For large portions of the U.S. population, the on-going struggle for police accountability has played out in sporadic bursts, following deaths at the hands of the police - 531 already in 2016. Amadou Diallo, Rekia Boyd, Kelly Thomas, Shantel Davis, Mike Brown, Eric Garner, Tanisha Anderson, Miriam Carey, Tamir Rice. These deaths, which include that of Omar Edwards, a Black plainclothes police officer who was killed after fellow Manhattan cops mistook him for a car thief, provoke a certain kind of terrorism, leading parents, including New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, to publically discuss the grim reality of telling their Black children not to move their hands too quickly when confronted by police - discussions absent from counsel of White parents to their children. Public pressure, education and movement building have forced the media to cover this problem, which has, for perhaps the first time, also been pushed - largely by young, Black organizers - into the discourse of the presidential primaries.
But a more widespread, insidious type of activity may finally be getting a long-deserved comeuppance here in New York City. Broken Windows policing, a high-arrest policy of aggressive police enforcement of minor crimes and violations, has reenergized policing (and police budgets) across the country after being popularized by Bill Bratton during his first turn as Commissioner of the New York Police Department under Mayor Rudy Giuliani during the mid-1990s.
Since 2006, NYPD has made approximately 3.5 million arrests (about three quarters of which were for misdemeanors) and doled out about 9 million traffic tickets and 4.5 million criminal summons violations. The impact of these low-level enforcements, over time - tickets, fines, a couple days in jail here and there - may not be as obvious as physical police brutality or murder, but can be a major barrier to success and at times, even deadly. Early this year, in The Nation, Debbie Nathan's poignant investigation into the death of Sandra Bland, described how a "deluge" of fines, fees, warrants and short jail stints - all triggered by minor, low-level violations like traffic offenses and marijuana possession - pushed a young woman's life off-track.
While Bland's death in police custody finally made the news, it was preceded by a life-long trail of humiliations at the hands of law enforcement across two states that seem to have derailed her - contacts made more dangerous and powerful by the systemic racism and sexism that circumscribed other opportunities. This is what broken windows policing is all about. A constant grind; jab, jab, jab, jab, against people already marginalized by a raft of public policies and historical hierarchies, before a final KO that may come as an eviction, a lost job, a desperate act leading to more severe criminal consequences, or brutality and at times - as it was for Eric Garner - death at the hands of the state.
In New York City, at least, police enforcement of low-level activities objectively focuses on certain people based on race. While a recent NYC Department of Investigation report identified that areas with higher populations of people of color saw more enforcement, even when controlling for levels of crime, a 2014 study also found that even in predominantly White neighborhoods, people of color, specifically Black and Latino people, represented almost everyone ticketed for things like spitting, jaywalking, open container of alcohol, or riding a bike on the sidewalk. NYC's Department of Health estimated that fewer than 20 percent of all dogs in the City are licensed, yet, Black and Latino pet owners make up 91 percent of the people fined for unlicensed dogs, according to that report. The work of the Police Reform Organizing Project and others has consistently reflected this reality.
While apologists for police overreach often point to community complaints as catalysts for low-level enforcement, this argument rests on the notion - supported by NYC's fraudulent neighborhood policing program - that the police are the only people capable of responding to conflicts in the community no matter how small or how far outside the traditional scope of their authority. To the extent that that may be true, this is reflective of the City's policies of disinvestment in marginalized communities (of all things besides law enforcement) not of some innate quality in police. Daryl Kahn elucidated this reality succinctly with his 2014 story aptly titled: "Harlem Residents: We Asked City for Help, We Got a Raid Instead."
At a community meeting I attended last summer in Brooklyn, a resident complained to the Commanding Officer of the local precinct about a violent crime that occurred on her block: a gun point robbery. What were the police doing to solve the crime and to ensure that it doesn't happen again, the woman asked?
"We are summonsing the crap out of that corner," the Commanding Officer said. That is, they are ticketing people for the lowest of infractions simply because they live or wander near a crime scene, because this, in reality, is the only way that police have to respond to community complaints. No one in the neighborhood had come forward with any information about the underlying crime, he continued; maybe they were all too busy in summons court.
When reality and justice eventually caught up with Stop and Frisk in 2011, after almost of decade of protracted struggle by activists here, then-Commissioner Ray Kelly and Mayor Mike Bloomberg came to the now thoroughly debunked practice's defense. Today, as then, a similar cast of characters has lined up to protect the status quo - and police power more generally. Bratton and De Blasio have replaced Kelly and Bloomberg as the administration talking heads, and like their predecessors, they have tied themselves to the mast of the sinking U.S.S. Broken Windows with Bratton's colleagues at the Manhattan Institute, who famously described Stop and Frisk as NYC's "most important export," and predicted streets bathed in blood following the successful constitutional challenge to the practice, events which of course, as Bratton himself announces regularly, never came to fruition. For his part, Bratton's professional legacy and personal wealth hinge on protecting this dying brand.
While the current debate over Broken Windows, like Stop and Frisk before it, centers on the utility of a police practice with racially discriminatory outcomes, at some point, we need to think about what is right and wrong, and act accordingly. Leaving aside the fact that there is no solid evidence to support aggressive enforcement of minor behaviors as a method for decreasing serious crimes, a public policy that discriminates based on race, or poverty - whose central outcome has been the reinforcement of a racist social hierarchy - is on its face indefensible in a free society. Stop and Frisk was "indispensable" before it wasn't - Broken Windows as practiced in NYC will eventually suffer the same fate, if the arc of history does indeed bend toward justice, no matter how long and stridently Bratton and De Blasio kick and scream against it. The only remaining question is how many lives will be harmed during the delay of this antiquated policy's demise.