Window air-conditioner units and fire escapes dot the red and tan brick apartment buildings on College Avenue, a street located just a few blocks east of the Grand Concourse in the southwest Bronx. Thursday afternoons in this area are often a very tense time for neighborhood residents. On what have become known as “Thirsty Thursdays,”1 a weekly event in which officers from New York City’s 44th Police Precinct flood the neighborhood in the department’s trademark blue and white vans, young people from the community can disappear for hours and sometimes days at a time.
Young adults, primarily men but also women, in this and other neighborhoods in the South Bronx are transported in this vehicle to the nearest police precinct and held there until a family member can pick them up. The explanation for whisking away these young people is typically vague or even nonexistent—at best, sometimes nothing more than the comment that the youth was causing trouble or disturbing the peace. The crime prevention program under which these young people are rounded up and abruptly herded away is known as “stop, question, and frisk,” or, colloquially, “stop and frisk.”
In the early 2000s, New York City began to experience a surge in the use of this strategy, an aggressive police tactic that became a distinctive feature of the New York Police Department. Young black and Latino men disproportionately became the focus of this approach, which targets residents of selected neighborhoods throughout the five boroughs. Although the number of documented stops began to decline in 2012, aggressive policing has not disappeared and its impact continues to be felt by both the individual and the community.
This book draws from three years of intensive ethnographic fieldwork conducted before and after the landmark court decision Floyd, et al. v. City of New York, which was handed down by a federal judge in 2013 and ruled such stops unconstitutional. My research was conducted in and around the 40th, 42nd, and 44th Precincts in the western portion of the South Bronx, the latter of which was recently recognized by the New York Times as having one of the “highest use(s) of force” in the entire city. 2
Relying primarily on participant observation, informal interviews, focus groups, and life-history interviews, this book examines how local residents make sense of aggressive policing tactics and explores the strategies and sources of resilience these individuals use to cope. I take a close look at residents’ conception of what it means to be a citizen and how their right to public space has been transformed by aggressive policing tactics.
My findings suggest that this approach to policing has led to a substantial erosion of faith in local and state institutions. My research also shows that these aggressive policing tactics discourage the formation of social ties in the neighborhood, the very networks residents need to thrive and get ahead.
Aggressive policing, most visible through the department’s highly publicized stop-and-frisk program, results in a number of negative consequences. Although high-profile cases of police misconduct often dominate the headlines, they are only a part of the story. Missed classes in school and missed shifts at work can put a strain on a young person’s financial situation and are among the more visible collateral costs of this mode of policing. Less visible but also destructive is the severe emotional toll that results when members of the community are forced to make sense of the experience of growing up under surveillance.
With New York City widely hailed as a success story in its ability to reduce street crime and with other cities having begun to replicate the New York Police Department model, I believed it was essential to analyze the effects of aggressive policing strategies on communities in New York. Much of what we know about the impact of this form of policing comes from statisticians and policymakers, who are typically examining the issue from a distance. Using a more grounded ethnographic approach, I wanted to look more deeply at the unanticipated consequences of the use of this tactic to better understand how residents of the South Bronx, particularly young adults, make sense of policing in their community.
Much of the existing literature on policing and its impact on local communities focuses almost exclusively on justice-involved black and Latino individuals or, at the other extreme, recounts the stories of the community’s highest achievers. By contrast, my goal was to expand on these narratives to gain a greater understanding of the effects of aggressive policing on the everyday lives of a broad range of local residents.
Specifically, I explore how different groups maintain a sense of community in the face of a looming police presence. I examine the ways that local residents remain resilient, along with the coping mechanisms and strategies they use to deal with this situation. I also examine the effects of this form of policing on residents’ day-to-day lives—for example, how employment and education prospects may be affected. Perhaps most important, I examine residents’ conception of what it means to be a citizen in such an environment and how the right to public space has been transformed by aggressive policing tactics.
In the Introduction, I begin by defining what aggressive policing means in New York City by focusing on the rise and subsequent decrease in the use of stop and frisk. I also provide a historical account of the role of the police in New York City communities, documenting the transformation of police practices over the decades.
Chapter 1 examines the experiences of the more achievement-oriented young people of the neighborhood, those “invisible youths” who may not be found out on the street, playing in the parks, or occupying other public spaces. These young adults have effectively been driven indoors through a combination of neighborhood violence and an aggressive police presence. In particular, I highlight the experiences of two groups of young adults in the neighborhood: “The Achievers,” a group that often avoids creating community ties as a protective mechanism, and the “Line-Toers,” those who try to reconcile community ties with their own personal aspirations.
In Chapter 2, I explore the experiences of young adults who have been involved with the court system and who often experience some of the harshest treatment from police. Subsequently, in Chapter 3, I discuss the experiences of local parents, who, although they are generally not the targets of aggressive policing, experience an acute form of trauma vicariously through their children. Many of these parents have developed a set of coping skills to help them deal with the emotional toll of having a son or daughter handcuffed and taken away and, on a more pragmatic level, to navigate the system when these situations occur.
In Chapter 4, I focus on the experiences of recent immigrants in the neighborhood, exploring how a lack of social capital coupled with the strength of ethnic group ties can provide a protective buffer between immigrant groups and police. Finally, in Chapter 5, I discuss the impact of aggressive policing on outcomes such as securing a conviction in court and offer some policy recommendations.
The impact of stop and frisk is of critical importance because of the dilemma inherent in aggressive policing in high-need communities. The very people who are typically victims of this approach are those who arguably need the most protection from the police. A humane and nuanced analysis of the implications and social and economic costs of this regime can only help policy makers address the issue with greater depth and understanding.