Policing a Class Society: New York City in the 1990s

It would be difficult to overstate the significance of the police institution in our thinking about progressive criminology in the early to mid-1970s. From the outset, Crime and Social Justice (now Social Justice) was concerned with the changing role of the police institution and, through its pages, made contributions to mainstream thinking that have helped transform the way that the police are viewed (and taught) in academia today. At the same time, nobody in the 1970s anticipated the way in which the extreme right-wing law-and-order agenda of Richard Nixon, John Mitchell, and Warren Burger would become the centrist law-and-order agenda of the 1990s, the agenda of Bill Clinton, Janet Reno, and William H. Rehnquist. The reason Crime and Social Justice and criminologists of the 1970s focused on the police is obvious. It was basic self-defense, defense of our communities. The police were everywhere in the 1960s and 1970s, and they were deeply involved in all kinds of harassment, beatings, surveillance, killings, and arrests aimed at minority, student, counterculture, antiwar, leftist, and poor communities. Thus, the idea of "studying" the police made a great deal of sense; it was applied criminology, meant to be useful to the movement. No existing analysis of the police reflected the reality that we observed daily. Often, criticism of the police was personal, as in the anti-working-class image inherent in the epithet "pig." Although the image of the pig might be "dirty" or "greedy," that had nothing to do with problems of corruption or excessive violence. Workers in the 1930s, for example, called the police "bulls," an image that does go to their underlying violence. If not personal, theories of the police were generally rooted in liberalism, with an emphasis on the institution's democratic roots. The basic models of how to research the police existed in G. William Domhoff's Who Rules America, itself derived from C. Wright Mills' The Power Elite. The North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) and other progressive groups further advanced this methodology, researching corporations and governmental agencies, including the police/military/industrial complex in the United States and various Latin American countries. The importance of detailed and careful research on the police institution made sense to graduate students who were thinking about progressive ways in which they could contribute to the movement. This core idea that the Left needed to do its homework, needed to conduct careful empirical study of the police institution, was central to the approach in Crime and Social Justice (CS who makes them; who the victims of those stops are; or how effective they are at combating crime.(1) Research has tended to be very narrow, very policy oriented, banal, and not particularly revealing. Former New York Police Commissioner William J. Bratton, for example, took much credit for his model of proactive policing: he was the first police chief to simply systematically study where crime occurred, and then transferred more police officers to the districts and patrol shifts that reported more crime. I. Policing New York in the 1990s The biggest police departments in the country have an importance beyond their sheer sizes. They define policing in America. In particular, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York all have distinctive police departments, with unique local police cultures. I (Harring) came to New York 20 years ago because I thought it would be interesting and challenging to work on New York City police issues. If we were to encapsulate the last 25 years of studying the police in New York in the wake of the Abner Louima rape and torture case and the Amadou Diallo killing, it would simply be to say "nothing" has happened. …