When City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito gave her State of the City speech last week, she was praised by progressives for proposing mild criminal justice reforms, including emphasizing summonses over arrests for low-level offenses. But she also repeated her call to increase the size of the NYPD.
There’s a huge contradiction here, and it’s a shame Mark-Viverito doesn’t see it.
“(The) NYPD needs a higher headcount to carry out more community policing — that is why the Council fought for 1,000 new police officers last year and why we will continue to do so this year,” the speaker told a largely progressive, and receptive, audience.
Mark-Viverito claims the higher number of cops will allow for more non-confrontational beat-walking to build back trust between cops and communities — “community policing.” But this city has been talking about a return to community policing since Bill Bratton first ran the NYPD back in 1994.
In the real world, it inevitably winds up as “proactive” — meaning aggressive — policing, mostly of blacks and Latinos and mostly of minor offenses.
Adding 1,000 new cops to a department that’s already the nation’s largest in absolute terms and one of its largest per capita will almost certainly mean one thing above all else: rookies pushing quota-driven low-level enforcement.
I thought that was the problem we were trying to solve, the reason tens of thousands have taken to the streets to demand the NYPD be reined in.
Somehow, broken windows — the disputed idea that a focus on low-level offenses deters serious crime — has become so widely accepted among our leaders that even reformers reflexively buy in.
When the only tool you know how to use is guns and badges, everything looks like a crime.
A recent John Jay College report documented the explosive increase in enforcement of low-level crimes over the years — fueled largely by an embrace of the broken-windows ideology. Whatever the speaker says about community policing, increasing the size of a department headed by Bratton — who has declared the NYPD will continue to vigorously arrest low-level offenders — can only mean more over-policing.
Mark-Viverito represents my district, but she doesn’t represent my interests or those of my neighbors who want an end to over-policing. Like Mayor de Blasio, she appears to be bending over backwards to show how much she appreciates the police since the murder of two officers in December.
Mark-Viverito should be moved more by the decline in crime during the three-week NYPD work slowdown that followed those murders — which undermined the long-disputed premise of broken windows.
And she should ask why the NYPD leadership is pushing so hard to return to “normal” arrest and summons numbers — as clear an indicator that there is in fact an illegal quota system as the department can publicly make.
A truly progressive outlook might push back against the idea that crime is produced solely by criminals — and not by things like poverty and joblessness — by investing in high-poverty, high-crime communities to tackle root causes.
Instead, proud liberals on the City Council including Mark-Viverito, Debi Rose and Jumaane Williams (co-sponsors of last year’s Community Safety Act) and other members of the Black, Latino and Asian Caucus are pushing for the 1,000 new cops that de Blasio has said are part of “an ongoing conversation” this budget season.
Are these self-identified progressives making a cynical political calculation or truly hoping, against all evidence, that this time will be different?
Mark-Viverito says she intends to lift “every voice.” Let’s hope that includes those of so many of us in communities of color who feel, like the late Eric Garner, like they can’t breathe.
Trujillo is an activist and organizer with New Yorkers Against Bratton.
