Sociology

CHAPTER 8

Policing, Crime, and Legi macy 1n New York and Los Angeles

The Social and Political Contexts

of Two Historic Crime Declines

JEFFREY FAGAN AND OHN MACDONALD

"'he relationship between citizens and police occupies a central place both in urban politics and in the political economy of cities. In this respect, for nearly fifty years,

New York and Los Angeles have been bellwethers for many of the nation's larger cities, In each city, as in cities across the world, citizens look to police to protect them from

crime, maintain social order, respond to a variety of extralegal community concerns, and reinforce the moral order of the law by apprehending offenders and helping bring

them to justice (Reiss 1971; Black 1980; Skogan and Frydl 2004). Beyond enforcing social and political order, the police are the front line representatives of a variety of

social service needs in communities (Walker 1993). Accordingly, policing is an ame- nity of urban places that shapes how citizens regard their neighborhood and their

city, and in turn, the extent to which citizens see their local institutions as responsive and reliable (Skogan 2006). Effective and sustainable governance, especially when

it comes to public safety, depends on the capacity of crimi-~1.al justice institutions to provide "value" that leverages legitimacy and cooperation among its citizens (Moore

et al. 2002; Skogan and Frydl 2004; Tyler and Fagan 2008; Tyler 2010). How the police exercise their legal authority is an aspect of policing that is par-

ticularly salient in larger urban areas and often competes with performance-based evaluations of police. Their legal authority has fundamental implications for public

sentiments about the quality of police services and trust in political institutions more generally (Moore et al. 2002; Tyler and Fagan 2008). There is an expressive function

in the way that police exercise their authority that signals their regard for the dignity and rights of citizens (Smith 2008). These signs of respect leverage the cooperation

of citizens with police and engage citizens as partners in security (Fagan and Meares 2008). When these expressions are absent, though, trouble follows when citizens

(219)

( 220) Social and Urban Problems

depend on the police for their safety and at the same time harbor resentments over the omnipresence of police in their lives.

For nearly five decades, tension between citizens and police in Los Angeles and New York City has pervaded relations and fouled the polity. Throughout this time, the institutions of policing occupied a special place in the political and social cul- tures of each city for at least four reasons. First, Los Angeles and New York City each suffered a crime epidemic from the late 1960s to the early 1990s that is visible in each city's homicide and robbery trends. These epidemics placed unprecedented demands on the police and on each city's political institutions, and created recurring conflicts between police and the most crime-ridden and heavily policed minority communities. The mix of crime, race, and policing placed intense political pressures on the police. 1

Ne."'ft, a series of police scandals and crises focused unwelcome attention on the police, threatening to undermine their perceived legitimacy and corrode citizen confi- dence in the police as effective agents of crime control. Third, the scandals of the police were also confounded with racial politics of cities, as a number of high-profile police abuse of force cases deepened historical minority distrust of the police in both Los Angeles and New York City. Both the scandals and patterns of civil rights violations by police landed each city in federal court and resulted in legal interventions that attempt- ed-and as we show later, largely failed-to reshape the institutions of policing.

Fourth, in response more to different forms of corruption scandals than to racia_l upheavals or conflicts, police in both Los Angeles and New York City underwent sig- nificant institutional transformations in their policing architectures. The tipping point in this transformation in each city was the intervention and administrative reforms brought about by (twice) former commissioner William J. Bratton. At the outset, these reforms fundamentally changed the strategies and tactics of policing. In both cities crime rates dropped significantly after these reforms, lending credence to the argument that the police have a material impact in influencing crime rates (Kelling and Cole 1996; Bratton and Knobler 1998).

These seeming "victories" over crime changed the discourse on the politics of the police in Los Angeles and New York City from one of scandal and reforms to control corruption, to managing the conflicts between aggressive police tactics and disparities in their application toward minorities (Alpert et al. 2006; Ayres and Borowsky 2008; Gelman, Fagan, and Kiss 2007; Ridgeway 2007; Fagan et al. 2010). Nevertheless, policing in each city in the last decade was colored and shadowed by the attention of the federal courts who responded to investigate, assess, and monitor both police agencies' responses to controlling crime and maintaining civil rights. 2 Beyond the acute periods of crime decline, as each city transitioned to a low(er) crime era, the two cities took sharply divergent paths in police-citizen relations and also policing tactics. Litigation bore very different kinds of fruit in each city, and the cur- rent atmosphere in the two cities reflects sharply divergent institutional postures toward crime and community. 3 Those divergent paths form the core of this chapter and forecast very different futures for policing in the two cities.

In this chapter, we tell the story of policing, crime, and the search for legitimacy over the past two decades in Los Angeles and New York City. Throughout this complex

POLICING, CRIME, AND LEGITIMACY ( 221)

political, normative, and legal landscape, crime rates dropped dramatically in each city to levels not seen since the early 1960s. Accordingly, a full understanding of the natural history of crime and policing in each city has to start at a much earlier point in time for two reasons. First, criminologists tend to forget history, especially history that pre-dates the sharp rise in crime that began in the United States in the mid-1960s, and the nationwide decline starting in 1993. There is a tendency in the criminology literature to decouple periods of rising crime from periods of falling crime, without viewing the two movements as a single social and historical process. 4

So, to understand the present, we look to the period before the crime rates began a steep rise in each place, at the moment when the smoldering tensions between citizens-especially racial and ethnic minorities-and the police exploded into open conflict One part of this chapter, then, is a modest effort to construct a "history of the present" to explain how two cities took different but intertwined paths from low to high crime and back again. 5

Second, crime itself has undergone historic transformations, both in its substance and its trends. While crime in each city has shown patterns typical of recurring and closely spaced epidemics, the longer view shows that its rise and fall over five decades seems to reflect a historic step and transformation t} at itself may have defied the best efforts of police, police reformers, and courts to eJect short-term change. Rather, the trends over a longer interval seem to point to profound political, economic, and structural transformations in the two cities into eras of relative safety and calm.

The chapter tells this story in four sections. We begin with a discussion of the evolution of policing in the two cities, assessing reciprocal and dynamic changes that reflected both the crises of crime epidemics and crises within the police. Next, we examine the role of litigation on the evolution of policing. Policing regimes in each city were challenged in federal courts, as well as by elected officials in local investi- gations. The outcomes of litigation in the two cities were starkly different, a reflec- tion in part of the structure of the litigation itself, as well as the posture of each city toward the links between scandal and reform. While Los Angeles linked a major policing scandal with reform, the NYPD compartmentalized the origins of its scandal to specific forms of police corruption and use of force, while ignoring the need to regulate the constitutional parameters of routine police~citizen interactions.

Third, we examine the historic transformations in crime itself. Criminologists, as we noted, tend to take a shorter view of crime trends that expand for one or perhaps two decades. Shorter-term crime trends are important in their social, political, and personal consequences. But short-term boom-or-bust explanations provide limited perspective for the longer historical trends that we observe for each of the two cities. Crime rates today in both New York and Los Angeles have returned to the same levels as fifty years ago, before the upheavals in policing in the midst of that cycle, eras that spanned significant changes in the social and political order of the cities. By stepping back, we show that what may be meaningful and consequential in the short-term may be less important when contextualized from longer and larger historical processes.

In the fourth section, we broaden our focus to examine basic changes in the struc- tures of the cities, looking closely at factors that were implicated in the boom-and-

(222) Social and Urban Problems

bust cycles of crime that characterize the past half century. We locate crime trends

in these larger structural transformations of the cities, and contextualize policing in

what seems to be a historic and evolutionary cycle, We conclude with a brief look at the past and the future.

POLICING IN THE CITY

The legacies of the Riots

The scars of riots in New York City and Los Angeles, events that took place nearly

fifty years ago, were part of the historical process that shook the police departments

in each city, and perhaps intensified the fifty-year cycle of crime and its decline that followed.

By 1967, riots erupted in more than 250 both large and small cities across the

country (Kerner Commission Report 1968). The 1965 Watts Riot in Los Angeles

received closer scholarly and popular attention than the Harlem riots in New York

City a year earlier (Cohen and Murphy 1966; Perlstein 2008). Nevertheless, the two

events had much in common. In each case, tensions between black citizens and police

ignited sustained violence and property damage. The riots revealed a breach of trust

behveen minority citizens and the police that lasted for decades.

Harlem, in northern Manhattan, was the scene of one of the nation's first riots.

The riot erupted in July 1964, when police shot and killed a 15-year-old African

American teenager following a dispute with a local white building superintendent.

When a police officer intervened, the teenager attacked him with a knife and was

shot by the officer. Riots followed in neighborhoods across the city, often beginning

with protest marches that ignited into violence when police attempted to control them (Walker 2012).

Within days, the Harlem Riots spread across the country, including to several cities

with multiple episodes of riots. More than 325 riots in 257 cities broke out between

1964 and 1968 (National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence

1969). For police in New York City, the Harlem Riots were a turning point not only in

their relationships to the minority communities, but in the stance of the city and its

political leadership toward crime and the underlying social conditions. While the US

Supreme Court had sought to curb the police tactics that led to many of the riots at

the outset of the 1960s, the Harlem Riots exposed fractures in the Court's dual cam-

paign of improving police procedure and supporting civil rights in the 1960s (Stuntz

2011). The election of liberal mayor John Lindsay in 1965 represented the face of

social reform in response to the riots, while the battle over civilian oversight of the

police brought forward a quite different face that sought deregulation of the police

and a pullback from the procedural reforms earlier in the decade (Perlstein 2008).

The spark for the 1965 riots in the Watts section of Los Angeles illustrates this

triggering mechanism. Marquette Frye, a 21-year-old African American, was pulled

over for running a red light by a California Highway Patrol officer. Mr. Frye had alleg-

edly been drinking alcohol and could not produce a driver's license. It was a hot night,

POLICING, CRIME, ANO LEGITIMACY ( 223)

and many people were outside to 1Nitness the event, including Mr. Frye's mother.

An altercation began between Mr. Frye, his mother, and the police and ended with

Mr. Frye, his brother, and his mother under arrest. The crowd became rowdier when

the LA police (LAPD) arrived in response to a highway patrol officer's distress call,

and more general violence in the Watts ghetto broke out as the crowd "stoned pass- ing automobiles, assaulted white motorists, and threatened a police command

post" (Oberschall 1968). The six-day Watts Riot spread thr~ug_hout Los Angeles and

resulted in 3,927 arrests, more than 1,000 injuries, 600 bU1ldmgs damaged, and 34

deaths. 6

Governor Pat Brown appointed a commission of six whites and two African

Americans to prepare "an objective and dispassionate study" of the Watts Riots.

The commission interviewed seventy-nine witnesses and questioned around 10,000

people about the events. Three months after the commission began, it produced its

report "Violence in the City-and End of a Beginning?" The report was short, only

88 pages, and the description of the riots was only about 15 pages. "Violence in the City," also known as the McCone Commission report, presented

what might be read as the "Riffraff Theory" of the Watts Riots. Police Chief Pa~ker

was blamed by many South LA residents for exacerbating tensions with th_e Afn~an

American community by disregarding widespread claims of police abuse-mcluding

1 ims of excessive force and routine use of abusive language. Yet the McCone report Ca " 'al exculpated whites, including the police, from blame, focusing_inst_ead on soci , eco-

nomic and psychological conditions" that faced rioters, but 1t still placed blame on

the Watts residents. Toe commission found that (1) less than 3 percent of the ghetto

population participated in the riots; (2) that rioters were "~iff~aff" meaning unem-

ployed, young, criminals, and outsiders; and (3) that the maJonty of the black popu-

lation opposed the riots. . . . . The McCone Commission and Chief Parker were not alone m hurlmg racial mvec-

tive at the rioters. Future California governor Ronald Reagan referred to the rioters

as "law-breakers and mad dogs," and Parker insisted that the riots were the work of "a

gang of Negro Hoodlums" (Cohen and Murphy 1966; Perlstein 2008) and "mo~keys

in the zoo" (Oberschall 1968). LA Mayor Sam Yorty insisted that a small port10n of

the ghetto community had instigated the riots and had expertise in ar~as_ such as

making Molotov cocktails, a fact that was rejected by the McCone Comm1ss10~ ..

Toe national reaction to the riots was quite differe:r:it. The Kerner Comm1ss1on,

named after its chairman Illinois Governor Otto Kerner, Jr., delivered a report

starkly in contrast to the McCone Commission. The riots that produced a nationwide

disturbance in 1967 created a space in which to challenge the riffraff theory that was

advanced by the McCone Commission (1965). The Kerner report saw the violence

as criminal, but also as a response to oppression, and something that could only be

curer· by a change in the actions of white America. . . ... .ne riots were the product both of increasing crime and disorder in inner c1_t1es

and increasing tension and conflict between citizens and police in those sam~ neigh-

borhoods. Surveys in that era showed that "nonwhites were more apprehensive than

whites" (Weiner and Wolfgang 1989). They had reason to be, as the number of index

crimes in the citie~ ("homicide, forcible rape, aggravated assault, robbery, burglary,

( 224) Social and Urban Problems

grand larceny and auto theft") in proportion to the population, was nearly three times higher than in the surrounding suburbs. Most of the victims of crimes were other city residents, meaning that nonwhites were far more likely, in some instances 78 percent more likely, to be the victims of crimes.

The scars of the riots remain visible today in two ways. First, the scars are pain- fully visible in the physical landscape of a few stubbornly poor cities, as well as those where poverty and crime have abated. In both gentrifying Harlem and chronically poor Newark, vacant lots and abandoned buildings or factories are visceral physical reminders of the struggles of that era. But the scars also remain visible in a philoso- phy and jurisprudence of criminal law that has instantiated the disparate fates of racial minorities in the criminal justice system (Stuntz 2011). A sign of the legacy of the close connection between race, police, and riots could be seen in the police posture toward rioters in the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles that erupted in 1992. There, the police were knovvn to use the term NHI-"No Humans Involved"-when issuing radio calls to patrolling officers who were being sent to homes in black sections of the city (Independent Commission on the Los Angeles Police Department 1998),

Scandals

Los Angeles

The history of corruption within the LAPD ranks during the first half of the twenti- eth century led the organization under police Chief William H. Parker and his succes- sors to separate itself from the political establishment. The LAPD was managed from 1950 to 1966 by _Chief Parker, who-despite the Watts Riots-was celebrated within the police profession for innovation in civil service protections of officers and com- mand staff, professional development and training, and vice enforcement. 7 Parker's innovations came after a previous half-century of repeated corruption scandals and frequent turnover of police chiefs. 8

VVhile the McCone Commission report offers very little in the way of direct criticism of the LAPD, the report does note the problems between the LAPD and the African American community. It suggested that they "place greater emphasis on their respon- sibilities for crime prevention as an essential element of the law enforcement task, and that they institute improved means for handling citizen complaints and community relationships" (rv.IcCone 1965, part 5). In particular, the report offers suggestions for revamping the citizen complaint process to increase the transparency of the system and prevent conflicts of interests, that emerged when police commanders were required to review complaints against their own subordinate officers (see Abu-Lughod 2007).

The LAPD, through the history of police chiefs Parker, Davis, and Gates, was focused on professional police administration and not known for its community relations. It also became politically insulated from both democratic regulation and administrative accountability. The Los Angeles City Council, at the urging of Chief Parker, enacted an appointment process for its chief of police that guaranteed virtual lifetime tenure (Greene 1998). These three chiefs moved toward a strong centralized

POLICING, CRIME, AND LEGITIMACY ( 225)

command and control structure that emphasized full enforcement of the law and lim- ited officer discretion. The eclipse of political control and external accountability over the LAPD insulated it and fostered its own cultural norms (Independent Commission on the Los Angeles Police Department 1991; Greene 1998). Partnership with the community was simply not paramount in this design of police professionalism.

At the same time, communities in South Los Angeles near Watts were still very much attuned to the legacy of the Watts Riots. Full and formal enforcement of the law was not what residents of South LA neighborhoods had in mind for police reform when they complained in 1965 about police abuse, entrenched poverty, inadequate access to housing and schools, and crime. Despite the structural prob- lems noted in the McCone Commission report, concentrated poverty, racial seg- regation, and poor police-community relations remained endemic of Los Angeles through the 1970s and 1980s, Formal, militarized policing embraced by Chief Gates in zones that are best portrayed as "poverty traps" (Bowles, Durlauf, and Hoff 2006) was a prescription for tensions and a breach in trust between minority citizens and the police.

It was in this context of twenty-five years of a politically isolated police force and a socially and economically isolated and impoverished minority community that two scandals emerged within a decade. Both shook the LAPD from its closed posture and launched the processes of reform. On March 3, 1991, an African American resident named Rodney King attempted to evade a traffic stop by the LAPD. His arrest and beating were caught on videotape and "went viral" long before there was YouTube, much less a widely accessible Internet. 9 The subsequent acquittal of LAPD police offi- cers charged with the beating sparked the 1992 LA urban riots. Like the 1965 Watts Riots, police abuse of authority (Independent Commission on the Los Angeles Police Department 1991) was again the touchstone event that triggered massive riots. The fact that the King incident led to such violent protests was indicative of the deep ten- sions that existed in South LA neighborhoods, and in particular the poor relations with the African American community. 10

Mayor Tom Bradley appointed a commission headed by Warren Christopher to investigate the King beating and the riots; its 1991 report provided the catalyst for change in the LAPD. The Commission found the LAPD had created a "crime fighter" and "warrior" culture among its officers that rewarded high arrest rates and overwhelming force when civilians resisted arrest. The department rejected the moves to community policing that had become an important innovation in polic- ing elsewhere in the nation (Independent Commission on the Los Angeles Police Department 1991).

In June 1992, LA City Council followed the Christopher Commission's recommen- dations and replaced Daryl Gates with former Philadelphia Police Commissioner Willie L. Williams, who was the first African American police chief of LosAngeles. 11 Two years later, the LAPD issued a strategic plan, "Commitment to Action," which called for part- nerships between the police, community, and other branches of local government. The plan involved a revamping of the Basic Car Strategy, which set up a defined neighbor- hood area for a dedicated patrol car all under the guide of one of eighteen community police divisions (as defined by police with community input), and increased training of

Basic Car 2A41

Basic Car 2A43

Basi1: Car 2AS1

Figure 8.1

( 226) Social and Urban Problems

RAMPART COMMUNITY POLICE STATION

St Hwy 12

Bask Car 2A2l

Beverl Blvd

"' W1stSt :i' 3 0 0

)> <

W 5th St

8th Sr

StH~12

Basic Car 2A45

Basic Car 2A56

S Lafayette Park Pl

; <{ 0

'g 0 E 0 z "'

W Pic:o Blvd

"' I Basic Car 0

0 2A91 i

w Santa Monica Frwy

Basic Car 2A79

Basic Car 2A75

Map of the Rampart Police Division in LA Source: Los Angeles Police Department.

senior officers and new recruits on community and problem-solving policing strategies (Glenn et al. 2003).

12 These were the first halting steps by the LAPD toward a commu-

nity policing model. Figure 8.1 shows an example of the Rampart Community Police

Division and corresponding basic car areas. (The Rampart police division, as we discuss later, becomes an important part of the story of scandal and reform.)

Still, there was intense resistance to community policing -within the LAPD middle

and upper management ranks (Glenn et al. 2003), eventually costing Williams his

job. He was replaced in August 1997 by Deputy Chief Bernard C. Parks, the city's sec- ond African American chief. Parks, even while attempting to build community ties,

focused his efforts on tactical units to combat crime. Crime dropped significantly under Chief Williams, and rose again under Chief Parks.

It was on Parks's watch that the Rampart scandal was uncovered, the second deep scandal in the LAPD within a decade. On September 21, 1999, Parks formed a Board

of Inquiry (BOI) of LAPD command staff to examine the depth of the alleged corrup- tion in the Rampart police division and the celebrated CRASH (Community Resources

Against Street Hoodlums) program. The BOI report focused almost exclusively on the

POLICING, CRIME, ANO LEGITIMACY ( 227)

problem of a few corrupt officers and not the systemic problems -within the LAPD (Board of Inquiry into the Rampart Corruption Incident, Public Report 2000). 1 3 A subsequent report commissioned by the LA Police Commission criticized the LAPD

for its failure to address larger problems in the department's internal culture that rewarded the ends-justify-the-means approach to crime fighting (Report of the Independent Review Panel 2000). The fallout from the LA Police Commission review

panel was apparent. By 2005 the California courts overturned 100 falsely obtained convictions, 20 officers were removed or left duty, and just over $70 million was paid in civil settlements as a result of this corruption scandal.

The Rampart scandal set the stage for the two measures that led to major changes in the internal operation of the LAPD and its relationship to the community: fed-

eral civil rights litigation that produced nine years of federal oversight under a Consent Decree negotiated -with the US Department of Justice, and the hiring of Commissioner William Bratton to oversee the transformation of the LAPD.

New York

One of the legacies of the riots in New York City was the ascension of a new class of

political leaders from the city's African American and Latino communities. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. was elected to Congress representing Harlem in 1960 and immedi-

ately raised issues of civil rights, including police misconduct, both on the floor of the House and also in Harlem and across the city's minority neighborhoods. Powell was

especially hard on the NYPD, accusing police in Harlem of corruption that included providing protection to drug sellers in return for lucrative payoffs. Powell had some

history to draw on, including a scandal involving a gam?ler, Harry Gross, who made payoffs regularly to every precinct in Brooklyn (English 2011). The Gross scandal led

to hundreds of arrests and convictions. The trail of payoffs eventually led to City Hall and forced the resignation of Mayor William O'Dwyer.

Powell's accusations, made in 1960, before the riots, presaged the corruption scandal of 1964 involving the NYPD's elite forty-eight-person "Watchdog" group. The

most volatile scandal was dramatized by the revelations of Detective Frank Serpico and became public news in 1971. His disclosures of pandemic corruption and cov-

er-ups led to the appointment of the Knapp Commission in 1970. The antecedents of this scandal lie in the ashes of the 1960s and could be traced to three narratives.

First, in the wake of the riots, a heroin epidemic spread through New York City's minority neighborhoods (Preble and Casey 1969). Drug distribution organizations

profited heavily, as did secondary markets in prostitution, gambling, and fencing goods stolen by addicts. These networks depended on police protection. Testimony

before the Knapp Commission revealed how, fueled by the new economics of heroin distribution, the residual system of low-level routine payoffs and minor acts of cor-

ruption among police suddenly became big business, reaching from the lowest ranks of patrol officers through the detective branches, and into some corners of the com-

mand ranks (Knapp Commission Report 1972). 14

Second, the late 1960s was a period of political violence in New York City. Both in New York City and elsewhere, revolutionary groups including the Black Panther

(228) Social and Urban Problems

Party, the Weather Underground, and smaller groups all engaged in either shoot- ings of police officers or conspiracies to bomb public places. Although the ambitions of these groups outstripped their impacts, they were seen by NYPD officers as an imminent threat to their lives. In addition to a conspiracy indictment against the Panthers, the shooting of a police officer at a Harlem Mosque in 1972 set off sparks of conflict not only between the police and the Nation of I.<;lam community in Harlem but also between the police union, police commanders, and city leaders over blame for the officer's death. Blame was at first placed on then Lieutenant Benjamin Ward, who a decade later went on to become the city's first African American police commis- sioner. The conflicts -with community and the external threats against police officers shielded public attention from the spreading knowledge of corruption in the NYPD.

The third narrative was the political hangover from the battle over civilian review of the NYPD. In 1966, Mayor John Lindsay created a Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB) to address citizen grievances of excessive force, false arrest, and other forms of police misconduct. The move came at a time of racial polarization in New York City over citizen control of schools, a conflict that played out both publicly and bitterly in the predominantly African American Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn. The police union, the Patrolman's Benevolent Association (PEA), pledged to empty its treasury to defeat Lindsay's creation (Perlstein 2008). After a 1966 riot in Brownsville, the PBA qualified a referendum on the November ballot to dissolve the CCRB. The CCRB was defeated in a 55-40 landslide.

One of the sites of the scandals that led to the Knapp Commission Report was the 30th Precinct in Harlem, which twenty years later became the site of another NYPD drug corruption scandal, known as the "Dirty 30." The Knapp Commission was formed in 1970 to investigate police corruption, based in no small part on Serpico's 1971 whistle-blo-wing testimony and that of fellow officer Sergeant David Durk. The Commission, officially known as the Commission to Investigate Alleged Police Corruption, in fact did not begin its hearings until after Serpico's revelations to the commission's investigators. The commission produced criminal indictments against corrupt police officials and officers, and led to the replacement of Commissioner Howard Leary (a Lindsay appointee) with Commissioner Patrick V Murphy. Murphy was tasked with cleaning up the department rather than redesigning its strategies and tactics. Murphy implemented proactive integrity checks, oversaw massive trans- fers of senior personnel, implemented mandatory job rotation in key areas, and pro- vided funds to pay informants. He also went after citizens who were complicit in attempts to bribe police officers.

Within two decades, a second corruption scandal erupted, with the drug trade again central to the narrative. Mayor David Dinkins appointed former i·__.dge Milton Mallen in July 1992 to head The City of New York Commission to Invest'.,5ateAllegations of Police Corruption and the Anti-Corruption Procedures of the Police Department, popu- larly referred to as the Mallen Commission. The Mallen Commission was tasked to investigate "the nature and extent of corruption in the Department; evaluate the departments procedures for preventing and detecting that corruption; and recom- mend changes and improvements to those procedures" (Mallen Commission Report 1994). Mallen carefully drew lines to distinguish the corruption patterns uncovered

POLICING, CRIME, AND LEGITIMACY ( 229)

by the Knapp Commission from the corruption of the Mallen era. Corruption dur- ing the Knapp investigation was systemic: a pattern of monetary exchanges between criminals and police, -with an unspoken agreement to conceal other forms of police misconduct including brutality and other constitutional violations. In other words, Knapp revealed a culture and practice where criminals and police officers gave and took bribes, and bought and sold protection.

Mollen's investigation revealed deeply ingrained patterns of brutality, theft, abuse of authority, and active police criminality (Mollen Commission 1994). The commis- sion report described a nexus between corruption and brutality, which essentially doubled down on the Knapp era scandals. One testifying officer, Michael Dowd, dis- cussed the deep place of this nexus in the culture of the NYPD, "[Brutality] is a form of acceptance. It's not just simply giving a beating. It's the other officers begin to accept you more" (Mallen Commission 1994). Officer Dowd and others described hundreds of acts of brutality they had engaged in; yet, apparently no fellow officer had filed a complaint about either one of them. Officers primarily from the 30th, 9th, 46th, 75th, and 73rd precincts were caught selling drugs and beating suspects.· 15 The "Dirty 30" scandal resulted in nearly one hundred convictions against seventy defen- dants being thrown out due to police perjury (Human Rights Watch 1998). By 1988, with approximately fifteen lawsuits still pending, the city has already paid $2 million in civil settlements to perjury victims (Kocieniewski 1998).

The scandal bled into the regime of the next police commissioner, William Bratton, who was appointed in 1994, shortly before the Mallen Commission report was published. In his efforts to reform the department, Bratton stated that if officers behaved properly, he would back them absolutely, but if they used unnecessary force, "all bets are off" (New York Times 1994a, b). Yet, when a civilian deputy commissioner in charge of internal affairs pushed for the creation of a special anti-brutality unit that would be available twenty-four hours a day to investigate allegations promptly, he was forced out of the de'partment in 1995 (Kraus 1995; Human Rights Watch 1998). Although most of the reforms recommended by the Mollen Commission- improvements in recruiting, scrutiny during probation, integrity training, and improved supervision-were implemented by 1998 (Herbert 1998b), the tensions from as far back as the 1960s and the struggle for police oversight were a constant in the culture of the NYPD. The PBA continued to oppose Bratton's stricter disciplin- ary measures, and the Mallen Commission's call for changes in the police union's response to allegations of corruption. Indeed, litigation surrounding the Abner Louirna assault by NYPD officers in 1997 (BBC News 1999) implicated the police union in the cover-up of that infamous incident.

Reform

The common thread in the stories of police reform in Los Angeles and New York City is not just the presence of William Bratton, but rather the critical role of scandal as a launching pad for reform. In Los Angeles, Commissioner Bratton used the plat- form of scandal and an external commission to achieve reforms in accountability

( 230) Social and Urban Problems

of individual officers, while also pursuing the types of strategic and tactical reforms that have been influential across the country. In New York City, Bratton also ben- efited from a scandal-the "Dirty 30"-that created a political space in. which he

could implement both management and tactical reforms in the political slipstream of the Mallen Commission's findings without the external constraint of litigation. In a similar pattern, Bratton used both scandal and litigation as a rationale for depart-

mental reform in Los Angeles, where he relied on both his own instincts and the reform insights gained in New York City.

The Rampart scandal, the review, and the subsequent consent decree set the stage for a new era of management reform in LAPD. In October 2002, William J. Bratton was appointed as LAPD's police chief. Having served as Chief of NYPD and institut-

ing its COMPSTAT program, Bratton brought a similar management philosophy to the LAPD. COMPSTAT was a method of policing that focused upon mapping and sta- tistically analyzing crime and crime "hotspots" and deploying police based upon that

analysis. Since 1996, Bratton had worked in the private sector, including serving as

a consultant for Kroll Associates monitoring team that oversaw the implementation of the Federal Consent Decree Vvith the LAPD.16

Bratton's primary focus was on implementing steps of the consent decree and

instituting COMP STAT within the LAPD command staff. His management philoso- phy was to use COMPSTAT to make strategic decisions about officer deployment and

to set police division benchmarks for crime reductions. In contrast to previous efforts to reduce crime, this new LAPD approach did not rely exclusively on specialized units

and tactical responses. Instead, each division captain was going to be responsible for crime trends and formulating a response in his or her police area. The LAPD insti-

tuted this approach under the title of COMP STAT Plus, under the direction of George Gasc6n, LAPD Assistant Chief of Police and Director of Operations.

In contrast to the NYPD COMP STAT model where performance was benchmarked in monthly command staff meetings, COMPSTAT Plus involved detailed inspections of underperforming police divisions. For police divisions that were underperform-

ing, Gasc6n assigned an audit team of LAPD commanders who would inspect the

current patrol, investigation, analysis, management, and supervision of these areas. After a thorough review, the audit team would work -with the police division to develop its own strategic plan to meet the crime reduction goals.17 It is notable that

this approach to policing was a sea change in the LAPD. Never before had efforts to reduce crime focused on a community-wide approach that relied primarily on line

officers and command staff. Gone was the sole focus on tactical units that had >een the staple LAPD approach dating back to the Parker administration. The modt l of

COMPSTAT Plus, however, was based on police accountability to the crime rates

and not improving community relations. Although one can reasonably argue that the LAPD was mindful that reducing crime could in turn improve public sentiment, even in the African American areas, community policing was not a central player in the department's organizational change. Interestingly, the LAPD continued to direct

its field services through its community policing plan, and the use of the Basic Car Strategy remained part of the LAPD organization, but the actual benchmarks of the organization were not strictly on community-relationship building.

POLICING, CRIME, AND LEGiTIMACY ( 231)

Like New York City, Los Angeles witnessed a significant reduction in crime rates after the implementation of Bratton's COMP STAT approach. But in contrast to the NYPD model, the COMPSTAT Plus approach did not result in the rapid realloca- tion of line officers to impact zones or the deployment of aggressive stop and frisk polices (Alpert et al. 2006; Ayres and Borowsky 2008). By the time Bratton resigned as police chief in October 2009, he oversaw a six-year decline in crime, the lifting

of the Federal Consent Decree, and no major corruption scandals. At present it is unclear whether his replacement LAPD Chief Charlie Beck will continue to focus resources on the COMPSTAT model or develop other strategies instead. It is notable

that Charlie Beck was appointed, in part, because of his reputation for community collaboration, including overseeing relationships with the business improvement districts and nonprofit services groups in MacArthur Park, located in the Rampart Division, and Downtown Los Angeles.

LITIGATION

In each city, litigation formed the legacy of the crime declines and scandals of the 1990s. It also was a background drama in the consolidation of crime declines

through the following decades. Litigation was an essential intervention that com- plemented the internal management reforms of Chief Bratton and was part of the

fabric of policing during most of his tenure in Los Angeles. In New York City, the threat of litigation was raised in 1999 by an investigation by the New York State

Attorney General of alleged civil rights violations, including racial profiling, by the NYPD. Litigation has been a constant in the political and policing environment since

2001, but Vvith seemingly little effect (Fagan et al. 2010). The case studies of each city show the stark differences in the responses to litigation by each city and its police,

and raise important questions about what litigation can achieve as an intervention in police reform.

Los Angeles

The next phase of LAPD reform came through outside intervention. In November

2000, the city of Los Angeles entered into a consent decree with the US Department of Justice to oversee the operations of the LAPD, in part responding to the specific

Rampart scandal, as well as a concern with widespread police abuse of authority that violated constitutional guarantees of citizens under the Fourth and Fourteenth

Amendments. This five-year term of the Consent Decree dedicated a large share of oversight to the review of procedures of management and supervision of officers

to promote civil rights integrity, as well as the conduct of general police activity, including the use of stop, search, and arrest powers. Included in the consent were specific provisions that indicated "LAPD officers may not use race, color, ethnic-

ity, or national origin (to any extent or degree) in conducting stops or detentions,

( 232) Social and Urban Problems

or activities following stops or detentions, except when engaging in appropriate suspect-specific activity to identify a particular person or group." And, the Consent Decree also required that LAPD officers complete an "electronic report eac:h time an

officer conducts a motor vehicle stop" (Consent Decree, p. 40), The Consent Decree was helpful to Commissioner Bratton in his program of reform,

both internally and externally. Many of the requirements of the Consent Decree worked reciprocally but in parallel to the strategic, tactical, and cultural innovations that he

pursued. Whether the litigation was successful, however, was sharply contested . .An analysis of the reforms of the LAPD under the Consent Decree was sought by the Los

.Angeles Police Foundation, an independent organization that supports the activities of the LAPD (Stone et al. 2009). The report found that the LAPD was in substantial com- pliance with the terms of the Consent Decree, and it was a factor in the decision by the

US District Court Judge Gary A. Fress to terminate the Consent Decree in July 2009. In his order, Judge Fress noted that: "When the Decree was entered; LAPD was a troubled

department whose reputation had been severely damaged by a series of crises .. ,. In 2008, as noted by the Monitor, 'LAPD has become the national and international polic-

ing standard for activities that range from audits to handling of the mentally ill to many aspects of training to risk assessment of police officers and more"' (Rubin 2009).

The conditions cited in the report that suggest substantial reform are in fact a curi-

ous mixture of increases in policing coupled with reports of citizen approval of police

effectiveness in the heavily policed African American and Hispanic communities. The report describes a declining rate of use of force at the same time that both pedestrian and motor vehicle stops doubled over the seven years of the Consent Decree. Arrests

rose in the period of the Consent Decree, as did arrests per stop, while prosecuto- rial declinations declined (Stone et al. 2009). These increases were seen as successes,

despite the general view that arrest should be a last resort when policing crime and disorder, a notion endorsed in the "Broken Windows" framework (Wilson and Kelling

1982) that informed the NYPD reforms under Commissioner Bratton (Bratton and Knobler 1998; Maple and Mitchell 1999). The increased police activity was seen as a

positive sign that litigation did not inevitably lead to a withdrawal from policing, or de-policing, by officers fearing increased departmental oversight and scrutiny.

Two other indicia suggest that the reforms left substantial room for improve- ment. According to the Stone et al. (2009) report, more than two-thirds of Hispanic and African American residents rated the LAPD as doing a "good" or "excellent" job

at controlling crime and calling offenders to account. But other indicia suggest that

a substantial minority within each of these groups was dissatisfied with the 1 i\PD. One in ten African American residents reported that almost "none" of the L PD officers they encounter treat them and their friends and families -with "courtesy or

respect." Others cited the persistence of racial disparities in police-citizen contacts. It is surprising that approval of the LAPD is so strong given the demography of

police-citizen contacts in Los Angeles (Ayres and Borowsky 2008) and the increase in the incidence of both nonarrest and arrest contacts between citizens and police.

Analyzing stop data from 2004, the only year made available to them, Ayres and Borowsky reported statistically significant higher rates of police stops, searches, cita- tions, and arrests of African American and Hispanic persons compared to whites,

POLICING, CRIME, AND LEGITIMACY ( 233)

even after controlling for differences by location in crime and other social conditions. They also report that "hit rates" from stops, frisks, and searches were significantly lower for nonwhites compared to white suspects. Ayres and Borowsky (2008) reject a claim that these rates reflect higher rates of criminality among minority citizens,

citing the lower rates of seizure of weapons, drugs, .or other contraband, and arrests on outstanding warrants.

Toe two pictures of the Consent Decree mirror the experiences of other cities that were placed under federal court supervision through court-appointed monitors (Schwartz 2010; Fagan et al. 2010). One reason for the gap in these narratives about consent decrees is the difference in emphasis on which factors matter to which commu-

nities. To a court, or perhaps to a public seeking a more accountable and professional police regime, the reforms in the inner workings of the department were good news. But

to those who sought relief from policing excesses or constitutional violations in deci- sions on whom to stop and search for suspicious behaviors, the failure to curtail racial disparities suggests that the policing biases of the pre-litigation era remain unabated.

Accountability, then, has two different faces-internal accountability for professional- ism and good management, and external reforms for accountable and performance-

based policing. One might reasonably ask whether the achieved reforms, however welcomed and needed they may be, are the right reforms when the racial disparities in police conduct that motivated the litigation remain persistent realities of policing.

New York

The cycles of scandal and reform that -have burdened the NYPD for nearly fifty years led to litigation against the City of New York and the NYPD in the late 1990s.

And since that time, class action litigation (as opposed to individual civil actions) has multiplied. Two incidents in particular motivated an investigation of the NYPD

by the New York State Attorney General, and subsequent litigation based on the investigation reports. One was the 1997 assault on Abner Louima in a NYPD pre- cinct station, and the other was the 1999 killing of an unarmed citizen, Amadou

Diallo, by officers who were part of an elite Street Crime Unit (SCU) that conducted aggressive stops and searches in the hunt for guns. The SCU was formed early in

the Bratton police administration and was expanded following Commissioner Bratton's resignation in 1996.

The Spitzer Report, as the Attorney General investigation was known, cited evi- dence that the NYPD engaged in racially biased police practices in decisions on whom

to stop and frisk (Spitzer 1999; Gelman, Fagan, and Kiss 2007). About one stop in six lacked a clearly articulated justification on forms filled out by the NYPD, and nearly

one in four lacked sufficient documentation to render a judgment of its constitution- ality. The racial disproportionality was stark: black New Yorkers were nearly three times more likely to be stopped relative to their crime rate than were white New

Yorkers; the comparable rate for Hispanics was about half the disparity for blacks.

While there has been some debate about the causes of these disparities (Ridgeway 2007), no one can deny that blacks and Hispanics were feeling the brunt of the

( 234) Social and Urban Problems

NYPD's stop and frisk tactics, and that these disparities are not a simple artifact of differences in crime rates betvveen areas that different groups inhabit.

The Center for Constitutional Rights filed the lawsuit Kelvin Daniel.s v. City of New York in 2001, relying on the Spitzer report as evidence, coupled with the

testimony of a class of plaintiffs. The litigation was settled in an agreement in December 2003 that-unlike the Los Angeles Consent Decree-did not include court oversight. New York City promised to reduce racial disparities in police stops, to improve documentation, and to reject racial profiling as a basis for conducting

street stops. Training on constitutional requirements for street stops and other reforms designed to increase constitutional compliance were also put in place.

Assorted other reforms were promised, including the conduct of citizen forums and community surveys. Documentation of street stops, thought to be spotty at best by the Spitzer investigation, was integrated into the COMPSTAT system of crime accounting.

Daniels was, however, a failure. There was no internal report comparable to the

Stone et al. (2009) assessment of the LAPD to determine whether there were signifi- cant or effective institutional reforms that resulted from Daniels. Even so, lawyers

for the Daniels plaintiffs reported that there was little compliance with the terms of the settlement. And, there was an exponential growth in street stops during the interval of the Daniels settlement. Fagan et al. (2010) showed that stops increased

600 percent betvveen 1998, the year preceding the Spitzer Report, and 2006, a year

before the December 2007 expiration of the Daniels Consent Decree. Almost all of the increase during that time was in districts that were predominantly populated

by African Americans. Fagan et al. (2010) observed that the increases were present even after controlling for race-specific crime rates in each police precinct. Similar patterns, though smaller in magnitude but still statistically significant, were found

for areas with concentrations of Hispanic residents. The "yield" from these stops was low-about one gun seized for every thousand stops and arrests in about one stop

in twenty. Figure 8.2 shows the growth in racial disparity throughout this period. While the NYPD claims that the growth in stops has kept crime rates low (Smith and

Purtell 2007), figure 8.2 suggests that in fact, crime rates were declining since long before the run-up in stops and have in fact been declining in New York City since 1991 (Zimring 2011).

Daniels failed for four reasons. First, there was the absence of any external over- sight or enforcement of reforms. Essentially, the NYPD and the City promised to

reform, but faced no incentive to do so in a timely fashion. Second, the NYPD firmly believed that these tactics were essential to keep the crime rate low and maintain

its slow decline through the decade following the appointment of Raymond Kelly as Police Commissioner. Third, there was public support to continue these tac-

tics, though the public has been split on this question for over a decade. The sup- port was equivocal in the minority communities, where stops were most heavily

concentrated and was strong in predominantly white sectors of New York City.18 Accordingly, there was no sense of urgency among community or political leaders

to hold the NYPD accountable for compliance with the terms of the settlement that largely impacted minority communities. Perhaps most important was the timing of

POLICING, CRIME, ANO LEGITIMACY ( 235)

the litigation: Daniels was filed in 2001, before the 9/11 terror attacks, and shortly afterward, the Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik-in his final year in office-very

publicly renounced racial profiling. And within a few months, the 9/11 attacks gen- erated widespread support if not admiration for the NYPD. In that climate, there was no political will or even attention to the issues raised by Daniels and Spitzer

before that. But the most significant reason for the failure of Daniels was the structure of the

stipulated settlement agreement. The terms did not include an external or court- appointed monitor, a departure from other consent decrees or collaborative agree-

ments negotiated around the same time, including the Los Angeles Consent Decree. There were no stated performance benchmarks to assess changes in racial disparities

in stops and frisks. There was no requirement for public release of data. Rather, the NYPD were required to produce reports to plaintiffs and later, to the City Council, a requirement they ignored until the shooting death of Sean Bell during a botched

undercover operation in November 2006, a year before the scheduled expiration of the Daniels settlement. There were no requirements for evaluation of training or

other personnel management systems. There was no external auditing of the data or of the routine reports on the reasons for citizen stops to determine if they were

consistent with Fourth Amendment requirements, When violations were detected, as in the case of the 600 percent increase in stops from 2003 to 2006 that exacer-

bated racial disparities (Fagan et al. 2010), there was no enforcement mechanism for reversing these practices. The NYC settlement agreement stands in sharp contrast to

the Consent Decree in Los Angeles that required active monitoring of racial dispari- ties in stop, arrests, and use of force behaviors by the LAPD. One can only imagine

what reforms and changes in transparency might have occurred if the NYPD had been subject to similar oversight.

1400.0 ~-------------------------------,250

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1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009

Whites • .,.. Blacks -.o•. Hispanics - Others ---11-- Felony Crimes per 100,000

Figure 8.2 Terry Stops and Felony·Crimes per 100,000 Persons, New York City, 1998-2009 Source: New York City Police Department, Various Years; Fagan et al., 2010; Uniform Crime Reports, various years.

( 236) Social and Urban Problems

Toe growing disparities led to a second lawsuit, filed immediately upon the expiration

of the Daniels settlement, by the same civil rights organization that had filed Daniels: the Center for Constitutional Rights. The litigation continues through this iNYitingwith the case Floyd et al. v. City of New York.19 In addition, two other lawsuits have been filed, Davis et al. v. City of New York in 2010, and Ligon et al. v. City of New York in 2012. Each alleges both racial discrimination and Fourth Amendment (search and seizure) viola- tions in the conduct of police operations in the apartment buildings that characterize

much of the city's housing stock. Plaintiffs in Davis allege discrimination in the conduct of stops and the enforcement of trespass laws in public housing complexes. Plaintiffs in Ligon allege similar claims in the enforcement of these laws in privately owned build- ings. In Ligon, the litigation cites abuses under the NYPD's Operation Clean Halls pro- gram, where officers conduct patrols in the lobbies and stairwells of privately owned

buildings-with the consent of the landlords-searching for persons who are illegally in the buildings. 20 The City says these tactics are essential to eliminating long-standing problems of drug dealing and related violence in these buildings. However, residents are

mixed on these tactics, and the plaintiffs complain not only of illegal searches but also

of often being arrested in their own buildings that they are legally allowed to be in. The persistence of litigation in New York City suggests both the animating power

of scandal to provoke litigation but also the limitations of political regulation and

accountability in policing in the post-Mallen era. It is not just class action litigation that characterizes this climate, but private litigation as well: according to the City Comptroller, New York City has paid out over $570 million in settlements of indi-

vidual private law suits in the past decade (Liu 2012). Litigation in New York City and the disagreements over the impacts of the litigation

in Los Angeles suggest a further and difficult question: Will the aggressive and proactive

policing tactics that characterize both cities inevitably lead to racial conflict and litiga- tion? Perhaps the absence of meaningful regulation of the police in New York City, dating

back at least fifty years, creates a political climate where accountability and lawfulness is secondary to both the norms of the police culture and the demands for security at all costs. The scandals dating back to the 1960s and before suggest that this is not simply

a matter of high crime eras, for as we show below, that era ended both in New York City

and Los Angeles a decade ago. Rather, the persistence of litigation and the allegations that these lawsuits seek to address may suggest a more disturbing notion of the endoge- neity of such norms in the modern policing institution when unabated by outside inter-

vention. In New York City, the bitter war over these three lawsuits suggests a dark vision of a permanent divide between the minority citizens of the city and the institutions that

exist to protect them. Los Angeles seems to be on a very different path.

CRIME AND POLICING

The connection between the crime reductions in New York and Los Angeles since the height of the crack epidemic in each city in 1990, with the cycles of scandal and

reform, is not a simple calculation. While notable reforms in policing occurred in each city following urban unrest, corruption scandals, internal reforms, and new models

POLICING, CRIME, AND LEGITIMACY ( 237)

of policing, it remains unclear how much these cascading dramas shaped the crime trends we observe in each city. In this section we analyze the changes in crime rates between 1960 and 2010 in the two cities, using the broader historical lens that cap- tures the eras of unrest, rising crime, scandal, and reform. We focus on only robbery

and homicide rates because these crimes are less likely to be influenced by changes in police reporting practices over this time period. Homicide in particular has not changed by definition. And, there are reasons to expect that the police generally do

not underreport homicides. 21

The Fifty-Year Arc

The trends over the fifty-year period in robbery and homicide rates in the two cities are very similar in both timing and the shape of increase apd decline. Both cities

experienced a massive increase in crime between the mid-1960s and the early 1980s, despite different trajectories in internal governance and reforms. In Los Angeles,

the various efforts of the professional model of law enforcement under police chiefs Parker, Davis, and Gates had little discernible effect on crime, as measured by rob-

bery or homicide rates through the 1980s. Crime rates also rose in New York City under several police commissioners through the same eras. The crime increase in

New York City and Los Angeles mirrored the crime increase seen in the majority of large US cities across this period (FBI Uniform Crime Reports, various years), sug-

gesting that large secular processes were animating crime trends through forces that were beyond the control of local police in any single city.

Bad Things Come in Threes

From the 1960s through the early 1990s, violent crime increased in three waves, each one closely tied to an epidemic of drugs-heroin in the late 1960s, cocaine and the

emergence of street drug markets in the late 1970s, and crack cocaine and the rapid

expansion of retail drug selling predominantly in American inner cities by the 1990s (Johnson et al. 1990). In each city, starting in the mid-1980s, the increase was best

described as an epidemic of violence, especially among adolescents and young adults ages 13-24 (Cook and Laub 1998). The coupling of the temporal phasing of crime in each city with concurrent drug epidemics has been the key source of theoretical specu-

lation and empirical analyses (Blumstein 1995; Fagan 1990, 1992). In these render-

ings of the causes of a violence epidemic, the connection was through drug selling in open-air markets (Zimmer 1984; Goldstein 1985, 1989; Fagan 1990) and the prolifer- ation of high caliber firearms (Blumstein and Wallman 2000). In each city, drug-selling

organizations animated forms of group violence that were tied to the economic instru- mentality, In Los Angeles, these groups emerged from, and sometimes coincided with,

the rise of street gangs in the late 1970s. In New York, drug-selling organizations dominated territories and markets (Fagan 1990, 1994; Johnson et al. 1990).

Drugs were hardly the only crime correlate that was co-morbidly tied to the three- stage run-up in crime. By the mid-1970s, guns became the weapon of choice in homicide

( 238) Social and Urban Problems

(Zimring and Hawkins 1997). We cannot know whether the proliferation of gun homi-

cides was the result of excess gun manufacture and faulty marketing controls that put guns into the hands of young offenders (Hemenway 2004) or a by-product of the rapid expansion of inherently violent street drug markets (Johnson et al. 1990; Fagan 1992) in each city. But the fact remains that nearly all of the increase and the entire decline in homicides across the fifty-year-window was due to changes in gun-related deaths (Fagan, Zimring, and !Gm 1998; Cook and Laub 2002; Zimring 2006, 2011; Hemenway 2004).

The Crime Declines

Figures 8.3 and 8.4 shows the trends for homicide rates and robbery rates between 1960 and 2010 for New York and Los Angeles, and begins the discussion of the crime

declines. In these figures, we placed lines marking years where major police issues occurred, including the 1965 Watts Riots, the 1991 Safe Streets Act of New York, the 1992 Los Angeles riots, the 1994 advent of COMPSTAT in New York and the LAPD

community policing plan, and the 2002 COMPSTAT Plus program launched by LAPD police chief Bratton.

The similarity in the patterns of increase and decline are remarkable. The rates rose and declined in both cities in the same decades, despite public perception that the cities

are distinct from each other with regard to both crime and its correlates. The trends show -with clarity that policing crises and reforms are correlated -with general secular trends.

When we examine any year as a point of departure from the decade-specific trends in· homicide and robbery for both cities, it suggests that a police reform contributed to a

lower rate of crime. Still, the effects of reforms are best viewed as nested in the longer fif- ty-year secular trends in these and other major cities (Rosenfeld, Fornango, and Baumer

2005; Harcourt ahd Ludwig 2006). Crime rates began declining in each city in 1992, despite starkly different political, social, and policing environments. In other words, the

shared onset and shape of the decline could suggest that policing had a modest effect. So, for example, we could attribute the decline in Los Angeles to the Rodney King

riots, the appointment of Chief Williams in 1992 to lead the LAPD, the work of the

Christopher Commission in revealing systemic problems in the LAPD and in the com- munities most heavily policed, and/or to Williams's community policing plan that

began in 1994 (and that was fiercely resisted by the patrol force). In New York City, we could claim that the onset of the crime decline began -with police reform resulting from

the 1991 Safe Streets Act, the implementation of COMPSTAT initiatives and other policy reforms in 1994, and/or the work of the Mallen Commission that investigated

police corruption beginning in 1993. In other words, no matter what the political land- scape or the specific local crime conditions, a secular decline in crime began in the two

cities at almost exactly the same time, and by the year 1993, this trend was seen in cities across the nation (Blumstein and Wallman 2000).

Perhaps the most remarkable trend within the larger arc is the sharp decline in each city's crime rate between 1990 and 2000. Within this shorter period, almost any

year that we estimate as a parameter in the decade of the 1990s after 1992 in either New York City or Los Angeles shows a significant downward trend that dominates

any reform occurring in the following decade, including both the appointment of

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POLICING, CRIME, AND LEGIT/IV/ACY ( 239)

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( 240) Social and Urban Problems

Chief Bratton in Los Angeles and the Consent Decree that went into effect in 2000. Even when we adjust for the full series of observations going back to 1960 for robber and homicide, the trend in the near decade from 1992 to 2000 shows that declines i~ each city were steep and systematic, even under starkly different conditions. 22

So, while Bratton's reforms in New York City in the 1990s and in Los Angeles a decade later showed some promise in reducing crime, one should also point to Chief

Willie Williams as the great crime drop leader in Los Angles through his effort to insti- tute community policing and transform the culture of the LAPD. The successes of Chief Williams were interrupted (and cost him his job) in the trend in Los Angeles in the

years surrounding the Rampart Scandal. Betvveen 1999 and 2001 both homicide and robbery rates in Los Angeles reversed course and increased for the first time since the

early 1990s. After 2001, with the Rampart Scandal resolved and new management in place under Bratton, the decline in LA robbery and homicide resumed. The salient point here is.that in both Los Angeles and New York City, in very different policing regimes

a~d political and social contexts, a crime decline began that has-vvith the interrup- tlon of the Rampart years-sustained itself for nearly tvvo decades into 2010.

The COMPSTAT Effect

The COMPSTAT innovation used spatial analysis of crime patterns with constant updating to drive the allocation of police resources to crime "hot spots." It is an

innovation first developed by William Bratton in New York City when he headed· the NYPD's Transit Bureau, and he brought it to departmental scale when he was appointed Police Commissioner in 1994 (Bratton and Knobler 1998). Since then, it

has been adopted by law enforcement agencies across the country and in several cit- ies in Europe and Latin America (Weisburd et al. 2004). Arguably, its effects have been most deeply felt in Los Angeles and New York City, where Bratton was the police executive during the implementation of the management design_2s

If we were to focus on only examining the effect of the COMPSTAT program in ~ew Yo~k City that started in 1994, we would see a clear influence of this program m reducing robberies and homicides. Figure 8.5 shows the linear trends in homicide

rates for New York City and Los Angeles in the years after each city adopted its ver- sion of COMP STAT under chief Bratton. In New York City, the linear trend was 14.5 fewer homicides per 100,000 residents after 1994. In Los Angeles, the linear trend

was 11.5 fewer homicides per 100,000 residents after 2002. These trends suggest that COMP STAT efforts provided a meaningful contribution to the crime decline in

each place. But, if we look back to the date of the onset of the crime decline in Los Angeles in 1994, the linear trend would be similar to New York City's-including the three-year spike in crime between 1999 and 2001 in Los Angeles.

Street Tactics

In ~oth ~os Angeles and New York City, Terry stops were the hallmark of the policing regimes m the past decade. Street stops of pedestrians under Terry v. Ohio (1968) 24

permit officers to engage, question, then possibly frisk suspects for weapons based

0 m

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POLICING, CRIME, AND LEGITIMACY ( 241)

COMPSTAT COMPSTAT+

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Linear Trend LA

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Figure 8.5 . Homicide Rates with Linear Trends in New York and Los Angeles followmg COMPSTAT,

1980-2010 Source: Uniform Crime Reports, various years.

on reasonable suspicions that "crime is afoot." Officers can search a suspect based on probable cause that the suspect is either armed or has contraband in his possession or has committed a crime. In New York City, with its high volume of pedestrian traf-

fic, most stops have been street stops. In Los Angeles, with a lower population den-

sity and far greater use of automobiles, stops are a combination of street stops and motor vehicle stops. The stops, whether in a car or on the street, are invasive, often unpleasant, and usually did not result in an arrest. The apparent racial disparity of

street stops and car stops was, in each city, a driver of litigation. Table 8.1 shows data on Terry stops in each city for two years in the past decade.

At first glance, it seems that "street" policing in New York in the past decade has not only grown substantially, but the number of involuntary police-citizen contacts also

rose by nearly 500 percent within five years. The years in table 8.1 were chosen for ease of comparison based on available data. In the four years from 2008 to 2011, the

rate of involuntary citizen stops in New York rose to 686,724, an increase of 45.5 percent from 2007. The rate in Los Angeles rose by 100 percent, a far higher increase. But the LAPD made a total of 875,204 stops including vehicle stops, so the focus

on pedestrian stops vastly understates the extent of LAPD citizen interdictions. The

percent black or Hispanic in New York was 86.6 percent in 2011, a rate that has been

rising slowly since the first analysis of these data in 1998 (Spitzer 1999). Blacks and Hispanics in both cities remain the primary recipients of proactive

police actions an4 attention. Data on pedestrian stops in both cities for years 2002 and 2007 presented in table 8.1 show that the majority of stops in each place are of

( 242) Social and Urban Problems

Table 8. PEDESTRIAN STOPS PER 100,000 PERSONS, NEWYORl<AND LOS

ANGELES, 2002 AND 2007

New York Los ~g~_l_e-~ _

2002 2007 2002 2007

Total 97,830 472,096 76,615 135,263

Rate per 100,000 1,210.1 5,705.4 2,010.8 3,384.9 % Black or Hispanic 73.4 81.7 78.5 81.0

Source: Source: Stop and Frisk data for New York 2002 and 2007 provided to Fagan in Floyd v City o(New York, 08 Civ 1034 (SAS) (2008). Stop and Frisk data for Los Angeles available from LAPD at http://www.lapdonline.org/ search_resul ts/ content_ basic_ view /9016.

Hispanic and black suspects. Although the LAPD has been subject to less scrutiny

than NYPD on disparities in police stops, the stop proportions by race in both cities are quite similar, Ayres and Borowsky (2008) showed stark racial disparities in Los Angeles in 2004, after controlling for crime rates, Fagan et al. (2010) showed the same in New York for 2006.

Our data in table 8.1 most likely understate race- or ethnic-specific disparities. We

combine black and Hispanics, but one should recognize that this masks the stark dis- parity borne by blacks in Los Angeles (Ayres and Borowsky 2008). Over time, blacks

have been a far smaller percentage of the LA population (9.6 percent in 2010) than are blacks in New York (25.5 percent in 2010). Conversely, the Latino population in Los Angeles is a far greater share of the city's population (48.5 percent in 2010) com-

pared to New York (28.6 percent in 2010). A separate analysis of stops per capita by race would show a far higher rate of pedestrian stops for blacks in Los Angeles that is comparable to NYC's rate.

The higher per capita stop rates in New York City may reflect more than simply tactics, but rather the size of human resources devoted to stopping citizens. The number of officers in uniform at the NYPD was 34,060 in June 2012, well below the

peak force of 41,000 in 2001, and the lowest since the 34,825 officers on the force in 1992 when crime rates began their decline (New York City Independent Budget Office 2011). In contrast, the LAPD had 9,927 officers from 2009 to 2012 (KPCC 2010; Heaton 2010; Berk and MacDonald 2010; Villancourt 2012). So, the dispar~ ity in personnel-a ratio of 3.5 to 1-between the two cities does not explain the 1. 7 to 1 disparity in per capita stop rates. When we include motor vehicle stops and

pedestrian stops, the LAPD appears to be stopping far more citizens relative to the size of its police force,

Pedestrian or "street" stops are hardly the only policing story in each city. The total- ity of policing over the past decade in each place has been substantial. Several specific

enforcement priorities, consistent with its Order Maintenance Policing strategy, have produced significant numbers of arrests for several types oflow-level misdemeanors

and violations. The NYPD has averaged over 45,000 marijuana possession arrests since 2000 (Geller and Fagan 2010) and an additional16,000 criminal trespass arrests

each year since 2007. More than one in three of those arrests were resolved in favor of

POLICING, CRIME, AND LEGITIMACY ( 243)

the defendant (NYCLU 2012). In 2011, prosecutors did not charge 13 percent of people arrested for trespassing in the city (Bowers 2010). NYPD officers also issue numerous . t· for a variety of "quality of life" violations that are not criminal offenses, but ota ions

· 1·nal liability if the citation is not answered. Comparable data in Los Angeles carrycnm · _ . are difficult to obtain, though the combination of pedestnan and motor vehicl~ st~ps suggests a rate of involuntary contact VITith police-whether ~hrough stops or otat10n of other enforcement initiatives-that is comparable to that m New York. .

The move over the past decade to a policing regime in each city that emphasizes

t . con"acts wi'th citizens whether at the moment of an offense or before it proac1ve t , . , .. has Pro duced a thick net of social control that envelopes each city s mmonty occurs,

neighborhoods. For adolescents and young adults, the frequent __ police con_tacts-~ave become a part of the normal process of adolescent developmenc, a form of anticipa-

tory socialization that internalizes the stigma of police contact, whether founded or t b the detection of crime. If the contacts themselves are harsh and unpleasant,

noy 1 .hd jf•· the negative aftermath generates not just ill will but a so a wit rawa o citizens from cooperation VITlth the police (Tyler 1990). In an era of steeply declining crime rates in each city, the theoretical and empirical basis for the escalation of police con- tact may be questionable and has the potential to strain public confidence in the

police, especially among minorities most likely to experience police contact.

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF POLICING AND CRIME

The shared temporal shifts in patterns of bellwether crimes in Los Angeles and New York are remarkable given the distinct political trajectories and institutional st_ruc-

tures of policing in each city over this fifty-year period. One might assume that, ~1ven the influence of William Bratton as the commissioner of the NYPD and later chief of

the LAPD, a remarkable figure in policing in each city and -within the profession, the

developmental teleology of policing would be similar. But it is not. The f~rc~s that shape policing are a combination of both the unique social and demograph1_c _circum- stances of the two cities, as well as their responses institutionally and politKally to

parallel pressures of crime, scandal, and reform. The two cities were e_ach und:rgoing rapid and profound transformations, not just since the peak of the cnme declme, but

for many years before. The twin patterns of ecological chang_e and the te~eology of policing and crime raise important questions about the ordenng of these mfluences

in the broader transformation of the city.

Housing and Gentrification

Toe physical space of each city has transformed dramatically in the past two decades. Gentrification in the central core of each city, as well as in selected neighborhoods,

has both displaced populations from poor, high crime areas and reconfig~red the built environment in dramatic ways. In each city, the process of transformmg both

( 244) Social and Urban Problems

the residential and commercial built environments has required the police to engage in more "order maintenance" styles of policing in the central business districts.

New York

In the midto-wn business core of New York, between the Theater District and office towers to the east, the gentrification of the Times Square area was a proce·ss designed and implemented in the 1990s. Together with zoning changes, tax incentives to spur development helped replace the licentious carnival atmosphere of Times Square with retail stores, hotels, and restaurants that draw from mainstream American culture. 2s Physical disorder was replaced by the construction of several office towers housin professional workers. g

As part of the development effort, the shift in policing strategy beginning in 1994 facilitated the removal of the signs of social disorder. This meant using zoning laws to force the dosing of destinations for "undesirables" including pornography shops and cheap eateries. The aggressive policing strategy focused on prostitution, vagrancy and loitering, and other petty misdemeanors to remove prostitutes, homeless persons, street card games, and groups of persons loitering around X-rated movie houses. The result was the replacement of old visible signs of disorder with businesses and build- ings that reassured tourists, merchants, and consumers that the area was safe. The local business community encouraged the creation of new forms of court services to reduce the recurring nature of much of this crime by providing remedial services to those who formerly occupied the streets rather than only fines or incarceration (Briffault 1999).

Although this is an appealing story, consistent with the "broken windows" theo- ries of policing (Kelling and Cole 1996) and its impact on disorder (Skogan 1990), whether crime dropped due to policing or due to changes in the environment or both is hard to disentangle. In other words, the two faces of "broken windows" were reme- diated simultaneously, with perhaps unique, additive, or even multiplicative effects.

Development in the neighborhoods outside New York City's business districts was based less on commercial development than on the tran~fonnation of housing and other faces of the built environment. Much of the development was driven by gentri- fication, but its forms varied by neighborhood. Gentrification in Harlem, Red Hook, Washington Heights, and the South Bron.,"'C brought about extreme transformations in housing and population composition, as well as reductions in crime. Gentrification in Chelsea, largely by gay populations, converted a working-class residential and rough area into a wealthy enclave. But the economic and cultural dislocations caused by this dis- placement were dramatic. New businesses in those areas were created to serve the new residents, but the jobs they brought demanded skills that the remaining local residents did not have, increasing economic tensions and inequality Vvi.thin neighborhoods.

Police responses in these places, where the crime rate is now low, are no differ- ent now than they were during the era of dramatic crime reduction in the 1990s. Aggressive enforcement of low-level crimes, and aggressive interdiction of those who are "out ofplace,"helpeddrive more than 500,000 citizen stops every year since 2003. Harlem, a relatively safe neighborhood today, still has a very high concentration of police activity, including Terry stops, marijuana enforcement, trespass enforcement

POLICING, CRIME, AND LECITI/VIACY ( 245)

(Operation Clean Halls), and b~ns on public dr~nking. Ge~trifi.cation inevitably led to the displacement of older residents by wealthier (and whiter) newcomers. There is some evidence that those who left took crime with them and have adversely affected the areas to which they have dispersed.

26

The relationship between housing and crime in New York is complicated not only b real estate booms over the period since the mid-1980s but also by strategic invest- ;ents in housing for poor people, Since crime in· New York, as elsewhere, was con- centrated in the poorest neighborhoods, we might expect those neighborhoods to be the most crime-sensitive to both housing development and crime. Figure 8.6 shows the distribution of $5.8 billion in housing construction and rehabilitation programs for the poor across three mayoralties, starting in 1987, under a program knovm as the "10-Year Plan" (Van Ryzin and Genn 1999). Figure 8.6 shows that these invest- ments were made in the New York City's poorest neighborhoods, which were those -with the highest homicide and other violence rates during the peak violence years in the late 1980s and early 1990s,

l<EY Sub Boroughs

Units Per 100 Hoose0 holds 0 to 1 1 to 5 5 to 20 20 to 38: No Residents 0 2 4 6 ~------Miles

Figure 8.6 Concentration of Ten-Year Plan Units in New York City, 1985-1995 Source: Greg Van Ryzin and Andrew Genn, 1999.

( 246) Social and Urban Problems

The decline in crime mirrors these investments. Figure 8. 7 shows homicide "tra- jectories" for the city's 275 neighborhoods from 1985 to 2002 using boundary defi- nitions of neighborhoods generated by the Department of City Planning. 27 Both

raw and smoothed trends are shown for each neighborhood trajectory group. Tue trajectories were identified using trajectory modeling methods based on Poisson

mixture models (Nagin 2005). Fagan and Davies (2007) identified four crime trajec- tories that grossly describe crime trends across NYC neighborhoods, with Group 4

comprising the most dangerous and the others showing a more gradual decline that began in 1991. These were not only the most heavily policed places in the city (Fagan et al. 2010), but they also were the beneficiaries of the Ten-Year Plan investments.

To illustrate this, figure 8.8 shows that homicide declines were greatest in the same neighborhoods where housing investments for the poor were the highest.

There are good reasons why people in poor neighborhoods may be more respon- sive to housing investments. First, housing imparts stake in one's community (Toby 1957), Homeowners are more likely to exercise guardianship over their homes and

neighborhoods when they have such stakes, Second, housing is a critical pathway to

wealth and an escape route from the poverty traps that characterize many poor and high crime neighborhoods (Massey and Denton 1993; Sampson and Moreno:ff 2006).

Housing ownership reduces transience and mobility, in turn promoting the kinds of

strong social ties that can inoculate neighborhoods against crime through collective social actions (Sampson, Raudenbush, and Earls 1997).

Of course, policing throughout this period was concentrated in the areas with. the highest homicide rates and most active drug markets (Letwin 1990; Karmen 2000; Fagan et al. 2010). Accordingly, the simultaneity of policing and the economic

0 0 -~

25.0

g__ 20.0 J' 0 0 0

o

-,, ~ 10.0 0

I

5.0

Year

Figure 8.7

Homicide Trajectories, New York City Neighborhoods, 1985-2002 Source: Adapted from Fagan and Davis, 2007.

POLICING, CRIME. AND LEGITIMACY ( 247)

Homicide Groups _llow

~]Medium Low 11i1Med1um High aJHigh

jNot In Analysis Q 2 4 6 - -Miles

~!;r;f t~micide Trajectories by Neighborhood, New York City, 1985-2002 Source: Adapted from Fagan and Davis, 2007.

transformation of housing complicate efforts to sort out the temporal s~quence odf d . 1 b th l' ce from those mfluence changes between crime rates shaped irect Y Y e po 1 . h

by changes in the built environment. Empirical arguments depend m _part on t de starting point for measuring change, on the lens-whether boroug~, ne1ghborho_o ,

1. recinct-and how one conceptualizes housmg and physical census tract, or po ice P . disorder (Schwartz, Susin, and Voicu 2003; Fagan and Davies 2007).

Los Angeles

The same tension in causal mechanisms is evident in the story of housing and cr~:e in Los Angeles during the same era. Was the drop in central Los Angeles cause y

gentrification in downtown neighborhoods and areas near the Univers_ity of Sou~ern • t d not easily reconstitute California? This is a complex picture because cnme ra es o - . h

themselves in areas settled by displaced residents. In fact, when we exarr:i_me t :

data on Los Angeles, it is clear that across .all police di~sio_ns c~~~:;;T;;p:i:s significantly after 2002-the period in whKh Bratton mstitut: . (C tral

. h t al business d1stnct area en (Gascon 2005). Yet, the crime drop m t e cen r

( 248) Social and Urban Problems

300

~ ,. . . ,t* ~

V ~· ~ 200 ~ u ro

w

~ .. ' ' "' 6 ~

100 ~ 0 ~

.'.!

o½---~--~--~--~--~--~--~--~

Weeks LJan 2000 to Dec 2007)

1--- SmootherTrend Line " Reported Crimes Figure 8.9 Crime Trends in Los Angeles Central Police Division, January 1, 2000, to December 31, 2007 Source: Los Angeles Police Department.

Police Division) of Los Angeles occurred during this period of police reform, while crime rates in South Los Angeles did not enjoy a similar decline.

In Los Angeles, the redevelopment of neighborhoods like Skid Row in the dovvntown area and Bunker Hill adjacent to dovvntovm, have fueled similar conflicts and tensions over how to appropriately police homeless populations when areas become prime tar- gets for real estate investment and urban renewal (Blasi 2007; Harcourt 2005). Figure

8.9 shows the decline in total violent, property, and nuisance reported crimes in the Central Police Division of Los Angeles (where Skid Row is located) between January

1, 2000, and December 31, 2007 (Berk and MacDonald 2010). Like New York, there is empirical evidence that the LAPD's efforts through its Safer Cities Initiative to crack-

dovm on misdemeanor crimes and enforce vagrancy laws that ban the formation of large homeless encampments led to meaningful reductions in crime (Berk and MacDonald 2010). Further information on how this played out in Skid Row is in chapter 14.

Whether a greater investment in LA County Mental Health and Health and Human Services agencies could have been equally effective as the LAPD' s approach to reducing

crime and disorder in Skid Row is an open question. But in both cities a focus on crime

reduction through getting tough on vagrancy always brought out tensions between those concerned with crime control and those concerned with the plight of homeless.

We can expect this to continue through the coming decade as neighborhoods develop, populations change, and older residents are dislocated. Gentrification will always bring about tensions for police as community expectations about the police response shift in

response to changing dynamics of neighborhood property O'Wllers and residents.

POLICING, CRIME, AND LEGITIMACY ( 249)

Immigration

The second major transformation of the city during the past sixty years has been the increase in both size and neighborhood concentration of immigrants. The relationship

between immigration and crime has been a topic of policy interest at different times in twentieth century, and the current era is no different. The 1931 report by the National Committee on Law Observation and Enforcement, popularly called the Wickersham Commission (National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement 1931),

observed no evidence linking immigration to increased crime patterns (Tonry 1997). Despite t_he Wickersham Commission's observations, sociology was dominated by

the thinking that immigration was linked to crime through neighborhood social dis- advantage. Sociologists studied immigration as a central feature of the social structure of neighborhoods in the first half of the twentieth century. Most concluded that immi-

grants themselves had relatively low rates of criminal offending, but that immigrants settled into disadvantaged areas that exposed their children to higher rates of offending.

Several notable sociologists theorized that any evidence of higher crime rates in immi- grant neighborhoods was a result of the exposure of second-generation immigrants

to economic disadvantage, a culture of conflict, and underclass norms that were more favorable to violations of the law in the presence of relative economic disadvantage (see Reckless and Smith 1932; Sutherland 1934; Sellin 1938; Shaw and McKay 1942).

But recent empirical research on the immigration-crime nexus suggests that the

earlier links between immigrant settlements and neighborhood crime rates have changed, suggesting a new and different interpretation of the social disorganiza-

tion theories of the first generation of immigration-crime studies (Moreno-ff and Astor 2006; Martinez, Stowell, and Lee 2010). During the 1990s, a number of US

cities, including both New York and Los Angeles, experienced substantial growth of immigrant settlement into inner-city poverty-stricken neighborhoods (Malone et

al. 2003; Passel and Suro 2005; Davies and Fagan 2012). Neighborhood patterns of poverty and residential segregation in New York and Los Angeles, like many other

large cities, shifted the demographic makeup of high poverty neighborhoods that had been the areas of standing racial or ethnic disparities in income and housing seg-

regation since the 1960s (Cutler, Glaeser, and Vigdor 1999; Glaeser and James 2011). The New York neighborhoods of Harlem and the South Bronx that had been settled

by African Americans and Puerto Ricans for decades became areas of concentrated poverty that were emblematic of crime in the city (Davies and Fagan 2012). In the

Los Angeles neighborhoods of East Los Angeles, South Central, and Watts, African

Americans and Mexican Americans had been living in entrenched poverty since the 1960s. These neighborhoods were considered hotbeds of crime and violence; Watts, as we mentioned earlier, was the center of an apocalyptic riot.

For reasons perhaps owing to both economics and race or ethnicity, these areas of entrenched poverty became destinations for new immigrants. Immigrants tended to

settle in places they could afford and places where people looked like them (Davies and Fagan 2012). In Los Angeles, this meant that areas of both Mexican American

and African American poverty became increasingly concentrated with foreign-born residents. In New York, the neighborhood of Washington Heights became a reception

( 250) Social and Urban Problems

zone for immigrants from the Dominican Republic in the 1970s, while American resi- dents of Puerto Rico in-migrated to the neighborhoods of the South Bronx and East Harlem in the 1960s. Haitian and other Caribbean immigrants settled in the East

Flatbush area of Brooklyn in the 1970s, accelerating an outmigration of whites to the suburbs that began two decades earlier.

These were neighborhoods with high crime and violence for decades, but as we show

for each city, that is no longer the case. As crime rates declined in each city, we·show that the decline in crime in the new immigrant neighborhoods was greater than in other parts of the respective cities. Below we show evidence in both New York and Los

Angeles that neighborhoods Vl/1.th high concentrations of immigrants have experienced larger crime declines than similarly situated neighborhoods without heavy infltrn:es of

:immigrants. As with housing, the worst places in each city became safer, and the evi- dence suggests that this marginal gain in public safety was attributable to immigrants.

Los Angeles

Figure 8.10 shows the distribution of foreign-born residents and Latinos (predomi-

nately Mexican American) in LA census tracts in 1990 and 2000. What is striking from this figure is how immigrant enclaves became more concentrated in Los Angeles, even in areas previously not considered immigrant enclaves.

MacDonald and colleagues (MacDonald, Hipp, and Gill 2012) showed that these

areas with high expected probabilities of immigrant settlement 28 had greater reduc- tions in crime between 2000 and 2005 than other similarly situated areas. 29 Figure

8.11 shows the average change in neighborhood crime rates as measured by the total number of serious crimes 30 declined substantially more in neighborhoods

with higher expected immigrant settlement patterns. What these findings suggest is that part of the crime decline in Los Angeles is a story of immigrant concentra- tion. But there are several immigration stories in Los Angeles, owing to the multiple

countries of origin of various immigrant groups, especially from Central and South America. Identifying unique sending-country effects is complicated by the absence of

country of origin measures prior to the 2000 census. Even with those data, parsing the unique country-of-origin effects would be complicated by the high percentage

of Mexican immigration and the residential integration of all immigrant groups in neighborhoods where Spanish is the first language.

New York

In New York, immigration rose steadily beginning in the 1970s, Vl/1.th settlements of

Caribbeans in East Flatbush and Dominicans in Washington Heights. Two decades before, Puerto Ricans in-migrated to New York City and settled primarily in East

Harlem 8.nd the South Bronx, spreading out from there to other neighborhoods across the city. Figure 8.12 shows maps of immigrant concentration in 1990 and again in 2000. Immigration since 1990, primarily South Asians, Mexicans, and other

.I I

I ,!

(252) Social and Urban Problems

0.00

-2.00

w E' u -4.00 .S w M C

-6.00 0 ~

u ~ w -8.00 ~ w ~

-10.00

-12.00 1st Quartile 2nd Quartile 3rd Quartile 4th Quartile

Predicted Immigrant Concentration

Figure 8.11 Average Change in Crime by Quartiles of Predicted Immigrant Concentration, Los Angeles Census Tracts, 2000-2005 Source: Adapted from MacDonald, Hipp, and Gill, 2012.

Central Americans, and several East Asian groups, has been concentrated in several neighborhoods in Queens and Brooklyn, with smaller concentrations in Manhattan and the Bronx.

As in Los Angeles, immigration has been a protective factor in the natural history of crime in the city's neighborhoods. Figure 8.13 shows the effects of immigrant con- centration on specific types of crime in New York during the same period, as reported by Davies and Fagan (2012). To assess potential cohort effects, immigrant neighbor- hoods were measured both as the percentage of all foreign-born residents and then as the percentage of foreign-born residents who had lived there for less than five years. In each case, there were strong significant effects for the total immigrant pop- ulation on all crimes, plus three specific crime types. But th€ effects were more muted for recent immigrants, oVving perhaps to the fact that by 1997, they had arrived in neighborhoods that already had experienced strong crime declines, and that realized significant improvements in housing (Fagan and Davies 2007).

Davies and Fagan (2012) also showed differences by ethnicity and race in the effects of immigrant concentration on neighborhood crime. Figure 8.14 shows the effects of immigrant concentration on both total and violent crime were greatest in neighbor- hoods where white (mainly Russian and other Eastern Europeans) and black (mainly Caribbean) immigrants settled. Concentrations of Latino immigrants showed little effect on crime rates, perhaps for different reasons. One was the generally lower concentration of Latino immigrants and their entry into a heterogeneous set of neighborhoods, with both low and high crime rates. Asian immigrants tended to settle in stable, low-crime areas,_ muting any effects of either long-standing or more recent immigrant status.

In both cities, generational effects are evident, though they seem to work in oppos- ing directions. In New York, neighborhoods with newer immigrants had smaller crime

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Figure 8.13

( 254) Social and Urban Problems

1.48

-3.57

Violent

All Immigrants

-10.95

Drug

Recent Immigrants

-3.82

Property

Effects of Immigrant Concentration on Crime by Type of Crime (Z Scores), New York City Census Tracts, 1990-2002 Source: Davies and Fagan, 2012.

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-3.42 -3.37

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Violent Crime

Effects of Immigrant Concentration on Crime by Ethnicity (Z Scores), New York City Census Tracts, 1990-2002 Source: Davies and Fagan, 2012

declines than the more settled immigrant areas. While this may be an effect specific to the ethnic group, it may also suggest that the effects of immigrant generation covary Vvith preexisting crime and other social conditions in the neighborhoods. But the story is somewhat different in Los Angeles. Areas settled by more recent Central American immigrants have had lower crime rates through the late 1990s

POLICING, CRIME, AND LEGITIMACY ( 255)

than areas settled several generations ago by Mexican immigrants (MacDonald, Hipp, and Gill 2012). Boyle Heights, for example, had a smaller crime rate drop than Southeast Los Angeles, where newer generations of immigrants had arrived since 1990. Although both areas had similar percentages of Hispanic residents, Southeast Los Angeles became an area of greater immigrant concentration over the decade of the 1990s. These trends suggest that acculturation by the second generation accom-panied by poverty trapped neighborhoods reduces any generational effect of immi-gration on lowering crime (MacDonald, Hipp, and Gill 2012). In short, by the third generation the rates of crime climb back to what would be expected :if a neighbor-hood had concentrated poverty and few immigrants. This suggests that the benefits of immigrant concentration on reducing crime may be transitory and can be affected by immigrant social mobility to diffuse and assimilate into the city (and regional) social structure and economy. In other words, racial and ethnic segregation might erode the gains in crime reduction and social control that are produced by new immigrants, In the first generation, segmented assimilation of self-selected immigrants into new ethnic enclaves may produce social capital benefits that help control crime and even provide some protection for second-generation residents during adolescence (MacDonald, Hipp ,and Gill 2012). But, as time goes by, neighborhoods entrenched in poverty regardless of the his-torical ethnic heritage ·will have crime rates that return to normal states. The South Central and Southeast neighborhoods of Los Angeles are not only central to this story of crime decline in Los Angeles but also to the immigration story. The crime declines in these places were strongly correlated with the arrival of new immigrant residents. So, while Los Angeles as a whole was growing safer between 1994 and 2005, the dominant trend was in the areas that were undergoing significant immi-grant arrival and gentrification.

Policing Immigration and Crime One might expect that the potential benefit of immigration for reducing crime rates in neighborhoods has not been lost on the police and public officials in either city. But on this question, the two cities differ. In Los Angeles, for example, former police chief Daryl Gates helped to establish an LAPD departmental policy in 1979 to not initiate "police action vvith the objective of discovering the alien status of a person" and to not arrest or book a person for "illegal entry" into the United States (Rampart Independent Review Panel 2000). The LAPD have been vigilant about not enforcing federal immigration laws so that they can encourage immigrants to actively report crimes.

How do police patrol these neighborhoods, and what is the nature of police-citizen interactions? Crime and arrests are endogenous, so it is difficult to sort out whether the lower crime rates in immigrant neighborhoods are externalities of immigration, or whether the police alter their strategies in areas that they may believe to be differ-ent and (more importantly) less problematic. While there is no direct data on police patrol strength in Los Angeles and immigrant enclaves, it is noteworthy that the LAPD has had a friendly immigrant policy on the books since 1979.

( 256) Social and Urban Problems

14

12.01 12

10

8 7.37

~ 6 5.73 0 u ~

N 4

2

0

-2

-4 -2.52

Total Violent Drug Property

IE\ All Immigrants Recent Immigrants

Figure 8.15 E~ects of Immigrant Concentration on Enforcement by Type of Crime (Z Scores), New York City Census Tracts, 1990-2002 Source: Davies and Fagan, 2012.

In New York City, there is no specific policy on policing immigrant neighborhoods. However, there is evidence that police in New York City more aggressively patrol

neighborhoods with poor and African American populations, after controlling for crime, but they are less aggressive in areas settled by immigrants from Latin America generally. Figure 8.15 shows that enforcement for total, violent, and property crimes

is significantly higher in places with greater proportions of immigrants, after con- trolling for any differences in crime. Only for drug crimes does there appear to be

less enforcement in immigrant neighborhoods. And enforcement here, defined as the sum of Terry stops (stops and frisks) plus misdemeanor arrests, is greater in neigh-

borhoods with higher concentrations of recent immigrants·. This effect is especially strong for newer immigrants who have been in the country for less than five years.

Although crime is on balance lower in neighborhoods with higher immigrant concen- trations, the ratio of stops and arrests to crime is higher in these same places.

These enforcement patterns vary by the race and ethnicity of the immigrant group, especially for immigrants of African descent. Figure 8.16 shows that enforcement,

controlling for crime, is slightly higher for recent immigrants of Latino origin, but lower for both whites (again, primarily Eastern Europeans) and significantly lower for immigrants of African descent. Evidently, while African immigration protects

neighborhoods from crime, it also protects them from the excesses of racially tinged enforcement that characterizes the NYC neighborhoods where native born African Americans reside (Fagan and Davies 2000; Fagan et al. 2010).

Immigration in Los Angeles and New York City will continue throughout the

coming decade (contingent on national political considerations) but at a pace that may not equal what we saw in the past decade. And as second- and third-generation

3

2

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-1

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-4

-5

-6

-7

-8

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African

POLIC//\IG, CRIME, ANO LEGITIMACY ( 257)

1.89

-0.19

Latino

W,i Total Crime

0.49 0.42

Asian

Violent Crime

-1.86

Caucasian

Figure 8,16 . . . Effects of Immigrant Concentration on Enforcement by Ethmc1ty (Z Scores), New York City Census Tracts, 1990-2002 Source: Davies and Fagan, 2012.

immigrants occupy the neighborhoods where their parents landed, their immersion into the (nonwhite) American culture suggests the possibility that crime problems

will emerge. How the intergenerational path from immigration to crime patterns

emerges in each city is difficult to predict. Toe interaction of immigration and gentrification is also a cautionary tale.

Tensions and conflicts between African American and Latino groups in Los Angeles

and Northern Manhattan suggest the possibility of a return to the social dynamics of a century ago in Chicago, where immigrant groups clashed, organized into gangs, and

crime and conflict were prevalent. Finally, the role of police in enforcing immigration laws is complex and changing. Most police agencies see this as outside of their mis-

sion and jurisdiction, and they also see it as a procedure that could risk dissuading citizens from voluntary cooperation with police in investigating everyday crimes.

Sampson (2008) suggests that there is a link between rising immigration patterns

in cities and the declines in crime rates that occurred during the 1990s. More recent work by Stowell et al. (2009) and Martinez, Stowell, and Lee (2010) suggests these trends are true across cities and within San Diego. Our review of the data suggests a similar pattern in Los Angeles and New York City. Immigrant settlement has not

played a central role in explanations of neighborhood patterns of crime. But, our research in both cities suggests a link between neighborhood changes in crime and

immigrant settlement patterns, holding constant the effects of population and hous-

ing characteristics traditionally correlated with crime. Thus, immigrant settleme~t patterns are associated with appreciable reductions in crime for neighborhoods m

both cities.

(258) Social and Urban Problems

THE FUTURE

For a half century, policing in the two cities has gone through a cycle of crime booms

an~ more rece~t busts that have oscillated around periods of scandal and reform.

Cnn:1e h~s declined for nine consecutive years in Los Angeles, including a 9.6 percent dedme m 2010. While crime has also declined throughout the past decade in New

York, the pac_e of change has been slower than during the first decade of the unprec~ edent~d dedme that started around 1992. Los Angeles is slowly catching up to the low cnme rates that now characterize New York. The connection between the two

~hen_omena is part of a larger and more complex evolution in each city: the trends m cnme. and the episodes of policing scandal and reform have also coincided VITT.th changes m the social fabric of New York and Los Angeles.

The past decade has been a time of battles with civil litigation in Los Angeles and New York over ~ccusations of unconstitutional police practices. In 2009, Los Angeles e~er~ed from mne years under a consent decree. In lifting the consent decree, the US District Court Judge Gary A Fees overseeing the decree noted that "LAPD has become

the nati~nal and international policing standard for activities that range from audits

to handling of the mentally ill to many aspects of training to risk assessment of police offi~ers and more" (Rubin 2009). The LAPD has entered into new partnerships with vanous community organizations (Nagourney 2011), and nearly 80 percent of LA resi- ~ents expressed strong approval for the performance of the department. This approval

mclude~ 76 percent of the black and 68 percent of the Latino respondents to the poll. These ~1gns show that the LAPD has recovered, both in reputation and in performance,

followmg what was perhaps the biggest police corruption scandal in the United States. While L~s Angeles has emerged from civil rights litigation in 2009 follo\/\71ng a

lengthy penod of intensive federal court monitoring, New York City emerged from the Daniels litigation in 2007 only to become immediately mired in three new sepa- rate lawsuits alleging both racial discrimination and a pattern of unconstitutional st re~t s~ops. ~e NYPD has intensified its spectrum of Order Maintenance Policing tactics, mcludmg trespass enforcement in public housing, street stops, and misde-

meanor marijuana enforcement. All three prongs of this strategy have led to liti- gation and their wisdom and benefits continue to be hotly contested. The divided

response o~ New York City's diverse communities to the Stop and Frisk program, the centerpiece of the NYPD strategy, shows the depth of the racial breach between

citizens and police: white voters approve 59 to 36 percent, while disapproval is 68 to 27 percent among black voters and 52 to 43 percent among Hispanic voters.

In Los Angeles, the future of the LAPD and its ties to the diverse communities of the city was set in motion by the changes brought about through both the external

pr~ssures of the litigation and the internal push for reform and responsiveness by

Chief _Bratto~. Th~ LAPD has become more diverse in the past decade, including a ~~urahty of mmonty officers, a compositional change that has been linked to the pos- itive response by the diverse communities of Los Angeles. There has been an active effort in the LAPD to diversify its department and find ways to enhance its recruit-

ment efforts, including using a new recruiting system developed by researchers at the RAND Corporation (Lim et al. 2009).

POLICING, CRIME, AND LEGITIMACY ( 259)

Like New York, racial disparities in police contacts remained in Los Angeles through

20 04, even after controlling for differences in crime rates betvveen locations (Ayres

and Borowsky 2008; Fagan et aL 2010). Still, the structural and cultural reforms in the LAPD suggest that Los Angeles has entered a new era, marked by collaboration between the LAPD and the community, built on a platform of accountability, trans-

arency, and positive performance in maintaining safety and order. What is perhaps ~ost important for the future are the signs of the community investment in this

collaboration (Nagourney 2011). Whether this future will hold, and for how long, is uncertain. But it is notable that there has not been a similar period in the past 50 years where the LAPD was viewed in such a favorable light by a wide cross section of

racial and ethnic minorities in the city. The future in New York is not quite as bright. High profile scandals continue to

surround the policing of racial and ethnic minorities, including, allegations offal-

sification of victim reports to suppress crime statistics (Rayman 2012; Eterno and Silverman 2012), monetary damage settlements of more than $57 million per year over the past decade in police misconduct litigation (Hennelley 2012), allegations of arrest and "stop" quotas and illegal arrests (Powell 2012), extensive targeted sur- veillance of Muslim groups in madrassas and mosques both inside the city and in

neighboring cities (Gold and Apuzzo 2012), constitutional violations in the handling of political demonstrations in 2004 and in the recent Occupy Wall Street movement, and chronic conflicts with the press over reporting of crime and political demonstra-

tions. Even as crime rates decline in a period where the NYPD force has shrunk by over 6,000 officers (Zimring 2011), the tension betvveen ethnic minorities and the

NYPD remains front-and-center. While the LAPD has emerged from a period of crisis and deep institutional reform

to build an umbrella of legitimacy through close ties to the varied communities of Los Angeles, the current posture of the NYPD and its resistance to outside monitor-

ing and internal reforms suggests a less clear future. The LAPD has harmonized, to the extent possible given its recent past, with the future of the social fabric of Los

Angeles. The same cannot be said in New York City. Many citizens in New York City,

including those moSt heavily policed, await the next mayor and police commissioner to see whether a new era of reform can begin that includes citizen trust and satisfac-

tion as an outcome as equally worthy of addressing as the crime rate.

NOTES

1. The New York Post, as only the New York Post can, published a front-page headline on September 7, 1990, that screamed "Crime-ravaged City Cries Out for Help: Dave, Do Something." The headline was aimed at Mayor David Dinkins, demanding that he take strong measures to stop crime after a particularly gruesome few days of lethal violence in New York City. Dinkins did just that, collaborating with then-Speaker Peter Vallone of the New York City Council to pass the Safe Streets, Safe Cities Act in the state legisla- ture, funding 5,000 new police officers who were deployed a year later in 1991. By 1992, crime had begun to fall, dropping 10 percent in two years (Fagan, Zimring, and Kim 1998; Karmen 2000; Zimring 2011). Crime continued to fall for the next twenty years.

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2. Litigation in New York was filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights in 200l following an investigation of the NYPD Stop and Frisk tactics by the New York State Attor~ey General (Spitzer 1999). The 2001 litigation resulted in a_ Stipulated Settlement 1~ ~elv'.n Daniels et al. v. City of New York et al,, 99 Civ. 1695 (SAS) (2003). Subsequent_ht1gat10n :-vas_filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights in January 2008 foll~VITlng the expiration of the Daniels settlement. The current case, David Floyd et .al. v. C1ty of New York et al., 08 Civ 1034 (SAS) (2008), will proceed to trial later thrn year. In Los Angeles, the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) filed ·a civil suit alleging that the department was engaging in a pattern or practice of excessive force, false arrests, and unreasonable searches and seizures. The litigation produced a Consent Decree in United States of America v. City of Los Angeles et al., Civil No. 00-11769 (C.D. Cal.) (GAF) that was signed in 2001.

3. Compare Stone et al.'s 2009 report on Los Angeles to Fagan et al. 2010's report on New York City,

4, David Garland points out in Culture of Control (2001) that two entire generations of Americans and Britains have knowledge only of insecurity, and either lack knowledge of or cannot remember low crime eras. This tends to make criminology a distinct! ahistorical discipline. Most active criminologists were born after 1960 and receive~ their advanced degrees after 1980. As a cohort, they have no memory of low crime eras or the theory and discourse on crime in the lower crime eras that pre-date the Presidents Commission on Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice (1967) or the Kerner Commission Report (1968). There also are some difficulties in accessing reli- able data on those eras. Current theory on crime is framed by the limitations of our data sources, which too often began after 1975 for crime victimization or 1976 for homicide incidents.

5. For illustrations of this Foucaultian idea, see Garland (2001). See also Garton Ash (1999).

6. During the riot, the incomparable baseball pitcher Sandy Koufax pitched a no-hitter for the team, the Dodgers, in a game that was witnessed by less than one-fifth of those who had bought tickets.

7. http:/ /www.lapdonline.org/history _of_the_lapd/ content_basic_ view/1110. 8. Chief Parker died within a year of the Watts Riots. He was replaced in by Ed Davis,

who _institut:d several reforms that sought closer ties to the minority community. One mnovat1on was the Basic Car Plan, which assigned officers to specific geographic ~oundaries, an early version of local-if not community-policing. Davis also mcreased the number of specialized units (Encyclopedia of Police Science). Aside from thes~ i:nargi~al cha_nges th~u?h, the LAPD remained focused on police efficiency and achmrnstrat10n while rebuildmg community relations damaged by the riots (Greene 2007). Daryl Gates succeeded Parker in 1978, an internal hire. He focused primarily on budget-driven reductions in hiring dll.ring massive population growth, the emer- gence of dense networks of street gangs, and the first of two waves of rising crime rates. Gates served as LAPD chief of police until he retired under pressure in 1992 after the riots set off by the Rodney King incident.

9. Ki~~ had previously been convicted of driving while intoxicated and was currently ~nvmg uncle~ a suspended license. He led the LAPD on a high-speed chase for approx- 1mate~y 10 mmutes. In total twelve cars were involved in the pursuit. Upon exiting the c~r, ~mg allegedly refused to lie down, was shot 'With a Taser, and then was repeatedly hit VITlth batons and kicked while on the ground (Independent Commission on the Los Angeles Police Department 1991). This may have been a routine police-citizen use of force case had it not been captured on videotape from a nearby resident.

POLICING, CRIME, ANO LEGITIMACY ( 261)

10. A poll taken by the LA Times newspaper shortly after the incident found that 87 per- cent of African American and 80 percent of Hispanic respondents thought that police brutality in the LAPD was common (Independent Commission on the Los Angeles Police Department 1991, 16). Tuch and Weitzer's (1997) examination of LA Times public opinion poll data over periods before and after highly publicized incidents of police brutality (e.g., January 3, 1979, shooting of Eulia Love; March 3, 1991, beating of Rodney King) found dramatic reductions in public approval of the LAPD among African American and Hispanic respondents, Studies in other cities also show that high-profile media cases of police abuse increase minority distrust of the police (Jefferies et al. 1997; Weitzer 2002). 1be trends of declining opinion appear to last in Los Angeles until 1995 (Tuch and Weitzer 1997), years after the LAPD had instituted its first series of reforms.

11. Williams's five-year term effectively removed the life tenure status of the police chief and made the LAPD executive more accountable to the political constituents. Williams was kno1NTI. for his ability to form tight bonds ·with the public in Philadelphia. However, Williams experience in the LAPD was short-lived, as his powers as a chief were circumscribed in many ways, including limiting his ability to bring in outside command staff The LAPD did, however, under ChiefWilliams's direction form a stra- tegic plan for change that fully embraced the goals of community policing, as well as

the mission. 12. See http:/ /www.lapdonline.org/search_results/content_basic_view/6528. 13. The BOI noted numerous problems with the recruitment screening and supervision

of CRASH officers in the field and dovvnplayed 'Wider problems of routine illegality by

CRASH officers. 14. For example, the Knapp Report identified two particular classes of corrupt police

officer, which it called "Grass Eaters" and "Meat Eaters." Each was endemic to the culture of the department, and the sustaining norms were passed on from the older generations of police to the new recruits. The classification itself refers to petty corruption under peer pressure ("eating grass") and aggressive premeditated major corruption ("eating meat"). "Grass Eaters" were police officers who routinely took five, ten, twenty dollar payments from contractors, tow-truck operators, gamblers, and others working both inside and outside the law, "Grass eating" was a way of life for many cops, normalized in the police culture, and was considered part of the "pay" for being a cop. The Knapp Commission found that "grass eating" was used by police officers to prove their loyalty to the "brotherhood" of cops and was essential to sustaining the police culture. "Meat Eaters" were officers who "spend a good deal of time aggressively looking for larger paydays," such as shaking ~ow~ pimps and drug dealers for money. The Commission noted that these officers_JuSh- fied this extortion by marginalizing their victims as criminals and undeservmg of

police protection. 15. The Mallen Commission heard from officers who admitted pouring ammonia on the

face of a detainee in a holding cell and from another who threw garbage and boiling water on someone hiding in a dumbwaiter shaft. Another officer allegedly doctored an "escape rope" used by drug dealers so they would plunge to the ground if they used it, and the same group also raided a brothel while in uniform, ordered the customers to leave, and terrorized and raped the women there.

16. See background at: http://www.lapdonline.org/history_of_the_lapd/content_basic_

view/1120. 17. http:/ /policechiefmagazine ,org/magazine/index. cfm ?fuseaction=prin t_display&

article_id=593&issue_id=52005.

( 262) Social and Urban Problems

18. According to the latest Quinnipiac University Poll, New Yorkers were narrowly split in their approval of the Stop and Frisk tactic, with 50 percent disapproving the prac- tice. The rate of disapproval has hovered between 45 and 50 percent since Quinnipiac began asking this question. See Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, "Cutting Stop and Frisk Won't Increase Crime, More New Yorkers Tell Quinnipiac University Poll," August 12, 2012. Available at: http:/ /www.quinnipiac.edu/institutes-centers/ polling-institute/ new-york-city I release-detail? Rel eas eID = 1 7 88.

19. One of us (Fagan) was a consultant to the New York State Attorney General and assisted in the analysis that was published in the Spitzer (1999) report on racial disparities and Fourth Amendment concerns in the NYPD Stop and Frisk Program. This review focuses on the larger social and political contexts of policing in New York before and after that era.

20. See Ligon et al. v. City of New York, 12 Civ. 2274 (SAS) (2012), for a description of how Operation Clean Halls operates. According to data provided by the City of New York in the Davis etal. v. City of New York, 10 Civ. 0699 (S.D.NY) (SAS) (2010), litiga- tion, police conduct approximately 25,000 "vertical patrols" each month where they patrol the halls and stairwells of these buildings, as well as buildings in New York City Housing Authority developments.

21. To control for the potential underreporting of robberies over time, we adjust robbery rates by subtracting the ratio of robberies to homicides in each year. This in effect reduces the influence that changes in the reporting of robbery will have on the rob- bery rate. A big ratio will result in do'WU-weighting the rate or robberies. The results we display with or without this adjustment have no material effect.

22. Adjusting robbery rates for changes in reporting practices relative to homicide does not change the story of the 1990s.

23. The statistical analysis was not the only component of Bratton's reforms. He devel- oped new models of accountability for field commanders, also instituted new tactics including aggressive street stops as part of his response in crime "hot spots" (see, e.g., Maple and Mitchell 2000; Dickey 2009).

24. Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1 (1968) 25. Chain stores (e.g., Gap, Levi Straus, Disney, Toys "R" Us), hotels (e.g., Marriott, W,

Hilton, Crowne Plaza), and entertainment (e.g., ESPN Zone, MTV), all with nation- wide identity, proliferate in Times Square today.

26. Incarceration rates in the upstate counties contiguous to New York City have risen sharply since 2000, in part because of the social shock to quiet and homogeneously white upstate areas of newly transplanted former New York City residents. See, for example, Carrie Johnson, "As Gangs Move to Upstate New York, So Too Does Crime;' National Public Radio, Morning Edition, March 14, 2009, available at: http://www.npr. org/2012/03/14/1481603 72/ as-gangs-move-to-new-york-suburbs-so-does-crime.

27. Boundary maps for these neighborhoods of approximately 15,000 population are available at: http:/ /www.nyc.gov/htmV dcp/html/bytes/meta_nynta.shtml.

28. Measured by a standardized value of percentage of foreign-born residents and per- centage of Hispanic/Latino residents.

29. Immigrant enclaves were matched with other neighborhoods based on local poverty index, a measure of residential stability, the number of males under age 25, and the regional patterns of immigration in Los Angeles.

30. FBI index offenses, which include murder, rape, robbery, assault, burglary, theft-per- son, theft-vehicle, kidnap, arson of a dwelling, and motor vehicle theft.

CHAPTER 9

Los Angeles and N York City Schools

JULIA WRIGLEY

huge public school systems of New York City and Los Angeles rank first and second in the nation in size, with New York City serving just under a million

students and Los Angeles counting dose to 700,000 (NCES 2010). The districts face similar problems of students living -with poverty (Trounson and Poindexter 2012; Roberts 2012), racial segregation (Orfield, Kucsera, and Siegel-Hawley 2012, 45), and low achievement levels (National Center for Education Statistics 2011a, b). The two districts' political paths differed in the early twenty-first century, with Los Angeles operating on a more inchoate level, while Mayor Michael Bloomberg established firm control over the New York City school system. By 2011, their paths began to con- verge, with each under leadership strongly influenced by a national school reform movement supercharged by private wealth, federal power, and an.ascendant ideology of accountability, school choice, and reliance on standardized tests. In New York City and Los Angeles, Washington, DC, and many state capitals, reformers battled teach- ers unions over how teachers would be evaluated, how bonuses would be assigned, and how teachers would be fired. Reformers blamed poorly trained and ineffective teachers for low levels of student achievement and fought for teachers to be assessed on the basis of value-added models of student test score gains. The number of charter schools, mainly nonunionized, multiplied in both Los Angeles and New York City. The popular documentary, Waiting for Superman, captured the moment, portraying teachers unions as enforcing ossified work rules while charter schools operated nim- bly and creatively.

In New York City, mayoral control of the schools paved the way for attempts to implement a school reform agenda. Lack of mayoral control, except in a limited and indirect form, in Los Angeles, helped slow implementation of a similar school reform agenda supported by the mayor and by wealthy individuals, such as Eli Broad. To the extent such an agenda was implemented in Los Angeles, it occurred in an erratic form that increased the fragmentation and contentiousness of the district. Even in New York City, with a high level of mayoral control, school reform has not

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