COPS The Rise of Crime, Disorder and Authoritarian Policing
Amar, Paul E. & Schneider, Cathy
Last year, New York City's famous former mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, a proponent of tough punishments for minor infractions and hardline policing without civilian oversight-the zerotolerance...
...7. Amnesty International, Police Brutality and Excessive Force in the New York City Police Department (Washington: Amnesty International, 1996...
...Such camigns are most successful when they play on public *ars of particular target populations...
...This trend cuts across the categorical divide between democratic and authoritarian regimes...
...The Rise of Authoritarian Policing 1. Robert Jervis, System Effects: Complexity in Political and Social Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997...
...Stephen Braun and Judy Pasternak, "A Nation with Peril on its Mind," Los Angeles Times, February 19, 1994...
...In New York, a crack scare was used to terrify New Yorkers, as Robert Stutman, the former director of the DEA's New York office observed with satisfaction: As far as the New York media was concerned, crack was the hottest combat reporting story to come along since the end of the Vietnam war...
...New York Police Department statis- associated with foreign meddling (Brazil) or where a tics show a 34.8% increase in civilians shot dead in left party is assured of victory (Quebec), the political 1994, as compared to 1993-from 23 to 31-and the language of paranoia and revenge has begun to be new rate did not decline until 1997...
...Governments have suspended limits on the coercive powers of police, the actions of parastatal vigilantes and the authority of state security forces...
...For many conservatives, crime-from street crime to drug traffic and terrorism-can be traced to cultural (i.e...
...tings leftist politicians This latter figure rose from 54 in 1993, to 60 in 1994, have initiated innovato 74 in 1996...
...Increased coverage and sensationalization of crime, along with a linkage implied or portrayed between crime and race or ethnicity, intensify the boundaries drawn between majority and minority communities...
...From this )int of view, the political essence of new policg/security practices lies in the fact that they represent a common set of objectives and interests instrumental to maintaining elite control...
...aimed at networks of -nr1nt...
...Nevertheless, this perspective th displaces debates around security and policing onto cr actions of the desperate poor, or to cultural clashes or economic inequalities...
...in Conservatives identify these kinds of criminal ri deviancies with the cultures of particular marginal- pr ized groups in urban zones that bear identifiable in racial-ethnic or social profiles...
...Finally we ask what dynamics encourage police impunity and the tendency to objectify and brutalize certain spaces, peoples and forms of citizenship, and what dynamics can be leveraged to mobilize change, reduce impunity and democratize the sphere of policing, security and justice...
...Media stories about crime flooded airwaves, and blacks were shown as perpetrators proportionally three or four times more often than whites...
...Urban elites are trying to et of manage the contradictions of a highly Sing volatile neoliberal global order that constantly triggers crises, rendering elite legitimacy tenuous at best...
...As political scientist Robert Jervis puts it, "an issue is considered newsworthy to the extent that it is being treated by the media, and they and politicians take their cues from each other...
...3. Robert Stutman, Dead on Delivery: Inside the Drug Wars, Straight from the Street (Boston: Little Brown, 1992...
...The media echoes the discourse of politicians 14 NM2LA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 14 NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICASCRIME, DISORDER AND POLICING during election campaigns, while increased media coverage of an issue increases pressures on politicians to provide solutions...
...and violence is no doubt also shaped by the legacies of slavery, inquisition, colonialism, machismo, paternalism and foreign intervention in Latin America and the Caribbean...
...Yet even leftist politiBoston...
...than the police and maintain the safest neighborhoods...
...They argue that authoritarian security practices are not iven necessarily by the dynamics of globalization, igration or neoliberalism, but that new urban policg tactics-and the transnationally circulating secuty paradigms in which they are embedded-are the oducts of specific arrangements of state and local stitutions, embedded in contemporary international authoritarian political trends that are fostered or ken up by those who control urban areas...
...Current prevailing understandings of the origins of crime and violence have not been able to grapple with the paradoxes of policing and security...
...This reassessment of the origins and effects of violence, police practices and security agendas by academics, social movements and state actors in Latin America reminds us that zero-tolerance authoritarian modes of policing are not the only policy choices available...
...In this perspective, fe more sympathy is granted to the marginalized than in re the culturalist view...
...5 Giuliani, and his new police chief William J. Bratton, played on the public's fears when they introduced what became known as the zero-tolerance approach to crime in 1994...
...Why would an advocate of unsupervised policing with no civilian review be hired to advise a leftist mayor in a city where the police are known to be responsible for half the crime...
...Ungar San Diego and Boston, which pursued problem-solv- notes that in La Paz the police tortured members of ing and community policing strategies, falling 76.4% the Permanent Assembly of Human Rights, while in Caracas 40% of civilians who resisted police were murdered...
...The trend toward authoritarian security and policing is all the more perplexing for the following reasons...
...Second, certain longstanding activities have only recently been defined as criminal...
...This attitude can slip back into the romantic but racist notion that the poor are thus "naturally" criminals/rebels...
...She is a member of NACLA's editorial board, Her publications include Shantytown Protest in Pinochet's Chile, Temple University Press, 1995...
...It sees geopolitics, urban is multiculturalism, issues of migration and urban race- d ethnic relations as symptoms of a "clash of civiliza- st tions...
...3 Nationally, fear of crime jumped from an average of around 7% in June 1993 to 52% in August 1994.4 In New York 84% of those surveyed in 1994 believed crime rates had risen throughout the year, when in fact they had fallen...
...In seta sharp rise in the number of individuals killed by tings where the militaristic right has self destructed police officers' firearms discharges, or while in (Argentina), where authoritarian parties have become police custody...
...Why would an advocate of controlling crime by arresting poor vagrants be hired to advise a city where organized violence emerges from elite cartels and state corruption rackets...
...Many of the articles in this report strive to develop an alternative perspective on the origins of crime and violence...
...In Caracas, Mark Ungar reports, homicides doubled between 1998 and 2000, and rose by another 65% between 2001 and 2002...
...Police brutality, vigilante thuggery and coercive security practices in some ways reflect the legacies of military dictatorships that ravaged Latin American civil society from the 1960s through the 1980s...
...In La Paz, Caracas, Lima and Buenos Aires violent clashes between unarmed protesters and police in San Diego, 70.6% in New York and 69.3% in have led to hundreds of deaths...
...Among the cases reviewed by Amnesty tive police reforms International, "nearly all of the victims in the cases of deaths in custody (including shootings)...were members of racial minorities...
...fear, reinforcing elite power and displacing responsiRudolph Giuliani's zero-tolerance approach to crime bility despite the tremendous social cost...
...Even working classes or youth populations m that are not racially marked can-and do-become C targeted as behavioral menaces in this framework...
...The origin of repressive practices has shifted from the operation of military-bureaucratic regimes to a fractured and diverse set of transnationally articulated urban police forces, unaccountable state-security services, and illegal arms dealers and protection rackets...
...Political convergence on a hard-line approach to crime puts pressure on police to show high rates of arrest, accomplished by targeting weak, negatively constructed populations...
...It will examine current regional tendencies in police brutality, militarization and impunity, and attempt to explain how and why these local practices of authoritarian security have come to cross borders, take advantage of crises, make new allies and become a dominant hemispheric trend...
...By 1998 the number of brutality complaints was triple that of 1988.6 Damages paid by the city to alleged victims of police misconduct rose from $7 million in 1988 to more than $24 million in 1994, to $97 million between 1994 and 1997.7 Once again, more than three-fourths of the complaints were lodged by African American or Latino victims against white police officers...
...6. Human Rights Watch, Shielded From Justice: Police Brutality and Accountability in the United States (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1998...
...He is also co-organizer of "Police Planet: Authoritarian Security Trends and Democratic Alternatives," an international conference being held in Rio in March 2004...
...Public officials take their cue from the media, targeting populations that have a negative image in the public mind...
...These essays suggest that increasingly hard-line policing and security tactics are not reflex responses to the legitimacy of state-affirmed faith...
...Punitive policing has set the tone for social control...
...In Jamaica, John Rapley Crime wars, aside from the high social cost, observes, citizens have concluded that "drug dons" do a generate fear, reinforce elite power and displace better job of law enforcement responsibility...
...Paul Amar is visiting professor of political science and Co-Director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the Federal University Fluminense in Rio de Janeiro...
...The media, in turn, echo political discourse...
...4. Katherine Beckett, Making Crime Pay: Law and Order in Contemporary American Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997...
...From this point of view, the increase in brutal policing and security tactics represent necessary responses to threats posed to the cultural norms of wage labor, sobriety and free-market capitalism, as well as to the values of secularism, individualism, the sanctity of private property and/or the Vol XXXVII, No 2 SPTEMBERIOCTOBER 2003 13 Vol XXXVII, No 2 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2003 13CRIME, DISORDER AND POLICING critiques of neoliberal economic policy, leaving the impression that crime and police vioel nce are unavoidable reflections of inequality and will "naturally" only get worse until the entire socioeconomic order is transformed...
...A symbiotic lationship then develops between politicians and e media and becomes a catalyst for contrived ises...
...The political scramble to avoid being outflanked on the crime issue then leads to a drift, or rush, to adopt right-wing policies as the major political actors try to outdo one another in their toughness, according to the narrow terms of this new populist, paternalist, punitive agenda...
...Although it was not the principal cause of New York's drop in crime in the 1990s, Giuliani's program, which assured impunity for the police and promised harsh punishment for the urban homeless, minor drug users, minorities and youth, has become a model of urban policing being emulated around the world...
...so Meanwhile, for much of the left, crime and vio- m lence are typically attributed to economic inequality eN or marginalization...
...But new trends, fears and conflicts have reanimated these past forms of Media ar stimulated fe clear solution the need to escalate repre reduce "tol zer repression in very new ways...
...In Mexico and the role of zero tolerance policies in reducing New Brazil the police often work hand in hand with orgaYork City crime rates was far from certain...
...We further ask how the recent patterns of abuse and brutality have been transferred among distant cities and countries...
...Third, many criminologists have demonstrated that as crime wars intensify and civilian controls are reduced, police become more likely to become corrupted, to participate in crimes rather than prend elite- vent them...
...This mix of old forms and new frameworks of corrupt policing, biased protection and social vengeance constitute a kind of dispersed multi-centered dictatorship, a matrix of "authoritarian security" that threatens to undermine the fabric of emerging democracies...
...it is impleented by control groups or regimes whose mandate weak, fractured and unreconciled with other ascenant norms of democratization, human rights rengthening and the inauguration of comprehensive multilateral institutions of justice...
...These threats are dr seen as fused with the phenomena of drug traffick- m ing, political violence and/or deviant desire...
...But in Mexico City, this was particularly strange...
...Within a year the media began to celebrate New York City's falling crime rates, ignoring the fact that they had been falling for three years, and resulting more from Dinkins' community, technological, and institutional approach that fostered greater oversight of and accountability for the police, rather than Giuliani's overtly racial "street gang" approach to policing, or his repressive "broken windows" campaign that collectively criminalized entire communimodel...
...constantly Finally hard-line urban security politics are often counter- ession and to productive, inflaming socioerance" to economic divisions, creating hostility between citizens and 0. police, infusing public spheres and public spaces with violence and fear, foreclosing political options and modes of participation and undermining those officials-judges, prosecutors, congress/council members, public defenders-who are supposed to control policing policy, monitor security practice, and provide legitimacy and stability to governance...
...Unemployment, commercial ri: globalization, fiscal austerity, privatization and the coerced degradation of labor are seen as leaving the cr poor vulnerable to the temptations of drug traffick- di ing, the ideologies of radical terrorists and the machi- p, nations of corrupt policemen...
...Politicians and government officials use fear of ime to win elections, increase government expentures and discredit political opposition...
...In this context, this report will examine the intensification of human rights abuses by law enforcement and security forces in the Americas...
...Last year, New York City's famous former mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, a proponent of tough punishments for minor infractions and hardline policing without civilian oversight-the zerotolerance approach to law enforcement--was invited by Mexico City's progressive mayor, Andr6s Manuel L6pez Obrador, to consult with the city government about its efforts to bring crime under control...
...Giuliani's law-and-order campaign coincided with President Clinton's Omnibus Crime Bill, announced in his State of the Union address and debated in Congress, as well as several sensational murders nationwide...
...Giuliani's zero-tolerance approach has been A similar intensification of human rights abuses by wIIU UI0;JL 111 kVII JI cLlU--L` J Lv Y- aW I .y -_ 1 -,- y increase in the number of civilians injured from offi- zenship...
...This change has artificially inflated official crime rates attributed to marginal populations, while prosecution of whitecollar crimes or elites involved in corruption or violence remains very low across the hemisphere...
...I Crime panics increase support for politicians who favor repressive legislation...
...Politicians While it is, at best, debatable whether Giuliani can can then reassure the same public they have frightbe credited with the drop in New York's crime rate, ened, thus appearing extraordinarily capable...
...In this context, we ask why authoritarian security has become so global, appropriating specific cultures, ideologies and histories in order to legitimize and justify a roughly uniform type of hegemony...
...Crime rates also fell in San Antonio, cians continue to call for zero-tolerance policing...
...one thing is certain: Zero tolerance did coincide with There is some cause for optimism, however...
...psychological or behavioral) rejection of hegemonic norms, modern self-discipline and/or family values...
...In cities as diverse as Kingston, Jamaica and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, many citizens have willingly ceded law enforcement authority to armed gangs who have shown they can provide a semblance of law and order-or its bloody stand-in, revenge...
...Giuliani's arrival in Mexico City draws attention to a bewildering paradox of Cathy Schneider is associate professor of international studies at American University and director of the Americas program in Comparative and Regional Studies...
...Yet, mented throughout the hemisphere...
...Faced with these paradoxes, there are two broad categories of explanations-one favored by conservatives and one by leftists-both of which tie the rise of authoritarian policing to previous increases of the crime rate...
...mistaken origins and misguided solutions-a paradox that guides this NACLA Report on Crime, Disorder and Authoritarian Policing...
...Houston and even in Los Angeles, a city plagued by Crime wars can be quite successful in generating scandals, low morale and a drop in arrest rates...
...New York City also experienced a sharp rise in police brutality complaints and lawsuits during this period...
...In these setcers' firearms discharged during the same period...
...And in the postold War, free-market era, very few regimes of ,cial control groups of any type seem to have a firm andate for intervening in society, except through rer-escalating projects of punishment and militazed criminalization...
...5. CBS NewslNew York Times, New York City Mayoral Election Exit Polls, November 1993...
...What disdid, however, lead to soaring arrest rates among tinguishes crime and drug wars is their ability to creracial minorities, immigrants, youth, and the home- ate a generalized anxiety which has neither less, accused of nonviolent and victimless crimes...
...In New York City, for instance, prosecutor Rudolph Giuliani-Mayor L6pez Obrador's recent guest in Mexico City-used the crime scare to attack his 1993 election opponent, liberal black incumbent mayor David Dinkins, as being soft on crime despite the fact that crime and homicide rates had radically declined as Dinkins implemented community, organizational, technological and civilian controls on the police during his last two years in office, an achievement which Giuliani later took credit for, and misidentified as a victory for his " rt, iLiaI...
...nn m cI,, ut v I, 1 "1,.y 16 NAULA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS erroneously evaluated and treated as a model, imi- law enforcement and security forces has been docutated in and imported by cities around the world...
...In Mexico City, violent crime rates have stabilized at unconscionably high rates after rising nearly four-fold over the previous two decades Alongside this rise in crime-and with accelerating intensity since the violent events of September 11, 2001-punitive policing agendas and hard-line security practices have come to define the role of local government in cities across the Americas...
...As crime control becomes "militarized," police ars offer no are more likely to become S, other than involved in drug smuggling, gun running and homicides...
...So we end up, analytically, back where we started...
...In Sdo Paulo, in the 1990s over one 1991 and 1998, crime fell at equal rates in cities like quarter of murders were committed by police...
...Torture, ' 1 2NALA RPORTON TE ARNICA NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 12CRIME, DISORDER AND POLICING militarized policing, lethal force, detention without trial and denial of citizenship to criminalized immigrant populations have increasingly been deemed necessary, or have become mainstream policy options even in long established democracies...
...tU crime rates dropped...
...Here security policy is focused on prevention rather than punishment, with the goal of building security through investment in human capital, human rights and the infrastructure of equality...
...This conservative at perspective is terrified by the prospect of contact ta with these criminalized populations in urban space p and the public sphere, and sees intermingling, inte- in New policing practices represent a s objectives instrumental to maintair elite control of urban areas...
...Over the same challenged by a sober and hopeful alternative period, the figures show a 53.3% increase in civilians approach to crime, couched in the language of laundering, arms trafficking and police racketeering, not individual minority youth or neighborhoods...
...2 The combined effect of political campaigns and media saturation led to a national crime panic...
...Between nized crime...
...Violent crime is, indeed, a serious problem in Mexico City and throughout the Americas...
...The idea, based on George Kelling and James Q. Wilson's "broken window" theory, was that if one attacked crimes of lesser seriousness, one could prevent crimes of greater significance from occurring...
...Maybe this is why progressives in Mexico City can be seduced by authoritarian policing remedies such as those proposed by Giuliani...
...One careful investigation found that the amount of stories in which blacks appeared as criminals increased 23% between 17U aU 1nn7 A i aI.t_1 l Vol XXXVII, No 2 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2003 15 0 5 an , w e actua Vol XXXVII, No 2 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2003 15 = 1=1 I ICRIME, DISORDER AND POLICING ties...
...First, public fears of crime are often unrelated to actual rates of crime, and soar after the politicians declare a crime war, indicating that political, journalistic and police agendas-not real crime rates-produce fear and set the terms of law enforcement...
...In practice, this meant greater resources allocated to the arrest and imprisonment of those accused of minor crimes, such as jumping subway turnstiles, or victimless crimes such as prostitution and drug use, rather than to those of greater significance like murder or rape...
...measurable effects nor clear solutions...
...2. Robert M. Entman and Andrew Rojecki, The Black Image in the White Mind: Media and Race in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000...
...gration, and immigration as forms of violence and as m menaces to be secured...
Vol. 37 • September 2003 • No. 2
