Frank Friday Posted on Friday, December 05, 2014

Does ‘Broken Windows’ Policing Work?

Shyama Venkateswar Distinguished Lecturer, Hunter College and Director, Public Policy Program, Roosevelt House

In the past week, people across the country reacted with disbelief as grand juries declined to indict the two police officers involved in the tragic deaths of Eric Garner in New York City and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Both men’s deaths once again pointed to the uneasy relationship that exists between law enforcement and communities of color, especially with their young men.

Research undertaken by Jeffrey Fagan of Columbia University on the nature of stops by the police, race, neighborhood, and type of crime in the period, 2004 to 2012 in New York found that more than half of the persons stopped were black (51.9 percent) and about one in three (32 percent) were Hispanic. Whites (9.13 percent) and Other race/ethnicities (6 percent) were stopped far less. Additional demographic patterns emerged from Fagan’s study: nearly 3 stops in four were among persons aged 16-34; males accounted for more than 9 in 10 stops. Black and Hispanic suspects were stopped over 50 percent more often on the suspicion of violent offenses and were twice as often suspected of carrying weapons and trespassing. Whites were about four times more likely to be stopped for Quality of Life offenses. Stop-and-frisk tactics by the police, that are now discontinued as an official strategy since Mayor de Blasio took office, occurred most frequently in neighborhoods with high black and Hispanic residents and where crime rates were high. Fagan’s study suggests that the disparate treatment by the police could be a result of “over-policing” in the most racially segregated neighborhoods with high minority populations or “underpolicing” in neighborhoods with low minority concentrations.

Other findings from Vera Institute, a non-partisan research organization, confirm the high level of mistrust of the police that exist in poor neighborhoods with high crime rates. In a survey of 500 people, 59 percent reported that they would not go to the police even if they were the victim of a violent crime. NYPD’s own statistics show that 95 percent of shooting victims are black or Hispanic who also represent 87 percent of all murder victims.

In many parts of the country, community policing has meant vigorously pursuing petty-crime and enforcing small laws in the belief it will deter more violent crime and lead to better quality of life for residents in tough neighborhoods. NYC Police Commissioner, Bill Bratton, has been a strong advocate for “broken windows policing,” a strategy intended to combat disorder, the lack of control and the fear that pervades violent neighborhoods. It is unclear whether this strategy has been the reason behind the drop in crime in NYC that Mayor de Blasio announced earlier this week. New York’s decline in crime is consistent with a nation-wide trend of a decreasing rate of violent crime, possibly due to the waning of the crack epidemic since the early 1990s.

Effective policing is a high priority issue across the nation. The question that confronts us all is how to implement a strategy that will result in a win-win situation for police departments as well as the “hot spot” neighborhoods, in particular those with a combined poverty, high-crime, and minority populations. Disproportionate attention on young men of color have had unintended negative consequences as we have seen all too well across the country. One can only hope that particular corrosive strategy can be overcome through revised policies, retraining, supervision and monitoring by police departments and neighborhood watch groups everywhere so that black, brown and white lives equally matter to all.


 

Shyama Venkateswar is Director of the Public Policy Program at Roosevelt House and Distinguished Lecturer at Hunter College. In this capacity, she leads the Public Policy Program’s undergraduate curriculum, teaches the senior Capstone Seminar, co-manages faculty initiatives, works closely with city & state agencies for student internships, manages adjuncts, and directs a scholars program funded by the Jewish Foundation for Education of Women. She is a regular columnist for Roosevelt House’s website on a variety of national and global policy issues on conflict resolution, food security, women’s leadership, criminal justice reform, among others. She has almost twenty years of experience in research, policy and advocacy focusing on social justice issues, both in the U.S. and globally. Before coming to Hunter College, she worked at the National Council for Research on Women (NCRW), where she served as Director of Research & Programs, and helped provide the vision and strategic direction for the Council’s policy agenda on economic security for low-income women, diversity in higher education and the corporate arena, women’s leadership, and ending global violence against women. She is co-author of two NCRW reports, Caring for Our Nation’s Future; and The Challenge and the Charge: Strategies for Retaining and Advancing Women of Color in addition to numerous commentary and opinion pieces on poverty, job creation, peace-building, and immigrant rights published in The Miami Herald, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Asia Times, The Indian Express, and the Chicago Sun-Times. She has given Congressional briefings, and presented her research findings to academic, policy, advocacy and corporate audiences. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia University and is a graduate of Smith College.