Last Saturday, at the funeral of Rafael Ramos, one of the New York Police Officers murdered by a lone gunman a week earlier, hundreds of NYPD officers watching Mayor DeBlasio's eulogy on a screen outside of the church turned their backs to show a sort of symbolic distrust of the first year Mayor. Yesterday, after a week of
fierce criticism for their seemingly juvenile behavior, they have once again
turned their backs at the second officer, Wenjian Liu's funeral. Obviously this is an emotional time for many people, including these police officers, who seem to feel betrayed by their leaders. However the tragedy that occurred cannot stop the debate about policing tactics in this city and around the country.
William Bratton, the current NYPD Commissioner, has reduced the controversial Stop and Frisk program, while reemphasizing another aggressive tactic that may have led to the death of Eric Garner. The crime rate has continued its long downward trend, but the community divide has grown to new heights. It cannot be denied that crime has decreased enormously over the past twenty years, but whether certain policing tactics are the sole cause of this drop and whether they are justifiable are fueling the current debate.
Broken Window Policing
In 1994, when William Bratton was appointed Commissioner of the New York Police Department for the first time, crime rates in New York were on their way down from the crack epidemic high of the late eighties-early nineties. The rates, however, were still very high, and for the next two decades they dropped significantly. In 1994, the crime rate index was just under one million, and by 2013 it had fallen to under half a million. New York City is a different place than it was during the eighties and early nineties, and these statistics are valuable for those who defend many of the tactics that have been used by the NYPD during those times.
Indeed, this statistic can be used very effectively to convince people that different policing programs based on the “Broken Window Theory,” which were first introduced under Bratton, should remain. The Broken Window Theory posits that implementing zero tolerance on petty crimes such as vandalism, public drinking, public urination, subway fare evasion, drug possession, etc, will prevent more serious crimes from happening. In the 1982 article, “Broken Windows,” the founding fathers of the theory, George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson, wrote:
“We suggest that "untended" behavior...leads to the breakdown of community controls. A stable neighborhood of families who care for their homes, mind each other's children, and confidently frown on unwanted intruders can change, in a few years or even a few months, to an inhospitable and frightening jungle. A piece of property is abandoned, weeds grow up, a window is smashed...Fights occur. Litter accumulates. People start drinking in front of the grocery...At this point it is not inevitable that serious crime will flourish or violent attacks on strangers will occur. But many residents will think that crime, especially violent crime, is on the rise, and they will modify their behavior accordingly.”
The theory was influenced by a social experiment that Stanford Psychologist Phillip Zimbardo conducted in 1969. In two different neighborhoods, one in the Bronx and one in Palo Alto, he arranged for two vehicles in the same condition, no license plates and an open hood, to be parked idle on the street. The Bronx neighborhood had a history of property abandonment and theft, and within ten minutes of being parked the vehicle was attacked and eventually fully stripped twenty-four hours in. On the other hand, the vehicle in Palo Alto sat untouched for a week, until Zimbardo himself smashed it with a sledgehammer, which quickly resulted in many clean cut and “respectable” individuals joining in and committing vandalism. Once the socially accepted mutual regard towards another’s property had been shattered, the same illegal and destructive behavior ensued.
This is an interesting experiment that reveals the delicate nature of communal stability. It seems obvious that in a neighborhood where vandalism and petty crimes are rampant, an increased fear would result along with further crime. But whether preemptively cracking down on petty crimes result in less serious crimes, as the theory suggests, is a point of much controversy.
While the crime rates in New York City have fallen since Bratton’s Broken Window policies were enacted, data show that they were already decreasing in the early 1980’s before being interrupted by the crack epidemic. In 1984, the overall NYC crime index had fallen to under one million for the first time in that decade, but for the next ten years it increased back to over the million mark. Only until 1994, when Bratton became Commissioner and the crack epidemic had cooled did it continue its decrease under one million.
Another important consideration is that the decrease in crime was not a local, but national phenomenon. As in NYC, the national crime rate had started to drop before shooting back up after the widespread arrival of crack cocaine. By the late nineties though, the trend had continued downward. As in New York, the crime rate has dropped significantly in the United States since the late nineties, including areas that did not enact the same preemptive and aggressive policing in NYC.
The fact is that the impressive crime drop in NYC cannot be solely based on policing policies, as many would have you believe. There are myriad causes of why crime has dropped so much over the past two decades, including economic changes, changes in abortion laws, reduced alcohol consumption, drug market stabilization, and many others.
Of course, it would be unfair to say that policing policies were not a major part of this crime drop. They were. But a decrease in crime is not an effective argument for a decrease in civil rights or human dignity. Nazi Germany also had a very low crime rate, at the cost of freedom and civil liberties.
Equality of Law
The NYPD’s Stop and Frisk policy, based on Broken Window logic, coincided with the continued decrease in NYC crime, which as we have seen is based on numerous factors. Nearly ninety percent of the hundreds of thousands of people stopped and patted down while walking on the street were innocents who looked suspicious according to police. The majority were black or Hispanic. Since DeBlasio came into office, this policy has all but vanished, which provoked former Commissioner Ray Kelly to say, “no question about it, violent crime will go up.” He was wrong though, violent crime is down in 2014. This is one of many examples where the “drop in crime” is used to justify a program that intrudes on one’s civil rights and human dignity.
But with the decrease in Stop and Frisk has come an increase in another Broken Window tactic of aggressive policing on petty crime, like selling cigarettes, smoking a joint, or hopping a subway fare. Petty crimes should not be ignored, but they should not be treated as serious crimes that send people to jail either.
In 2014, from January to March, more than 7,000 individuals were arrested in New York City for possessing small amounts of marijuana. In 1991, before the Broken Window policies, there were only 800 marijuana arrests. What makes this NYC statistic particularly disheartening is that 86 percent of the people arrested earlier this year were black or Latino. Whites and blacks use marijuana at about the same rate, but blacks are 4.5 times more likely to be arrested in NYC.
Regardless of whether policing policies are the sole cause of a decrease in crime, as we have seen they are not, they should never be used to justify infringing on a citizens’ rights, and everyone, no matter what color or class, should be equal before the law. Police are to respect citizens, just as citizens are to respect police. Lately there has been a lack of respect on each side. There are many admirable NYPD police officers who are forced to work under these policies and end up infringing on another human being’s dignity because of them.
Not every police officer is bad, and not every citizen is innocent. It should not be citizens against police officers, but citizens and police officers against bad policy. Those officers who continue to turn their backs on the Mayor have turned their backs on the city. When a police officer is killed in the line of duty, everyone should mourn, just like when a citizen dies because of overly aggressive policing and bad policy.
Mayor Bill DeBlasio's should be applauded for not allowing this childish behavior by some Officers to alter his viewpoints. In the video below, DeBlasio severely criticizes one of the many reporters who have contributed to the current division in New York. I hope the Mayor has a similar boldness when dealing with policies that still require changing.