The Mafia and the NYPD’s Racist Gang Database
Local media outlets have been in a frenzy for the past few days over the story that a Mafia boss, Francesco Cali, was killed out in front of his Staten Island home. The New York Times, quoting anonymous law enforcement sources, as media likes to do, called Cali, the reported head of the Gambino crime family, “a ghost” who few New Yorkers knew about because he “avoided the limelight.”
While the excitable coverage of the mob killing seems to suggest that the media and police were caught off guard in a city where the Italian mafia seems to no longer have the influence they once did, it stands in contrast to the NYPD’s expanded use of anti-gang tactics that overwhelmingly targets Black and Latino New Yorkers.
In 2015, the New York Daily News, using information provided by the NYPD, published an interactive map (“Gangs of New York: And How Close You Live to Them”) that purported to lay out all of the city’s gangs. The map included a graphic of a gun pointed at your face.
The map, and accompanying op-ed from then-police commissioner Bill Bratton, was top notch fear-mongering, for sure, but if you scrolled through the listed gangs you would think that the Gambino crime family didn’t exist because it wasn’t listed at all. In fact, the map didn’t have any gang presence detected in the whiter neighborhoods of Staten Island, where Cali was murdered, or other suspect mob strongholds, like Howard Beach.
It’s hardly surprising then that alleged white gangsters operate as practical “ghosts” because police themselves, while more than happy to villainize and categorize alleged non-white gangs and so-called “crews” like Bloods, Crips, Latin Kings or Mac Ballas, don’t even mention them in the context of gang enforcement.
Recently, the NYPD gang database, a secretive and sprawling list of New Yorkers (some as young as 13 years old), has come under increased scrutiny thanks in part to Freedom of Information requests filed by CUNY Law professor Babe Howell, who shared her findings with The Intercept last year.
As grassroots organizers and families have rallied and civil rights groups have demanded transparency, the racial makeup of the database has been even more lopsided than some of the police departments other tactics: the database, the NYPD testified at a hearing last year, is over 99% non-white (at its peak, Stop and Frisk was about 90% non-white).
At a press conference after Cali’s murder, the NYPD weren’t asked and didn’t comment on whether he or the Gambino family fell under the same scrutiny as the Black and Latino people on it’s database or that lived in areas mapped out as “gang” areas.
Was Cali part of 0.8% of white people on the gang database? Is the Gambino organization a “gang” in the minds of police — or something else entirely?
All of this is not to say that anyone should advocate for more white people in the gang database or a ‘better’ database. In fact, as many of us have demanded in New York (and as Chicago activists have apparently successfully advocated for) gang databases should be abolished. Still, it’s important to note the racial double standards at play.
In fact, he takeaway to the separate approaches displayed towards urban gangs versus La Costra Nostra, which is often put on a pedestal in film, books and television, might be that the way we look at urban gangs is informed by a thinly veiled racism. The police department’s public relations approach to “gangs” of young people of color is strengthened by the media’s (and sometimes the public’s) propensity to believe the worst about Black and Latino youth.
Are there differences between urban gangs and the Mafia? Federal prosecutors treat them the same way, legally. Federal racketeering indictments that are today used when the NYPD executes “takedowns” of alleged Black gang members in the Bronx were made possible by the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), which was enacted and designed by the government in 1970 to take on the mob.
The difference, of course, is that Italian Mafia bosses can hire high-priced lawyers to beat cases, as they still do (on ethnic discrimination defenses, at that), while young Black targets of police and prosecutors that live in poor neighborhoods — whose cases are often built on their social media activity–cannot.
