by Matt Taibbi
The squad was also heavily white. According to some reports, the group was less than 10 percent minority, compared to 30 percent across the NYPD generally.
In the early nineties, when Bratton first took the commissioner job, the SCU took off. The expanded use of Terry stops meant the self-appointed commandos didn’t have to pussyfoot around anymore. Now they could jump out of cars anywhere and everywhere and jack up people in search of things like guns.
And they took the job seriously. At one point, despite being less than 2 percent of the whole NYPD numerically, they seized 40 percent of the guns.
In 1996, the group had T-shirts printed up that quoted Ernest Hemingway:
THERE IS NO HUNTING LIKE THE HUNTING OF MAN, AND THOSE WHO HAVE HUNTED ARMED MEN LONG ENOUGH AND LIKED IT, NEVER CARE FOR ANYTHING ELSE THEREAFTER.
Howard Safir, the squirrelly, oddly nondescript man who took over the commissioner’s job from the swashbuckling Bratton in 1996, took the SCU and tripled it in size. In 1997, it went from 138 members to 380. The mandate of the SCU was like the mandate for the police department generally: make numbers. It came out in a New York Times story as far back as 1999 that the group was operating on an unofficial quota, which demanded that each officer turn up one illegal gun a month.
“There are guys who are willing to toss anyone who’s walking with his hands in his pockets,” one officer told the Times. “We frisk 20, maybe 30 people a day. Are they all by the book? Of course not; it’s safer and easier to just toss people. And if it’s the 25th of the month and you haven’t got your gun yet? Things can get a little desperate.”
On February 4, 1999, four white SCU officers—Edward McMellon, Sean Carroll, Kenneth Boss, and Richard Murphy—thought they had spotted someone matching the description of the suspected serial rapist of twenty-nine victims.
Dressed in plain clothes and driving an unmarked Taurus, they jumped out at 1157 Wheeler Avenue in the Bronx with the intention of doing a stop-question-frisk of a black man standing in a doorway.
What the Guinean immigrant Amadou Diallo did next is a matter of some dispute. But everyone agrees that he was not armed, that when asked to “show his hands” he reached not for a gun but for a wallet, and that, in an instant, the four officers responded by shooting at him a preposterous forty-one times.
The SCU’s unofficial motto was “We Own the Night,” but in February 1999, they owned not the night but the headlines. The incident became the latest touchstone for complaints by the city’s nonwhite population about police behavior.
When community groups and lawyers got together to figure out what to do, they decided to focus on the signature part of Bill Bratton’s revolution, the Stop-and-Frisk campaign.
They did this for a number of reasons. First, the SCU that shot and killed Diallo was responsible for a massive number of stops: 18,023 in 1997 and 27,061 in 1998. A few hundred mostly white men responsible for tens of thousands of stops a year was definitely something to raise an eyebrow at, especially when one factored in the racial breakdown of the people being stopped.
When the attorney general’s office did a study of Stop-and-Frisk in response to the Diallo incident, for example, it found that while blacks constituted 25.6 percent of the city’s population, 50.6 percent of all people stopped were black.
The uproar over Diallo and Stop-and-Frisk produced a lawsuit in 1999. Daniels v. City of New York was brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights, led by attorney Darius Charney, along with an attorney named Jonathan Moore from the firm Beldock, Levine and Hoffman. Ironically, Moore would later represent Eric Garner’s family in their lawsuit against the city.
Daniels targeted Stop-and-Frisk generally and the Street Crime Unit specifically. The story of how the city defended it provides a clear view of the intellectual toxin buried deep underneath seemingly banal statistical imperatives like Stop-and-Frisk.
Four years into the case, a new mayor was elected in New York named Mike Bloomberg. He in turn brought in a new commissioner, another mouthy Bostonian named Ray Kelly.
“So Kelly and Bloomberg come in, and they immediately do two things,” recalls Charney, the lawyer on the Daniels case. “First, they offer to disband the SCU, which was great. Then they say, ‘We want to settle this case.’ ”
Charney and his cohorts were at first surprised but assumed this was good news. They entered into settlement negotiations.
In the end, the settlement turned into a classic Manhattan story. What the city offered, and what the plaintiffs unwittingly took, was a handful of wampum.
First of all, the agreement ended up including the following language: “Municipal Defendants deny that they had or currently have a policy…that deprived persons of rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution and laws of the United States.”
This was a “neither admit nor deny” deal. The city agreed to make changes but formally denied that changes had ever been necessary.
Next, the city eagerly promised to make up a new set of written guidelines expressly forbidding racial discrimination in the city’s police department. The new NYPD operations order, issued on March 13, 2002, issued a strict instruction:
All police-initiated enforcement actions, including but not limited to arrest, stop and question, and motor vehicle stop, will be based on the standards required by the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution or other applicable law.
It went on:
Officers must be able to articulate the factors which led them to take enforcement action, in particular those factors leading to reasonable suspicion for a stop and question.
The new written policy was simply a promise to follow the existing law governing street stops. It even used the same language as the Terry case, talking about articulable, reasonable suspicion.
Since the city was already obligated to follow these laws and had been since 1968, the offer of a new written operations order on that theme was a bit odd, to say the least. Even Charney shrugged at the new policy. “I think everybody understood that this was already illegal,” he says.
Beyond that, though, the city offered to maintain regular audits of the department’s policies to make sure there were no more shenanigans. They also promised to turn over their data about Stop-and-Frisk and start a public education program.
The plaintiffs’ lawyers assumed that what was essentially a four-part settlement (new written policy, regular audits, data turnover, public education program) amounted to a legally enforceable promise to stop racially profiling people. Since this was the goal of the suit, they agreed to the deal. Judge Shira Scheindlin approved the settlement on December 12, 2003. It seemed like a major victory.
But very soon after, when Charney examined the first set of numbers the NYPD delivered, he was dizzy with disbelief. Not only had the city not stopped its discriminatory practices, they’d significantly ramped them up, massively expanding the number of stops.
In 2002, before the deal, the NYPD had stopped 97,296 people. In 2003, that number jumped to 160,851. By 2004, it was 313,523. Then, by 2007, the city was stopping almost half a million people every year. In each of these years blacks and Latinos made up well over 80 percent of the stops, despite being less than 50 percent of the population.
The CCR lawyers were flabbergasted. In year one of their settlement the city doubled the number of stops, and their own data showed the same clear evidence of racial profiling. Within four years, the city had quintupled the number, and all evidence suggested that a Bloomberg-led city would continue to order more and more stops in nonwhite neighborhoods. The new administration might as well have used the Daniels settlement as toilet paper.
“We were going crazy,” Charney says. “So we went to the judge and we were like, ‘Your Honor, they’re not in compliance. They’re still doing it.’ ”
But Judge Scheindlin had bad news for Charney and his colleagues. The NYPD had fulfilled all of their promises in the settlement. They did the education program. They did th
e audits. They turned over the data. And they wrote the new policy.
That they didn’t stop mass violating the constitutional rights of 50 percent of the city’s population was, sadly enough, immaterial. The city hadn’t actually promised to change, as far as Judge Scheindlin saw it. They’d merely promised to write a new policy prohibiting the wrong behavior and turn over some numbers.
“She said, ‘If you want to change this, you need a new lawsuit,’ ” Charney recalls.
So in 2008, they sued again.
The new case was called Floyd v. City of New York. Charney wasn’t sure what to expect, but certainly the city’s defense this time around was a surprise.
In Floyd, the city suddenly stopped denying that enormous numbers of people were being stopped for no good reason.
Instead, the city introduced two lines of defense. First, they said, Stop-and-Frisk had reduced crime. This was a curious nonanswer to a charge of mass civil rights violations.
More important, the city argued that it was not stopping people because they were black or brown. Instead, they were stopping them because black and brown people were statistically more likely to be criminals.
When asked to justify the fact that in 2011 and 2012, blacks and Hispanics represented 87 percent of all the people stopped, the city’s answer was that “approximately 83 percent of all known crime suspects and approximately 90 percent of all violent crime suspects were Black and Hispanic.”
Therefore, they contended, it was reasonable to be suspicious of the entire group.
This reasonableness also made it legal, by the city’s logic, to stop anyone who belonged to those groups. In other words, in a court, before a judge, the city essentially now argued that they had falsified millions of Stop-and-Frisk forms. All of those reasons justifying the searches that the city’s cops had cited on official forms countless times—“furtive movements,” “bulges,” “inappropriate attire,” etc.—were just convenient euphemisms. In truth, there was a single, blanket justification that covered “reasonable suspicion” for at least 80 percent of those searches: they were black or Hispanic residents of high-crime neighborhoods.
The city’s defense against accusations of profiling was to argue that profiling works.
Pedro Serrano testified in that suit, and his tapes were played for Judge Scheindlin. She heard the critical exchange between the whistleblower cop and his boss, Christopher “Red Rage” McCormack. McCormack not only told Serrano that “male blacks, fourteen to twenty, twenty-one” were “the right people” to stop, but that people who didn’t fit this description, even if they might technically be breaking the law, were the wrong people. He told Serrano, for instance, that he didn’t encourage stopping “a lady [who] was walking through St. Mary’s Park when it was closed.”
Scheindlin was struck by this and other testimony and concluded that the police had a two-faced policy designed to hide a program of mass profiling. She struck down the program in a lengthy ruling, which contained the following key passage:
The NYPD maintains two different policies related to racial profiling in the practice of stop and frisk: a written policy that prohibits racial profiling and requires reasonable suspicion for a stop—and another, unwritten policy that encourages officers to focus their reasonable-suspicion-based stops on “the right people, the right time, the right location.”
As Scheindlin put it, “Rather than being a defense against the charge of racial profiling, however, this reasoning is a defense of racial profiling.”
City leaders were furious with the woman Donald Trump would later infamously call a “very against-police judge.” Bloomberg, still the mayor, was perhaps angriest of all. On August 12, 2013, he stood on the steps of City Hall with his commissioner, Ray Kelly, and issued a lengthy statement.
Bloomberg directed his ire at the “one small group of advocates—and one judge” who overturned what he implied was otherwise an overwhelmingly popular program.
“Throughout the case, we didn’t believe that we were getting a fair trial,” he said. He lamented the fact that Judge Shira Scheindlin had not wanted to hear any of the city’s arguments about the effectiveness of Stop-and-Frisk.
His statement buzzed with loaded language. Judge Scheindlin, Bloomberg said, had “ignored the real-world realities of crime” in striking down Stop-and-Frisk. He angrily denied that his administration had been engaged in racial profiling and cited the fact that he had passed a law banning the practice.
He neglected to mention that the practice was already illegal.
As to what the mayor meant by “real-world realities,” his commissioner, Kelly, shed some light when he issued his own statement.
Kelly’s defense of Stop-and-Frisk was a parody of the city’s legal argument. It came out as a tautology: we stop more people in neighborhoods with higher crime rates because those neighborhoods have higher crime rates. “That’s where the crime is,” he said.
“That’s where the crime is” became the go-to explanation for anyone defending the statistically lopsided policing tactics of the zero-tolerance era.
There was an irony in this.
—
The neighborhoods at which Ray Kelly and Michael Bloomberg pointed were not just a statistical location for criminal acts. They were crimes themselves.
Most of the crime-ridden minority neighborhoods in New York City, especially areas like East New York, where many of the characters in Eric Garner’s story grew up, had been artificially created by a series of criminal real estate scams.
One of the most infamous had involved a company called the Eastern Service Corporation, which in the sixties ran a huge predatory lending operation all over the city, but particularly in Brooklyn.
Scam artists like ESC would first clear white residents out of certain neighborhoods with scare campaigns. They’d slip leaflets through mail slots warning of an incoming black plague, with messages like, “Don’t wait until it’s too late!” Investors would then come in and buy their houses at depressed rates.
Once this “blockbusting” technique cleared the properties, a company like ESC would bring in a new set of homeowners, often minorities, and often with bad credit and shaky job profiles. They bribed officials in the FHA to approve mortgages for anyone and everyone. Appraisals would be inflated. Loans would be approved for repairs, but repairs would never be done.
The typical target homeowner in the con was a black family moving to New York to escape racism in the South. The family would be shown a house in a place like East New York that in reality was only worth about $15,000. But the appraisal would be faked and a loan would be approved for $17,000.
The family would move in and instantly find themselves in a house worth $2,000 less than its purchase price, and maybe with faulty toilets, lighting, heat, and (ironically) broken windows besides. Meanwhile, the government-backed loan created by a lender like Eastern Service by then had been sold off to some sucker on the secondary market: a savings bank, a pension fund, or perhaps to Fannie Mae, the government-sponsored mortgage corporation.
Before long, the family would default and be foreclosed upon. Investors would swoop in and buy the property at a distressed price one more time. Next, the one-family home would be converted into a three- or four-family rental property, which would of course quickly fall into even greater disrepair.
This process created ghettos almost instantly. Racial blockbusting is how East New York went from 90 percent white in 1960 to 80 percent black and Hispanic in 1966. The inflated mortgages sold to refugees from southern racism and underqualified buyers—which then led to one-family houses being foreclosed on and converted into poorly maintained multifamily rentals—is what turned this black and Hispanic neighborhood into a ghetto. And companies like ESC got rich for their role.
The scale of these scams was, for the times, massive. Federal prosecutors estimated that in 1968 alone, companies like the Eastern Service operation created $100 million in defaults and more than five thousand empty h
ouses in New York City alone.
Decades later, when the 2008 crash happened, it turned out that one of the major factors in the crisis was a mortgage fraud rip-off almost exactly similar to the Eastern Service scam, only executed on a much grander scale.
There was no direct bribery element in 2008, but everything else was more or less exactly the same: wholesale falsification of financial records, the aggressive effort to get people with poor credit histories into homes, falsified employment data, inflated appraisals, etc.
At the heat of the subprime craze, white real estate agents spilled into black neighborhoods in huge numbers, offering free mortgages and no-lose investments. They explained that a surging home market and fancy new loan instruments would once again deliver the promise of home ownership. They said that times were so good and the financial conditions so strong that even the most modest home owners would now get to ride the gravy train with the rest of the country.
But the people who signed on the dotted line ended up upside-down on giant albatross loans almost from the jump. They would have been better off never listening to the pitch at all. From forty acres and a mule to the Great Society to subprime, it was the same swindle, over and over and over again: promises that turned into brutal obligations that turned into life-ruining debt and neighborhood-destroying foreclosures for some and massive windfall profits for others.
—
On August 13, 2013, the day after Ray Kelly and Bloomberg held a press conference to denounce the end of Stop-and-Frisk, Jewel Miller’s house burned down.
At the time, Jewel and her four children were living in a multifamily home on 30 Norwood Avenue in Staten Island. She was living on a Section 8 state-subsidized voucher in a building that was a typical low-income housing nightmare. As of that morning, the home had thirty-nine open violations, ranging from bedbugs to mice and roach infestations to mold to broken electrical outlets, violations that had never led to real punishments.
