Police and Gentrification
The night Saheed Vassell died in a hail of police bullets, people huddled near the police tape at Utica and Montgomery where cops stood guard around the spot the 34-year old father was killed. Clean, numbered police cards marked where bullet casings came to rest on a street corner still red with Saheed’s blood.
Many people were shaken but hardly surprised. Cops were aggressive in the neighborhood, not like the ‘neighborhood policing’ commercials than ran on television, some pointed out. The cops were outsiders, one man that night said to me. If they knew Saheed, they wouldn’t have shot him. But as grief and outrage developed into a need to rally as a community, questions of outsiders to the Crown Heights community veered into issues beyond police.
A woman showed people cell phone footage of the aftermath of the shooting and wondered if it was a white person who called the cops. One man yelling at police said he’d moved to Crown Heights from another part of Brooklyn to escape the the invasion of newer, whiter neighbors there only to find signs of gentrification here too. They were both Black.
Ironically, as the night grew darker and media vans began to disappear, more and more white people started to show up. A white woman snapping pictures and taking video announced she’d recently moved in nearby — a resident now herself.
Amid frustration with another police killing, the sense that Crown Heights was under attack on more than one front hung in the air throughout the night and into the next day thousands took the streets to demand justice and sound the alarm over police and gentrifiers alike.
Who called the cops on Saheed Vassell? Nearly four years ago, the police interaction that led to the death of Eric Garner was at times blamed on complaints from local businesses. In fact, Garner was killed over a police obsession with quality-of-life infractions, an approach known as Broken Windows policing. Garner’s past history with police was riddled with these types of arrests. In response to criticism of Broken Windows post-Garner, police officials have claimed enforcement is driven by public calls to cops, though that formula is not backed by data.
The NYPD was quick to release 9–1–1 call transcripts to ostensibly justify Saheed’s shooting and, as with Broken Windows, has habitually pointed towards calls and community complaints when there is public backlash. Did gentrification play a role in Saheed’s fate last week, if it was in fact outsiders or newer residents who called the cops? The 9–1–1 system doesn’t keep ethnic or demographic data of callers, although some data suggests calls are higher in gentrifying areas. Still, it is important to examine all ways in which community — and changes in community — actually affect policing.
Gentrification and changes to neighborhoods can change community norms, and thus complaints and complainers. A loud block party in the Puerto Rican Williamsburg from my youth may have been perfectly normal then but could result in a call to cops in gentrified Williamsburg today. And of course, the propensity of white people to threaten police involvement over things more annoying than criminal is always a concern for people of color.
But longtime residents can clamor for police too. New neighborhood policing “Build the Block” meetings, as well as the precinct community council meetings that long preceded them, bring together a sliver of the community who rail against marijuana, noise and other menial nuisances. Here you can find longtime residents who’re often older, more police-friendly and yes, also people of color. However, these complaints represent a fraction of the neighborhood and loyalty to the precinct is encouraged as meeting leaders can receive perks and special treatment from police. Cops seek out and spotlight complaints from the community about the community. Complaints about the police are discouraged, ignored or both.
So does community really drive policing? Police want you to believe that at least partly because it conveniently allows them to redeem their tactics, whether it be those that drive mass criminalization or result in painful hashtags. The truth is that complaints have less to do with policing than you think. A handful of monthly complaints don’t drive the tens of thousands of marijuana or fare-beating arrests the department dishes out every year. Community certainly didn’t ask for predictive policing. Police strategy approach is driven by ideology, not community.
But if community doesn’t truly drive policing, what then of the notion that gentrifiers do? The answer is that gentrification doesn’t need to pick up a phone or lodge a complaint to make its influence felt. The presence (or even just the promise) of white and well-heeled bodies in a neighborhood produces a powerful political pull. The expectation that a community once deemed ‘too dangerous’ is now ‘up and coming’ intensifies police responsiveness, zealousness and aggression towards the community, specifically its less affluent and nonwhite inhabitants. Cops have to maintain ‘order’ at nearly any cost and bend, much like real estate and local businesses, to the gravity of whiteness.
Yes, gentrification fuels policing — and the relationship is cyclical. The disneyfication of Times Square three decades ago relied on a coordinated police effort to clear away ‘disorder’ to create a corridor where corporate stores and tourism could flourish. The complainers then were local business interests, most notably the Times Square Alliance. The model of using policing to clean up neighborhoods was exported throughout the city (and nation) as real estate and business extolled the virtues of development — which for many poor people of color is synonymous with displacement.
Cops today are used to harass homeless people, street vendors and other signs of ‘disorder’ not simply because of community complaints but because neighborhoods of color are being eyed for development. Neighborhoods must be ‘cleansed’ not for the sake of longtime residents, but for what is coming.
Four years ago today, Mayor Bill de Blasio honored the NYPD at a fundraising gala organized by some of the city’s wealthiest real estate moguls and business leaders. A map of geographical drops in crime was shown along with a map showing an accompanying rise in property value. “It’s actually incredibly inspiring to see what the work of the NYPD has achieve,” he said. “Let’s thank them for all they’ve done. I will also note, as a homeowner in Brooklyn, I was struck by the real-estate value map. There’s good news all around tonight.”
Policing and gentrification are related pressures felt in neighborhoods of color like Crown Heights because they remind residents of how powerless they can be rendered. If people are squeezed by the criminal justice system on one end and the housing market on the other, anger and mistrust are completely appropriate. In fact, for communities who feel besieged, the simple stubborn refusal to give in may be how to best fight police abuse and so-called development as both continue to cast a long shadow over our lives.
