Ronald Reagan (1911-2004) and William J. Casey (1913-1987).

While some of these great white men have passed away, these policies, theories and mindsets that produced this country’s mass incarceration persist. Over the years, police departments have given it different names: quality of life policing, community policing, hot spot policing, stop and frisk, neighborhood policing, and zero tolerance policing, to name a few. In the comfort of criminal justice classes and textbooks, these descriptions each have a specific definition. However, in practice over the past 30 years, these tactics mirror one another in their reliance on racial profiling and cracking down on petty crimes and ‘disorder’ to yield the same result: criminalizing the poor, black and brown. Those who champion it should be honest with themselves: it’s not crime they’re afraid of — it’s the black body.

As Bernard Harcourt says, “this type of policing is premised on society being divided into two groups, the ‘orderly’ upstanding law-abiding citizen and the ‘disorderly’ criminal-in-the-making.” Even in New York in the 1990s, where racial and economic divides have always been sharp, who is perceived to be law-abiding is most often white; while the disorderly criminal-to-be is black, poor, or both. In the height of gentrification, the racial and economic divide in New York has only increased. The original 1992 theory did not shy away from showing they valued commercial interests over others:“if a dispute erupted between a businessman and a customer, the businessman was assumed to be right” and at least half of those interviewed on their feelings of safety for the Newark Foot Patrol Experiment were individuals with commercial interests in the neighborhood. Police protect the interests of the developers; therefore, instilling an illusion of white safety becomes of utmost importance. And as the social norms that are expected in neighborhoods are increasingly white and upper class ones, what gets criminalized is the very existence of blackness.

Mayor Bill de Blasio and William Bratton, smiling.

During the mayoral election, Bill de Blasio spoke out against the use of stop and frisk under Bloomberg in the outer boroughs, while telling his Upper West Side audiences that he believes in the “core notions of the broken windows theory.” Conveniently, both stop and frisk and the broken windows theory call for the policing of young, black people. For stop and frisk, they claim they’re looking for guns; for broken windows, they claim they’re keeping the order. After Mayor De Blasio was elected on his anti-stop and frisk stance, he appointed William Bratton as police commissioner at the beginning of the year and Bratton returned to his old job.

In the first half of 2014, reported stop and frisk statistics have gone down. Meanwhile, in a year where homelessness hasn’t been this high since the Great Depression, Bratton made plans to remove homeless people from the subways. The homeless removals are part of a larger subway crackdown, in which Bratton has created two NYPD special units to patrol the subways. The crackdown, that started at the beginning of 2014, is extensive; arrests on fare dodgers, panhandlers, subway performers and homeless people in subways have increased by 300 percent. The NYPD has even gone as far as to monitor generally obsolete (and originally anti-homeless) MTA rules — such as no sleeping on the train in a way that disturbs other passengers — to the extent that they will brutally arrest and detain a black man for dozing off in a near empty subway train while he is on his way home from work. The recent announcement of Bratton’s plan to put cameras on all subway cars, will be yet another surveillance tool that will aid the police department in cracking down on petty crimes and non-criminal ‘disorder’.

A subway showtime dancer. Photo by Kelly Stuart, goingthroughglass.com

The NYPD arrests on subway performers, that escalated at the beginning of this year, are unrestricted; they target both performers on the subway trains and on the platforms, as well as, performers who both comply and don’t comply to the strict MTA rules. However, multiple performers have said that the New York Police Department specifically targets young, black performers. Reports have come out that over 240 subway showtime dancers (who are more often than not, young and black) have been arrested this year, compared to 2 dancers who were arrested in all of 2013. Most of the subway dancers are charged with reckless endangerment (which can be either a misdemeanor or felony and goes on one’s record regardless); others are charged with disorderly conduct (a violation). Kids who get lite on the subway and people who ask for money, “create a sense of fear” on the subway trains, according to Bratton. However, he admits it “isn’t a serious crime.” His reasoning doesn’t explain why these subway dancers continue to receive a steady income from the same public who ‘fears’ them so much. Nor does it explain why young, black breakdancers are also targeted on the subway platform — a performance that complies with MTA rules — and charged with reckless endangerment. Just like how the drug war “has never been about drugs”, here is the root of mass incarceration: heavily police and incarcerate black and brown people — give the public another reason beside their skin color.

Photo by Kelly Stuart of subway showtime dancer, goingthroughglass.com

In the first three months of 2014, there were more marijuana arrests than in Bloomberg’s third or fourth quarter of 2013, according the Marijuana Arrest Research Project. The arrests are dominated in low-income black and latino communities. 500 arrests were made in East New York and 408 arrests were made in Morris Heights between January and April 2014, where residents are 89% and 95% black and latino respectively. Meanwhile, 13 arrests were made in Park Slope and 8 arrests were made on the Upper West Side during those same months. Even in these two majority-white neighborhoods the majority of those arrested were still black or latino. Of the 9,906 total marijuana arrests made between January and April 2014, 86 percent were black and latino. At this rate, marijuana arrests will continue to be just as high as they’ve been for the past five years and New York will continue to make more marijuana arrests than any other city in the world. Even though the Brooklyn District Attorney, Ken Thompson, announced plans to dismiss small marijuana charges, Bratton called marijuana decriminalization “a mistake” and declared that the NYPD will continue to make arrests. Bratton even seems to be steadily increasing marijuana arrests during the short amount of time he’s been in office: 4,360 arrests were made in the first two months of 2014 (up from from 3,964 arrests made in November and December 2013) and there were 5,276 arrests in March and April of 2014. De Blasio’s campaign promise to decriminalize seems to have disappeared.

Thirty years later, the power of broken windows policing to sustain mass incarceration and preserve the system of control and ownership indefinitely is harrowing. Michelle Alexander conceived the term “the invisible cage” to describe the life that a person convicted of a felony lives once out of prison:

“the unique set of criminal sanctions that are imposed on individuals after they step outside of the prison gates…These laws operate collectively to ensure the vast majority of convicted offenders will never integrate into mainstream, white society. They will be discriminated against, legally, for the rest of their lives — denied employment, housing, education and public benefits. Unable to surmount these obstacles most will eventually return to prison and then be released again, caught in a closed circuit of perpetual marginality.”

furthermore, those on probation and parole,

“are at increased risk of arrest because their lives are governed by additional rules that do not apply to everyone else. Myriad restrictions on their travel and behavior (such as prohibition on associating with other felons), as well as various requirements of probation and parole (such as paying fines and meeting with probation officers), create opportunities for arrest. Violation of these special rules [can result in a warrant issued for one’s arrest and] can land someone right back in prison.”

In fact, in 2011, nearly 40 percent of prison admissions in New York were because of parole violations. Even after someone is released from prison, they remain property of the state. With broken windows policing, those who are already products of the prison industrial complex are more likely to come in contact with the police, increasing their chances of a parole or probation violation. The person selling items on the street without a permit may not be able to get traditional employment because they have a record — and is the same person targeted by police in the name of ‘maintaining order’. Broken windows policing continues to push new people into the carceral system but also continues the cycle of those already locked out of society.

Take, for example, William Bratton’s police raids on homeless shelters. In May, the NYPD raided the Freedom House shelter at 4 a.m. without probable cause and checked everyone for outstanding warrants. The commanding officer of the 24th precinct said the raids, “serve as a deterrent of deviant behavior.” Residents of the shelter describe the raids as, “disruptive and frightening.” Since people with felonies are discriminated against in housing, many have no choice but to go to the city’s shelters. During a press conference on the raid, an advocate mentioned that most of the ‘warrants’ justifying the raids are simply from unpaid fines and tickets.