Zero Tolerance: Quality of Life and the New Police Brutality in New York City

6. No Justice, No Peace

6 No Justice, No Peace Andrea McArdle SAFE CITY, MEAN STREETS While New York City burnishes its reputation as a safe haven for developers , tourists, and affluent residents,1 the iconic presence of Emma Lazarus’s Statue of Liberty offers a more ambivalent welcome to the city’s new immigrants.2 Meanwhile, in the streets of the city, the claims of safety are tested daily. Young pedestrians and bike riders in the poorer neighborhoods are routinely stopped and questioned by police in the Giuliani administration’s campaign to reduce drug-related crime. These confrontational investigative tactics have led community members to dread the police rather than welcome their presence.3 In its declared war on guns and street crime, the NYPD dispatches scores of barely trained recruits into the Street Crime Unit where, in 1997 and 1998, NYPD data indicate that 45,000 people—primarily black and Latino males—were stopped and frisked, often for no reason other than the fact that they were black and Latino. Anecdotal information gathered from NYPD officers suggests that there is extensive underreporting of these encounters—perhaps only one in five stops—according to New York’s attorney general, Eliot Spitzer.4 At the same time, aggressive “quality-of-life” initiatives designed to promote public order and “protect” public spaces have targeted the homeless, sex workers, and gay men.5 In this narrative of a new economic order, police use of force is an accepted part of a campaign to pacify the city’s more marginalized, less marketable communities. When the circumstances of a violent incident are contested, the mayoral establishment routinely supports 147 police officers. Mayor Giuliani’s remarks following the killing in April 1997 of sixteen-year-old Kevin Cedeno attest to this presumptive crediting of police officers’ accounts of events “until and unless there are facts that are established that they acted improperly. That’s how a decent, civilized and orderly society operates. You give the benefit of the doubt to the sworn police officers.”6 The mayor’s hasty release of Patrick Dorismond’s minor police record shortly after the unarmed Dorismond was killed in an altercation with undercover officers on March 16, 2000—as if to mitigate the damage, and deflect attention from the conduct of the officers involved—is another example of the presumptive bolstering of the police and discrediting of civilian casualties of police violence. When evidence of police violence is more pronounced, police misconduct is framed as isolated and exceptional. Then Police Commissioner Howard Safir’s characterization of the vicious assault on Abner Louima as a “criminal act,” as distinguished from “police brutality,”7 suggests that brutality, far from being viewed as criminal, is essentially tolerated and minimized in police culture. The extent to which police brutality is itself criminalized becomes a “measuring stick” for whether or not it is possible for the law to operate evenhandedly, to avoid a disenfranchising double standard.8 Yet, city officials refuse to acknowledge that brutality, under any definition, is driving current dissatisfaction with the NYPD. Incredibly, Commissioner Safir editorialized that it is a lack of civility rather than the use of force that fuels the criticism.9 In April 1999, the NYPD inaugurated refresher courses on basic politeness , issuing cheat cards that remind officers to use terms of respect such as “sir” and “ma’am,” and to say “thank you.”10 This continuing failure to acknowledge police criminality in all but the most egregious instances has led disconsolate family and community members to enact their grief and anger publicly. In the wake of the Amadou Diallo shooting, the NYPD is perhaps the most intensely scrutinized police force in the country. The New York State Attorney General ’s Office completed an investigation into the Street Crime Unit’s stop-and-frisk practices late in 1999, and in that same year the NYPD was investigated for civil rights abuse by the United States Attorney’s offices for the Eastern and Southern Districts of New York, the New York City Council, the New York City Public Advocate’s Office, and the U.S. Civil Rights Commission.11 In this context, the relative infrequency with which official New York registers the occurrence of police crimi148 ANDREA McARDLE nality hardly betokens a “civilized” society, however the mayor has appropriated the term. THE GENDER AND RACIAL LIMITS OF ENFRANCHISEMENT In deciding when...