Street Gangs & the Inner City
ENDING THE WAR IN LOS ANGELES
By Tom Hayden
Warren Olney hosted a Manhattan Institute pundit last night who extolled the law-and-order achievements of William Bratton in New York and predicted even greater results for his ?war on gangs? promises in Los Angeles. Concerned listeners might ask when ?war? became the accepted mainstream policy description of policing and where it leads?
Such questions are apparently irrelevent to the Manhattan Institute ideologues, one of whom originated the so-called ?broken windows? theory of policing and who serves as an official adviser to Bratton today. The Manhattan Institute, after all, has built on its New York model to gain lucrative consulting contracts with government officials in Honduras, Argentina, Venezuela and Mexico (New York Times, 11-11-02). The ?war on gangs? has gone global. Indeed, the Manhattan Institute source on ?Which Way LA?? claimed the Institute/Bratton plan could win the ?war on terrorism? as well, a claim Bratton has not denied.
The whole story of Bratton?s tenure in New York is not being told. He reduced petty crime, it is true, to the great relief of people across the city. But the ?Bratton era? created other problems that will continue to be felt for years to come. These were:Pre-trial detention for tens of thousands of indigent African-American and Latino youth. These young people were ?put into the system? while awaiting arraignment. The City of New York paid up to $50 million to settle a lawsuit on behalf of 50,000 plaintiffs who asserted they were strip searched for ?broken windows? offenses- the largest monetary settlement of a civil rights suit in New York history. The popular stop-and-frisk policies were overkill; for example, no weapons were found in 75% of the stop-and-frisks for suspicion of having a gun?.
An atmosphere that promoted excessive force. The torture-rape of Abner Louima in a NYPD precinct and the close-up shooting of Amadou Diallo with 41 bullets were not isolated cases. Citizen complaints and civil rights claims rose by 75% between 1992 and 1996, years overlapping the Bratton tenure. Most of the complaints arose from nine police precincts out of the city?s 76.
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Alienation of the African-American and Latino communities who constituted a majority of New Yorkers. The New York Times reported in March 1999 that nine out of ten blacks felt that ?the police often engaged in brutality against blacks (and) almost two-thirds said that police brutality against members of minority groups is widespread.?
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Findings of police abuse by the state Attorney General. In 1999, the New York Attorney General reviewed and criticised the stop-and-frisk policies initiated in the Bratton era, finding that 90 percent of the targets were African-American and Latino, and that the requirement of ?reasonable suspicion? was not articulated in one-fourth of the stops.
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Like Rampart, NYPD was forced by litigation to abolish ?Street Crimes Units? and adopt policy against racial profiling. After the Diallo murder, civil rights attorneys sued the NYPD in a case that closely resembled the Los Angeles Rampart scandal. Like the LAPD CRASH units, the NYPD SCU?s were front-line paramilitary forces who routinely
violated constitutional rights by ?tossing? any street corner youth the encountered. (See U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, Memorandum Opinion and Order, 99 Civ. 1695 (SAS), 12-13-99).
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In summary, the Bratton era in New York led directly to scandals like Rampart in LA. The police misconduct scandals in New York crested shortly after Bratton?s departure, and he attempted to distance himself in later comments to Time magazine (3-6-02). But the claim is implausible, since the rising patterns of police misconduct and citize complaints began during Bratton tenure (1994-1996) according to Amnesty International data (1994) and continued to spiral out of control in the three years after his departure.
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The Manhattan Institute ideologues may not want this more balanced analysis to be publicized, but the people of Los Angeles tired of the perpetua cycles of violence, police scandals and blue-ribbon commissions ? deserve to be informed before we again are carried away by the rhetoric of ?war?.
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Tom Hayden is national co-director of No More Sweatshops!, a coalition of labor, clergy, community and campus advocates of "sweat-free" guidelines on public procurement and enforceable labor standards for corporate behavior.
