Personal Encounters with New York City Policing

I lived in New York City for five years beginning in the late 1980s. This was when the city had yet to undergo its surge in gentrification that really got rolling under Giuliani; for instance, Times Square was still a squalid strip of peep shows, adult bookstores and rundown steak houses. 

I had my run-ins with the police. One time, when I was living in a neighborhood of Dominicans and Hasids tucked up against the eastern entrance to the George Washington Bridge a white undercover cop accosted me as I was crossing 181st Street on my way back to my apartment. He demanded to see some identification; he wanted to know what I was doing. He puts his hands on me and went through my pockets. I told him I lived in the neighborhood and was on my way home.

The cop was incredulous. He couldn't imagine a white rock'n'roller young man living willingly among blacks and orthodox Jews. The neighborhood was notorious for being the preferred destination for suburbanites to acquire street drugs. It is a narrow part of northern Manhattan conveniently bisected by Interstate 95.

Finally, I defused the situation by inviting him up to my apartment. I told him something like, "If you don't believe me, come on up. I'll show you where I live."

He dismissed me with the imperative to stay out of trouble, warning me that he would be watching.

I wasn't really upset by the encounter, more dumbfounded than anything else. It seemed ludicrous, comical that undercover police could bodily search and interrogate a person in broad daylight on a busy thoroughfare with zero cause besides falling within the parameters of an overly broad profile. Nonetheless I can vividly recall the encounter more than twenty-years on.

This was not my only run-in with New York City's finest. I actually got into an altercation late one Friday night with a Transit Authority police. The location was 136th Street 1-line subway stop. The cop ended up calling for backup. A gang of undercovers arrived and frogmarched me at high velocity up a long flight of subway-station stairs and threw me in the back of their cruiser. Off I went at breakneck speeds with sirens wailing to a Harlem police station to spend the night locked up.

What had I done? I asked why the Transit Authority police was hassling my friend for having an unlit cigarette on his lips. Smoking is not allowed in the subway but he wasn't smoking. The Transit Authority police responded to my inquiries by telling me to "Shut the fuck up and put your hands above your head."

My retort? "Fuck you!"

And that's when the altercation began. The people on the platform -- all black and Latino -- formed a circle around me and the Transit Authority cop as we grappled and chanted, "Police brutality! Police brutality!"

I had forgotten about this incident until this week when the Garner grand jury refused to indict the undercover policeman, Pantaleo, for homicide.

Not all of Gotham's constabulary are Gestapo types. During my residence in the Big Apple I came across several, particularly the ones who were my age, in their 20s, who were approachable, more so than your typical big city West Coast police who affect sort of a sterile haughty professionalism.

The Garner murder has struck a chord. It is a stain on the credibility of the U.S. You'll be less likely in the immediate aftermath of the ongoing #BlackLivesMatter protests to witness John Kerry climbing up on his high horse to hector other nations about good government.

Something has shifted from business-as-usual patterns. Even Hillary, who anticipates success by roping crackers into the Democratic Party at the same time keeping the "Obama coalition" loyal, is sounding off about racial justice. According to Peter Baker and Amy Chozick's "Some Conservatives Say Deadly Force Used to Subdue Garner Didn’t Fit the Crime":

. . . Mrs. Clinton drew broader conclusions. “Each of us has to grapple with some hard truths about race and justice in America,” she said, speaking at a conference in Boston. “Because despite of all the progress we’ve made together, African-Americans, most particularly African-American men, are still more likely to be stopped and searched by police, charged with crimes and sentenced to longer prison terms.” 

Mrs. Clinton endorsed Mr. Obama’s decision to form a task force to review police tactics and praised the Justice Department’s decision to investigate Mr. Garner’s death. She called for changing police tactics, overhauling the prison system and demilitarizing police departments. At times, she struck the personal tone some had expected of Mr. Obama. 

“The most important thing each of us can do is to try even harder to see the world through our neighbors’ eyes,” she said. “To imagine what it is like to walk in their shoes, to share their pain and their hopes and their dreams.”

For Hillary to take this stand you know it has been vetted by campaign operatives and focus-group tested. The politics of outrage over racial injustice have gone mainstream.

The Gray Lady's editorial board bears this out. Over the last two days some of the best items written on the Garner homicide can be found in the unsigned editorials. Two things stand out in "It Wasn’t Just the Chokehold: Eric Garner, Daniel Pantaleo and Lethal Police Tactics." First:

But among the many needed reforms, there is one simple area that risks being overlooked. Besides the banned chokehold used by Officer Daniel Pantaleo, who brought Mr. Garner down, throwing a beefy arm around his neck, there was lethal danger in the way Mr. Garner was subdued — on his stomach, with a pile of cops on his back. 

This breaks a basic rule of safe arrests, especially for people who, like Mr. Garner, are overweight and have medical problems like asthma. When the New York medical examiner’s office ruled Mr. Garner’s death a homicide, it cited “compression of neck (choke hold), compression of chest and prone positioning during physical restraint by police.” 

As early as 1995, a Department of Justice bulletin on “positional asphyxia” quoted the New York Police Department’s guidelines on preventing deaths in custody. “As soon as the subject is handcuffed, get him off his stomach.Turn him on his side or place him in a seated position.” 

As Michael Baden, a former chief medical examiner of New York City, told The Times: “Obese people especially, lying face down, prone, are unable to breathe when enough pressure is put on their back. The pressure prevents the diaphragm from going up and down, and he can’t inhale and exhale.” 

Which is exactly what Mr. Garner was trying to tell the officers who were on top of him.

 Next:

The Garner killing must lead to major changes in policy, particularly in the use of “broken windows” policing — a strategy in which Officer Pantaleo specialized, according to a report in September by WNYC, which found that he had made hundreds of arrests since joining the force in 2007, leading to at least 259 criminal cases, all but a fraction of those involving petty offenses. The department must find a better way to keep communities safe than aggressively hounding the sellers of loose cigarettes. 

And while defenders of the police like to point to thousands of nonfatal misdemeanor arrests as evidence that officers are acting in a way that is reasonable and safe, there can never be a justification for any lethal assault on an unarmed man, no justification for brutality.

The outrage in New York, echoed by anguished protesters in Ferguson, Mo., and in Cleveland, where the Justice Department has found a pattern of excessive force by the police, is based on a genuine fear of aggressive, abusive cops.

Crime in the City

John Tierney has an excellent, substantial story from this past Saturday about the remarkable and thoroughly debated year after year decline in New York City crime. There is a lot of information here, for instance, New York City crime continues to drop even though there have been reductions in the police force whose expansion in the 1990s is credited with creating safer streets in the first place:

Elsewhere, studies have shown that crime drops when more police officers are hired, so it is not surprising that the expansion of New York’s police force in the 1990s by more than a third was accompanied by a drop in crime. But during the past decade, the force has shrunk by 15 percent, and yet crime has mostly continued falling.

The thinking is that if you have a physical police presence at "hot spots" -- areas of high crime -- you see significant decreases in crime citywide. The criminals don't just pack their bags and set up shop in a different neighborhood; in other words, crime is more spatial than characterological.

Nonetheless, the hot-spot strategy was initially met with skepticism by police veterans. 

“We assumed that if we hit one area hard, the crime would just move somewhere else,” said Frank Gajewski, a former police chief of Jersey City, who worked with Dr. Weisburd on the experiments there.

But Dr. Weisburd won over Mr. Gajewski and other skeptics — and also won the 2010 Stockholm Prize, criminology’s version of the Nobel — by showing that crime was not simply being displaced. Moreover, he and his colleagues reported a “spatial diffusion of crime prevention benefits” because crime also declined in adjoining areas, as the police in Jersey City had observed.

“Crime doesn’t move as easily we thought it did,” Mr. Gajewski said. “If I’m a robber, I want to be in a familiar, easily accessible place with certain characteristics. I need targets to rob, but I don’t want people in the neighborhood watching me or challenging me. Maybe I work near a bus stop where there are vacant buildings or empty lots. If the police start focusing there, I can’t just move to the next block and find the same conditions.”

After more than two dozen experiments around the world, criminologists generally agree that hot-spot policing is “an effective crime prevention strategy,” in the words of Anthony Braga, a criminologist at Harvard and Rutgers who led a review of the research literature last year.

There's more in Tierney's story; it's also an argument for rerouting money currently spent on incarceration back to policing. He traces the boom in prison building back to an article published in 1974:

New York, while now an exception to the mass-incarceration trend, also happens to be the place that inspired it. When New York State four decades ago commissioned an evaluation of programs to rehabilitate criminals, the conclusions were so discouraging that the researchers were initially forbidden to publish them.

Eventually one of the criminologists, Robert Martinson, summarized the results in 1974 in the journal Public Interest. His article, “What Works? Questions and Answers About Prison Reform,” was soon known as the “nothing works” thesis. Dr. Martinson concluded that rehabilitation strategies “cannot overcome, or even appreciably reduce, the powerful tendencies of offenders to continue in criminal behavior.”

An outgrowth of the study was a consensus to eliminate parole for many offenders and to mandate long sentences determined by formulas rather than rely on the discretion of judges and parole boards.

Dr. Martinson wrote an article in 1979 recanting his “nothing works” conclusion, but by then it was too late. The trend toward tougher sentences continued, causing prison populations to grow rapidly in the 1980s throughout the country, including in New York. When crime kept rising anyway, sentences often were further lengthened.

My time in New York City, spent predominantly in the 33rd Precinct, was during the last several years prior to the expansion of the police force and the crackdown on petty crimes with the enforcement of a broken windows theory under Giuliani. I suppose what I saw while living in Washington Heights from 1988 until 1993 was the end of era.