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

SIDNEY L. HARRING & GERDA W. RAY
Social Justice Summer 1999 v.26, i.2 p63
1jul1999

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 (C&SJ).

We can now reflect on the beautiful simplicity in all of this: we wanted to really know the police institution in a complex and detailed way. Ironically, 25 years later, research on the police institution is bankrupt. With all the data and computers at our command, no one has any idea how many Terry stops are made in a year; 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. Academics in New York continue to analyze the police in 1960's and 1970's terms, as though Jerome Skolnick's ideas on an insular police culture responsible only to itself and suspicious of outsiders is the latest research on the problem of the "blue wall of silence" (Skolnick, 1966). This can be clearly seen in the discourse following these two cases.

The New York City Police Department is still largely a political institution, deeply rooted in the same machine politics that has dominated New York for over a century. Every time the mayoralty changes hands, one crew goes out and a new crew comes in. The forced resignation of Commissioner William J. Bratton over petty personal conflicts with Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, including the mayor's resentment over the amount of press attention the police commissioner was getting, illustrates politics at its pettiest level. These days, however, the old crew usually leaves the department for high-paying jobs in the private security sector, high-level security opportunities that did not exist in the 1970s.

New York has never required a college education or city residency for its police officers. Currently, there is a requirement of two years of college, although there are equivalencies, such as military service, which mean the requirement is not always met. Most recruits these days are very young, often 20 or 21 years of age, mostly white, and from the suburbs. They are not streetwise, not good at understanding urban problems, and not comfortable with minority populations. They are scared by the city in many ways and this is reflected in their policing. College-educated police officers complain that their education means nothing to the department and does not enhance their careers.

Police academy training is probably better than it was 20 years ago. Discipline may be better in only one rudimentary sense: there is clearly less overt violence and corruption. When I came to New York in 1979, you could watch the police hit people in Times square. In October 1979, I took a group of Scandinavian criminologists on a walking tour of Times square. It was a weeknight and we were out for one to two hours. During that time, we observed the police assault three people. One young man was standing in line for a movie, behind a yellow line. He pushed against the yellow line, and a police officer pushed him back. He said, "don't push me." The officer hit him two or three times with his nightstick. An old man, dirty and down and out, was hit with a nightstick (for no apparent reason) as he walked by a police officer. Another young man was pulled out of a minor fistfight and beaten on the spot with nightsticks. I often saw police hitting people in those days: homeless people sleeping on the subways were often awakened by a sharp blow from a nightstick.

Such assaults, and the language that goes with it, are probably less frequent these days. Better training and a changing police culture (among many of the younger officers) define such behavior as "trouble." Officers are encouraged to be more careful. At the same time, Officer Charles Schwarz, convicted of participating in the assault and rape of Abner Louima, had three charges of petty violence and racial remarks in his record. Police Commissioner Howard Safir has said, perhaps disingenuously, that Schwarz should have been terminated for the assault. He drew a 15-day suspension.

Civilian complaints against the New York police are not effective. The Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB) has little power. Few of the complaints brought to the Board are heard, and even fewer are substantiated. In 1997, for example, out of some 5,000 complaints, 276 were "substantiated." Action was taken in only 89 of the cases. Often, these disciplinary actions were "slight," e.g., a formal reprimand was given. The CCRB was so ineffective that in 1998 it was discovered that the Board had failed to pass on 108 "substantiated" cases of police misconduct to the NYPD (Cuneen, 1999: 307).

Ironically, an effective way to proceed is to rely on a completely separate complaint system, the department's own internal investigation system. In this process, the victim simply walks into the station house and asks the desk sergeant to take down the complaint. The desk sergeant is required to do so (although they often do not) and then to forward the complaint using ordinary police channels. Officers typically do not want "trouble," and any buildup of complaints can lead to unknown future problems, so officers try to avoid complaints. Once the complaint is in official channels, these direct departmental cases are processed by the department in the same way CCRB complaints are, meaning most often that nothing happens. The result is somewhat paradoxical: though complaint processes are generally ineffective, their mere existence has some unknown effect on the behavior of some police officers.

As part of the U.S. attorney's office investigation of the Abner Louima case, a detailed investigation of the complaint process led to the conclusion that there was a "pattern" in the NYPD of ineffectively processing civilian complaints. The effect was to communicate to the rank and file that they were free to "get tough" with suspects, creating a climate where citizens' civil rights were routinely violated by the police (New York Times, 1999: B1).

Still, as the Schwarz and Livoti cases show, the department has no consistent policy on what to do with officers with records of uncontrollable violence. Francis X. Livoti killed Anthony Baez with a chokehold after his football hit a patrol car in a street ball game in 1994. Livoti had been set for a transfer out of the precinct because of excessive complaints, but the patrol commander, who wanted tough officers in his precinct, overruled the decision. Dispositions of complaints are irregular and inconsistent. Often nothing at all happens. Most complaints turn out to be "unsubstantiated," with the most common cases simply pitting an officer's word against a citizen's.

A. The Abner Louima Case and the Problem of Pervasive Police Violence

The Louima and Diallo cases are linked in the minds of New Yorkers, but they represent two very different problems in police administration. The Louima case, at its most basic level, stands for the level of violence involved in ordinary policing of minority communities in 1997 and for the systemic failure of police management to deal with the problem of police violence. It arose from a simple Saturday night fight at a Haitian social club that spread into the street. The police were called and, during the melee, some unknown person punched Officer Justin A. Volpe in the face. Although not seriously hurt, Volpe was embarrassed and angry and, for some reason, he misidentified Abner Louima as the person who had punched him. Louima was arrested for assault and "taken for a ride" on the way to the police station. The patrol car stopped in a deserted area and Louima was beaten by at least four officers before being taken to the 70th precinct station house.

While he was standing in the main hall of the station house in front of the desk officer, Louima's pants were pulled down around his ankles. Humiliated in front of all of the officers in the building, he was led by Volpe and Schwarz into a restroom just down the hall. There he was sodomized with a wooden handle, either from a mop or a toilet plunger, and his teeth were knocked out as the handle was shoved into his mouth. His screams were clearly audible throughout the building, which was occupied by a number of police officers, all of whom were legally obliged to use force to defend Louima from injury. Louima was then thrown into a filthy holding cell to await arraignment on criminal charges in the morning.

Three or four hours later, Louima's screams resulted in his being taken to a hospital. There the officers joked about him being injured while having sex in jail. Nobody at the hospital paid much attention to Louima until a Haitian nurse took the time to listen to his story. She believed him and raised holy hell, calling the news media, NYPD internal affairs - everybody! Within a few hours the media were deep into the case. Yet it took 48 hours before the NYPD internal affairs unit first questioned individual officers in the precinct.

Subsequent events have overtaken this story, but the salient element is the depressingly ordinary character of these events. All of this was routine - except for the unusually horrible torture of Louima. If he has just been routinely beaten, nothing would have become public. Volpe and Schwarz were so confident of their protection by the "system" that they did nothing to conceal their actions in an attack that had begun in front of the desk sergeant in the main room of a police station house. Volpe even bragged about it to other officers. None of the officers present were disturbed by the attack until two things became obvious: Volpe and Schwarz had exceeded the bounds by committing a particularly hideous act of torture, and heads were going to roll because of the notoriety of the case.

All through these events, police management took the position that their "swift" (two-day) response proved that "the system worked" and that the "blue wall" no longer existed because of a new professionalism in the department. None of this was true. The basic response by internal affairs was late, and even then was only a crass and cynical political maneuver in the face of terrible press coverage. The "blue wall" held up perfectly for several days, finally collapsing because internal affairs threatened peripherally involved officers with life prison terms, and some officers felt genuine revulsion at what Volpe and Schwarz had done not because they had beaten Louima, but because they had engaged in sadistic sexual torture, behavior out of bounds in police culture. Mayor Giuliani and Commissioner Safir continue to proclaim the professionalism of their police department, defining the Louima case as an aberration, not as "police work as usual" gone bad.

Officers Justin A. Volpe and Charles Schwarz are "poster cops." Volpe, age 27, is the son of a famous police detective who is a world-class expert in art theft. He lives at home with his mother and father. He is a college graduate, holding a degree in criminal justice from St. John's University, a Vincentian institution, with a religious commitment to service. His police record was exemplary. Schwarz, age 33, was an 11-year veteran of the force, coming from the Marines rather than college, and with a more checkered career. He had faced three charges of excessive force, cursing, and ethnic slurs before the Civilian Complaint Review Board. The charges were dismissed for lack of corroboration, but he received a 15-day suspension for punching a civilian while off duty. He also had 11 commendations.

To this day, two years after the event, we have no idea of the extent of the problem in the 70th precinct. Five officers were charged criminally with federal civil rights violations, but with the exception of Volpe and Schwarz, all were acquitted. The jury simply would not accept Abner Louima's evidence alone as sufficient to convict the officers who were less seriously involved. Four officers testified against Volpe and Schwarz. Yet many more officers were working that night: in all, 14 officers were suspended or placed on modified duties. The entire precinct was later transferred out and an entirely new crew of officers was brought in from other precincts.(2) At this writing, departmental disciplinary hearings are still pending against many of these officers.

Police management in New York has long been indifferent to problems of police violence, denying the scope of its existence. Police procedures for investigating and prosecuting police violence were inadequate, with a management culture that tacitly supported undercurrents of brutality. The reasons for this inadequacy are not difficult to deduce: the basic management plan was for an aggressive police response to crime. Tolerating a high level of brutality was seen as a normal part of that cost.

B. The Amadou Diallo Killing: The Social Costs of Aggressive Police Crime Control Strategies

The Amadou Diallo killing in February 1999 followed the Louima assault by almost two years, but immediately preceded the trial. It mobilized public discussion on the New York police in a way not seen since the Knapp Commission of the 1970s disclosed systemic corruption in the department. Amadou Diallo, a mild and unassuming Guinean immigrant from a middle-class commercial family working 12-hour days selling on the streets, was shot 41 times in the space of a few seconds in the vestibule of his apartment house in the Bronx. His killers were a special street crimes unit of four undercover officers, part of the aggressive crime control strategy that characterizes modern New York policing. This nearly all-white unit was charged with policing high-crime areas, looking for violent crime, and then confronting violent criminals with highly trained, overwhelming firepower, four officers to a car. Although Louima's torture was presented as an aberration, the killing of Diallo was police work as usual, an unfortunate accident, but the normal product of the department's touted aggressive policing strategies.

The history of this police strategy, developed by former Police Commissioner William J. Bratton, and retained by Howard Safir, deserves comment since it is being copied around the country. At its core is a process called CompStat. Computers are used to track crime patterns all over the city, and they are programmed to follow many different kinds of crime patterns. A weekly meeting of precinct commanders subjects them to individual and collective responsibility for their performance as determined by the computer. Police brass subject local commanders to very harsh questioning, a public "grilling" in front of their peers, holding them accountable, on a week-to-week basis, for changing crime patterns in their precincts. Thus, the technology of the computer is connected to a management process designed to hold captains accountable for crime in their precincts. Each captain is expected to use these statistics to promptly redeploy his men so as to reduce crime statistics. Captains who do so effectively are promoted; those who fall behind get undesirable assignments. CompStat is an entire management system, widely copied across the country and abroad (Harcourt, 1998:291389).

The problem with this methodology, of course, is that small changes in statistics at the precinct level are easily misleading and manipulated, encouraging local captains to order their men to generate arrests that look good statistically: 10 drug arrests for example, in response to a rise in street crime. The CompStat methodology also rewards aggressive police work, encouraging escalating levels of aggression and competition between precincts. It is a standard joke that periodic police "sweeps" move low-level criminal offenders around the various neighborhoods, pushing them back and forth from one precinct to another, each movement picked up by sophisticated CompStat computers and given a different meaning as each captain strains to explain the changing arrest pattern in his precinct.

An underlying idea is that ordinary petty crime is linked to more serious crime. This also encourages the police to react quickly and harshly to minor offenders presumably tomorrow's serious offenders - in a "zero tolerance" policy toward quality-of-life offenders (Cuneen, 1999: 299-313). "Zero tolerance" language embodies a network of interrelated police practices, including increased aggression toward offenders and "zero tolerance" of dissent in the street without parade permits. The police department does not easily grant such permits. The September 1998 Million Youth March in Harlem was attacked by police in riot gear, accompanied by dogs, horses, and helicopters, the minute its 4:00 P.M. parade permit expired. Diallo died as a direct result of this escalating police aggression.

The officers, all now under indictment for murder, offered standard explanations for the shooting: they were on an aggressive anti-crime patrol, honestly believed that Diallo was armed, and shot to defend themselves. There are a number of problems with this account, besides the obvious, that firing 41 shots is an overreaction. Forensic evidence apparently reveals that Diallo was paralyzed and left in a prone position by some of the first shots, meaning that dozens of bullets were fired into a completely immobilized human being, travelling in a vertical direction, that is, up his body from trunk to head. Part of the problem of the excessive shots was new firearm technology: police officers in New York are armed with Glock semi-automatic pistols with 14 shot clips that hold special hollow-point bullets designed to explode on impact, tearing much larger holes in human bodies. An overreacting officer can now fire 14 shots in a few seconds, making mistaken shootings more likely to be fatal. Four overreacting officers, of course, can fire 41 bullets in the same few seconds.

The Diallo shooting apparently (according to the official account) stems from a routine Terry stop. The police officers were looking for a young Black man wanted on rape charges. Their description was rudimentary and applied to perhaps a hundred thousand young Black males in the Bronx. The chilling reality was that any of those young men might have been shot dead that night, the result of "normal" police work. The confrontation between four alert, aggressive police officers and a frightened Black man is inherently dangerous because of the police culture of competitively fighting "crime wars" in unfamiliar minority neighborhoods. Living in the suburbs, the police often fear the very communities in which they work. Diallo, in this view, simply made some wrong move that led the officers to mistakenly believe he had a gun.

This "wrong move" could have been anything. For example, last year a 16-year-old Black male was shot (but fortunately lived) in Queens. When police officers behind him yelled "freeze," he was startled and turned around. He was carrying a candy bar and the officers mistook the metallic wrapper for a gun. Police shot another Black man in a grocery store when a key ring in his hand was mistaken for a gun.

In this context, the Diallo killing struck a chord in the Black community. Police management meanwhile brazenly dismissed all criticism of the police, calling the killing a "human tragedy" while defending it as good police work. Although a few kind words were said about Diallo's family and their grief, and powerful people who came to New York from Africa spoke of simple justice, the police department went on with business as usual. Commissioner Safir went to Hollywood for the Oscar ceremonies.

This was too much for Black community leaders. In a show of support in the nonviolent tradition of Martin Luther King, Jr., prominent Black leaders, including former Mayor David Dinkins, Jesse Jackson, and Congressman Charles Rangel, demanded the prosecution of the police officers. They symbolically obstructed the doorway to police headquarters and were arrested for "disorderly conduct." For two weeks, thousands of people massed in front of police headquarters, with over one thousand arrested. The demonstrations were quite moving as the crowd chanted off the shots: "One, two, three, four, five, six..." all the way to "forty-one," graphically illustrating how violent Diallo's killing was.

These demonstrations reinvigorated traditional left politics in New York City, recalling old alliances, and led to speculation of renewed liberal prospects in the next city elections. Trade unionists, clergy, lawyers, teachers, the Left, old and new, community groups, Black, white, and Hispanic, all turned out to be arrested and taken to jail. Rabbis, standing arm in arm with Black clergymen, were led off to jail every night on the evening news. A week later, Robert M. Morgenthau, the Manhattan district attorney, announced that he would drop all of the charges. His reading of the law of disorderly conduct followed the common law: the offense of "disorderly conduct" requires real disorder, real interference with human activity. Symbolic blockages of a door do not meet that standard. The police had illegally made 1,100 arrests to keep the doors to one of their headquarters unblocked.

The police department's response was legalistic and technocratic. They basically said, "police officers are sent in disproportionate numbers to minority communities because there is more crime there." At one point, police management shoveled out data revealing that there were about 25,000 Terry stops, of which 8,000 led to arrests. Their intent was to show how dangerous these stops are for the police, yet how productive they were in terms of crime control. Although these data were seriously discussed for several days, that discussion was overtaken by another: these data are meaningless because most police officers do not even bother to record their Terry stops. In reality, there are hundreds of thousands of them; indeed, nobody has any idea. That all of this scientifically structured, aggressive police work could be pulled off without even the most rudimentary data about its result reveals the hollow core of the social scientific foundation of New York City's highly managed policing. CompStat is no better than its flawed database.

Nor were the obvious underlying racial issues within the scope of political officials. Both Giuliani and Safir denounced Black community leaders facing arrest as "publicity seekers," as though Jesse Jackson and Charles Rangel need to get arrested to make news. Similarly, both insisted that the police were protecting the Black community with these patrols. The racist denial of any legitimacy to Black protest rivaled anything seen in the 1970s.

This racism on the part of police management occurred after 30 years of well-publicized "community policing." In New York, as in most cities, this accompanies aggressive anti-crime patrols, manifesting the proverbial "iron fist and velvet glove." This often takes the form of highly visible community policing by day, with layers of anti-crime patrols sweeping the same community by night. Foot, bicycle, and horse patrols are visible in most inner New York City neighborhoods by day. In the wake of the Amadou Diallo killing, Commissioner Safir appointed the imam of the Malcolm Shabazz Mosque on 116th Street in Harlem, the mosque of Malcolm X, as the first Muslim police chaplain, explaining that he would minister to the spiritual needs of the city's 40 Muslim police officers (out of 40,000). Such gestures are low cost, yet involve the police in various New York City communities. Similarly, the city has budgeted $10 million to advertise for police recruits in minority communities.

The Diallo killing was a product of New York's aggressive policing formula: identify high-crime areas and blanket them with police officers who aggressively engage suspected criminals. Some accidental killings follow from it, but are "legal" as long as the officers are in reasonable fear for their lives and respond with reasonable force - the law of self-defense. The police institution and the political majority are willing to pay this cost. As the Diallo protests showed, however, minority communities, together with the political forces that they can mobilize, are outraged by the cold-blooded calculus.

The New York City police force, for all of its emphasis on modern social science research, does not easily permit research of its operations. All of our requests for access to public data have been denied. The research that does take place is screened so as to minimize embarrassment to the department. One particularly vile example of this genre is the recent book, Wild Cowboys, which describes the Washington Heights drug world through the eyes of the police drug squad. The stuff of Hollywood films, it glorifies police work and portrays Washington Heights, a vital immigrant community, as a haven for drug lords and drugged-out social scum- the kind of research that New York City police policy is based on!(3)

[More on Amadou Diallo]

C. Police Management in New York City

All of this comes full circle when we look at the conflict between police management and the rank and file. The Patrolmen's Benevolent Association (PBA), the police union, recently voted "no confidence" in Commissioner Safir. The union is as conservative as ever, representing white officers. Minority officers have their own unions, with more liberal politics, itself a revealing development. Safir is a doctrinaire law-and-order conservative, having filled important federal law enforcement positions in the Reagan and Bush administrations. His politics are roughly those of William Parker, the legendary Los Angeles police chief, and of J. Edgar Hoover, so we should make no bones about where police culture has gone in 50 years. He is just as outspoken, just as contemptuous of liberals, minorities, and police critics as Parker and Hoover were. He is an appointee and loyal servant of a conservative mayor. Why do his men hate him?

There are many reasons. One has to do with the Louima and Diallo cases. Instead of immediately supporting his men, Safir normally takes the view that the law must take its course. Thus, he distances himself from the immediate actions of his men. This is obviously the prudent thing for any police commissioner to do, but it is not the way that police unions are accustomed to being treated by the brass.

Safir is also a heavy-handed manager. He has aggressively upset the department with bold transfers. Troubled precincts are quickly broken up - everybody is transferred. This effectively blocks the maintenance of a stable police culture and makes supervision easier. Yet old-line police officers liked working with the same partners for years, which facilitated covering up illegal behavior.

Safir and Mayor Giuliani have kept the pay of all city workers low by blocking pay raises and then holding even limited increases down. In the 1970s, police unions received hefty pay raises in return for their political loyalty; Mayor Giuliani has not rewarded such loyalty. The larger conservative agenda in the 1990s is a low tax/cost-cutting agenda. In relationship to the police department, it stands for more efficient policing. Since salaries remain the largest part of the police budget, there is no way to accomplish this and still increase police salaries - especially given the rapid increase in the size of the department, up from 30,000 to almost 40,000 officers in 10 years. While supporting the mayor on salary stagnation, Safir has shown no sensitivity to his men. His trip to Los Angeles for the Academy Awards on a corporate jet while patrol officers were facing suspension for taking a free soda struck the men as sheer hypocrisy. Safir and Giuliani's conservatism is an upper-class affair, with each hobnobbing in tuxedos, an image of the police not common in the 1970s. Though their political positions are often identical, they differ greatly in the methodologies used to gain political ends.

This animosity between Safir and his men flows from the heightened use of management devices to hold the department accountable. Frequent use of transfers, short suspensions, fines, and minor disciplinary actions afford police management much better control over their rank and file. It also raises the level of conflict and resentment within the institution. Thus, a general politically conservative line celebrating the achievements of the New York City police as "the best in the country" rings hollow among the rank and file. Giuliani and Safir, in tuxedos, benefit most from this. Police morale is very low.

II. What Is the Central Character of the Police Institution?

Much of the early theoretical work on the police institution came from a Marxist tradition and was published by the Center for Research on Criminal Justice, the collective that produced The Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove: An Analysis of U.S. Police (1977).(4) Though there is complexity to this argument, it began with the idea that the ruling class held state power and organized and used state institutions to perpetuate the interests of their class. The police, in this analysis, were instruments of class power. As a starting position, this view had much to commend it. It resonated with what we were seeing in the streets, especially in the context of the Vietnam War, with the police fully mobilized to use great force to smash opponents to the war. The specter of the Democrats nominating Hubert Humphrey in Chicago under police protection, the arrest of whole delegations, and the massive violence in the streets was just one of these images.

There were, however, contradictions that interested us. The police forces were made up of city workers and were paid good "skilled worker"-level wages. How would class forces play out within the police institution? Were there ways to neutralize or weaken the violent, right-wing loyalties of police organizations?

Some social scientists insisted that the police were really a "working class" organization. Their logic rested on the working-class roots of individual police officers, coupled with basic similarities in the ideology of police unions and the right-wing skilled trade unions that were leading attacks on Vietnam War protesters. Behind this logic was the powerful image of the benign Irish cop, a fixture in immigrant communities, straightening out bad kids, helping widows carry their groceries, and finding lost children. Although this image was never compelling, it did emphasize the complexity of the police role and the need to carefully understand all of the linkages. For example, we all rely on the police for important social service. Indeed, for many Americans, the police (and perhaps school employees) are the government: it is only through crime control and public education that the government has any presence at all.

Important to understanding these contradictions were bureaucracy and ideology. Police institutions are hierarchically organized, often very large, public institutions with very rigid, top-down, paramilitary management. Law-and-order ideology has made deep inroads into American culture, including deep roots in working-class white and minority communities. There are analytical tools, however, that deal with law-and-order ideology. Gramsci's writings concerning ideological hegemony and false consciousness were very important here. The power of law can be seen as a double-edged sword, both injuring and protecting, depending on whose side you are one. Crime and social disorganization, along with all of the other accompaniments of poverty, do appear disproportionately in minority and poor communities, making some police work necessary.(5)

The police institution was a creation of class-conscious elites and was carefully structured to serve their interests. It was a lengthy historical process, with the police institution itself occasionally divided by class conflict. Because the police are a local institution, the particular form these developments take varies city by city (Harring, 1983). This variety leaves open a number of questions regarding the particular form of police response to social events, leaving police management with many strategic options.

It also leaves open complex questions of race and policing - questions that have not changed appreciably in 25 years. It is possible to view the repression of minority communities as simply class justice. Despite evidence for this, the offense of "driving while black" reveals a stark reality that transcends class analysis (Allen-Bell, 1999: 195-225). We routinely ask our students to reveal how many times they have been stopped and questioned in the streets by the police, a routine "Terry stop." A few white men will reveal a stop or two each. One Puerto Rican student who grew up in projects in Queens holds the record: he thought "about 60." Questions of basic class repression have become clear issues of the repression of minorities. Data on the stopping of Blacks on the New Jersey Turnpike revealed a reality far worse than even the most cynical might have expected. For example, with clear evidence that Blacks and whites drive at roughly the same speed down the Turnpike, Blacks, who make up only 10% of all drivers, have been drawing at least 70% of the stops. The only empirical basis for this disparity is racist discrimination. Put in reverse racist terms, the worst white male criminal simply does not face the same risk of being stopped as an average Black man does. Imagine here a police sweep for a "young white man," the same level of description that resulted in Amadou Diallo's killing.

Without some kind of theory of the police, the Left and the academic community were adrift, seemingly explaining an almost infinite variety of actions as idiosyncratic because of the sheer size of the police institution and the broad range of its functions. Social Justice has promulgated a Marxist general theory of the police that could be taught, debated, and applied to particular problems. This theory was obviously not without controversy given the demise of the Berkeley School of Criminology.

III. The Law Enforcement Assistance Administration: The Federalization of American Law Enforcement

It is apt that right at the heels of the founding of C&SJ came the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, the Nixon administration's massive plan to transform American policing with federal money. For the first time, the local police institution was the object of sustained federal intervention. Some of the problems that had moved people on the Left had also moved policymakers on the Right.

The local character of American law enforcement is vastly different from the more nationalized police systems in Canada, Great Britain, France, and most countries. The local character of the police makes it accessible to local elites, who often have racist (or other) interests inconsistent with national policy. The idea of "professionalizing" the police as a hedge against these local elites made complete sense in this context.

The ideology of police professionalization, around since the 1930s, was also deeply rooted in Berkeley and the School of Criminology. In itself, it does not change the class character of the police. Rather, an elitist ideology of professionalism is inculcated in individual police officers, substituting for the top-down paramilitary model that emphasizes carrying out the orders of police management.

Besides obvious issues of racism, elites identified corruption, inefficiency, and violence as police problems. Lyndon Johnson's Commission on Violence in American Society had identified many of the conflicts stemming from urban and antiwar protest. Into this stepped the Nixon government and the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA).

It is impossible to briefly summarize the legacy of the LEAA to U.S. law enforcement. One certainty is that the LEAA's educational investment in U.S. law enforcement had no meaning at all. The LEAA paid for over one million person-years of college education, an average of nearly three years for every active police officer in 1970's America. There is no empirical evidence that college-educated police officers perform differently from non-college-educated officers. This should not be surprising to Marxists: Why should racism and violence be a product of educational level? The only model that makes such an assumption views these effects as the product of defectively socialized human beings, not as systemic to the American social order.

LEAA money also transformed the university, changing the nature of criminology as a social science and reducing the amount of critical research and writing on criminal justice issues. The idea of professionalizing the police by financing their college educations assumed that police officers would receive the same liberal arts education that "professionals" received, opening them up to major currents in world thought, including psychology, history, sociology, anthropology, and political theory. Instead, college after college responded by creating special, dumbed-down programs for cops. The two thousand criminal justice programs that were created were designed to teach the police about policing and to give them credit for all of their experience. Ordinary college students, influenced by glamorous TV depictions of criminal justice, the related life experiences, and easy courses with little reading and few difficult ideas, flocked to these departments. Very often, they became the biggest departments on campus, wiping out sociology, psychology, political science, and the traditional liberal arts majors. In short, the police who went to college did not get "college" educations (Sherman, 1978).

These new departments created a boom in jobs for criminologists at a time when academic jobs were declining in the late 1970s and 1980s. Many of these departments contributed to the increasing conservatism in the discipline of criminology. Not only did these departments emphasize "applied," as opposed to "theoretical," criminology, but they also often fairly aggressively sought to market themselves to conservative students. Any scholar who has attended a criminology conference in the past 10 years can testify to the poor quality of the scholarship and the narrow subject matter of the papers presented. In the 1970s, these conferences experienced at times real engagement and excitement. Groups of three or four radical criminologists would, for example, visit a panel on "International Terrorism," listen politely, and then rise to ask questions about the political nature of the analytical categories used, the underlying ideological assumptions, and suggest alternative approaches.

If the LEAA was a bust in terms of its educational initiatives, it was far more successful at buying hardware and training local police to use it. My family, the Harrings, has lived since 1854 in a small, rural county in Wisconsin with a population of about 8,000 - roughly what it was at the time of the Civil War. When I was in grade school, the whole county had two full-time law enforcement officers, one an elected sheriff and the other a traffic officer. When I was in high school in the 1960s, the sheriff was given the job of hiring two officers, getting the highway department out of the law enforcement business. Ten years later, when I was in law school, the now "professionalized" sheriff's department had 17 employees, including three jailers, three radio operators, and 11 officers. Today, the same department has about 30 employees - and a new jail. A full-time officer, paid from federal funds, works in the county's two high schools, alternating half days. There, with the full cooperation of the school, she searches lockers, book bags, and cars in the parking lot and then walks drug-sniffing dogs through the hallways. Students who get caught with drugs or paraphernalia are arrested, put in handcuffs, and taken to jail. They are also suspended from school, often ending their education.

The county police also have boats, snowmobiles, automatic weapons, riot guns, all kinds of expensive drug field-testing equipment, all purchased with various kinds of federal money. None of the officers have been to college, but nobody particularly notices. What all of this promotes is the legally structured monotony of small-town America. Teenagers who wear black T-shirts, weird hair styles, listen to the "wrong" music, or generally act like rebels are subjected to the same police harassment that "long hairs" faced 30 years ago, but without the support of comparable social movements. It is dismal out there for these kids. And the fallout from Littleton, Colorado, is just beginning. Children are being taught that they should report anyone who might be violent to the police. "And how do you tell?" "Well, they say bad things and they act weird." Children who act "strangely different" are presumed to be part of subcultures rooted in violence and drugs, the appropriate objects for police intervention.

This transformation is doubtlessly most noticeable in small-town and suburban America (the country's new political center of gravity), but it has had the same impact in the cities. The police institution was technologically backward in the 1970s. We all knew that if the police caught you, there was probably no more than a 50/50 chance that they would be able to pull up your criminal record on their ancient computers, occasionally surplus airline reservation equipment. Leo Burr, one of the Army Math bombers from Madison who for years had been on the FBI's "ten most wanted list," was arrested once for shoplifting in San Diego. He drew a 10-day jail sentence, but not until hours after he had been released did the report on his fingerprints came back - and he was long gone.

In the 1970s, we toured the atomic-bomb-proof vault far beneath the Parker Center in Los Angeles where the Emergency Command Communication System (ECCS) was headquartered. This technology was capable of monitoring the demand for police services and of regulating police resources in response- even through a nuclear attack. Besides the obvious absurdity of dialing 911 during a nuclear attack and expecting a response, this technology exceeded the capacity of the police institution to utilize it. Someone pointed out that "union rules" did not allow a computer to order patrol cars to respond to particular emergencies. Of course, the computer only knew what the patrol cars reported about their availability. (Traditionally, police officers have been very skilled at "cooping up," disappearing from patrol for hours to escape the control of their sergeants.) The LEAA bought hundreds of millions of dollars worth of hardware, computers, guns, helicopters, and boats and this material has transformed the nature of police work. The modern global positioning system (GPS) technology takes everything one step further: the state can implant criminals with microchips. Then, if they are arrested, they can be tracked electronically, either by police officers or by "smart bombs."

IV. Criminal Law and Procedure

Police work may be more aggressively proactive now than it was in the 1970s because the legal culture encourages aggressive police work. As criminologists concerned with the police, we often underestimated the importance of law. Yet, the police are a legal institution, operating at the intake level of a large criminal justice system. They take many cues from prosecutors and judges.

The U.S. Supreme Court, first under Chief Justice Warren Burger and later under Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, has handed down around 100 decisions since the 1970s that encourage aggressive police work, exaggerating the social interest in crime detection while minimizing the human interest in personal integrity and autonomy. The idea that the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments protect the civil rights of all Americans has been replaced by the idea that being "free from crime" is the most basic civil right. Democrats as well as Republicans have jumped on this bandwagon. Ruth Bader Ginsberg, a feminist and Columbia law professor appointed to the Court by Bill Clinton, votes more often on criminal issues with Rehnquist than she does with David Souter, who is, together with John Paul Stevens, the most liberal justice on criminal matters. Sandra Day O'Connor, seen as an archconservative when Ronald Reagan appointed her, is now in the center of the Court on criminal matters. The legal landscape of crime fighting has completely changed and the police institution has been given carte blanche with car searches, street searches, informal identifications, and field interrogations. Miranda is now so full of holes that the Right has stopped arguing that it needs to be overturned because it "handcuffs the police." In fact, the opposite is true: law enforcement officers like Miranda because, once you give the formal warning, almost "anything goes" in the interrogation process.

The U.S. Supreme Court is, in the words of Justice Louis D. Brandeis, a great teacher. Thus, the Court's pronouncements on the need to balance constitutional rights against the threat of crime reinforced an already existing police ideology. Further, the Court cynically looked away from outright police perjury, accepting as true almost any story that an individual police officer told. The underlying message was that very aggressive police tactics were legitimate, provided they were accompanied by the "right" stories.

Cars can be pulled over as long as the officer has some legal basis for doing so. All this requires is a story: "the car deviated from its lane," "a tail light was out," "it was speeding," "it was moving erratically" - all stories that any of us could tell about ordinary driving. The "Terry stop," based on "articulable reasonable suspicion," required only narratives about "high-crime areas," "furtive glances," "suspicious movements of the hands," "matching the general description," or "appearing to throw something away." If such factors were not actually present, individual officers could easily make them up, embedding a cynical culture of lying even deeper into police work. This "law," sanctioned by the U.S. Supreme Court, provided legal rationalization for exactly the kind of aggressive police behavior that communities were organizing against in the 1960s and 1970s. Recent events in New York City make this clear. Basically, the bad police work of the 1960s and 1970s became the good police work of the 1990s.

Social Justice has published few articles about substantive criminal law and procedure, reflecting the fact that criminologists (and social scientists generally) do not usually analyze the law. There was also, in the heat of the times, a tendency to assume that the police were acting illegally when they engaged in brutality, spying, and other controversial activities. We were wrong. The bottom line is that the police are legal actors, responsible to a hierarchical legal order that is based on flexible rules operating in an environment of great discretion on the part of police officers, their supervisors, prosecutors, and judges. This makes the kind of law that the police actually carry out always suspect. However, what the police do is better understood as law than as deviance or misconduct.

V. Conclusion

Researching the police institution is as important today as it was when C&SJ first started to publish. The basic framework of police work has not changed in 25 years. City Hall and One Police Plaza in downtown New York are armed camps with police officers visible everywhere, keeping people back from even the steps of City Hall. Relations between the police and minority communities are more strained now than they were in 1975. Arrest and prison statistics are more racially unbalanced than they were in 1975.

Police violence, central to our concerns about the police, is at roughly the same level as 25 years ago. Sudden violence is very much a possibility in any police-citizen encounter. Some of this, as in the Louima case, is completely irrational or, as Justin Volpe put it, "he just lost it." Given the nature of police work and the nature of police training and control, it is a problem of the structuring of violence in a liberal state. Most of the violence, however, is structural, derived from the nature of police work and training itself. If the police violently confront a large number of suspects, "accidental" deaths, if they can be called that, will be the fate for some proportion of them. A certain number of the young men accosted by the police will make the wrong move and get shot by aggressive police officers carrying out some kind of a plan.

These deaths, of course, do not fall randomly across the population, with all of us accepting our portion of the risks of aggressive policing. Poor and minority people bear those costs, while those more fortunate reap the "benefits." That distinction is precisely what class justice is, precisely what it means to "police" a class society. It means stabilizing an existing social order, according to the requirements of particular class interests.

That analysis requires a close look at the changing nature of class relations in New York City, changes reflected by the election of Mayor Giuliani. New York, literally the capital of world capitals, is an increasingly polarized city, serving as a world economic center, with major economic functions increasingly carried out by highly paid workers who live either in wealthy enclaves, primarily in Manhattan, or in the suburbs. Growing urban poverty and its visible signs were disturbing these workers and the city's millions of visitors. Aggressive police activity, zero tolerance of quality-of-life offenses, and parallel police measures removed the "squeegee men," the homeless sleeping on the sidewalks and in the subways, and the young males hanging out on corners. Essentially, this police work contained the existing communities "in their place," while making even those places more "sanitized." The remaining white ethnic communities, also part of the Giuliani coalition, benefit from an increased sense of security, an increased distance from peoples that they do not wish to live among. It is a particular form of policing, suited to New York City at this particular moment in its history.

NOTES

1. Terry v. Ohio 392 U.S. 1 (1968). This case defines the legal scope of a police street inquiry into a citizen suspected of a crime. Basically, the case requires the officer to have "articulable reasonable suspicion" that a crime has been committed, or that criminal activity is afoot, by a particular person, in order to make a temporary stop for a short duration to make an inquiry. In addition, if the officer has a reasonable fear for her or his safety, they may make a cursory pat-down search of the outer clothing in search of weapons. The "Terry stop" is a stop under these rules.

2. See ACLU News (August 14, 1997) and Human Rights Watch (1998: 286-289).

3. See Jackall (1998). The Harvard University Press spring 1999 catalogue describes the book as follows: "In this bloody urban saga, Robert Jackall tells how New York detectives pieced together a case of drug trafficking, money laundering, and murder, all centered on a vicious gang of Dominican youths known as the Wild Cowboys." The book fails to note that routine police tactics in such cases include beatings, perjury, and harassment of families and communities. The bloody and provocative language of this analysis, more evocative of prime-time television than scholarly work, is part and parcel of the same police culture that tortured Louima and killed Diallo.

4. See also Harring et al. (1977), Harring (1976), and Harring and McMullin (1975).

5. Doing community organizing in the late 1960s in a midwestern city, we had a strategy of calling the fire department when we needed city services. Not only did they respond more quickly than the police, they were nicer people - and they didn't carry guns or arrest bystanders. Whatever problem existed, the firefighters dealt with it effectively.

REFERENCES

Allen-Bell, Angela Anita; 1999 "The Birth of the Crime: Driving While Black (DWB)." Southern University Law Review 25.

Center for Research on Criminal Justice; 1977 The Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove: An Analysis of U.S. Police. Berkeley: CRCJ.

Cuneen, Chris; 1999 "Zero Tolerance Policing and the Experience of New York City." Current Issues in Criminal Justice 10,3.

Harcourt, Bernard E.; 1998 "Reflecting on the Subject: A Critique of the Social Influence Conception of Deterrence, the Broken Windows Theory, and Order-Maintenance Policing New York Style." Michigan Law Review 97,2.

Harring, Sidney L.; 1983 Policing a Class Society: The Experience of American Cities. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

1976 "The Development of the Police Institution in the United States." Crime and Social Justice 5 (Spring-Summer).

Harring, Sidney L. and Lorraine M. McMullin; 1975 "The Buffalo Police: Labor Unrest, Political Power, and the Creation of the Police Institution." Crime and Social Justice 4 (Fall-Winter).

Harring, Sidney, Tony Platt, Richard Speiglman, and Paul Takagi; 1977 "The Management of Police Killings." Crime and Social Justice 8 (Fall-Winter). Reprinted in William J. Chambliss (ed.), Criminal Law in Action, Second Edition. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1984.

Jackall, Robert; 1998 Wild Cowboys. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

New York Times; 1999 "U.S. Report Expected to Criticize Response by Police to Brutality." June 14: B1.

Sherman, Lawrence W.; 1978 The Quality of Police Education. Washington, D.C.: The Police Foundation.

Skolnick, Jerome; 1966 Justice Without Trial: Law Enforcement in Democratic Society. New York: Wiley.

SIDNEY L. HARRING is on the faculty of the CUNY Law School, 65-21 Main Street, Flushing, NY 11367 (e-mail: har@maclaw.law.cuny.edu). GERDA W. RAY is on the faculty of the History Department, University of Missouri-St. Louis, 8001 Natural Bridge Road, St. Louis, MO 63121 (e-mail: Gerda@umsl.edu).

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