3 Parenting the Dispossessed

Y’all good for stopping him, but I’m the one who’s paying for his crime!

—Glenda

I’m impatiently pacing in front of a brick nursing home on a tree-lined block on the Bronx’s once-celebrated Grand Concourse thoroughfare. Today is the 44th Precinct’s monthly community council meeting. It is roughly 7:10 p.m. and there is still no sign of Glenda. But within a few minutes, I see her waving from the passenger seat of a tan Chevrolet Malibu. The car parallel parks, and her friend Leslie climbs out of the back seat. Glenda and her husband, Todd, whom I haven’t seen in more than a year, join us.

Todd is brown-skinned, with neatly cropped hair. His shoulders are hunched and his eyes glassy. He is wearing dusty blue jeans, Timberland boots, and a worn blue T-shirt from his construction job.

He shakes my hand and begins to take out a cigarette before realizing that we’re late. “Man, I just got out of work,” he says in his gravelly voice as he tucks it back in his pocket. “A man needs a cigarette, you know?,” he adds with a laugh. “Aw, shit, we gotta go inside, huh?”

We make our way through the front door of the drab brick building and sign in at the front desk. Glenda and Leslie seem to take this seriously—writing out their names neatly. Glenda writes Todd’s information for him as well.

Arriving on the second floor, we make our way to a large conference room that is almost fully packed. At the front of the room sits an elderly black woman wearing a Yankees cap. She is flanked by a middle-aged Latina and a skinny white male officer whose white button-down shirt is adorned with his badge and an array of medals and decorations.

On one side of the room a number of teenage Explorers, a New York Police Department–sponsored youth group, are busy readying materials for the meeting. There are approximately 15 rows of chairs, with 10 chairs in each row, all of them filled. After we grab some paperwork and sign in at the front, Glenda picks out a row near the back where the four of us sit.

The older woman opens the meeting, which starts with the Pledge of Allegiance and a moment of silence honoring the victims of the September 11 attacks. Leslie remains seated for the first part of the pledge, before Glenda yanks her by her arm. “Leslie, get up!,” she whispers loudly.

The older woman, who seems to be running the session, introduces a terrorism specialist from the New York Police Department. He begins to expound on who terrorists are (“they can be anyone”), and identifies some Puerto Rican and black nationalist groups as terrorist organizations. Seemingly out of the blue, Todd stands up and makes his way down the aisle, muttering under his breath, “Y’all are the goddamn terrorists!” I initially assumed he was just heading to the bathroom, but then Glenda whispers to me, “He couldn’t take it. He left for good.”

Roughly 20 minutes later, Glenda and Leslie followed suit. They are tired. After working a full day, they do not wish to hear officers from the 44th Precinct boast about how crime has declined in the neighborhood. The more important questions have to do with why their sons are so often thrust into the middle of situations that can prove deeply troublesome and sometimes dangerous. They would rather hear solutions.

Although the three are long-time residents of the neighborhood, this was their first time attending a precinct community meeting. The decision to attend was not part of some grand plan to become more civic-minded. Rather, it was fueled largely by how their own sons, now in their late teens and early twenties, have systematically been mistreated by local police officers.

When I first met Glenda, a few years earlier, we sat on a cement segment of space near the entrance of her building in the courtyard of her apartment complex. It was hot out, and we were clinging to the shade. As we made small talk about the neighborhood, she proudly pointed to the perch on which we were sitting and then motioned to the ground, “This is my porch,” she said with a smile. “And this,” she added with a laugh, pointing to a space a few feet in front of her, “is my veranda.”

Combined, Todd, Glenda, and Leslie have lived in their South Bronx neighborhood for nearly a century. It is their home. Each has created family here, both through blood ties and kinship networks. Recently, however, the physical space, the apartments and houses where they lay their heads, and the public parks, stores, and streets where they spend much of their time, has been compromised by police efforts to make the community more “livable.”

While so many of the residents I’ve spoken to in the course of my research recognize and appreciate the decrease in specific crimes, such as homicide, they are quick to acknowledge the profound social consequences taken at the expense of the community as a result of aggressive policing tactics like stop and frisk. In other words, while only a select few are actually committing crimes in the area, in many ways the community as a whole must endure the policing regime, experiencing a form of collective punishment. And nowhere has this phenomenon become more abundantly clear than among neighborhood parents.

In talking with the partners of men serving time in California’s San Quentin Prison, the sociologist Megan Comfort concluded that the lives of these families are disrupted and consequently reshaped by the experience of incarceration.1 They, in turn, experience a form of “secondary prisonization.” Using this theoretical framework, I argue that although the parents in the southwest Bronx are often not the direct subjects of aggressive policing tactics, they experience an acute form of trauma vicariously through their children, a “secondary policing” of sorts, and must often endure both the emotional and financial burden of their children’s interactions with the police.

A Crash Course in Parenting the Policed

For Glenda, the stresses of having a teenage son in the neighborhood have been lifted, at least in part. Although it is still only fall, this is the first time in years she can recall not being anxiety-ridden about the forthcoming spring and summer months. It is during these warmer months, when her oldest son, Richard, and his friends spend their time playing basketball or passing time on the front stoop, that they also experience a great deal of harassment from police. Richard is now working two jobs and has moved out of the house, and, perhaps more significantly, out of the neighborhood he has called home for the entirety of his young life.

Although Glenda has fond memories of times with her children in the neighborhood, more recently, given local violence and aggressive police tactics, the neighborhood has become a source of frustration and even anguish. Glenda is unhappy that she can no longer see her son as often as she would like. Still, she feels that his new apartment in the North Bronx, away from family and friends, is a safer haven for him at this point in his life:

It was for the better, you know—him and his father wasn’t getting along too well, you know . . . working down there, he don’t have to worry about people coming in and messing with him. He don’t know nobody that live down there, so it’s good for him. When he comes back up here now, he’s not involved with all that stuff going on in the courtyard. It’s just “hi” and “bye.” He comes over to see his momma and his brother and that’s it.

According to Glenda, Richard’s first interactions with police began in his early teens. She is quick to point out, however, that they may have actually begun long before that. “As far as I know,” she says, “it could have been 14. It could have been younger, because like . . . the young men now, or the adolescents or young teenagers, and especially the men. I found out, that it became a thing with them, that it was normal. To them, it was normal. It was no need to tell Mom.”

When Richard turned 14, Glenda had bought him the once highly popular Sidekick cellphone. One day, on the way back from school, the police stopped him and his friends. During the search, his phone fell out of the pocket and broke. Only then did he tell his mother what had happened:

He was on fire, he was like, “He [the officer] gonna break my phone and then start laughing!” I was like, who? He said the cops. I was like, what he stop you for? He was like, “Mom, c’mon!” He getting frustrated, like, “Mom, they always do that! That ain’t the first time that they did that!” I was like, wait a minute, that ain’t the first time? He was like, “Mom, this ain’t the first time. They been doing that . . . I’m just mad about my phone!” I’m talking about, they been stopping you for what? So, I’m like, oh, wow. Then you feel bad because if something happens, you as a parent want to defend your kid. So, that’s like a bully messing with my kid and it’s nothing I could do about it because it’s on a day-to-day basis.

Both Richard and his mother felt paralyzed by the interaction. While Richard was more immediately concerned about his cellphone, Glenda realized the significance of this series of events and how they might continue to affect her son and undermine her role as a parent. From this point forward, she said, she began to focus on how the police had begun to shape Richard’s everyday movements.

This was her introduction to raising heavily policed children. Routine events like walking to and from the subway, the park, or the store became much more of a challenge for Richard and his friends. Upon seeing boys in groups larger than four, police would quickly break up the pack, splitting them off into pairs, and, in the case of an odd number, forcing them to travel on their own. Because her son was often the tallest in the group, Glenda believed that he was unfairly ostracized and pushed to go places by himself, using routes he might not have been familiar with, at the insistence of the officers. In Glenda’s eyes, this type of police intervention could potentially jeopardize her son’s safety and well-being.

“Thirsty Thursdays”

In the southwest Bronx, “positive” outcomes are too frequently defined by whether a person is able to leave. For Glenda, this came in the form of Richard moving out of the neighborhood. For Leslie, this came in the form of a change in her Section 8 housing voucher, a document that helps make housing more affordable for low-income families, allowing her and her son, Albert, to leave the neighborhood and move north to Westchester County. In recent years, as conflicts between local crews have escalated, the police have clamped down especially hard on the neighborhood. In the three years I spent talking to residents of the southwest Bronx, several large white New York Police Department observation towers sprouted up in the area for weeks at a time. Officers would also execute raids on particular blocks and buildings, using the program known as Operation Clean Halls as a means to enter privately owned buildings and implement a form of what is known as “vertical policing.”

On the block where Leslie and Glenda lived, this resulted in a weekly event known locally as “Thirsty Thursdays.” On Thursdays, particularly during the warmer months, police would descend on their block, typically in the mid- to late afternoon, and carry out “shakedowns” of the young men. As Todd described what happened, “They run up in here like an army, man. Coming up here with paddy wagons right up in the middle of here . . . you see they check to see if the gate is open and will drive right through the middle of here and start bothering people.” A van would be parked nearby, and neighborhood boys were carted off to be booked on petty charges ranging from truancy to open-container violations or trespassing.

According to Leslie, these “scare” tactics are often used to badger people like her son Albert into giving them information about what goes on in the neighborhood. This can prove to be risky and even potentially dangerous for teenagers who may be labeled as informants or cooperators by their peers. For parents like Leslie, these tactics can prove both financially costly and physically taxing. During one of our conversations, Leslie and Glenda discussed the ramifications of a recent interaction with police:

Leslie: It’s these stupid “disorderly conducts”—what does that even mean? That, or trespassing or loitering in they own building! A few weeks ago I was sitting on my fire escape. I do that sometimes, especially when it’s hot out. And so I see Albert, my nephew, and George [another neighborhood teenager] just sitting there hanging out and talking to each other. Doing absolutely nothing. Next thing I know, the police walk up in there and are giving Albert a ticket for disorderly conduct. They said there was a call that he was gambling and shooting dice! I’m telling you, they wasn’t doing nothing! So now we have a $120 ticket! I’m just sick and tired of going to the courthouse. It’s already been six or seven times this year. That’s crazy! But of course I’m going to challenge it. It’s not right.

Glenda: You have to understand, it’s hot out and a lot of people can’t afford A/Cs like that so we go outside. Outside in the courtyard is where we go to escape the heat and so if the police don’t like that, what are we supposed to do?

As Glenda emphasizes, this form of policing infringes upon local residents ability to find a place to stand. Given the dearth of neighborhood resources, young men in the neighborhood try to find solace in nearby public spaces, but are continually discouraged from doing so. In hot summer months, with electricity costs soaring, getting access to common spaces in and around their own buildings often proves even more challenging. Now that her son has gotten a costly ticket, Leslie must now shoulder the burden of either paying it off (and thereby acknowledging his guilt) or trying to contest the charges. The latter decision could prove extremely frustrating and time consuming and may result in other financial consequences in the form of a loss of wages.

On the block where Leslie and Glenda live, benign everyday activities often take on an entirely new meaning for residents. Glenda described an incident involving her youngest son, Cliff, which occurred a few years ago:

My youngest, Cliff, is 14 and was with his friend who was riding his bike on the sidewalk right around here. So the officer tells his friend that he can’t do that and told him he’s going to write him a ticket, so, you know, my boy just starts laughing. I mean, it’s just silly the officer felt he had to do that. Next thing you know, they got my son in the back of a cop car. He had his cell phone on him, so he calls me and I hear him whispering, “Mommy, come get me.” When I get there, they talking about they going to write him a ticket. I’m like, “For what? Laughing?” I’m not going anywhere. That’s my son. Let him go. And the crazy thing is the boy he was with who was riding the bike in the first place didn’t even get a ticket!

Through such repeated interactions, parents like Leslie, Glenda, and Todd have been conditioned to expect this type of treatment from police, although they shy away from accepting it as a norm.

Aggressive Policing and the Transition into Adulthood

It is raining outside as Glenda and I sit across from each other on a sectional couch in her living room. An open window allows for a light breeze on this humid June afternoon. Outside, we can hear trains whiz by on the Metro North track less than 50 yards from the building. “I’m saying no,” Glenda says, pausing to let a train pass, “my son shouldn’t have to feel like this is normal. I don’t care where you live at. This is not normal.”

Yet for so many parents this sort of police contact has become the norm. Similar to how many of their children have come to understand police in their lives, parents have adopted an implicit acceptance of their presence and even begun to equip their offspring with strategies on how to deal with unwelcome police encounters. In the wake of high-profile police killings, black families nationwide have increasingly begun having this form of conversation, sometimes referred to as “the talk.”2 For some, the experiences of their children represented their first introduction to this type of policing. For others, this understanding was carefully cultivated through years of personally experiencing aggressive police tactics or observing close family members experience it.

Lance, a young father from the area, explained to a friend, Joey, how these norms are passed down from one generation to another:

Lance: I got a daughter. Luckily I don’t got a son. But what I think it does to little kids coming up—in they mind it becomes regular. Like when they get older, cops stopping them, they gonna remember when they was little they always seen that. It’s not going to be out of the norm for them.

Joey: Yeah, like it gives you that assumption . . . that’s why a lot of niggas think like that now. Like growing up, I used to see my older brother getting clapped up [handcuffed] for stuff like that . . . so it gave you that assumption that all cops were dickheads. As I got older I realized that there were some good cops out there, but my first assumption growing up was that this cop stopping me is going to mess up my night.

Fathering the Dispossessed

Raheem is about 6’1, with light brown skin. He typically wears a knitted hat tipped to the side and perched on the top of his shoulder-length dreads. He is 27 years old and currently on probation supervision for an assault charge stemming from an incident on a subway a few years ago.

Raheem openly talks about the mostly minor transgressions from his youth, of which there are many. In his teens, he found himself selling small amounts of weed, crack, and angel dust to make extra money. At the age of 15 he was arrested for the first time and processed at “the Tombs,” as the Manhattan Detention Complex is known. “Going through the system for the first time wasn’t pretty, because I didn’t know what to expect,” he recalled. “You hear everybody telling them stories, like, back in the day, ‘You know jail is rough!’ So, I’m going in there like . . . it wasn’t a good experience, I don’t like it at all, because now I’m in the system, so now anything that pops up, I’m there.”

Fortunately, none of Raheem’s convictions resulted in anything worse than a misdemeanor, thus not adversely affecting his employment prospects. At the age of 21, he had his first child, a daughter, Serena, which he saw as a turning point in his young life. As Raheem reflects, “I had to fall back.” He now has a job in construction, and is working to obtain his GED.

While for most of his teenage years he identified himself as a “hustler,” his priority has shifted to being a decent father. He and his longtime girlfriend, Sharon, preside over a full house. Six children currently live with them, two from her previous relationship as well as the four children they share. Raheem’s eldest daughter lives with her mother.

Despite his age, Raheem seems to understand the gravity of his situation. He is acutely aware of the financial responsibility, which can occasionally seem overwhelming, associated with a family of this size. Still, he insists, he abstains from selling marijuana to supplement his income, as he once did, due largely to his most recent arrest. He was initially sentenced to do a 6–5 split (six months in jail followed by five years’ probation), but ended up with a 3–3 (three months in jail, followed by three years’ probation). As Raheem describes the punishment, “Hard as hell! Hard as hell, man! That’s the only bid I did. It wasn’t nothing, but just, not seeing my kids every day, hearing they voice, just being out in the world, period. Freedom is everything.”

Like many of the men involved with the criminal justice system who I spent time with during this project, Raheem is aware of how the police may perceive him and he adjusts his behavior accordingly. He reports having been frisked more than ten times a year from the age of 15 onward, with harassment peaking between the ages of 18 and 23. As Raheem notes, “That was a rougher time for me . . . but as I got older, I’d say it slowed down after I turned 25. I started noticing the pattern, like, hold on, I gotta change something because what I’m doing is not working.”

For Raheem, seemingly ordinary day-to-day activities in public spaces can become cumbersome. He realizes how his own missteps have shaped his current situation and is unwilling to accept a similar fate for his children. While he has grown accustomed to police harassment, he is adamantly opposed to his children, particularly his daughters, experiencing the same thing, often going to great lengths to shield them from it.

He described a particularly harrowing interaction with the police that took place a few months earlier:

I’m walking with my daughters and my older cousin and they [the police] just hopped out. I got my kids and my groceries and they just threw me on the wall with my kids right there! So I’m like, what’s going on, and he’s like, “Oh, well, you just fit the description” or whatever. This happened right there near 167 and Jerome. So, I’m like, what’s the description? You can’t tell me the description, but I fit the description and I look like everybody else that’s walking down the street!?

I was pissed off because you don’t have no type of consideration. I’m sitting here holding my daughter’s hand with groceries . . . and not just one child, I had three children with me, three daughters. And now my daughters are looking at me like, “Poppy, what’s going on?” I’m like, don’t worry about it. They ain’t got nothing else better to do.

With his children watching, Raheem was made to feel embarrassed and vulnerable by the police. He worries that incidents like this will not only affect his children’s impression of their father but also shape the way they perceive the justice system as a whole. Psychologists have identified this indirect punishment as a form of “vicarious victimization,” whereby relatives may experience many of the same symptoms of anxiety and depression as the victims.3 As Raheem puts it, “I don’t want my children growing up thinking that’s the way of life.”

Although he followed a much different trajectory than Raheem, Rudy, a Puerto Rican father who lives in the neighborhood, shares many of the same challenges. At 36, he is a former Marine who currently works as a superintendent at a building in lower Manhattan. As part of his job, he was given a studio apartment in Union Square, but he chose to remain in the Bronx. While space certainly factored into his decision, he was also reluctant to leave the neighborhood he has called home since he was in the third grade.

Rudy is the father of an eight-year-old boy, Carlos. As Rudy’s son gets older, his patience with the neighborhood has seemingly begun to wane. According to him, the area has changed a great deal over the past few years, making him less eager to raise children there. Several factors are responsible for this, namely community safety and a police presence he sees as ineffective.

Although he is careful not to romanticize the way things were, he insists that there was some semblance of order and decency in the past, something he feels no longer exists:

It was more of a hierarchy, man. I’m not saying it was a good thing to do, but at least there was an order, you know what I’m saying? Back then you didn’t have these problems . . . personally, with me growing up, I’m not going to go to an OG or an older dude and fucking disrespect him, because I was gonna get slapped, you know what I’m saying? Because either he slaps me, or my older brother slaps me, or my uncle slaps me. I was gonna get slapped from somebody! [Laughs] I was gonna get slapped or cocotazo [hit hard on the head], kicking my ass, like get the fuck outta here. Now you don’t have that. There’s no chain of command no more. There’s no hierarchy no more, it’s just to each his own.

Having spent so much time in the neighborhood, Rudy is well aware of how his community operates. He prides himself on his ability to negotiate different local groups, although he understands how police may perceive this:

Rudy: I’ve been frisked many times. I’m not the type of dude to be out there selling drugs, but at the same time, I know a lot of people. So, I could be talking to you today, and two minutes later I’m talking to some dude that sells crack or sells dust or something. The cops come and they’re, you know what I’m saying, they’re going to throw everybody against the wall and they’re going to put you in certain categories, even though you’re not in that category. You know, I probably make more money than you do. I probably have a job, and I got a family. Just because I’m talking to this guy, you treat me the same way. I don’t think that’s cool.

Jan: In the past year, how often do you think you’ve been frisked?

Rudy: Altogether, it has to have been more than 10 times. In that area there, since last February until now, in that area alone, it must have been like six times. And one time, I was just coming from my job. I mean, you could tell certain people from other people. I mean, I got tools on my belt, I got a bag, you know, dude, I’m coming from work. They want to know what’s in my bag, so I oblige, you know. They take all my shit out, put it on top of the car. You know, my papers are flying everywhere, they don’t give a fuck. They see I don’t have anything and then they open up my Leatherman Tool and he says he can take me to jail for that, I’m like, “Dude, it’s a tool. I’m a superintendent to a condominium in Manhattan. You know, I can have you call ten people right now, so you can verify that.” And he still threatened he was going to take me to jail.

Incidents like this continue to negatively color Rudy’s view of the neighborhood. Despite his age and visible work gear, police persisted in searching him. He is unwavering in his desire that his son not experience the same form of harassment, and feels strongly that his chances of not being stopped will be better in a different environment. Statistics support the salience of geography in New York City. In 2011, the year when documented stops reached its highest point, the 42nd Precinct, where Rudy lives, recorded 12,414 stops, or 15.6 percent of the population in the area.4 Comparatively, the 13th Precinct in lower Manhattan, which encompasses the Union Square neighborhood where Rudy is slated to move, reported 5,252 stops, or 5.6 percent of the population in the area.5 Unlike some of his friends on the block, Rudy’s financial situation is stable enough to be able to orchestrate a move out of the neighborhood. He has already asked his boss to alert him when a two-bedroom apartment becomes available in the Union Square building. Fed up, Rudy elaborates:

Sometimes I just feel like cramming my whole family into that studio and just staying in Manhattan because I feel so much safer in Manhattan. The Bronx is shit, man. . . . [My son] he’s eight years old now . . . and, you know, sometimes I just glance at him and I think to myself, Jesus, the shit that he’s going to be exposed to is just insane. That’s why I came up with the plan, he’s not going to be in the Bronx. He’s not going to grow up in the Bronx. By the time he hits 12 years old, he’s not going to be here. There’s no fucking way he’s going to grow up and see this.

New Beginnings

Trevor, an African American man who works as a plumber, and his girlfriend, Kym, a Puerto Rican woman who works an office job in Manhattan, are relative newcomers to the neighborhood. Trevor originally hails from the Baychester Houses, a public housing complex in the North Bronx, but has more recently lived in upstate New York. Kym grew up in the Wakefield section of the borough. She originally settled in the southwest Bronx about three years ago in part because of more affordable rent but also because of its proximity to the college in upper Manhattan where she is a student. Trevor joined her last year, and they share a modest one-bedroom walk-up unit a few feet from a busy thoroughfare.

In recent months, a handful of shootings have occurred in the area and a robbery took place in a first-floor apartment in their building. They see a noticeable difference in how the neighborhood is policed compared to other neighborhoods they’ve lived in. This they attribute to a number of factors, including its proximity to the courthouse and Yankee Stadium. Now that the couple is expecting their first child, these factors have begun to weigh on their decision to remain in the neighborhood. As Trevor said:

I feel like I’m ready to move. I just don’t like the fact that . . . me, just knowing that all the time, I always get the second look, the second glance from cops. They want to do U-turns and stuff like that, you know? I want to move somewhere where I don’t have to worry about police like this, the “stop and frisk.” . . . I came home and lived in a decent neighborhood where it wasn’t a lot of things happening so they didn’t fly around like that. Like, over here, it brings back shades of growing up in the projects, the way they are. I just came here in January [back to the Bronx]. But, I’m looking to move. I don’t want to stay here any longer.

Like many of the young adults I spoke to, Trevor has adopted something of an “isolationist” strategy as a way of adapting to his circumstances. After work, he leaves the apartment only when absolutely necessary, preferring to stay indoors, even in summer, away from any potential danger.

Kym echoes this sentiment: “I just feel like, we go to work, we come home, we close our door, we stay to ourselves, and there’s no real sense of community or socializing. . . . It’s like, go to work, come home, groceries, like, it’s all basic day-to-day things you need to do. If you need to leave the house, you do, if you don’t, go home. Just avoid trouble.”

With a baby due in a few months—they are expecting a son—the couple has begun to discuss their immediate future:

Jan: How do you feel about preparing him to deal with police?

Kym: I’m so scared about that. I have no idea. I just feel like I’m going to read a lot of books and not let him go out until he’s 18! [Laughs]

Trevor: I mean . . . depending on how we . . . I don’t plan on living here, so, depending on where we’re living, up until he has an interaction with them, I don’t feel the need to tell him.

Although Trevor and Kym are lifelong Bronx residents, they feel that the neighborhood, and even the borough itself, presents too many potential land mines for children. While other neighborhoods may present similar obstacles, the pair feels that life on the whole may be more manageable away from the city. As Kym puts it:

I have my heart here in the Bronx, but as far as raising my child, I want my kid to go to a good school district and have a fighting chance. I don’t want him to think that it’s normal to drop out of high school or to be stopped and frisked. I don’t want to worry about that . . . or at least worry about it less.

The Second Shift

In the 1989 book, The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home, a seminal work on the division of labor in the home, Arlie Hochschild and Anne Machung talk at length about the so-called second shift, or the “job after the job,” when parents must attend to housework and child care. In the southwest Bronx, this second shift often takes on an entirely different meaning for parents as police add another layer of complexity. Many of the parents I spoke to have cultivated a set of coping skills used both to 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 instances occur.

When Glenda’s son, Richard, was still living in her apartment, for instance, he was instructed to check in periodically, as most parents require of their children. In instances when he failed to check in or arrived late, however, instead of calling the parents of a friend, Glenda began to call the 44th Precinct to make sure he wasn’t being held there. This decision came after repeated occasions when her son was brought in and often unable to call and notify his mother until a few hours after the initial police contact. As she explained, “You know . . . after a while you lose count. I can count the times I had to get him. I can’t count the times I ain’t know he was there. I’d say in a year . . . at least 20 in a year. At least . . . AT LEAST. To pick him . . . to see if he even in the station. I’ve walked, caught cabs, stood there.”

During the summer, Leslie took it upon herself to restrict the movements of her son, Albert, to a set of previously defined places so as to avoid police contact. For days at a time, her teenage son was forbidden to leave his apartment’s courtyard. “I mean he can go to the store for me during the day,” she said. “But when it gets dark, uh-uh. He knows he has to be in the house. When he’s at his girlfriend’s place, I tell him to take a cab back. It’s not worth it.”

Even while on the apartment grounds, both mothers see it as important to keep on “parent patrol.” With her eldest no longer in the house, Glenda’s day-to-day routines have begun to shift. For starters, she no longer feels obliged to spend her after-work hours monitoring her children:

I don’t be out like that. I come on upstairs. Since my kids done got older and I don’t have to . . . well, the oldest one has gotten older and moved away, I don’t feel like I have to protect him and be there on parent patrol because that’s what I be doing, parent patrol. My youngest one [Cliff], he don’t hang in here, he’s got his little friends and he’s at their house. And to be honest, it’s a color thing too, because my oldest one, it was black and black. He’s [Cliff] black, and he’s got Dominican and Puerto Rican friends so, they don’t . . . it’s when you get a group of this one right here, or group of that one.

Glenda feels that the obligation to monitor the behavior of her children has been lifted in part due to which children her youngest son associated with. In her worldview, race and ethnicity play a critical role in how young people of the neighborhood are policed, with black children in the neighborhood receiving a disproportionate amount of police contact, even when compared to Latinos in the area.

Given what they have experienced over the past decade, Leslie and Glenda are hopeful that their sons will “age out” of being police targets. These past few years have proved to be taxing for both mothers, as each arrest often takes a substantial amount of time out of their schedules, can be costly, and, perhaps most important, could compromise their children’s ability to live normal, healthy teenage lives. Both Glenda and Leslie actively contested all of the charges levied against their sons. They take each contact with police seriously, worrying how it may negatively affect their sons in the future. In Leslie’s case, after nearly two years of contesting a case involving her son and a friend, the matter was finally dismissed after a new assistant district attorney took on the case:

We were out there, we came out to the courthouse the other week. The line was stretched all the way out here! [motions to 163rd Street and Morris Avenue, two blocks away from the courthouse.] So we waited and waited. We saw people we knew and let them cut, I mean we might as well wait together, right? [Laughs] So we waiting for some hours and I’m calling my lawyer, and she finally tells us that the case was going to be thrown out. They wanted them to cop to another charge, but we wasn’t doing that. You’re not gonna have my son copping to something he didn’t do. So we took it to trial and they finally threw it out! After all these years going back and forth to court.

In another incident, Glenda’s son was arrested for trespassing while at a friend’s apartment up the block. Richard spent the night in jail until he was able to see a judge:

Glenda: They tried a lot of stuff, but, I guess they tried to scare him and make him . . . like, they caught him one time out there without me, for trespassing. He was 16, so—

Jan: So he pleaded by himself, you didn’t even get to talk to him about it—

Glenda: No, I wasn’t even there. So you know, he was like, Mom—

Jan: Was it an ACD [Adjournment in Contemplation of Dismissal]?

Glenda: No, I had to pay a fine and an ACD. He said, they told him, this how they got him . . . they said, “Could you pay $25?” You know, he want to come home, so he like $25, yeah! This is something he could do without me. $25. Then they say the surcharge is this, $145. Now it’s too late [laughs]. Then, I’m like, OK, don’t you ever do that again.

Tired and homesick after spending the night in a holding cell, Richard was eager to get back home and accepted the fine, unaware of the gravity of the charges. While he would have to see out the ACD for the remaining six months, his mother was forced to pay off the hefty ticket.

Glenda, who works at a child-care center, openly questions how things might have been different if she had worked elsewhere. Her office is in walking distance of both her apartment and the precinct. As a result, she can leave and check in with her children with relative ease and without a substantial loss of earnings. Had the situation been different, she wonders if she would have been able to put in the hours necessary to fight the charges levied against her son:

I have a job that I can just run out and run back to. You really have to, because you don’t know how long it’s gonna take. So, yeah, you had to take off. You had to because then you don’t know if your child . . . you telling me that he’s old enough but he . . . if you tell him he can go home and there’s an ACD, six months out of trouble, he ain’t paying no fine. He gonna take that. But eventually, it’s not gonna look good once some judge opens it up.

“I Know It’s Gonna Change”: Dislocation in the Southwest Bronx

For Glenda, the neighborhood has changed a great deal since she moved up from Maryland in the early 1980s. Initially settling with an aunt in the southwest Bronx, she ended up moving several times, each time within a few blocks of where she currently lives. She knows the area well, and from time to time she will reflect on just how much the neighborhood has changed over the years.

Although the Bronx of previous decades is vividly remembered as a powerful symbol of social disorder, defined by crime, drugs, and widespread civic indifference, many older residents remember these years as having a greater sense of cohesiveness and community. As part of this collective memory, mothers like Glenda often yearn for the “community policing” of old:

The people who were in the area here, they were close-knit. Everybody knew everybody’s kids. We knew people that lived in the courtyard that still live here now. Some of my cousins and them stayed across the street. It was just totally different. I seen it when, you know, police, at a point, you didn’t mind. They were out there and it was like, that was their beat. They knew the officers that you was familiar with. Even if you didn’t know his name, you knew that was the officer that was coming there. That’s the police right there! The kids know the policemen and you had a conversation with him. When you was going to the store, you felt protected.

While some visible remnants of this form of policing remain, the statistics-driven CompStat revolution has pushed policing in the southwest Bronx further away from this standard. A direct result of this shift is families leaving the neighborhood. In my time in the community, countless residents told me about their aspirations, some distant and some already realized, to leave. For many, the tension between wanting to stay and having to leave was all too real.

Most mornings, before the sun makes its way over the horizon, Leslie will take a stroll around the neighborhood. A close friend, who also lives in the building, will join her on some days as they make their way through the maze of streetlights and stop signs. There’s never any defined destination. Sometimes they’ll stop for coffee, but usually they’ll just walk and talk, enjoying the calm before the rest of the city wakes up. These are the moments Leslie misses the most.

In the spring of 2013, her Section 8 transfer went through, allowing her and Albert to move out of the neighborhood and to an apartment in Westchester County, to the north of the city. Although she sees the move as necessary, she misses the old neighborhood. They still visit as often as they can. She, to see her sister and friends, Albert, to see his newly born son, who lives with the mother of his child in the neighborhood. Still, Leslie tries to remains optimistic about the move and the changes it set in motion:

Leslie: It’s really not bad. Albert is still up here all the time. His son is here and all of his friends, you know. . . . I just bought him a new bed and he hasn’t slept in it yet! I’m going to return it if he doesn’t spend the night here soon [laughs]. I spent good money on that! . . . It’s real quiet there. I’ve been there for a few months now and I still haven’t seen anyone who lives in our building!

Jan: Do you wish you stayed at all?

Leslie: [Shakes head] Uh-uh, not at all. It was too much going on. I had to get out.

As for Glenda, although she sees the rapidly changing composition of her block as somewhat of a natural progression, she is sad to see so many of her friends leave, and not by choice:

Well, I’m glad mine’s [Richard] gone. I mean, whether it was the police or not, it was time to grow up and be on your own to become a man, because you a father now . . . you have to. But, to see families picking up, mothers picking up to take their kids, their young men out, because you’re scared . . . both ways you’re scared. It ain’t like I’m scared of the street and I can call “Officer Joe” and he’s gonna help you. Officer Joe is a big part of the problem. So, it bothers me . . . people that I’ve been with for years. Our kids grew up together. We still . . . it’s a whole new . . . when I walk into the courtyard, it’s all different faces.

With Richard out of the house, and her youngest seemingly able to avoid persistent contact with the police, Glenda holds tight to the notion that things will change again, and this time for the better. Along with a handful of her remaining friends, she has built a foundation in the neighborhood, and would prefer to see her commitment to the area through:

I’m not leaving. I mean, I work in the area, I walk to work. . . . I don’t pay no carfare. My son was born up the block and raised here and went to school all around. The little one. Hopefully, it doesn’t become the O.K. Corral, or the cops really get out of hand, or people just knocking your door down robbing you. I’m not gonna leave because I know it’s gonna change. It’s gonna change and it’s gonna be a better place. I’ve been here for years, so I’m going to have to have this little apartment once it turns to condominiums. I’m going to be the little 1 percent! [laughs] I gotta have that 1 percent! You can’t just kick me out! I’m that 1 percent and they better just build around me!

Still, for many of the people I spent time with, the damage has been done. Given the often-prohibitive costs of raising a child in New York City, aggressive police tactics pose yet another barrier for poor and working-class families trying to get ahead. This policing regime continues to undermine their roles as parents and has caused countless mothers and fathers to rethink what it means to raise children in the neighborhood.