No Place on the Corner: The Costs of Aggressive Policing by Jan Haldipur (review)

In No place on the Corner, Haldipur traces the experiences of southwest Bronx community residents living under New York's infamously aggressive police regime. This work provides a critical analysis of policing through illuminating the consequences aggressive policing has on communities. Drawing upon participant observations, focus groups, and life-history interviews, Haldipur documents how the New York Police Department's (NYPD) reliance on stop-and-frisks undermines community cohesion and trust in local and state institutions and does not have the effect of reducing crime. Haldipur's primary argument is that the most devastating effect of aggressive policing is "neighborhood destabilization," which has the consequence of making residents avoid public spaces and developing social bonds. This increases mistrust between local residents and works to effectively strip them of their right to community.

Rather than focus exclusively on criminal justice-involved Black and Latino people, this book expands upon previous studies with rich ethnographic work that includes a range of local resident experiences. Haldipur also situates the study historically, providing a detailed summary of the rise of aggressive policing in New York and its impacts. Haldipur spent time with achievement-oriented youth, criminal justice-involved young adults, their parents, and immigrants to explore how each group maintained a sense of community and what it meant to live under aggressive policing. In response to hyper-policing, each group remained resilient by developing distinct strategies and coping mechanisms to avoid police. However, Haldipur shows that these same strategies often simultaneously contributed to the estrangement between community members.

The "achievers" was a group in school or college-bound and that mostly escaped police encounters by participating in after-school programs, staying inside, and avoiding certain people. They developed coping strategies, which made them "invisible" to police and other residents. But, these "achievements" came with a social cost as these youth had weaker social ties to the community and other youth in response to aggressive policing. Achievement-oriented youth regulated their clothes with the awareness that certain styles attract police attention (e.g., wearing hats, logos, jewelry, or sagging pants could be misinterpreted by the police). Aggressive policing of youth who dress in a certain style became internalized by achievement-oriented youth who then justified that policing of the former and increasing their detachment from their community.

For other youth, the social costs of disassociating with their community came at too steep a price. Haldipur describes youth who were able to balance their personal aspirations while still maintaining social ties as "line-toers." Youth "toeing the line" established just enough connection to those more involved with the criminal justice system to not create animosity, but risked increased police contact. The descriptions of interactions between line-toers and criminal justice-involved youth seem self-serving. While reading, I wondered if this connection could be more than self-preservation and a genuine desire to connect with their community. For achievement-oriented youth or simply those who want to avoid police contact, the threat of aggressive policing forces them to forgo connection with criminal justice-involved youth whom they may have grown up with and avoid their community more generally.

Haldipur reiterates what other ethnographies on criminal justice-involved youth have demonstrated. Mainly, youth with criminal records are most aggressively police, often stifling attempts to "stay straight." Criminal records enable police encroachment and regulation of their movement within the community regardless of current involvement in criminal activity. And for those who continued criminal activities, aggressive policing proved ineffective. Haldipur's contribution to our understanding of aggressive policing of criminal justice-involved youth lies in his documentation of the deleterious effects on families and community. To avoid police, criminal justice-involved people developed "isolationist strategies"—similar to achievement-oriented youth—that kept them in their homes. Aggressive policing, however, also extended into homes. Entire households are subjected to traumatic police raids when a...