Safer Streets

BY 

Crime in New York peaked in 1990. Why are the police still treating so many people like criminals?
June 3, 1999, Loretta Lynch, who was then the chief Assistant United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, delivered the final arguments in the prosecution of several police officers accused of having beaten and sodomized a Brooklyn man named Abner Louima almost two years earlier, in an incident that began outside a club in Flatbush. The trial had already taken a dramatic turn. Officer Justin Volpe, whom Louima had identified as the policeman who rammed a broken broomstick up his rectum in a precinct-house bathroom, said that he was the one who had been attacked, and his lawyer argued that the internal injuries Louima suffered were the result of a prior homosexual encounter. Then other officers came forward to testify against Volpe. He ended up tearfully confessing, and Lynch and her colleagues saw him convicted in a case that, she later told the Wall Street Journal, she was determined not to present to the jury as a “referendum on race.”
Yet that’s how many New Yorkers couldn’t help seeing it, and how, last Wednesday, they saw the failure of a Staten Island grand jury to bring an indictment in the killing of Eric Garner—just a week after a grand jury in Missouri had declined to bring an indictment in the shooting death of Michael Brown, who, like Garner, was a black man confronted by a white officer. Lynch, who is also African-American, is now not only the U.S. Attorney but also President Obama’s nominee to replace Eric Holder as Attorney General. On Wednesday, she interrupted her round of courtesy visits to the senators who will vote on her confirmation to announce that, in the Garner case, her office would “move forward with its own independent inquiry to determine whether federal civil-rights laws have been violated.” Lynch has a reputation as a prosecutor with a strong relationship with the police, but she wasn’t necessarily imperilling that. Even many conservatives have conceded the need for a review, given the starkness of the case. A team of officers surrounded Garner, whom they apparently suspected of illegally selling loose, untaxed cigarettes, in Staten Island’s Tompkinsville neighborhood. What happened next was recorded in a cell-phone video. Garner told the policemen to leave him alone. When they moved in on him, Officer Daniel Pantaleo put him in a choke hold—a maneuver banned by the N.Y.P.D.—and pushed him face down on the sidewalk. Garner said, eleven times, “I can’t breathe,” before he died.

The year of the Louima assault, there were about eight hundred murders in New York City. That’s a big number if one considers that this year, so far, there have been two hundred and eighty-six. Crime peaked, though, in 1990, when there were twenty-two hundred and sixty-two murders; nine years later, by the time of the Louima trial, the Broken Windows theory, with its emphasis on quality-of-life policing, and CompStat, the use of statistical analysis to target high-crime spots, were well-worn catchphrases. There are many explanations for the drop in crime—demographics, shifts in the drug trade, and long, hard hours on the beat. But the communities that were epicenters of crime two decades ago were not bystanders in its reduction. The people who live in them made choices, too, to help make their streets safer, for which they deserve credit. Instead, they are too often treated as presumptive recidivists.
Police work, in this time of relative calm, has a tendency to be distorted by two imperatives. The first involves the notion that if quality-of-life policing lets up for a minute we’ll return to the days when playgrounds were littered with empty crack vials. When Mayor Bill de Blasio ran for office, he talked about radically cutting back one such measure, the N.Y.P.D.’s stop-and-frisk policies, which had become not only a civil-rights violation inflicted on a generation of mostly young black and Latino New Yorkers but counterproductive. There were almost seven hundred thousand stops in 2011. There have been fewer than fifty thousand this year, and crime is still falling. De Blasio’s recent proposal to have the police deal with the possession of small amounts of marijuana by issuing summonses, rather than by making arrests, is designed to help reduce the disparities in arrest rates and prevent arrest records from derailing young people’s job prospects and their futures. His announcement, on Thursday, that every N.Y.P.D. officer will take a retraining course whose goals will include not letting “adrenaline” and ego get the best of them is intended to help prevent deaths like Eric Garner’s.
The other law-enforcement imperative is the idea that every precinct house and sheriff’s office in the country must hold the line against the next September 11th attack—and the concurrent militarization of American policing. New Yorkers are somewhat inured to this, in part because the city is a place where anti-terrorism measures make particular sense, although we are still caught short by reports of, say, undercover units operating in mosques. The images from Ferguson, where military-style vehicles roamed the streets, showed what policing had become, in an era when the Pentagon sells military surplus to towns that lie far from any likely terrorist threat. President Obama announced last week that this program would be more closely regulated.
There is a need, however, for a different sort of review, one that recognizes a national dilemma that goes beyond law enforcement. The Times recently cited comments that Loretta Lynch made in 2000, a year after the Volpe trial, at a luncheon of the Association of Black Women Attorneys. “We live in a time where people fear the police,” she said. “But we must also understand that when people say they fear the police, as bad as that is, they are also expressing an underlying fear, that when they are confronted with the criminal element in our society they will have no one to call upon to protect them. And that feeling of vulnerability and utter helplessness is the worst feeling that we can inflict upon fellow-members of our society.”
A decade and a half later, that same sentiment could be heard in protests throughout the city. Speaking after the grand-jury decision in Staten Island, de Blasio, whose wife is black, talked about their worries for their son, and said, “There are so many families in this city that feel that each and every night—is my child safe?” The question concerns the safety of people who might simply fit a police officer’s conception of a criminal. What we need to do now, perhaps, is learn to look at each other through unbroken windows. ♦