. One resident sums up this logic: “People have an implicit, causal theory about why things are littered—that somehow it’s out of control, the city is not paying attention. So, by removing graffiti you may not have changed other things, but you make people feel as if you have.”⁸An example is the way the administration heralds the ability of police officers to decipher graffiti-covered walls and thus solve local crimes, but in actuality no such link has been established.⁹In the Quality of Life campaign, it is assumed that people will perceive clean (devoid of homeless, panhandlers, graffiti) as safe areas. George Kelling writes, “For most people, New York’s crime problem comes down to the well-founded belief that society has ceded control to those who are on the margin of or outside the law, and therefore that anything might happen in such places.”¹⁰In the language of the broken windows theory, life in cities is synonymous with urban warfare. Fred Siegel, a professor at Cooper Union, writes: “New Yorkers understand that entering public places leaves them open to what have become the indignities of everyday interaction. In the East Village and on Upper Broadway, ‘thieves’’ markets set up by predatory peddlers block the sidewalks. On nearly every street, homeless men panhandle aggressively, often ‘rough tailing’ passersby. Even those who drive must pay a toll to not-so-subtle shakedown artists, the ‘squeegee men.’”¹¹By focusing on fear of crime, the Quality of Life campaign skirts the accusation that it is engaging in a form of social control. Not only does the campaign strive to impose order on the built environment; it seeks to create a notion of the public good that is above politics, while sanctioning violence and harassment against certain people and populations.

The campaign juxtaposes the idea of a city that had proliferated out of control and the claim that cosmetic changes like erasing graffiti and removing newsstands and bus shelters are what have made a difference in reducing the number of dangerous felonies.¹²The ubiquitous posters of a white cop and young black man talking amiably underneath the caption “NYC needs CPR (Courtesy, Professionalism and Respect)” exemplify this strategy. The Giuliani administration has used cultural representations effectively, from the mantra of “cleaner, safer, brighter” to justify zoning laws and homeless evictions, to subways signs that are supposed to create a shared sense of the negative effects of panhandling. A Municipal Transit Authority (MTA) public service message from 1996 read:

I’m SOOOO glad I got this seat. GOOD, now I can relax. (deep breath). Haven’t even seen a panhandler for a while. WHOOPS, spoke too soon. TeRRIFic. MY LUCK he HAD to pick this car. Hey. HEY, buddy. Over here—over my head. See that? It says it’s illegal. Come onnnnn! Can’t I just SIT HERE without getting hassled?!!!! Change ?… yeah, THIS is what I’d like to change.

This poster was intended for the assumed community that shared a mutual exasperation with panhandlers on the subway. As a representation of a monolithic urban mindset, the ads and the campaign’s justification as crime control shift the focus from problems of homelessness and economic disparity to a notion of public order and disorder. By invoking an abstract concept of order, the ad disguises the repercussions of the campaign on real people’s lives.

While the eradication of some disorder sounds like a palatable idea to some, the lingering question is whether it results in a decline in crime. To justify the Quality of Life initiative, the Giuliani administration has assembled an impressive array of statistical information about the decrease in crime. However, no statistics have proven that arresting people for drinking beer in public reduces murders. Kelling and Skogan differentiate between the national crime problem and the continuum of local disorder problems on a neighborhood level. Some police officers contend that focusing on minor offenses will lead to a decrease in major problems, and that officers will now have specific guidelines when faced with thorny issues like panhandling as part of a unified strategy for addressing street disorder.¹³Whether crime has actually decreased is subject to debate considering that misdemeanor arrests have increased by 50 percent.¹⁴Previously, most people accused of minor offenses were given desk appearance tickets, which included a court date, and were then released. Under Giuliani’s administration, the practice has shifted to detaining people accused of even minor misdemeanor offenses for the purpose of verifying their identities and whether any outstanding warrants exist. After being written up and detained, thousands have their charges dismissed by prosecutors who deem the arrests “flawed.”

Another explanation for the overall decrease in crime and the increase in misdemeanor arrests is the way that the Giuliani administration and the NYPD have implemented programs like Compstat. Compstat is a computer system that systematically maps and compares high crime areas in the city. Precinct commanders meet weekly with the commissioner and people from probation, parole, and the district attorney’s office. Each commander is required to give a formal presentation highlighting crime results and statistics in his or her precinct. Their charts track crime reports and arrests by the week, day, and hour as well as concentrations of drug trafficking, shooting, burglary, and robberies.¹⁵In one meeting, Louis R. Anemone, then chief of department, asked a narcotics supervisor to explain why there were few Saturday arrests. “It’s a tough area, but aren’t we doing anything on Saturday? Your arrests are low on Saturday. Aren’t they selling dope on Saturday? I want you to balance this. I certainly don’t want you setting a pattern where they know you won’t arrest them on Saturday.”¹⁶Officers and commanders who want to keep their jobs have a tangible incentive to make as many arrests and issue as many Quality of Life summonses as possible.

Aside from its implementation by the police, the initiative’s effort to link questions of disorder and crime has garnered significant support among certain New York City residents. A quality-of-life survey conducted by the Commonwealth Fund in New York in 1992 found that people feel the city government has the primary responsibility for aspects of life that give them the most concern: the number and quality of available jobs, safer and cleaner streets and parks, and better schools.¹⁷In an unsystematic survey conducted by the New York Times City Section in 1994, New Yorkers were asked what they saw as the quality of life issues in their neighborhoods. The impressionistic responses ran the gamut from traffic congestion, drugs, car radios, unlicensed vendors, vacant lots, panhandling, social service programs, homeless enclaves, prostitution, graffiti, in-line skaters, to motorcycle noise.¹⁸The Commonwealth survey also found that three out of five New Yorkers stated that five “qualities”—dirt (43%), graffiti (40%), homeless people (34%), noise (31%), and panhandlers (29%)—have created a sense of disorder on the streets and reduced the quality of life for themselves and their families.¹⁹

While it is understandable that some of us wouldn’t want alley rats and litter on our sidewalks, what happens when this extends to people sleeping on benches and meeting on stoops?

HOW THE ROTTING APPLE WAS REDEEMED

Like most tales of redemption, the Quality of Life campaign invo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Policing the Quality of Life
• PARTII
• PARTIII
• Bearing Witness
• Areas A, B, and C: An Afterword
• Contributors
• index