It’s like you can’t . . . you can’t be who . . . who . . . let me see a good way to say it . . . you can’t be the people you see on TV and expect to be somebody from the hood.
—Grams
On a chilly February afternoon I sat with Grams as he awaited a meeting with his probation officer, John Latedes. As Latedes met with other clients in the front room of the recently renovated Bronx NeON probation office on 161st Street near the Grand Concourse, Grams, an African American male in his early twenties, quietly texted friends on his cell phone a few tables away.
NeON, which stands for Neighborhood Opportunity Network, was a result of a massive overhaul of the New York City Department of Probation ushered in by Commissioner Vincent Schiraldi in conjunction with Mayor Bloomberg’s Young Men’s Initiative. Located in “high-need” areas across the five boroughs, the program was designed to bring together the Probation Department and community resources. Opening in August 2012, the physical space of the Bronx location is much different than one might expect from a standard probation office.
Although the outside is a drab blue, with caged windows, inside the walls looked recently painted, with a series of round tables near the entrance. A group of older black women operate the reception desk off to the left. Graffiti-like artwork decorates the wall along the main hallway, and a plasma TV screen sits on the far wall. The only noticeable security presence comes in the form of a heavyset Latina from an independent security company. On this day, she is wearing a long-sleeved white polo shirt and blue slacks, and holds tightly to a black metal-detector wand. Unlike the courthouse across the street, which is fully equipped with armed guards, metal detectors, and scanners, this space is largely devoid of these remnants of the carceral state.1
In many ways, Grams’s biography is the archetypal account of young adults involved with the criminal justice system. His story encompasses an intricate maze of blocked opportunities and illustrates how, over the years, so many institutions, most recently the 40th Precinct, have failed him and others like him. I choose to focus on the plight of these men and women because they are very much a part of the neighborhood ecology. Moreover, how police engage with these “at-risk” youth and sometimes predicate felons (those who have previously been convicted of a felony) can have huge implications on community safety.
Grams’s nickname was given to him by a close friend in his early teens, an appropriate play on both his birth, or “government” name, and the weight used to measure drugs. He is currently on the front end of a five-year probation sentence for selling crack to an undercover officer in his neighborhood. Grams is small in stature, although his face looks far older than his 21 years. He has a slightly unkempt beard and a short afro. Apart from a tattoo of his mother’s name on his neck, and another on his left hand, homage to his crew, the YGs, or Young Guns, he is largely unassuming and reserved both in appearance and his overall affect.
Grams, who has spent his entire life in the Patterson Houses, a public housing complex located in the Mott Haven section of the Bronx, began selling marijuana at the age of 12, and soon graduated to crack and heroin. In the 10th grade he dropped out of school to pursue the street full time. Grams elaborates on how his descent into the drug trade began:
I used to see my father doing it all the time. I felt he was getting a lot of money. . . . I used to be behind him and act like I ain’t seen him when he used to stash stuff. I’d run and sneak and take stuff out. . . . I started stealing off of his stuff. So I’m out there doing my thing, feel me? Everybody got they certain color tops at the time. . . . They got either bags or tops . . . we still do bottles in my hood. Yellow, red top, blue top. My father had blue and then they seen me with them.
I was young when I first started so I was doing it, so I was selling them for $5! “Here, take $5 bags.” So people would come up to my father and see the blue top and tell him like, “What, ten dollars!? It’s five!” He like “who . . . who selling them to you for . . .” He started finding out about me [laughs]. After the third time he caught me, I got locked up. . . . He like, “Fuck it. I see I can’t control you. You gonna do what you want.” He started helping me, actually. He started giving it to me. “I’d rather you get it from me if anything.” Then it just became like that.
Grams’s foray into the drug trade was inspired, at least in part, by his father, who later went on to become his supplier. Despite the fact that his father identified as a Crip, by the age of 17 Grams had decided to run with the YGs. Initially Grams and his friends would imitate the mannerisms and handshakes they saw some of the older YGs in the neighborhood doing, until one of the “OGs” (an elder in the crew) adopted him into the group. This immediately sparked tension with others in the neighborhood, including his father:
My neighborhood was Crip. My father was Crip. So then with YG . . . we both . . . YG and Crip was left handed—when we throw it up, we throw it up with the left hand and then the Crips didn’t really like that at the time. So it was tension. My father used to run down on me, feel me? . . . So it was basically like my father tried to tell me, “Yo, stop them from doing this. You got these niggas robbing people, they making the block hot. Y’all rob somebody over here. . . . I’m trying to hustle! Cops pull up on me and catch me hustling.” I ain’t really think nothing of it cuz I’m like, “Man . . . do whatever.” We getting money in all ways.
In contrast to the deeply entrenched gang cultures in cities like Chicago and Los Angeles, New York City has shifted away from these hierarchical street organizations toward more loosely defined neighborhood “crews,” or semiorganized groups of young adults that are often more transient in nature. The New York Police Department has adjusted its approach as well, implementing tactics such as “Operation Crew Cut,” which focuses specifically on young people aged 13 to 21 who are involved with neighborhood crews. A year after its inception in the fall of 2012, the program boasted that “police and prosecutors have conducted 25 investigations throughout the five boroughs resulting in more than 400 crew members indicted for crimes including murder, robberies, assault, and weapons possession.”2
With access to a crew, Grams expanded his entrepreneurial enterprise into robbing—both stickups and snatching gold chains, which they would later sell at pawnshops. Now even more deeply immersed in the underground economy, having a gun became increasingly necessary. With discussions about gun control reaching a fever pitch nationwide, widespread accessibility of guns still remains an issue in New York City. Countless young adults, Grams included, have walked me through the steps by which they have obtained guns with relative ease.
For many people, this ease is hard to imagine, considering the perceived effectiveness of stop and frisk in this capacity. Yet, as one analysis revealed, the citywide gun recovery rate between 2003 and 2013 was a fraction of a percent, or .016 percent. More specifically, about 600 stops were needed to confiscate each gun.3 The gun yield was only slightly better in the southwest Bronx. In 2011, in one 40-block section of the 44th Precinct, approximately eight guns were recovered per 4,882 stops, or .12 percent.4
For Grams, having a gun translated to a form of protection and a sense of respect. Assault rifles, glorified during the height of the crack era of the late 1980s and early 1990s, have fallen out of favor, replaced by less conspicuous pieces. Still, as Grams reveals, “I was seventeen years old in the hood with a Mac-11 [machine gun].” This was his first gun, one he obtained during a robbery.
His eyes light up as he describes the piece. “It’s like a brick . . . like this big [motions with both hands]. I got the handle right here and then the clip. So you can hold it by the clip. It’s a Uzi. It’s a little Uzi. A little machine gun.” He later obtained a .38 revolver, a smaller pistol, after seeing someone in his neighborhood toss it in the bushes while running from the police.
Now, with two guns in his possession, he ended up selling the Mac-11 to his uncle for $1,500. According to Grams, “That’s when it got back to my Mom. She thinking I’m the gun connect. Everybody run up to me, ‘yo, I heard you selling guns! I heard you selling guns!’ Shit fucked me up with my Mom and shit. It was crazy.”
As Grams demonstrates, those who want a gun need not jump through many hoops. When trying to acquire a piece, residents involved in the criminal justice system almost never go through traditional channels to obtain one; all that is really needed is a friend or an associate with a clean record. Here, Shawn, a young adult from the 44th Precinct, described how some of his peers go about acquiring weapons:
Shawn: Nowadays, you get a brand new one [gun] for $200–300. In the box. Brand new. Never been used, with a whole box of bullets. . . . In PA [Pennsylvania], you can walk out the same day. That’s what most people do, they go out to PA, they buy 4–5 guns, they’ll come bring them back, they report them stolen, then they sell them in the street. It’s ridiculous. It’s like as long as you 18 or older, I think it’s like 21, you go to PA and buy a gun. I have a friend that lives in PA . . . he has a whole garage with an arsenal, and he just likes to collect guns, that’s what it is.
Jan: How about—
Shawn: Used already? It would probably be like $100. A little .22, you’d probably get that for free. You probably sit there and smoke with the nigga, become friends, and he’d be like, ‘Here, you could have it’ [laughs]. If it has a body [a homicide], they’d rather pass it off, because if you get caught with that gun, you gotta take that body. It’s crazy. The game is crazy.
Grams was never arrested for more severe offenses like gun possession or robbery. Instead, he accumulated a number of arrests for lesser drug offenses involving marijuana and crack cocaine. His most recent arrest, in December 2012, was the first to carry a felony.
Grams’s longest stint in jail took place in 2009 when he spent a month on Rikers Island for a crack sale. This brief stretch only seemed to affirm his street ties in Patterson, however, as one of his associates from the neighborhood was only a few cells down. “Basically the house was his that I was in, so I was good. I’m like, ‘Damn. God just was with me just now.’ My Gunna got the crib, feel me? It was a half YB [Young Bosses] crib and YG crib.”
When Grams was arrested in December, his father was included in a separate, large-scale federal case that brought down several others in a crack distribution network in the Mott Haven and Patterson Houses. Due to the severity of the charges, Grams does not expect him to be freed any time soon.
Only a few months shy of his 22nd birthday, Grams is unemployed and living with his mother. Apart from a solitary summer spent working in housing as part of New York City’s Summer Youth Employment Program, he has no formal work experience, high school diploma, or a GED. He has a toddler-aged son with his girlfriend, who, according to him, is still “out there” partying, drinking, and, perhaps most important, is unemployed as well. He is not optimistic about his chances in life, but he does not hesitate to reflect on how he got to this point:
Since I was younger I always said it. It came out of my mouth a thousand times that I wanna be just like my father. I don’t want a job. I wanna hustle. It came just like that, “I wanna hustle.” My father making too much money. He supporting me, my family, everybody. Feel me? I wanted to be just like him. Growing up in the hood that I grew up in, if you want to be a fireman . . . who the hell are you? You was basically . . . especially to have my rep . . . we out here gangbanging, doing stuff and you’re talking about you want to be a fireman or a cop or something!? It don’t add up. . . . So . . . it’s like damn, how do I start from nowhere?
As much of the data suggest, a disproportionate number of those incarcerated come from neighborhoods that are home to only a small fraction of the city’s population. In New York City, neighborhoods that are home to approximately 17 percent of the adult male population account for more than 50 percent of prison admissions each year.5 Two zip codes in the South Bronx that are home to a number of my contacts, 10455 and 10456, fall among the top 10 in the city in number of prison releases.6
This can translate to astronomical costs to the community. The total annual cost of prison expenditures in the Bronx has been estimated at $310 million. In the Melrose neighborhood alone, costs are estimated at nearly $33.6 million.7 Perhaps even more discouraging, data suggest that more than 22 percent of Bronx youth age 16–24 are considered “disconnected” as they are not working (“on the books”) and are not enrolled in school. This rate is the highest in the city. In the Mott Haven and Melrose sections of the borough, this number spikes to nearly 36 percent.8
Grams is but one face among many trying to “get by” with a felony. As much of the prisoner reentry literature indicates, this is often an uphill battle fraught with restrictions on housing, employment, voting rights, and even educational opportunities.9 For residents of the southwest Bronx, these barriers to reentry are compounded by a looming police presence that can hinder their ability to remain outside of the law.
***
Reese, who is 20, has recently reached the halfway point of his five-year probation sentence, part of a “6–5” split (six months in jail and five years on probation) the judge ordered for him after being arrested for robbery when he was 17. Although Reese received a felony as part of his conviction, his record is now sealed as part of the “Youthful Offender” adjudication.10
For Reese, “coming home” presented its own set of unique issues with his peers back home in the Webster Houses, a public housing complex in the 42nd Precinct. “I’m known by everybody over there and stuff like that,” he said. “When I came home and just started acting different, everybody was looking at me, like . . . that’s not the Reese we knew from before.” Reese tried to go “straight” by minimizing the contact he had with his old crew in the neighborhood, often staying indoors for extended periods to avoid seeing his former peers.
He elaborates on his transformation: “[Before] I’d just ride out for my homeboys. So, whatever, if they was like ‘Oh, we doing this,’ I’m doing that too. So, that’s how it was until reality hit me and I got arrested. Nobody was there but me. I ain’t have no homeboys. I ain’t have no family.”
His incarceration and the feelings of abandonment that followed seemed to serve as a turning point. Both his real and kinship families had abandoned him while he was incarcerated. As a result, when he was released, he tried to focus inwards by obtaining “on the books” employment, most recently through a seasonal job at a nearby Party City store. Reese dropped out of school in the 10th grade and is now trying to go back and get his GED.
His efforts to stay on the straight and narrow are continuously stifled by police in his neighborhood. Over the past 12 months, Reese reports that he has been stopped and frisked more than 30 times. Additionally, the previous October, while spending time with friends, the police raided his apartment. According to Reese, a friend had recently bought a phone on the street, which, as it turned out, was stolen. Using the GPS system on the device, police followed the phone to Reese’s place. Despite the friend admitting that the phone was his, officers handcuffed and arrested both youths as well as Reese’s younger brother:
I’m like, “What is this for, Officer?” He was like, “Don’t worry about it! Shut your effin’ mouth!” Just talking crazy, so I’m like, “all right.” We get down to the Precinct. Now, they put us all in a lineup. They ain’t put my brother in a lineup because he don’t really got a criminal background. Because me and my friend got the criminal background, they automatically, basically tried to railroad us.
So they put us in a lineup and the person ain’t pick us out cuz it wasn’t us that did anything. So they tried to make me and my friend go against us, telling us that, well, he was telling on me saying that I did it. I told them, saying that he did it, whatever the case may be . . . they sent us to the DA’s office because they couldn’t get nothing from us, so they put us on camera and stuff, and they was “blah blah blah blah blah.”
And I was telling them that one of the officers told me to tell them that I did it, or they was going to go to my house and take my brothers away. They was going to send ACS [Administration for Children’s Services] to my house and take my brothers away. So I’m like, “Alright, I did the crime.” I said it on camera to the DA that the officer told me to do it or this was going to happen. So they seen it on camera and they let me go from Rikers. I was already on Rikers being processed, so I’m thinking to myself what did I do to be in here, and stuff like that? And they just called and said I had bail. I ain’t really have bail, they just let me go, because they ain’t have no evidence on me.
Reese’s already profound sense of vulnerability was further magnified by the series of events that followed the police raid—the coercive interrogation techniques and, perhaps most notably, the threat of being separated from his brothers. Despite what transpired, Reese feels fortunate he was not reincarcerated. His friend was not so lucky, however, and ended up doing a year upstate for his role in the incident. As is apparent in Reese’s story, aggressive police tactics often go beyond the street and extend into the homes of residents in so-called high-risk neighborhoods. He feels that he was unfairly targeted because of his past (although his record is technically sealed). Reese is aware of his precarious situation and, in his view, tried to “do the right thing” by not hanging out with his old crew on the benches outside. As he recounts:
They wanted me because my record is basically bad. They was basically trying to do everything in they power to get me arrested. That’s why they sent me to Rikers. I came home the same day, and I’m just messed up in the head, like, what did I do? I just came home. I’m not trying to get into any trouble. I stay in the house all day. Right there, that caused me to not want to hang with my friends or nothing because I don’t know what’s going to happen when I hang out with them. Anything can happen.
Like some of the more achievement-oriented young adults, Reese resorted to an isolationist strategy after “coming home” from his first felony arrest. He quickly discovered that even this approach could present its own set of issues that might compromise his freedom.
Mecca, an African American male who lives a few blocks north of Reese, in the Butler Houses, shares a similar experience trying to “stay straight.” At 22, he was arrested for gun possession, after stashing a friend’s gun at his girlfriend’s apartment. The police raided the apartment based on information from a confidential informant. Mecca was arrested and given a plea deal: “They started off trying to give me a felony, but it became some type of misdemeanor, you know they got Class A, B, all that . . . some type of misdemeanor. I figured once they said misdemeanor, I could still keep my license, my security license, and I could just move on from there.”
As a doorman at a midtown nightclub, Mecca works late into the night, often not arriving home until 5 or 6 a.m. Less than a year after the first incident, police again came to raid his girlfriend’s apartment, this time searching for a gun allegedly used in a shooting involving a police officer. Officers from the 42nd Precinct, along with those from an ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives) unit, descended upon his girlfriend’s apartment at approximately 7 a.m. on a Friday morning.
Officers spent the morning searching the apartment as his family looked on. The questioning and search extended into the evening, but no gun was found. As Mecca says, “I’m telling them, listen, there’s nothing here! I’ve been in the hood long enough to know, once you get a gun charge, that’s it, it’s a wrap. Now y’all gonna be on me. It’s a wrap. I’m not going to do it again. It’s over.”
The investigation caused him to miss his evening shift and the accompanying “under-the-table” wages he receives after a night’s work, a valuable source of income he uses to supplement his earnings from his minimum-wage security job in lower Manhattan:
I hit ‘em up and told them [his employer] I’m not going to be able to make it. He was like, “all right.” Next Thursday I ain’t get no phone call, next Wednesday I ain’t get no phone call. It kept going for weeks and after that I was like, I guess I’m fired. No notice, no nothing. They just let me go, so it was just like, all right, whatever. So, damn near the whole January, I picked up one check from Madison, and from there on it was just like, struggling . . . I’ve been struggling.
Mecca is expecting a child with his girlfriend, although their future together remains unclear. The loss of his night job created an even more unsteady financial situation for the couple. Furthermore, the police raids have created a wedge between Mecca and his girlfriend’s family. “Her sister, she don’t even like me no more,” he said. “They went in there, they broke something of hers, so from there she started flipping. . . . Her mother brought it up too. ‘Oh, we got you staying here and you got police coming!’”
Mecca’s attempts to eke out a living and create a sense of stability for his family are only made more complicated by his past convictions. While he has largely moved past this phase of his life, he is well aware that past transgressions will likely continue to haunt him. At first glance, the police search caused only a momentary disruption in the lives of Mecca and his family. Upon closer examination, however, the residual effects become abundantly clear, as Mecca must pick up the pieces and again try to improve his situation.
In late 2012, a video featuring “Alvin,” an East Harlem teenager, went viral.11 The video detailed a particularly negative encounter with police, recorded on his iPod, in which the teenager was verbally and physically assaulted by officers executing a frisk. The reaction of many New Yorkers was outrage. For those who had experienced this type of contact firsthand, there was finally something to validate their own negative experiences with police.
Many of the young people I spent time with were able to recount aggressive and sometimes violent interactions with police that they had either experienced personally or had observed. Among young men involved with the justice system, these interactions took on a whole other meaning, with a dramatic increase in both frequency and severity. Of all of the local residents I spoke to, this subgroup often experienced some of the harshest treatment from police.
As one African-American young adult, Marcus, reported:
They [police] don’t care, because they know you don’t, you can’t say nothing. One time he ran up on me . . . he just moved up on me like, “Motherfucker, don’t move or I’ll break your face!” . . . the way they talk to you is crazy, man. They just, they don’t even care.
Others, like Desmond, a multiracial African American and Puerto Rican male in his late twenties, have experienced more explicit forms of physical violence. Desmond, who grew up in the Lincoln Houses, a public housing complex in Harlem, but currently lives in the 40th Precinct, described a particularly harrowing experience from the previous summer when a large fight broke out in his neighborhood:
I left out my building with slippers, swim shorts, and a tank top. I went around the corner to go to the “loosey” spot, and three detectives jumped out on me. I didn’t see them coming. And instead of, like, “freeze,” you know, “get on the wall” so they could pat me down, the first thing they did was take my head and smash it into the wall . . . turned around on me and punched me in the face and then told me “stay still” while he was choking me. I’m like, “What is this for!?” He was like, “We had rumors, y’all had guns over here.” Officer, I got flip-flops on with swimming shorts and a tank top where you could see my waist. Where do you see a gun? Why did you have to punch me in my face?
The search did not find any guns, nor was Desmond issued a ticket. The following week, upon showing his probation officer his bruised face and arms, she urged him to file a formal grievance. Fearing reprisal, Desmond opted to not address what had happened with the police. Apathy and dejection are unfortunately commonly shared sentiments among many of the justice-involved young adults I spoke to. As Charles, an African American parolee who lives in the 42nd Precinct, summed up the situation: “I think the mentality is like, ‘What am I to do about it?’ It’s been going on. I’ve seen this forever. What am I going to do about it that’s going to make it different? Even after me too, right? You get the mind-set, like, this is the way it’s supposed to be.”
In response to many of these often horrific acts of brutality, I came to expect that resentment toward police would be consistent among the group. I held to the simplistic notion that a universal antipolice sentiment would be shared by all of the young adults involved in the criminal justice system whom I met. To my surprise, I discovered a much more complicated relationship with the police.
Despite having actively sold crack and marijuana up until his recent indictment, Grams spoke fondly about a particular officer he got to know intimately during his time in the street. Grams described a specific encounter he had had with Officer Schultz as a child, one in which he was granted an all too rare second chance. Although this encounter was in many ways an anomaly, it marks a return to an increasingly rare form of community engagement that otherwise seems to have been lost and forgotten in the push for more aggressive tactics:
It was a cop on my block named Officer Schulz. Nobody liked him, everybody used to be like, “Ah, Schultz is coming! Schultz is coming!” Out of everything bad that I did, feel me, out of all the bad shit I did, I was always a respectful child. So for some reason Schultz liked me out of everybody . . . so he actually told me one day . . . I was probably like 13 this time. He came up to me while we all on the bench and everybody surprised. He come up to us, “Grams, how you doing?” I’m like, “I’m all right.” [Shultz responds], “Bet you if I check that pocket, you got a lot of 5s in there.” So now, I’m looking like, “huh?” He’s like, “Yeah, I see you going back and forth from that building.” So, I’m like, oh shit, I got the weed on me and all that. I’m scared now. I’m like, damn, he about to arrest me. But he’s like, “You’re lucky, I’m gonna let you go . . . I know what you’re doing out here.”
Many of the young people currently or formerly involved in street transgressions implicitly understood why the police targeted them. In their opinion, they were harassed only when they “deserved” it and were engaging in illegal activities. Moreover, they rationalized persistent police contact and frequent stops as part of keeping their communities, where their wives, girlfriends, mothers, and children also lived, safe.
One young person who held these beliefs was Justin, a Puerto Rican male in his early twenties who does construction work for his uncle in Queens. He works long days, often starting at 5 a.m. and working late into the afternoon. He spends much of his free time with his younger brothers at his mother’s house in Queens, although he calls his father’s place near Prospect Avenue in the 42nd Precinct home.
Life for Justin has changed dramatically in recent years. Apart from a fading “20” tattoo on his left hand, there are few visible reminders of his former circumstances. Starting in his early teens, he and his crew, the Rollin’ 20s Crips, an East Coast iteration of the infamous Los Angeles-based gang, began their careers as stickup kids. According to Justin, “It was fast. At the time, I felt like it was easy, you know. I tried hustling [selling drugs]. . . . I didn’t really like it. I guess it wasn’t really for me.”
Justin and his friends continued robbing and chain snatching until, at 17, he was arrested and convicted of felony robbery. Even after being sentenced to five years of probation supervision, he and his crew continued these activities. Only two years later Justin was arrested again, this time for robbing an off-duty officer in Washington Heights in upper Manhattan. Despite having fled from the scene, his codefendant, another Crip, cooperated with authorities and implicated Justin in order to reduce his own sentence. Sentenced to eight months on Rikers Island, a sentence reduced to encourage good behavior, Justin made it a point to leave the gang before his jail stay:
It just didn’t feel the same no more. I felt like I was betrayed by my right-hand man. I felt like I was betrayed by everybody. And I noticed, like, they really didn’t care, so, I was like all right, and one day I left. I told them what they had to do to get me out the game. Basically jump me out.
During this window of time, Justin made a few visits to a tattoo removal center, though the process proved costly and time consuming. As he explains, “I didn’t want to ask my parents for money or anything, so I just went in [to jail] with it. People already knew. They just asked me what it was, and I guess they was expecting me to lie. For me telling them the truth, I guess they respected it, you know.”
Upon release, Justin tried to disentangle himself from everything that reminded him of his former life. The police, who he once held in a thoroughly negative light, took on a different meaning in his life:
To be honest, [they] make me feel safer. If I was a criminal . . . still doing crime, of course I would say I don’t trust them, they’re a threat. But, since I changed my whole life around, I feel a lot safer with them being around.
Israel, a young adult who has spent nearly a quarter of his life behind bars, echoed many of these sentiments. One afternoon, while chatting with two other young men, Tony and Gordon, at a neighborhood center in the 42nd Precinct, he offered his outlook on policing in the neighborhood. Much to our surprise, Israel seemed to largely empathize with the officers, downplaying some of the negative effects that aggressive policing tactics were having on people in the neighborhood:
I probably did more time in prison than anyone here. I got more than five years and I’m only 22 . . . and I got a positive outlook on police. . . . police officers, it’s like every time I went to jail it’s because I did a crime. But every other time I don’t get stopped or none of that. . . . Police always gonna mess with you if you doing something wrong. I never get bothered by the police like that. It’s because I’m never doing nothing wrong. If you’re doing something wrong standing on the corner at 12 o’clock at night, of course . . . just imagine you as a police officer—you riding around see dude on the corner.
Later on, Israel, Tony, and Gordon had a particularly telling exchange concerning their experiences with stop-and-frisk policies:
Tony: I think there should be a better way they can go about it. Not just to stop you and say, hey, I’m going to stop you because you got a hoodie on. If you wanted to be like, “Where you think you going around this time?” and ask questions before you actually start going into the frisk then . . .
Israel: Where do you think you at? They’ll pull a gun out and shoot the cop right in they face . . . people don’t shoot cops now? Just imagine. We thinking like civilians. Think as you being a cop. You walk up on a person with a hoodie in the middle of the night. What, you just going to talk to him? [acts out]. “Get on the wall!” . . . Think of you as a cop. Think about it as you got kids and you that cop. You can’t think like that. You thinking regular like you from the hood. You being someone from the hood you don’t like someone doing that to you.
Gordon: But think about all the people they doing that to that’s just walking to the store!
One of the young men who best exemplified this complex relationship with the police was Rick. Upon moving to the United States, Rick and his family settled in an apartment in Mitchel Houses, a public housing complex in the 40th Precinct. Having spent his early years in the Dominican Republic, Rick had frequently seen officers try to extort people—“dame lo mio” [loosely translated: “give it to me”], he recalls, was a common refrain among officers. Yet by his late teens he found himself on the other side of the law, selling drugs with a neighborhood crew in America.
In time, he abandoned this endeavor, securing a job working security at a bar while taking classes at a local community college. In a journal entry Rick wrote for a class and shared with me, he documented this shift in vantage point, capturing the precarious position he then occupied on the street:
Once I turned 17 I became a corner boy, and began to have a lot more encounters with police officers. Being corner boys brought a lot of attention to me and my friends because the police would know we were up to no good and causing damage in the neighborhood. Even though I knew that what I was doing wasn’t good, I still felt safe that the police were around, and that my encounter was with them and not with other street guys who only wanted to harm us so that they could take over. So in reality with the cops there I knew I would still live to see another day. I know it was a weird theory but I would rather go to jail and have my mom visit me there then have her visit me at a cemetery. Guess this is the mentality of a lot of kids who grow up in the rough conditions of the projects.
Many of the young adults involved in the criminal justice system whom I spent time with discussed a social distance they often felt from law enforcement officials but also, and increasingly, from other members of the community. They are keenly aware of how they are viewed by the police, school administrators, employers, and even their neighbors. Years of being turned away or failed by local institutions, or both, have conditioned them into accepting their liminal position in the community’s social order. Facing seemingly insurmountable barriers, some have come to rely on alternative means to get ahead, fully aware of the additional loss in social status that could result.12As a young adult named Larry reflects:
I think being poor is depressing in itself. Just to think about it, like, know what I mean? Light’s going to get cut off, you ain’t got no food. You starving, you got to feed your kids, like “what am I to do?” Like, I know if I do this, these are the outcomes of that. I know if I do that, those are the outcomes of that. Just thinking about everyday things and it being so hard, that’s enough to depress anybody. . . . Trying to still do the right thing at the same time. That’s a lot.
The lives of justice-involved young adults are marked by few, if any, second chances. The southwest Bronx, like other “high-need” areas around New York City, is a second-chance desert. Whereas their white and affluent contemporaries in other parts of the city are continually granted second chances, seemingly at every juncture of the criminal justice system, young adults in this community are often defined by their worst act. Tactics like stop and frisk often serve as an early entry point into the criminal justice system, with some residents establishing an arrest record before they even hit puberty.
One such youth is Cam, now 17, who can recall his first trip to the 44th Precinct for breaking a car window in the fourth grade: “We was young. They ain’t put handcuffs on us even, they just grabbed us and threw us in the car.”
Only a few years later, at the age of 14, he received his first felony conviction for an assault charge and spent a few weeks upstate at a juvenile detention center. He caught his most recent case at the age of 16, this time for assault and robbery, again a felony conviction.
In trying to understand the plight of Cam and other young men like Justin and Grams, it is important to broaden the way we look at punishment in America—in a sense, to shift, as sociologist David Garland notes, from viewing punishment as a mere instrument and regard it as more of a complex social institution and cultural agent.13 It is hard to ignore the impact the various tentacles of the criminal justice system have had in shaping Cam’s young life. Sometimes, it’s easy to forget that he is still a child. Still, at present, current practices seem not to be effectively addressing the underlying causes of his actions.
Cam is currently on probation supervision and must report to his probation officer weekly. Any time he is outside of his home, whether he is spending time with friends, on his way to GED classes, or just picking up his younger brother, he reports that he is frequently stopped by police. In the summer, this happens at least once a day. Still, given this overwhelming criminal justice presence in his day-to-day life, these stops haven’t prevented him from participating in a series of neighborhood conflicts with his section of Clay Avenue in the 44th Precinct. There is a sense of urgency in Cam’s voice as he tries to explain why his block is currently at odds with crews that live less than 50 yards away:
Cam: Since young niggas walking through your hood, they just, they say something smart, they go get they brother, they come back, they gonna handle it, because niggas ain’t gonna . . .
Jan: Why?
Cam: Just ‘cuz. ‘Cuz of respect. Just because of the name.
Jan: It sounds like you lost some friends, why keep going with it?
Cam: That same reason why . . . because you lost friends. That beef ain’t never gonna stop. It ain’t never gonna stop . . . it’s just gonna continue.
The New York Police Department persisted with an aggressive policing agenda in large part because the agency was convinced that it worked. The prevailing belief among city officials has been that aggressive policing tactics went hand in hand with the decline in crime. In an op-ed essay published in the Washington Post in August 2013, toward the end of his final term, Mayor Bloomberg continued to endorse the ability of “stop, question, and frisk” to save New Yorkers’ lives:
Our crime reductions have been steeper than any other big city’s. For instance, if New York City had the murder rate of Washington, D.C., 761 more New Yorkers would have been killed last year. If our murder rate had mirrored the District’s over the course of my time as mayor, 21,651 more people would have been killed.14
Yet, as the stories of Cam and Grams vividly illustrate, these policies hardly seem to detract young people involved in the criminal justice system from engaging in criminal behavior. Research by criminologists Richard Rosenfeld and Robert Fornango further supports these claims, as their work suggests that stop and frisk has had a much smaller, and short-lived, effect on crime than initially anticipated.15 Instead, the excessive reliance on aggressive policing tactics seems to do nothing more than introduce more young people to the criminal justice system, thus contributing to a form of net-widening.
As the data suggest, stop-and-frisk tactics have produced limited results when it comes to actually getting guns off of the street. As a result, despite an overall downward trend in gun violence, guns still remain accessible to those who need or want them. Moreover, for young people like Reese who are trying to “go legit,” these policies do little more than pull them back into the tangled web of the criminal justice system.