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

Foreword

Foreword Paul G. Chevigny The police are a political lightning rod, especially for the sort of politics , so highly developed in the United States, through which a group carves out a place for itself in the system by recognizing its difference from others, while at the same time organizing to attack discrimination against it. It is easy to see why. In New York City, as in practically every other municipality larger than a village, the police are local. We have more than ten thousand police departments in this country, and even though employment in many of them is governed by civil service , they are sensitive to the society and the political structure in every place, big or small, where they work. Moreover, their work is structured so that they come in contact with the poorest and most marginalized people, even when other political actors do not. The common crimes that are at the heart of our penal codes—the assaults, thefts, and burglaries—as well as the category of “deviance” offenses, from disorderly conduct to narcotics, are given to the police. The white-collar crimes are rarely given to the police, and even when they are, most police rarely encounter them. For a great many people—the poor and the dispossessed, the minorities , immigrants, and the thousands of others who are victims of crime, violators of city ordinances, as well as perpetrators of crime—the police are the cutting edge of government. They are the government agents who give orders in the street, divide people into those who are acceptable or suspicious based on their behavior and sometimes their appearance, and, as every child knows, have the power to make their orders stick, by force if necessary. It is inescapable that class relations, discrimination, and basic issues about rights, such as the right to free vii expression and the right to be free of arbitrary arrest and search, are embodied in police-community relations. It is little wonder that people who for one reason or another are treated by society as pariahs—either permanently as part of a suspect minority, or temporarily, for example because they are drunk or are urinating in a back alley (in a city where there are almost no public bathrooms)—are sometimes infuriated by the incursions of the police. Combined with the rage is a large element of parochialism. Every city dweller sees his or her own police department as the paradigm. Every set of charges of police violence is insufferably bad, except when it is ignored by the citizenry. There are no better or worse departments, or more or less effective bureaucracies, because the police are almost totally local.1 The local media hardly ever report scandals among out-oftown police, unless the events make it onto a network videotape. For example, suppose a terrible police scandal involving corruption and violations of civil rights were raging in, say, Los Angeles; preoccupied as we are with the dramatic incidents of police violence in New York City, we would probably be scarcely aware of it. Mirabile dictu, such a scandal does exist in Los Angeles as this is written, involving a cold-blooded shooting, a frame-up, and the reluctant review of thousands of convictions . That scandal may become familiar to people on the East Coast by the time this book sees print, but at this moment it is obscure here. Knowledge about police abuses remains local also due to the fact that it is difficult to get nationwide information that compares cases or departments with one another. Until recently, the federal government made almost no effort to coordinate knowledge from different cities, and it made very little effort to enforce federal standards of civil rights against local law enforcement agencies. Since its powers were increased in 1994, the federal government has begun to try to draw minimal federal standards for police accountability, and to bring them to a few cities, but the project is still in its infancy. The belief that each local scandal is the absolute worst is fed by the fact that systems of accountability, in New York City as in most other cities, are quite inadequate. We are free to draw our own conclusions about the prevalence of police abuses because we cannot have faith in decisions on cases of abuses by individual officers, and we cannot get reliable statistics about groups of cases. So people, even the police themselves, believe whatever they think is true about the police: that...