City of Disorder

How the Quality of Life Campaign Transformed New York Politics

Alex S. Vitale

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780814788202
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

2009 Association of American University Presses Award for Jacket Design

In the 1990s, improving the quality of life became a primary focus and a popular catchphrase of the governments of New York and many other American cities. Faced with high levels of homelessness and other disorders associated with a growing disenfranchised population, then mayor Rudolph Giuliani led New York's zero tolerance campaign against what was perceived to be an increase in disorder that directly threatened social and economic stability. In a traditionally liberal city, the focus had shifted dramatically from improving the lives of the needy to protecting the welfare of the middle and upper classes—a decidedly neoconservative move.

In City of Disorder, Alex S. Vitale analyzes this drive to restore moral order which resulted in an overhaul of the way New York views such social problems as prostitution, graffiti, homelessness, and panhandling. Through several fascinating case studies of New York neighborhoods and an in-depth look at the dynamics of the NYPD and of the city's administration itself, Vitale explains why Republicans have won the last four New York mayoral elections and what the long-term impact Giuliani's zero tolerance method has been on a city historically known for its liberalism.

1

Conceptualizing the Paradigm Shift

How can we understand this shift in the social regulation of marginal populations in New York in the 1990s? Two discourses have emerged in the last twenty years to explain this process. In one, criminologists ask whether this transformation is part of a process of growing criminalization and punitiveness toward those who violate the law and community norms or is merely a more effective form of policing and criminal justice administration developed in response to popular calls for enhanced security. In the other discourse, urbanists debate whether or not quality-of-life politics developed as a response to a decline in public civility or gentrification and disorder emerging as a result of growing inequality. These two fields of study are a logical starting point for a framework to interpret the complex social, political, and economic changes associated with the rise of quality-of-life politics.

Criminology

Criminologists are concerned with why, over the last thirty years, the orientation of American society has become more punitive toward crime and disorder. More people are in jail for longer periods; more police are patrolling the streets; and support for the death penalty remains widespread. Currently, a staggering two million people are incarcerated in the United States, and another four million are on probation or parole. Since the 1980s, numerous states have imposed heavier penalties for a variety of violent and nonviolent crimes and increased their use of the death penalty. This is in marked contrast to the predictions of classical sociological and criminological theorists, who argue that the natural social progression is to find more integrative methods of dealing with deviance and to move away from more punitive methods. These theorists generally contend that as society became more complex, educated, and wealthy, criminal justice policies would become more restitutive and re-integrative rather than punitive and exclusionary. What can explain this seeming contradiction?

The story of urban policing is similar. While there has been an overall reduction in police violence since the social unrest of the 1960s and 1970s, the 1990s turned away from community policing and refocused on maintaining order, including the utilization of zero-tolerance strategies, aggressive stop-and-frisk operations, and large-scale sweeps of minor offenders. In addition, SWAT and other paramilitary units have grown in prominence, and the overall size and scope of urban police departments have increased even before new terrorism concerns arose. Why have the police taken a more punitive posture in the last decade, and how is this tied to broader criminological trends?

Advocates of more restrictive policing methods argue that they are in direct response to the growth of crime and disorder. In their book Fixing Broken Windows, George Kelling and Catherine Coles lay much of the blame on the social tolerance of unregulated individualism following the social upheavals of the 1960s.¹ Building on Amita Etzioni’s new communitarianism,² they contend that this dangerous move in favor of individual rights came at the expense of the communities’ needs and that the privileging of the individual has contributed to the breakdown of community stability. According to Kelling and Coles, the rise of new policing methods is in direct response to the recent

emphasis on individual needs and rights, and the belief that such rights were absolute; a rejection, or at least a serious questioning, of middle-class morality; the notion that stigmatizing individuals as criminals or deviants turned them into criminals or deviants; and the positing of solutions such as mental hospitals, therapies, and other interventions as more invidious than the problems they were designed to address. In the judicial arena, the courts developed a corresponding body of legal precedent in which constitutional protections for the fundamental rights and liberties of individuals were expanded and elevated to a position of far greater significance than either the responsibilities of individuals, or community interests.³

For Kelling and Coles, the rise of unregulated individualism is at the root of the quality-of-life crisis, and the water that has given life to those roots is liberal permissiveness. This is similar to Fred Siegel’s and Jim Sleeper’s arguments that the origin of urban disorder and decline was the rise of liberal permissiveness toward extreme social movements and minority groups.⁴ All these theorists consistently point to liberal judicial rulings that, they maintain, have unleashed anomic incivilities by failing to regulate the human potential for antisocial and destructive behaviors.

They see this criminalization of homelessness and the rise of quality-of-life policing as a necessary counteraction to the growth of unregulated social behaviors that threaten to destabilize local neighborhoods and entire cities. Quality of life comes to stand for the middle-class desires for order that have been ignored by liberal legal, political, and cultural actors. According to Kelling and Coles, Siegel, and Sleeper, the middle class chose the police as the tool to restore these values, by directly confronting these unregulated incivilities. In essence, this is a return to a social control theory of social regulation in which the police become the primary labelers of appropriate behaviors and provide the necessary negative sanctions to reinforce them.

But is the emergence of this new individualism really the result of the judicial actions taken by liberal elites engaged in social engineering? Another way of understanding the anticommunal individualism of this period is to look at the economic forces driving individualism and social deregulation. David Garland pursued this approach in his analysis of social changes over the last thirty years that describes the new punitiveness.⁵ These changes include the decline of the rehabilitative ideal, the reemergence of punitive sanctions, a focus on victims, an aversion to risk, the expansion of the criminal justice system, and the commercialization of crime control. Some of these changes predate many aspects of the new quality-of-life movement and therefore represent a national punitive context for the changes in urban areas.

Garland argues that the origin of the new anomic individualism is not the rise of a liberal regime of expanding formal rights. Instead, it is tied to the economics of “late modernism,” which Garland characterizes as more flexible production and distribution, the increase in two-wage families, the suburbanization of work and living, the rise of electronic mass media, and the democratization of social and cultural life. These changes have been combined with a political realignment favoring economic liberalism and social austerity. The result is a new social condition of an increasing sense of risk as people’s social and economic lives become less stable. Not surprisingly, the cultural response to this condition is, on the one hand, a desire for greater individual freedom of expression, consumption, and lifestyle and, on the other hand, a desire for risk aversion in the form of increasing demands for security, orderliness, and control.

This reconceptualization of liberalism is more than just a series of social movements and court decisions granting additional individual and minority-group rights. It defines postwar liberalism as an expression of a larger economic shift away from a mass society of undifferentiated consumers and workers toward a society made up of individuals maximizing both their productivity and their formation of identity through flexible specialization. The effect of this process on geographic communities is disintegrative. British criminologist Jock Young describes it as a shift from social inclusiveness to social exclusion, whereas the old approach was characterized by a growing social tolerance of difference:

The post-war years came to fruition in the permissive 1960s. Just as citizenship in the legal and political sense became extended by class, by age, by race and by gender, so the limits of normality, permissible behavior within the social contract, were pushed forward. More and more areas of behavior which were once seen as offences, by definition outside the social contract, became embraced by it. (emphasis in original)⁶

For Young, this was a paternal liberalism that treated the socially marginal as needing individual assistance to help them become better integrated into the society, rather than addressing the structural roots of inequality.

According to Young, modern society has become more tolerant of diversity but less tolerant of difficulty. As the new paradigm developed, therefore, it focused less on destroying diversity than on consuming it, and at the same time, it threw out those parts that it found difficult. The superficial trappings of diversity were embraced as long as they did not produce any major inconvenience. The result is a kind of social “bulimia” that deals with social tension by purging the symbolic and superficial source of the problem without addressing the actual cause. This process of assessing difficulty has developed into what Young describes as an “actuarial society” in which social actors are constantly assessing risk:

The actuarial stance is calculative of risk, it is wary and probabilistic, it is not concerned with causes but with probabilities, not with justice but with harm minimization, it does not seek a world free of crime but one where the best practices of damage limitation have been put in place; not a utopia but a series of gated havens in a hostile world.⁷

Young makes it clear that this new paradigm rejects the hopefulness of liberal social interventions carried out in the interests of the society as a whole, in favor of more parochial and individual calculations. It represents a profoundly conservative approach that undermines progressive attempts to increase equality and social integration.

Young argues that the rise in punitive social control policies is tied to two related developments: the increased individualism of the 1960s and 1970s and the economic restructuring of cities during the 1980s and 1990s. Both of these stem from a general process of disaggregation. Individualism takes the form of a kind of “personal exclusiveness” characterized by the breakdown of traditional connecting and regulating institutions such as the family and the community, producing individualized identities and desires. This is a Durkheimian vision of an anomic individualism that leads some people to pursue their unregulated desires at the expense of others in the form of increased street crime. The economic restructuring of society is tied to the post-Fordist economic model in which production and demand are increasingly disaggregated and individualized. Young contends that a new consumer economy has been created that decentralizes production and thereby leads to unemployment, underemployment, and contingency in the workforce.

The combination of these developments has led to a great deal of relative deprivation. Although people’s individual desires have been increased, the ability of all but the most wealthy to satisfy them has been diminished. The result is both more crime and more resentment of criminals. As Young argues,

What I am suggesting is that both the causes of criminal violence and the punitive response towards it spring from the same source. The obsessive violence of the macho street gang and the punitive obsession of the respectable citizen are similar not only in their nature but in their origin. Both stem from the dislocations in the labor market: the one a market which excludes participation as a worker but encourages voraciousness as a consumer, the other from a market which includes, but only in a precarious fashion.⁸

The causes of the new punitiveness are therefore tied to both the actual rise in crime and the rise in insecurity among those in the middle and, to a lesser degree, the upper classes. And both of these are tied to the changing labor market and the rise in individualism.

Young and Garland make important theoretical contributions to our understanding of the cultural nature of the current backlash. We clearly are living in an actuarial moment in which assessments of personal risk have replaced concerns about society’s collective well-being. Conversely, our view of those who pose a risk have turned from an interest in addressing the needs of individuals existing outside societal norms to viewing that group as a collective “dangerous class” to be avoided and excluded. In addition, we can see that the failure of the state to address the underlying crime and disorder problems is a significant contributor to the punitive backlash as communities become frustrated with the declining conditions of everyday life.

Urban Studies

One of the more interesting urban phenomena of the last twenty years is the rise of neoconservative politicians in many traditionally Democratic cities. New York City, in particular, has elected Republicans as mayor in the last four elections, despite the city’s being about 80 percent Democratic. Many urban scholars have been interested in this apparent abandonment of liberalism in New York and other major cities. Some have concentrated on the role of race and disorder in undermining liberalism, while others have highlighted the effects of globalization in destabilizing the liberal project of social reform, increased equality, and social tolerance. Both sets of scholars point out that liberal urban politicians failed to take into full account the effects of their economic and social policies on the city’s long-term stability.

Some critiques of liberalism have stressed the ways in which liberalism’s tolerance of radical demands by racial minorities during the civil rights era hurt white support for liberalism’s economic and social agenda. In his book Canarsie, Jonathan Rieder describes how white Italian and Jewish residents of the Brooklyn neighborhood of Canarsie came together to fight the busing of minority children into schools in their neighborhood. He shows that these residents’ historic connection to the ideals of New Deal liberalism were undermined by their desire to protect their neighborhood from the destabilizing process of integration. They accused the city of social engineering, which they believed threatened the life of their community.⁹

Rieder’s main contention is that it was the liberals’ attempt to use government to increase blacks’ economic and social equality that created whites’ racial resentment. Canarsie’s residents felt that they were being asked to sacrifice their schools, homes, and neighborhood for the advancement of another group. This was especially troubling because they already felt under siege from their own declining economic status. During the 1970s, New York and other major cities were losing middle-class manufacturing jobs, which put a squeeze on many white-ethnic communities.

Rieder outlines how the rise of crime and political disorder in the 1960s began weakening liberalism, especially along racial lines. As crime increased and blacks made more radical demands on government, middle- and working-class whites turned away from liberalism’s embrace of racial inclusiveness. Evidence of this can be seen in Canarsie’s support for Richard Nixon in 1968 and 1972, despite having voted for Democrats since the New Deal. This process, however, was reversed in the mid-1970s when Canarsie residents voted for Jimmy Carter and continued to vote for Democrats in neighborhood elections. Although they had become disaffected from liberalism, they were not yet ready to abandon it altogether and voted for Democratic mayoral candidates, including Koch in the 1980s and Dinkins in 1989. It took the social crisis of homelessness, combined with concern about crime and race to finally and fully destabilize urban liberalism in Canarsie and other white working-class neighborhoods.

Rieder’s emphasis on the role of race in undermining liberalism is echoed by Jim Sleeper and Fred Siegel, each of whom claims that liberals were too tolerant of the more extreme demands made by black militants in the late 1960s and early 1970s.¹⁰ As an example, they point to the effort by blacks to take local control of the schools in the black Ocean Hill–Brownsville neighborhood in Brooklyn. Many whites viewed this effort as an assault on the mostly white teachers’ union and as a threat to the overall standards of the public school system. They accused New York City Mayor John Lindsay of failing to take action more quickly to regain control of the schools and reestablish a sense of order. This was a crucial moment for liberalism. Up to that point, the teachers’ union had been viewed as a liberal organization in city politics, but the racialized split between black parents and white teachers drove them to be more conservative. In both 1993 and 1997, the teachers’ union failed to endorse the liberal and African American David Dinkins in his races against Rudolph Giuliani, despite Giuliani’s repeated criticism of the teachers and the Board of Education.

Siegel claims that this racial resentment became the basis of a new neoconservative urban politics ushered in by Rudolph Giuliani. According to Siegel, whites began to view liberalism as a political philosophy that tolerated political and social extremism, which was socially and economically threatening to middle-class whites. Siegel also criticizes liberals’ reliance on the courts to win enhanced social freedoms, accusing groups like the Coalition for the Homeless and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of trying to win cases in the courts that they could not convince the public were worthwhile. According to Siegel, this gave these groups an elitist and antidemocratic appearance, and his bypassing of public opinion also alienated many community residents from liberalism’s allegiance to social tolerance and a rights-based view of social interaction.

When Giuliani ran for office in 1989, he appealed directly to these disaffected white, formerly liberal voters. He even received support from the local Liberal Party and numerous well-known white liberals such as neighborhood activist Fran Reiter from the Upper West Side and journalist Wayne Barrett of the Village Voice.¹¹ In 1993, Giuliani campaigned on a platform of retaking control of the city from welfare recipients, criminals, and the homeless. These were code words for poor minorities, whom, the argument goes, liberal politicians had “coddled” with their poorly designed social programs, which had created a climate of sloth and permissive...