WHAT MINORITY COMMUNITIES REALLY WANT FROM THE NYP

A majority of poor blacks want a return to NYPD’s ‘broken windows’ arrests for quality-of-life offenses

By Heather Mac Donald

New York Post
June 9, 2015

“How you view ‘broken windows’ policing,” Charles Blow pronounces in The New York Times, “completely depends on your vantage point, which is heavily influenced by racial realities and socio-economics. For poor black people, it means that they have to be afraid of the cops as well as the criminals.”

To test Blow’s assertion, I attended a police community council meeting in the South Bronx’s 41st Precinct last week.

The “fear” Blow attributes to “poor black people” was nowhere in evidence. Instead, I heard what I always hear from law-abiding residents of “poor black” neighborhoods: an urgent desire for more policing, and above all, for the enforcement of public-order laws in the face of an ongoing breakdown of informal social controls.

“Oh, how lovely when we see [the police]!” an elderly woman from Hunts Point exclaimed during the meeting. “They are my friends.” Retired transit worker Earl Cleveland told me: “Where I live, the police are very courteous; I’ve never had a problem with them. They do their best.” During the public Q&A with the precinct’s commander, residents complained repeatedly about large groups of youths hanging out on corners. “There’s too much fighting,” one woman said. “There was more than 100 kids the other day; they beat on a girl about 14 years old.”

Another man asked: “Why are they hanging out in crowds on the corners? No one does anything about it. Can’t you arrest them for loitering? They’re perched there like birds.” A middle-aged man wondered: “Do truant officers exist anymore?”

The president of a local mentoring program, Israel Rodriguez, begged for a police watchtower in his neighborhood, a plea he has been making for 10 years, he said. Whenever he hears gunfire, as he had over the previous month, he goes running toward the shooting, terrified that one of his three children was struck.

Shootings are up 167 percent in the 41st Precinct through May 24 of this year — and the precinct is not even considered one of the high-priority areas that are so worrying NYPD top brass as summer approaches.

Before the meeting, the superintendent and two residents of a subsidized senior housing building discussed a fellow tenant who was allowing teens to use his apartment for drug dealing. Their hypothesis: The elderly man was a “homo,” trading access for sexual favors. “For this to be happening, it frightens me very much,” one of the tenants said. “Drugs are very dangerous. The police should arrest those kids.”

As for pedestrian stops, a middle-aged man told me: “I think they should put [stop-and-frisk] back. It was higher two years ago before the mayor took office. The criminals feel more comfortable now; it’s easier to get their hands on a gun.”

All of these wished-for and promised enforcement actions are precisely the type of policing that Blow and other activists relentlessly blast as oppressive and racist.

And if the officers of the 41st Precinct respond to these heartfelt requests for enforcement, they will generate precisely the racially skewed statistics that the New York Civil Liberties Union and The New York Times will use against the NYPD, since such demands for public order come disproportionately from minority communities, where parental controls have broken down.

Blow’s claim that one’s view of Broken Windows policing depends on one’s “vantage point, which is heavily influenced by racial realities and socio-economics,” is true, but not as he intends it.

In New York City, the only group of voters in a recent Quinnipiac poll who don’t support Broken Windows policing is the 18- to 34-year-old demographic. Many young people have no experience of New York’s bad old days and are ignorant about what it takes to maintain the public safety that they assume is their birthright.

The closer one is to crime and disorder, the greater one’s support for proactive enforcement.

Slightly more black than white voters said they want the police to “actively issue summonses or make arrests” in their neighborhood for quality-of-life offenses: 61 percent of black voters wanted such summons and arrests, with 33 percent opposed, versus 59 percent of white voters in support, with 37 percent opposed.

But thanks to the attacks on Broken Windows policing and proactive stops, officers are reverting to the purely reactive policing of the pre-1990s era.

Criminal summonses in New York, which are made up overwhelmingly of the dread Broken Windows enforcement, were down 26 percent by the end of May, compared to the same period last year. Arrests were down 17.4 percent. Pedestrian stops have dropped 95 percent since their 2011 high, and are on track to go down another 42 percent this year.

Meanwhile, homicide is up 18 percent this year from 2014, and shootings are up roughly 20 percent from two years ago. In Baltimore, arrests were down 56 percent in May, while the month was by some measures the most deadly period in the city’s recorded history.

The puzzle for the police is what critics like Blow want them to do — proactively police and be accused of racism, or back off and wait for people to get shot and be accused of a dereliction of duty.

Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the author of “Are Cops Racist?”