What Happened to Community — Police Cooperation?
As I wrote my book, Community: Journal of Power Politics and Democracy in Hell’s Kitchen, I realized I was telling the story of the interplay between the police and the villagers of my “small town” neighborhood in the middle of New York City. We at the block association resisted a proposal for mandatory sentences for sex workers, asking the police to focus instead on the customers, and eventually the police and D.A. came around. We wanted to have non-violent interventions against the illegal drug trade and not the “trap” and “raid” strategy that would leave so many dead. It meant constant pushing for what we saw as most effective and least harmful.
I am quoted as saying I wanted Operation Pressure Point in the neighborhood early on, in the late 80s, but I didn’t really know what that was exactly. I thought it meant more police presence and making our community a priority. Well, it did, but it was an arrest-oriented approach with the potential for violence. When I got involved in taking action, though, I chose, and the block association chose, the Trespassing Affidavit program, a much more benign approach. Although it resulted in arrests, they were usually for minor offenses. We wanted more cops on foot, more communication, more information. That began to happen in the late 1980s and early 1990s under both the Dinkins and Giuliani administrations.
Our main effort was to bring people out into the parks, their front steps, and to street fairs. We made advancements in the 1980s and ’90s: sensitivity training, community policing, community courts. We worked on these with elected officials, police brass and rank-and-file members, and the justice system. Explaining why we thought the focus should be on alternatives, education, deterrents, and community pride. Pushing through the resistance to these ideas.
In 1995, when a police action went bad and a young black drug dealer was killed by a police officer in a building a few doors away from the playground, we were not happy. The officer had been undercover in the playground, and met some men who said they knew where he could buy drugs. They led the officer to a nearby building, and one of the men went inside with him, pulled a knife and tried to rob him. The officer shot and killed him.
We questioned whether it was a good idea to have undercover cops in the playground looking for dealers, when if something went wrong, bullets might fly where children were playing.
Someone put a candle in the doorway of the building where the man was killed, although no one knew him.
According to the police report, he was “26, black and undomiciled.” Most of the dealers on our blocks were white or Hispanic/Latino, reflecting Hell’s Kitchen’s demographic. This young man was probably addicted and robbing people, many white, who came to the area to buy drugs. He was the most marginalized — addicted and homeless — of all, but he paid the greatest price. His death did nothing to stop the drug trade on our block or in the city.
Stories of police brutality began to rise in the mid-1990s. That undercut our efforts at working with the police. Trust began to ebb away. Policing became a matter of statistics. Grassroots social programs were subsumed by larger groups, a social service industry fueled by money. Community and police and the courts evolved separately.
Now people are talking about community-police-justice system cooperation again. It’s time to go back to the future.
As a country, we need to knit together new strands of thought and action. We can take from the progress of the past, and from innovative ideas that spring from the understanding of those most affected, and build a more humane society.
