‘Broken Windows’ Is Good in Theory, Troubling in Practice (NY Times - July 27, 2014] #Harlem Education News: Columbia Business School [Donnel Baird grew up in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, and spent several years as a community organizer in Brownsville. He is a recent graduate of Columbia Business School, and the founder of BlocPower, a tech start-up] Many folks in minority communities want laws enforced. The last thing my 34-year-old Latino friend Mike, a devoted father of two, wants to see upon returning home to the Bronx after a 12-hour shift selling cars in Midtown Manhattan, is a crowd of young men loitering in front of his building, blocking the entrance, smoking and selling marijuana and gambling — so caught up in their late night carousing that he has to beg to squeeze past them to enter his own apt building. Many minority communities want laws enforced. But police officers often dont distinguish between working people, idle teens and criminals. On the other hand, the cops in his neighborhood are almost always antagonistic, extremely hostile and poorly trained. They are almost always unable to distinguish between a working man, an idle teenager and a dangerous criminal. It is the same in Harlem, where I work, and in Brooklyn where I grew up. In every interaction with the cops, I know I must keep my voice low and move my hands slowly, or I risk being killed. The psychologist Dr. Kirkland Vaughans told me that he thought the four officers who approached Eric Garner were in a mindset that made it difficult for them to hear his cries for help, as he screamed that he couldn’t breathe. Similarly, the N.Y.P.D. is unable to hear and respond to a communitys pleas for effective support. We’ve been subjected to several years of N.Y.P.D. policy that automatically criminalizes New York’s men of color, cataloguing hundreds of thousands of arrests that may, as Commissioner William Bratton noted a few days ago, have been better served with verbal reprimands or citations. Eight years ago, I worked with a group of 20 young people who were volunteering to talk to voters in their Prospect Heights neighborhood in Brooklyn about how the construction of the Barclays Center arena would displace them from their homes. The young people, all aged 12 and 13, grasped and communicated complex legal concepts such as the definitions of economically blighted communities and eminent domain. Many could have eventually become lawyers. But since then, every last one of those young men has been incarcerated by the N.Y.P.D.: for jumping turnstiles, soliciting free MTA rides, yelling at a police officer or selling loose cigarettes. Their futures are ruined and they know it. They know that young white kids in affluent neighborhoods rarely get arrested for such minor offenses. Many folks in our communities might encourage Mr. Bratton to follow through on his recent comments that simple admonitions – “Move along, you can’t do that here” – might often make more sense than arrests. Wed encourage the city to continue to think about a program to train and employ people like Mr. Garner, a Staten Island resident, on much needed infrastructure projects – particularly with the looming threat that climate change and superstorms pose to all New York City residents. If the Mr. Garners of our city were employed to install energy efficient projects and storm mitigation technologies on Staten Island, in the Rockaways, and in downtown Manhattan, what impact would that have on crime statistics? Policing well is a tough job. But when mistakes are made, and lives are ruined or destroyed, there must be penalties. Fundamentally, the broken windows theory is about maintaining the integrity of a community. There can be no integrity in an environment where people of color are arbitrarily harmed or killed by police officers for petty crimes. Violent police responses to petty crimes, selectively over-enforced along class and racial stratifications, amount to structural discrimination, and therefore are a violation of civil rights. These violations destroy the foundation of civil society in a way that selling loose cigarettes never could.
Posted on: Mon, 28 Jul 2014 12:51:53 +0000
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