The NYPD Needs a Culture Change

Kimani Gray

I’ve been fretting over the shooting of Kimani Gray in Brooklyn. I haven’t been able to go out to the vigils and rallies, but have been following the news via twitter and I’m troubled. A 16-year old boy was shot and killed by the NYPD. Official reports say he pointed a gun at the officers, while eyewitness accounts say there was no gun. Protests, while mostly peaceful, have turned violent at times. Young people, supported by activists, say they are responding not just to this incident, but to a widespread pattern of harassment, repression and brutality by the police perpetrated on youth of color. Some community leaders are critiquing “outside agitators” who they say are irresponsibly exploiting young people’s anger. Since I haven’t been out to the rallies in Brooklyn and I don’t know the full details of the Kimani Gray shooting yet, I will refrain from making judgments in this case.

Ed García Conde (right) with friends from BDC

What I will write about is what happened tonight in my South Bronx neighborhood. At 11:00 PM, I received a call from Mychal Johnson, a neighbor of mine and a member of Community Board 1, letting me know that a mutual friend of ours, Ed García Conde, had just been arrested. Ed is a well known community activist and author of the blog Welcome 2 Melrose. He asked if I could come over to the station since I was a member of the 40th Precinct Community Council. I got out of bed, dressed and walked across the street where I met Mychal, along with several staff and volunteers from the Bronx Documentary Center where the arrest occurred.

They filled me in on the details. The group, including the Center’s co-founders, was closing down the facility. Several volunteers were waiting outside, including two white women, a white man, and a black woman. One member of the group was carrying a broken beer bottle out to the trash and using a cup to keep the liquid from spilling. A patrol car pulled up and ordered the group against the wall and asked them to produce identification. One of the officers reached into the pocket of one of the volunteers to take his wallet. Ed, never one to keep his mouth shut, objected to the officer’s actions and pulled out his cell phone to record what was happening. A sergeant warned Ed to stop filming, to which Ed, who was standing 5 feet away, responded: “I know my rights.” At this point, the sergeant stormed towards Ed, grabbed his phone and threw him up against the wall of the documentary center hard enough to shake the glass. He then cuffed him and took him to the precinct. You can watch the video below: 

When I got to the precinct, we spoke briefly to the sergeant who was unrepentant about his actions, even as Mychal explained that these were community volunteers working hard to improve the neighborhood. “He’s lucky that he’s just getting out of here with a summons,” the sergeant said, “instead of being put through the system.” We went through the usual steps of calling Community Affairs, emailing the Deputy Inspector, and reminding the NYPD (again) that arresting pro-social community members is about one of the most counter-productive things they can do to promote public safety. After about an hour, Ed was released, and his summons explained to him by a nice and apologetic young officer who seemed embarrassed by the whole incident.

For a while this evening I was battling feelings of ambivalence about the Brooklyn protests. I’m conciliatory by nature and slightly uncomfortable with direct confrontation. I am suspicious of activists who seem hell-bent on provoking clashes with police, some of whom use the pain and anger of young people as fuel for their political agenda. As a Christian, I am compelled to seek shalom, a wholeness that includes justice and peace. Yet I cannot deny the core claim of the protestors: that the NYPD regularly and routinely treats people in communities of color as sub-human, and is given license to do so from the top with the justification that these aggressive tactics are necessary to suppress serious crime.

What I saw this evening confirmed to me again that the NYPD is in dire need of a policy and culture change from top to bottom. Nothing justified the behavior of the sergeant in this evening’s incident. It should have been crystal clear that the staff and volunteers of the Bronx Documentary Center were not in the least a threat to public safety. What Ed was guilty of was asserting his right to be treated with courtesy, professionalism and respect, which he did fully within the bounds of the law. When Ed, a Latino resident of the community refused to cower, the sergeant (also Latino) felt the need to teach him a lesson using coercion and force.

While waiting for Ed’s release, several members of the group expressed their disbelief that the police would behave this way. Others astutely pointed out that while this rarely happens to young white people, to hipsters, artists and gentrifiers, it happens every day over and over again to young men of color, who don’t have the social or media connections to tell their story in a way that compels people with power and privilege to listen.

In Flatbush, the mostly peaceful protests have included some isolated incidents of young people clashing violently with the police and vandalizing property, leading the Mayor and Police Commissioner to state first and foremost that they will have zero tolerance for violence and rioting.

Yet even those like Jumaane Williams, who are decrying the violence and calling for peace while fighting for police reform, are quoting Dr. King, who called rioting the language of the unheard. If you listen closely to young people, you will hear them saying the same things King spoke about 50 years ago:

“When you cut facilities, slash jobs, abuse power, discriminate, drive people into deeper poverty and shoot people dead whilst refusing to provide answers or justice, the people will rise up and express their anger and frustration if you refuse to hear their cries. A riot is the language of the unheard.” 

Protestor arrested during march and rally for Kimani Gray

Some are uncomfortable with the confrontational tactics of groups that film the police, march on precincts, and vent their rage on street corners. But until the NYPD learns to actually listen and respond to the cries of young people of color, these actions will – and must – continue. And hopefully, the voices of more and more people with privilege and institutional power will add to their cry, demanding that the police protect and serve all the people equally well.

Juvenile Justice Reform: Punishment? Paternalism? Or Partnership?

The landscape of juvenile justice is changing. Instead of building "supermax" juvenile prisons, we are now investing in community-based alternatives. Where we once saw "killer kids," we now see children in need of services.

This change, for which advocates on the margins fought vigorously for years, has now gained traction in the mainstream. Its implementation has been made possible by skyrocketing incarceration costs that threaten to cannibalize city and state budgets if not curtailed. It is far cheaper to spend $15,000 on evidence-based home services than $150,000 for a bed in a juvenile facility. 

It wasn't always this way. In the 1990s, criminologists terrified the nation with warnings of a coming juvenile crime wave. In 1996, John DiIulio, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, coined the term "Super-Predator" to describe a generation of young people, who born to crack-addicted mothers and raised on gangsta rap and violent video games, would soon wreak havoc on America.

“Based on all that we have witnessed, researched and heard from people who are close to the action, here is what we believe: America is now home to thickening ranks of juvenile ‘superpredators’ — radically impulsive, brutally remorseless youngsters, including ever more pre-teenage boys, who murder, assault, rape, rob, burglarize, deal deadly drugs, join gun-toting gangs and create serious communal disorders.” (Bennett, DiIulio, and Walters, 1996)

DiIluio’s dire warnings helped fuel the mad rush to criminalize children. Between 1992 and 1997, all but three states enacted laws to make their juvenile justice systems more punitive, allowing prosecutors to try youth as adults, and send them to prison for longer periods of time. The threat was not all young people, but Black and Latino youth from poor, urban communities, described euphemistically as “inner-city children.” The problem wasn’t just the young people, but the essential criminality of their families and communities. “At core,” DiIulio wrote, “the problem is that most inner-city children grow up surrounded by teenagers and adults who are themselves deviant, delinquent or criminal.”

Ironically, the march to incarcerate accelerated just as the unprecedented rise in violent juvenile crime was starting to decline. While juvenile homicides increased 110 percent between 1987 and 1993, they fell almost as rapidly by 68 percent between 1994 and 2003. Juvenile arrests for other violent crimes fell as well, and by 2003, the offending rate had returned to the levels of the early 1980s (Butts & Travis, 2002).

But the damage was already done. Youth prisons had been built. State laws had been changed to try ever more young people as adults. Police were stationed first in urban high schools, and then even middle schools. Black and Latino youth were looked at as a menace to society, a danger that had to be controlled.

We are starting to realize the error of our ways. As serious juvenile crime has continued to fall, and states have realized they cannot afford to incarcerate so many children, the pendulum has shifted away from punishment, back towards a rehabilitative response to youth delinquency. New research proves that therapeutic interventions are effective in preventing re-offending. A host of new programs has been developed, tested, replicated and packaged to help fix broken kids. Whereas incarceration was once a catchall response to the needs of “high-risk” youth, a veritable alphabet soup of off-the-shelf programs is now available to treat young people. Programs like multi-systemic therapy (MST), functional family therapy (FFT), aggression replacement therapy (ART), and multi-dimensional foster care treatment (MDFCT) have been taken to scale, reducing overreliance on incarceration, cutting prison spending, and keeping children safely at home.

The switch from a punishment-focused juvenile justice system to treatment-focused system is a welcome one. When it comes to holding youth accountable for their actions and developing children into pro-social adults, I happily choose counselors over correction officers, and professional treatment over prisons. Less incarceration and more services is certainly a good thing.

Yet as one who holds to the core conviction that all youth, families and communities are imbued with strengths, I can’t help but notice a disturbing strain of paternalism in many juvenile justice reform efforts. These approaches don’t view young people as essentially criminal, but they still assume that young people need to be “fixed.” Helping professionals are now seen as the answer to the problems inherent in poor communities. I fear that we are dismantling the prison industrial complex only to replace it with a new system that, while kindler and gentler, still holds to the notion that there is something fundamentally wrong with children, families and communities of color.

I believe there is another way to address what must seem to some an intractable problem. Yet this approach requires looking at young people, families, and their communities through a completely different lens. It requires policy makers to take off the punitive lens, that views young people as risks to be controlled. It requires practitioners to take off the paternalistic lens that views children, families and communities as essentially needy. It requires a new vision grounded in partnership. This strength-based approach looks at young people as assets to be developed, their families as irreplaceable, and the members of their communities as primary partners.

I often hear high-crime, low-income neighborhoods described as resource-deprived and lacking in services. Yet I find that these same communities are bursting with assets that can be marshaled to surround young people with the supports they need to thrive. These assets are found in the form of grassroots faith and neighborhood organizations that operate below the radar of government, academic, and philanthropic institutions. These assets are found in programs operating in the basements of housing projects and storefront churches. These assets are the fathers returning home from decades in prison, many of whom were once caught up in the crack game, and are now seeking to rebuild the same communities they once helped destroy. These assets are mothers who are healing themselves from the trauma of having their own children taken away, by helping other parents hold on to theirs. These assets are the young people themselves, who are exploding with intelligence, creativity, and leadership and have better ideas than any of us can imagine.

Even the criminologist who was once the nation’s foremost proponent of juvenile incarceration eventually changed his lens. John DiIulio underwent a conversion of sorts when he walked the streets of the neighborhoods he had once only written about. His eyes were opened when he met men and women – mostly in urban Black churches – who were working fervently, joyfully and effectively to keep young people out of jail. In his 1999 editorial for the Wall Street Journal, “Two Million Prisoners are Enough,” DiIulio publically repented of his incarceration-first approach and called for investing in community-based solutions to the problem of juvenile crime. “If I had known then what I know now,” DiIulio stated in a 2001 interview, “I would have shouted for the prevention of crime.”

We can fix the damage done by the era of mass incarceration. But we can’t do it if we continue to view young people, their families and their communities as essentially dangerous, needy, or broken. We must move forward in the spirit of partnership, one in which those who hold power give up the need for primacy, authority and control. This means building the capacity of communities to develop strategies to respond to their challenges. It means listening to young people. It means engaging their families. It means investing in grassroots faith and neighborhood organizations that are already doing the work on shoestring budgets. Partnership means trusting those who were once thought to be “the problem” to rebuild communities decimated by America’s addiction to incarceration.