I Can't Breathe

by Matt Taibbi

  Bratton learned surprising lessons working the Fenway. Bostonians at community meetings proved more concerned about things like dirt, uncleaned streets, and illegally parked cars than they were about serious crime. When police attacked the small stuff, people felt safer.

  So Bratton retrained his officers to focus on these minor offenses.

  “It wasn’t the easiest lesson,” he said. “We wanted to make the good pinch…We didn’t want to be wrestling with drunks.”

  Once named chief of the Transit Police in New York, Bratton instituted a campaign that employed the Trumpian theme of “taking back the subway.”

  Almost overnight, the subway became a symbol of how policing was destined to work all over New York City. Police would later insist that the crime rate underground dropped precipitously after the Clean Car Program. In a report written well after the fact, Bratton himself would say that between 1990 and 1993, underground crime rates fell by more than 35 percent, compared to a 17.9 percent drop aboveground. This became a key part of the rationale for using quality-of-life policing aboveground.

  It’s difficult to look back now at the public comments made by officials at the time and not see some ominous signs of where Broken Windows might be headed. Kelling himself began his 1991 City Journal article about subway policing with an anecdote about a helpful, civic-minded citizen who is accosted by a panhandler:

  At midday in a New York City subway train, a man carrying a paper cup approaches a woman and thrusts the cup in front of her. She ignores him. He thrusts the cup nearly under her nose. She glances about, checking her situation—the train is approaching the terminal. If he’s hungry, she says, there’s a church nearby where he can get some food—she is specific about its location. He glowers at her, and pushing the cup even closer says, “Mind your own f——in’ business, b——ch.” The train stops. The woman gets off the train.

  The passage is race neutral, in Kelling’s careful way, but it’s not hard to image the racial composition some in his audience, primed by politicians, the media, and the anecdotal evidence around them, would have projected onto the fictional scene. For those readers, anecdotes like Kelling’s were stories about how their city and even their personal space were being violated by menacing black and brown bodies. That white people are inherently afraid of black people, and particularly black men, has been established by countless scientific studies, ranging from the prosaic (police officers shoot black suspects more quickly than whites in video simulations) to the bizarre (white people are more likely to ascribe superhuman or paranormal powers to black people than to other white people). This fear lurks under the surface of a wide spectrum of controversies past and present. The “subway shooter” Bernhard Goetz became a hero to white New Yorkers not because he was an introverted nut with a quick trigger finger but because so many white New Yorkers could identify with the experience of being afraid of black people on the subway. There was no other way to explain it: New York’s reputation as a “scary” city was inextricably linked to the perception that it was a black city, or at least a place where white people couldn’t safely avoid having to deal with black people.

  Kelling didn’t necessarily look at things that way. He believed sincerely that people who were afraid of crime were already victims of crime. If one could somehow decouple that concept from irrational fears of other races, his would be an absolutely true observation. His tale of the panhandler in the subway was, for him, a parable about how disorder makes victims of people even if they aren’t robbed, beaten, or raped. It was also a story about why the city was failing.

  “Disorder undermines not only the subway but the quality of life and the economic vitality of New York City,” he wrote.

  Kelling wanted Broken Windows to be a tool that would be remembered for restoring the quaint, almost Victorian quality of civility and decency to a city that had become legendary for the opposite. But his vision would become almost impossible to decouple from another, less lofty idea.

  Kelling, unwittingly perhaps, had set in motion a massive government program that would be warped from the beginning by a chilling syllogistic construct:

  New Yorkers who are afraid of crime are already victims.

  Many New Yorkers are scared of black people.

  Therefore, being black is a crime.

  —

  In 1994, the newly elected Rudy Giuliani empowered Bill Bratton to run America’s largest police force. Bratton not only committed his army to George Kelling’s Broken Windows theory but to a separate mania that belonged much more to him personally: statistics.

  The academic in George Kelling spent a lot of time thinking about more amorphous issues, like how safe people did or didn’t feel under certain kinds of police strategies.

  The hard-charging, macho Bratton was more intensely interested in counting the progress of cops. The idea of the friendly street patrolman idly policing a block that had one or two muggings a month had no appeal to him. He wasn’t interested in counting things that didn’t happen. He wanted action.

  Bratton was disdainful of the old model that focused on simply solving crimes one at a time. From an organizational perspective, having cops simply work cases as they popped up was a managerial sinkhole. How can you measure the progress of a detective sitting at his desk, coffee in one hand, telephone in another?

  “Work on crime is usually done on a case-by-case basis without any real strategic oversight,” Bratton complained. “As a result, police organizations can be particularly subject to drift.”

  So Bratton began to implement what he liked to describe as a “goal-setting” culture, which was heavily based on laying out numerical targets and making sure everyone hit them, or else.

  Captain Joseph Concannon liked the new changes. He’d been a cop for decades and thought the police had been on the defensive for too long. By the mid-nineties, the barrel-chested six-footer had worked in virtually every part of the city.

  He’d served the 114th Precinct in Queens as a beat cop, been a sergeant in Forest Hills, worked as a lieutenant in Brooklyn’s Seventieth Precinct. He’d operated in Staten Island and the Bronx, and he would end his career with tours captaining two Manhattan precincts, the Seventeenth in Midtown and the Twenty-fourth on the Upper West Side.

  He would be one of the first to see the CompStat system in action. And he was impressed. The cops were finally taking the fight to the criminals.

  Concannon’s memories of police work were all stored in what he calls the “library” of impressions that traveled with him everywhere on the job. The stuff in the library, a catalog of vivid experiences, was the raw material of any cop’s muscle memory.

  There was the time he got caught in a no-man’s-land between the projects in Astoria and Queensbridge, a place all grown over with weeds. It was a spot where thieves dumped the hulks of stolen cars. Cops cruised the place sometimes, looking to catch people in the act.

  One night he and his partner get a call: “Man with a gun.” They’re sent to the lot with the weeds. They drive up and eventually stop a young black guy driving a small black car. He’s got a gun on him, a little Raven automatic, but they can’t restrain him or get the gun. All three men end up in the backseat of a tiny car, wrestling for their lives.

  “We’re beating the piss out of ourselves, because we can’t get ourselves on this motherfucking kid with a gun in his hand,” Concannon remembers. “And we’re trying to control the gun, we’re trying to control his hands, we’re in the backseat of this car, you know?

  “So those are all of the things that are in the back of your head.”

  That episode ended without serious injury, but there were other memories. Concannon recalls the riots and the protests across the years, but what he mostly remembers is being shouted at and having stuff thrown at him and being told not to fight back.

  He came up during an era in the seventies and eighties when New York police had a different mandate. The old, O. W. Wilson school of policing—based on cars, rad
ios, and quick patrol response—turned out to have the effect of distancing cops from neighborhoods. Police were guys in cars who passed through like tourists, but they were told not to violate the Star Trek–ian prime directive—Don’t interfere—even when provoked.

  Inwardly, police like Concannon stowed those insults in the “library.”

  “I’ve been up in Washington Heights when Molotov cocktails were being thrown at the cops,” he remembers. He describes showing up at the scene of a riot in a tough neighborhood and being told, when a store was set on fire: “ ‘Watch it. Don’t do anything. Let them burn it down to the ground.’ ”

  So he liked Bratton’s new ideas. At least, they had potential. They were tough on captains like himself, but he didn’t mind.

  —

  A huge part of Bratton’s new push was the CompStat system, which will be familiar to fans of the HBO drama The Wire. On a daily basis, high-ranking police commanders started meeting in a corporate-style conference room to discuss current crime statistics and plot strategies.

  The giant room full of sweating commanders that put high-ranking police officials on the spot was designed to be intimidating and ritualistic. The corporate imagery was very deliberate. Bratton, the exacting CEO in his own emerging corporate metaphor, talked about watching departmental progress “with the same hawk-like attention private corporations pay to profit and loss.”

  In these miserable, stress-filled ass-whipping sessions, local chiefs like Concannon were regularly asked to stand in front of the ranks and describe the progress of their sectors in painstaking detail.

  “I’d be at a little podium here by myself, and behind me was a twenty-foot-by-twenty-foot electronic map,” says Concannon. “And then [in front of] that map, I would have to defend…what I was doing to address the crime patterns in my area.”

  Concannon soon realized that commanders who weren’t on top of the numbers in their sectors were screwed.

  “All of this different data gets brought up,” he says.

  Recalling a typical scene, he plays both parts, the bosses and the commanders.

  “They say, ‘Inspector Charlie, in your command, we’re getting a lot of radio runs for assaults,’ ” Concannon says. “ ‘Can you tell us what’s going on in that area?’ And he says, ‘Yeah, we’ve gone down there, we’ve taken about sixteen different reports for assaults in the area.’ ”

  Concannon turns to play the role of the bosses interrogating the commander and waves his hand to indicate the great twenty-by-twenty screen.

  “ ‘Captain. This is a picture of your domestic violence officer. We understand she only has sixty ARs.’ ”

  An AR was a domestic violence activity report.

  “Then they’ll start eating away into why he’s got so many assaults,” Concannon explains. “They’ll say, ‘Captain, we’re making you see that your assaults and your domestic violence are very much related, and that you better get on top of your domestic violence, Officer. Otherwise, we’re going to get on it for you.’ You follow me?”

  Now, even without having explicit numerical targets set for him, the captain had still been told in no uncertain terms that his domestic violence officer needed to start making more arrests. Otherwise, he wasn’t going to be captain anymore.

  Concannon believed CompStat was a great thing for the department. He believed it instilled accountability and organization in a police department where morale had sagged. “It’s a very, very deliberate management process that’s in place, and it’s very much professionalized,” he says. “But it’s got to be managed and supervised.”

  Concannon remembers hearing direction about Stop-and-Frisk in CompStat meetings. The bosses would gripe if there weren’t enough 250s written (again, the UF-250 was a form police filled out after they completed a stop). It was presented as the solution to every problem.

  “[They’d say,] ‘Hey, listen. You’ve got robberies here, you’ve got car break-ins there, you’ve got this going on all over the place,’ ” he recalls. “ ‘How many two-fifties do you have in that area?’ ”

  Like all the captains, he got the message. The brass wanted more 250s.

  —

  The Bratton programs were an immediate hit in the media, particularly after stats began to show a sharp drop in the crime rate in New York.

  Time put Bratton on its cover, dressed in a trench coat and standing at night on a New York street conspicuously empty of anything but a squad car. The headline: “Finally, We’re Winning the War Against Crime.” In the blink of an eye, police departments in cities big and small began adopting similar programs. Kelling watched in amazement as versions of his ideas spread around the country. In each place, the concept was more or less the same one he’d advocated: ditching the old reactive policing model for this new, highly interventionist, proactive strategy that focused on the visible symbols of disorder.

  But the idea that spread around the country was not exactly what Kelling envisioned. In some places, they called it “community” or “quality-of-life” policing. But in others, it was called “zero-tolerance” policing, a term that troubled Kelling to the point where he would ultimately find himself reluctant ever to say it out loud.

  “Zero tolerance implies the police have no discretion,” he says. “But the program really depends upon the police exercising good discretion.”

  Kelling believed a key to good policing depended upon police knowing when to throw the book at people and when to negotiate problems away quietly. Moreover, “zero tolerance” implied police were arresting everyone everywhere by the book, without making their own judgment calls, which was certainly not the case. Cops were not throwing zero tolerance at stockbrokers in high-rent neighborhoods. It was discretion here, no discretion there.

  Moreover, the sheer number of stops and searches was growing at an ominous rate. At the policy’s height in New York, police were stopping more than 680,000 people a year and issuing upward of half a million summonses a year. And throughout the life of the program, black and Hispanic residents made up 80 to 90 percent of all stops (usually closer to 90 percent), in a city where they made up roughly half of the population.

  This disparity echoed an earlier bizarre statistic showing that 90 to 95 percent of all people imprisoned for drug offenses in New York in the nineties were black and Hispanic, despite studies showing that 72 percent of all illegal drug users in the city were white. Clearly a certain form of discretion was being exercised.

  Bratton moved to Los Angeles in 2002 and launched a similar program there. Before long, L.A. was making more than 870,000 stops a year, a rate significantly higher than was ever seen in New York. Chicago, too, was still stopping people at a rate four times higher than New York as late as 2016.

  In Baltimore, a little-known city councilman named Martin O’Malley won a surprise victory in the 1999 mayoral race on a platform of zero-tolerance policing. Within a few years, O’Malley’s police force was arresting 108,447 people in a single year, or about one-sixth of the city’s entire population.

  In its first years, Broken Windows wasn’t just popular among law enforcement. It became intellectual chic. In 2000, America’s leading fast-food philosopher, Malcolm Gladwell, helped establish his place in the intelligentsia on the back of a half-baked analysis of Broken Windows in a book called The Tipping Point.

  Gladwell sold Middle America on the idea that making little changes in an environment can bring about big results, and you can fight crime the same way you start a fashion trend. So just as you can sell lots of Hush Puppies shoes by getting a bunch of kids in a chic neighborhood like the East Village to wear them, so too can you stop felonies and murders by busting graffiti artists. Or something. It sounded convincing enough to the millions of people who read the book.

  The only people who had a problem with Broken Windows seemed to be the ones living in the target neighborhoods.

  People in black and Hispanic neighborhoods of New York and other cities began showing
up in lawyers’ offices with horror stories of being knocked down, strip-searched on the street, and busted repeatedly for nonsense charges like obstructing government administration, loitering, or obstructing pedestrian traffic.

  The theory behind the program had evolved—by making people in certain neighborhoods aware that they could be stopped and/or searched at any time, for any reason, it would discourage them from bringing guns or drugs out on the street. A black state senator named Eric Adams would later testify that Ray Kelly, the city’s commissioner throughout the Bloomberg years, had told him openly that the goal was to change the psyche of young black and Latino men by “instill[ing] fear in them that every time that they left their homes they could be targeted by police.”

  “How else would we get rid of guns?” Kelly asked Adams.

  But the program had the effect of making a city full of nonwhite people of infinitely varied backgrounds experience a nearly identical sense of dread and uncertainty about when the next stop might come. College students, working professionals, and bloodthirsty gang killers all felt the same thing.

  —

  Eric Garner thought he had the system beat once he found the cigarette scheme, but soon he was feeling that same dread. Right or wrong, the threat of being stopped went from an annoyance to a thing that took over his life.

  SIX JEWEL

  Jewel Miller didn’t like government offices. The dislike dated back to when she was twelve years old, when she put herself into foster care after her parents died.

  “I needed a minute,” she explains.

  Growing up, she’d never known any serious problems.

  “I lived in a nice house. I knew nothing about welfare and projects. I had parents that went to work,” she says. “My mother was a secretary. I had it good.”

  But her mother and stepfather had been heroin addicts when Jewel was born and didn’t get clean until she was three years old. When they got sick with AIDS nearly a decade later, she didn’t understand. “AIDS was for people who did drugs,” she says.