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Despite its popularity, community policing in New York’s public housing stumbled badly in the 1970s. The political and economic turmoil of that decade not only destabilized the individual lives of New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) residents and police officers but also disrupted the delicate relationship between them. Attempting to weather the hard times, each group adopted strategies at odds with the other’s interests. For residents, making ends meet now often meant “hustling”—turning to an underground economy that deepened as formal jobs disappeared. But hustling tenants also had reason to conceal much about their daily lives from the Authority and its officers. For Housing Authority Police Department (HAPD) officers, refashioning their force along the lines of the New York City Police Department seemed the surest way to realize their middle-class aspirations. These changes also undermined Housing’s steady presence as “neighborhood cops” in NYCHA complexes. Inevitably, the tacit alliances and informal rules that had undergirded community policing in the projects gave way, under economic pressure, to more adversarial perceptions and practices. By the decade’s close, little remained of either the institutional structure or human sentiment necessary for the community order the two groups had previously cooperated in maintaining. Compounding the cracks in the once-shared interests between tenants and officers was a legal assault from an unexpected quarter: rights activists eager to curtail the power of the state to enforce conformity and impose morality. In the 1930s, as one radical “houser” reflected, public housing thrillingly “smacked of socialist Vienna, Red Moscow,” but three decades later a new generation of activists saw the New York City Housing Authority as simply another government bureaucracy.1 Amid what historians have called the “rights revolution” of the 1960s that sought to expand individual social freedoms, NYCHA’s screening, fining, and eviction of tenants seemed more redolent of oppressive paternalism 79 3 A Confluence of Crises The 1970s and the Undermining of Community Policing than liberating socialism. Not surprisingly, such policies came under attack by what amounted to a new professional group: poverty lawyers. Thanks to federal grants, this reforming cadre multiplied sixfold between 1963 and 1971. And the lion’s share of the ultimately more than 2,500 poverty lawyers settled on New York City as the laboratory for testing litigation’s potential not just to serve individual poor people but also to right social wrongs on a sweeping scale.2 To the Housing Authority, however, rights advocates’ successful court challenges to their social-engineering practices stripped NYCHA’s policy cupboard bare. No longer able to exercise a firm hand in the choosing of tenants or the enforcing of rules, the Authority came to believe it had little to offer residents struggling to preserve order in their communities. Little, that is, except a greater reliance upon police services. But as federal support for both cities and public housing dried up, meeting tenants’ demands for more officers who could respond more quickly to their emergency calls meant weakening the very community policing strategies that had distinguished NYCHA’s complexes from other low-income neighborhoods. Police Union Politics and the Model Precinct Experiment New York City’s tumultuous labor disputes during the 1960s provided the political context for decisions made by the Housing Police that would eventually magnify the gulf between officers and tenants. Driving the public sector labor unrest were new threats to the interunion peace that had long prevailed among the city’s uniformed services. New York’s Depression-era politics had bequeathed a tradition of guaranteeing cops and firemen equal base pay—salary “parity”—at a level that would, in turn, always hover a status-conferring 10 percent above sanitation workers’ earnings. Likewise, within each department, supervisors would take home more than the rank and file by a formula-determined percentage consistent across the uniformed services.3 The potentially divisive question of the Housing Police’s place in this finely filigreed equation remained largely moot— even as Housing’s ranks and salaries grew—so long as NYCHA’s officers lacked formal New York State recognition as a distinct police department in the city.4 Without that title, at least according to the New York Police Department (NYPD) way of looking at things, Housing officers continued to be no different from any of the poorly paid “special patrolmen” employed by various city agencies, such as the Welfare Department, which maintained a police force into the 1970s.5 NYPD officers, ever attentive to their enviable place in the pecking order...

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