Tag Archives: new york city police

Letter to Brooklyn College President Karen Gould: Get Security off Students’ Backs!

The Executive Committee of the Brooklyn College Chapter of the Professional Staff Congress – CUNY (PSC-CUNY) has written to the President of Brooklyn College, Karen Gould, regarding the assaults on, and arrests of, CUNY students by CUNY Security at Brooklyn College on May 2nd. Please take the time to read the letter–reproduced below–in its entirety and help spread the word.

(For background, including links to videos, President Gould’s response, student letters, petition links please consult the Reclaim Brooklyn blog. As I’ve noted before on this blog, this kind of response by campus security is a classic piece of intimidation that always, without fail, succeeds in creating a hostile, combative, threatening atmosphere, and almost invariably results in students getting hurt. And as noted here before as well, the police continue to harass and abuse those that are ‘on their side.)

The NYPD as Domestic Intelligence Force: Kelly and Browne Need To Go

The New York City Police Department (NYPD) has a vexed relationship with civil liberties. The department’s long and troubled history with minority populations is perhaps the best indicator of a kind of systematic confusion in its training institutions, its rank-and-file, its leadership, and thus, in its deeply-ingrained institutional culture, about the very notion: “Civil liberties? You talkin’ to me?” Its current whole-hearted embrace of a new role as member of the domestic intelligence apparatus, dedicated to aggressively conducting surveillance on NYC and NJ’s Muslim population, add to the list of its previous achievements such as coerced confessions, stop-and-frisk, over-enthusiastic deployment and use of deadly weapons, corruption, and sometimes even rape. The NYPD is also the police department that shows racist films in its academy and publishes creepy maps showing the locations of Muslim businesses and houses of worship. A rap-sheet this long would condemn most to life without parole; in New York City’s case, we seem to be the ones destined to never receive relief from the NYPD’s policing.

Yesterday, a petition signed by four hundred fifteen faculty members–”the first nationwide faculty response to the AP’s revelations of widespread NYPD surveillance on college campuses”–was sent to Mayor Bloomberg, calling for the resignation of Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly and Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne, in whose reign rights-abusing practices appear to have bloomed. The petition and the list of signatories is available online. Yesterday too, the Chronicle of Higher Education published an Op-Ed by Saskia Sassen and Jeanne Theoharis, which explains why this petition was necessary. Kelly’s response, thus far, to the furore over the NYPD’s malfeasance, has revealed deep ambivalence and confusion and, of course, Mayor Bloomberg’s defense of the surveillance program has been disappointing, especially for a man ostensibly committed to civil rights in other domains.

(On a side note: AP’s ‘revelations’ such as they are, only came about once it became clear that surveillance of Muslim students was not restricted to say, grubby public institutions like the City University of New York, but also extended to ‘prestigious’ Ivy-League campuses such as Penn and Yale. One reaction among CUNY faculty was, “Well if it takes surveillance of the Ivy League to get this to be noticed, then so be it.” But another reaction is a little less sanguine: Had this remained confined to the nation’s less-privileged pockets would it ever have been noticed or cared about?)

The NYPD, perhaps more than any other police force in the nation, does not so much see itself as a part of the community that it polices, as much as it sees itself set over, above, and against it. This aggressively, offensively, and destructively adversarial posture is what contributes to its continued abuses of city resident’s civil rights. Unless its leadership changes, unless it changes its training practices, indeed, unless it engages in a fundamental ‘overcoming’ of itself, it remains destined to be locked into a pattern of behavior that will continue to do damage, sometimes deadly, to the citizens that are controlled and regulated by it.

The first step in this institutional reform should be the resignations of Kelly and Browne.

Update: Alex Vitale, in comments, clarifies that AP’s response came earlier, and that it was the nation-wide faculty response that came later, in response to news of the surveillance taking place all over the North-East. Still, civil liberties violations get noticed more when they take place in pockets of privilege.

Random Searches on the New York Subways: Getting Used to the Stop-n-Frisk

New York City residents are, by now, used to the subway version of the stop-and-frisk, to the sight of policemen manning the turnstiles to the city subway, subjecting passengers to ‘random’ searches of their bags and belongings. The rules are quite simple: if you don’t subject yourselves to the search you don’t get to enter and ride. Many of the city’s residents, however, do not realize the option to refuse the search exists. (I have never looked closely enough to verify whether this option is made clear to the potential passenger; rather, the subway rider becomes aware of the impending search when a policeman menacingly waves you toward his partners with the irritatingly faux-polite “Sir, would you step this way?”)

Over the past few years, in the course of teaching the privacy portions of my Computer Ethics class at Brooklyn College, I became aware of a rather depressing fact when discussing the Fourth Amendment: not a single student in my classes was aware of the fact that they could decline a search and simply leave the subway station instead. When I informed them that on two separate occasions–once at 42nd Street station and once at Atlantic Avenue–I had said, “No thanks” and walked out–on the latter occasion, I walked up the stairs, crossed Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues and then entered the same station at the unmanned Hanson Place entrance–I was greeted with cries of disbelief: “Really?” “No way! You can do that?”

This little discussion is quite useful in enabling a segue into a discussion of the ludicrous rallying cry–If You’ve Got Nothing to Hide, You Shouldn’t Mind a Little Stop-n-Frisk Action–of the pro-search brigade. I ask my students whether concealment of a crime is the only reason that someone might give for refusing a search, and ask them to suggest situations where someone might quite reasonably decline a search in order to keep something entirely legal private. (Unsurprisingly, some of the examples involved pornography: one student suggested a closeted gay man going home with recently purchased gay porn; another student said he wouldn’t want his hetero-porn purchases to be visible to other passengers; others disliked the idea of police looking through their clothes; and some students, because of their own personal history of encounters with the police, simply disliked the idea of police, once again, subjecting them to an atmosphere of intimidation.) Many of my students quite like the sound of a great line I got from Marc Rotenberg: If I’ve Got Nothing to Hide, Then Why Do You Need to Search Me?

During this discussion, I also ask my students what they think is being achieved by these random searches in the subway system. As my example of entry and re-entry to the Atlantic Avenue station suggested, the system is easily co-opted (when I declined my search at the 42nd Street station, I walked eight blocks and entered the subway at 34th Street); moreover, someone actually planning to do harm to the city subways would not plan an operation that could preempted by a mere search at the turnstiles. The answer to this question emerges quite quickly: this system of searches does nothing to increase our security; it does however, ensure that the citizens of this city (and certainly those who visit it), increasingly get used to a world in which armed representatives of the state are present in public spaces, ready to inspect, regulate, and commandeer. Gradual conditioning like this can do wonders to ensure the steady, relentless erosion–one enabled by the acquiescence of the citizenry–of legally sanctioned and protected civil liberties. These searches are not tactics of protection; they are strategies of subversion.

Police Militarization – Contd.

Reader Dan Newberry, in the course of offering a thoughtful response to my recent post on the militarization of police says:

[T]hese names [like "interceptor"] are made up by the people who make and market the items…It is no surprise to anyone that companies which market to police forces routinely do so with names that suggest offense, attack, and so one….it is hard to reason that an Interceptor-logo emblazoned trike, rolling past a player at the golf course, would make that player… take a more aggressive swing when that logo rolls past. It is equally unlikely that riding in the Interceptor all day is going to make a good police suddenly want to wield the baton to solve a problem….Police forces…are by their very nature…paramilitary organizations. They recruit, they are organized by rank, they patrol, they arrest and detain, go on offensive missions to disrupt other organizations, on so on. They use and employ a language system that has been commensurate with that type of organizational structure….If one could prove that if the trike was called the “Sunflower” the police riding in it would adopt a brighter disposition toward their duties, or that calling it the Community Patrol Cart would make its occupants somewhat more blase about ticketing we would be all for renaming almost everything. Unfortunately it is difficult to follow…that the name of a vehicle will change the disposition of its routine occupant (and by extension, eventually the culture of policing).

The reason it is not a “surprise” that this nomenclature is part of a marketing strategy directed at the police is that, as is pointed out by Dan, police view themselves as a “paramilitary organization.” And it is that self-view that I suggest is problematic.

Importing such militarized language, has had, in my opinion, a reconfiguration of how police view their work and the community they service. I would suggest that thinking of the police as a paramilitary organization breeds an adversarial attitude that is conducive to the kind of aggressive behavior, which all too sadly is associated with policing (paramilitaries, for what it is worth, have a horrific human rights record when it comes to patrolling and controlling domestic populations). When viewed as a paramilitary force, police resemble nothing so much as an occupying force, perhaps a counter-insurgency force, dealing with a hostile population in a hostile territory. And we all know how beloved those forces are in the territories they seek to “control.” The problem isn’t that this language has a simple, direct, causal relationship with police behavior; the problem is that this sort of language is part of a certain packaging of police activity that causes police to reconceive themselves in a manner bound to create the problems I was complaining about.

In hostile territory: one kills or is killed; everyone is to be suspected; it is us-against-them. There is no community here, no fellow-citizens. That is the problem. The folks that make the trikes and market them to police in the manner they do, do so because they are directing their efforts to a particular culture, one bred in the academy and reinforced by daily operations and modes of interaction. (This culture then seeps down into security guards on campuses as well, who love pulling out their wireless radios and acting like a trench-bound sergeant calling in an airstrike when all they are asking for is a spare set of keys to open a chemistry lab.) A police “force” that thinks it is a basically a paramilitary organization is off to a bad start; as it continues to deploy the language associated with the military it is setting itself further down the road to an essentially adversarial, hostile relationship with its community. Thus, witness: the “thin blue line”; “it’s a jungle out there”; and so on. Buildings in which people live cease to be “homes;” they become “territory” to be controlled. It makes a difference to how the police approach a task, how they gear themselves up for it.

Words and descriptions find their applicability in networks of meanings that trigger particular associations. So, self-conception by the choice of language we use to describe ourselves does make a difference to our eventual activity. That is why we choose to tell particular stories about ourselves and that is why we insist people describe us in certain ways and not others. (Remember the old joke about the kid who worked at a gas station and told everyone he was a “petroleum transfer engineer”?)

There is plenty more to be said here, of course, and I thank Dan for having triggered this chain of thought.

Traffic “Interceptors” and the Militarization of Police

Yesterday, as I strolled down my neighborhood’s main street, I noticed two rather portly New York City police checking parked cars for traffic violations. I deliberately use the word “portly” to describe their appearance because I never cease to be amazed by how patently unfit for their duties our local guardians of law and order appear to be. (This unfitness, given the unceasing litany of corruption scandals associated with New York’s ‘Finest,’ clearly extends to more dimensions than just the physical.)

But of more immediate interest to me was what lay just ahead: the ubiquitous traffic police three-wheeled automobile in blue and white, marked with NYPD regalia, parked on the street, waiting to transport its riders to the next scene of parking misdemeanor. On its back it proudly and aggressively sported the title “Interceptor.”

“Interceptors” in military parlance can be used to refer to any vehicle that is used to, well, intercept, disrupt, and destroy enemy vehicles and forces making attacks on defended territory. It is most commonly used in military aviation to designate aircraft that attack other aircraft carrying out offensive bombing or raids on high-value targets. Those Spitfires shooting down German bombers during the Battle of Britain? They were interceptors. Aerial encounters in the old days took place between interceptors and aircraft designated to defend the bombers; that is why Spitfires and Me-109s tangled in the skies above England during that same battle. Interceptors versus Escorts, you see.

So, of course, it would make perfect sense to designate a traffic police automobile an “interceptor.” Because, in keeping with the constant militarization of everything associated with policing, we should think of the brave police as defending us against hostiles armed to the teeth, coming to hurt us. The police are operating in hostile territory, in an area where the slightest wrong move could cost them their lives. It’s kill or be killed in a war zone and an aggressive posture needs to be adopted, right down to the nomenclature associated with the vehicles they use.

Calling police vehicles “interceptors” would be amusingly juvenile and self-indulgent of the schoolboy fantasies that clearly still seem to animate the police, were it not for the fact that this sort of militarized language puts the police in precisely the wrong frame of mind, one that has cost the lives of many innocents over the years (especially in this great city of ours). The police are supposed to be policing “communities,” not war zones; the people they police are supposed to be their fellow community members, not armed hostiles.