Dr. Haberfeld's last complaint, if accurate, represents a major advance among NYC politicians.
"Nobody talks about the responsibility of the politicians to explain to the community why quality-of-life enforcement is necessary."
Politicians used to rush to "explain" that we must target the most minor offenses of poor Blacks and Latinos and humiliate male Blacks and Latinos hundreds of thousands of times every year in "stop and frisk" confrontations in NYC. This was supposedly "necessary" to prevent a (mythical) rapidly increasing epidemic of violent crime by young, predominately minority "superpredators" who were deliberately dehumanized as "feral" by inventors of this "moral panic" such as James Q. Wilson (one of the co-developers of "broken windows"). These claims ignored the actual epidemics of crimes of the Wall Street elites (the true "superpredators") that devastated the Nation. The phrase "criminal justice system" is an oxymoron when we allocate our resources in a manner that is inherently unjust and certain to fail against the elite offenders who cause incomparably greater financial losses and maim and kill more people than do blue collar criminals.
I am not aware of Dr. Haberfeld ever upbraiding the NYPD or Attorney General Holder for failing "to explain to the community why quality-of-life enforcement is necessary" on Wall Street. If she has done so I hope she will contact me and I will pass on to my readers her efforts to explain that necessity.
American elected officials are becoming increasingly aware that the drug war is insane and causes terrible injury to our Nation and catastrophic harm to several other nations. It is hard to find a public official who will now defend the racist policies we followed in punishing crack cocaine far more severely than powder. Sadly, as recently as 2010, the Fraternal Order of Police disgraced itself by attacking legislation that simply reduced the 100:1 disparity.
Dr. Haberfeld was one of the important advisors in the DEA's failed drug wars. I stress that the DEA's failure was inevitable and not the product of Dr. Haberfeld's advice. The only way to "win" the drug war was not to engage in it. Given the 9/11 attacks and her background as an Israeli intelligence specialist, Dr. Haberfeld now works largely in the anti-terrorism field.
Criminologists debate whether "quality-of-life enforcement is necessary" or disastrous in the blue-collar crime context. Criminologists generally do not agree that research has demonstrated any such "necess[ity]." Criminologists increasingly recognize the extreme costs inflicted on society of applying the racialized and class-driven counter-prioritization of "broken windows" strategy in the manner used by the NYPD.
Ironically, the "broken windows" strategy worked far better in the context of elite white-collar, e.g., in our response to the control fraud epidemic that drove the savings and loan debacle and our crackdowns on junk bond and liar's loan frauds. "Broken windows" strategies against elite white-collar crimes have far fewer drawbacks than they do in the blue-collar sphere. Conservative proponents of "broken windows" strategies against blue collar crime, however, rarely mention elite white collar crime. Sadly, Sutherland's observations about the unwillingness of elites to take elite white-collar crimes seriously and the resultant enormous cost of such crimes remains largely true 75 years later.
The "broken windows" strategy against blue collar crime and the related strategies that have made it inevitable that criminal justice enforcement will be unjust and will fail against elite white-collar criminals also makes it inevitable that large numbers of Blacks and Latinos and the police will be largely unable to understand each other and work together. The frames of the police and large numbers of Blacks and Latinos are not simply different, but inherently contradictory under these police strategies.
Even if we assume that "politicians" actually had (and accepted) a "responsibility" "to explain to the community why quality-of-life enforcement is necessary" the politicians' efforts would fail. Dr. Haberfeld does not seem to understand that she is demanding that Black and Latinos communities accept the NYPD's policies, and their framing of the issues, as valid. Note that she uses the world "community" rather than "communities." Why would Blacks and Latinos ever agree that a system in which 80% of the "stop and frisk" humiliations are inflicted on their children constituted "criminal justice?" Why would Blacks ever agree that the 100:1 crack/powder cocaine disparity was "criminal justice?" Whey would Blacks and Latinos ever agree that a drug prosecution effort that disproportionately targeted their children for arrest for drugs represented "criminal justice?" Why would Blacks and Latinos ever agree that "quality-of-life enforcement is necessary" for poor minority communities while Wall Street elites grow wealthy and devastate our Nation, particularly Black and Latino communities, with impunity? Why would Blacks and Latinos ever agree that ending the rule of law for banksters represents "criminal justice?"
What does "quality-of-life enforcement" actually mean? When the NYPD, overwhelmingly, humiliated Blacks and Latinos an average of 1,500 times daily through "stop and frisk" encounters, what happened to the quality of their life? What happened to the quality of life of all the Blacks and Latinos who witnessed those humiliations? What happens to the quality of life of Blacks and Latinos when their kids are far more likely to be arrested for drug crimes than white kids with the same incidence of drug use? What happens when their kids spend far longer in prison because they use crack while the white kids use powder cocaine? What happens to the quality of life of the Blacks and Latinos targeted by predatory lenders when the lenders' CEOs' crimes go unpunished?
How many Blacks and Latinos must we incarcerate and even kill for trivial offenses in order to optimally improve the "quality of life" of Blacks and Latinos? Why does spending the City's scarce dollars in this strategy of repression improve the "quality of life" in Black and Latino communities more than using those dollars to create jobs?
Who seriously believes that the failed drug war, net, adds to the "quality of life" in the City? Who thinks it adds to the "quality of life" in cities throughout Mexico and Colombia?
The Black and Latino communities have heard, ad nauseum, "politicians" "explain" why "quality-of-life enforcement" is supposedly "necessary" in their communities. They have heard the thunderous silence of the proponents of this claim -- the failure to even attempt to "explain" why "quality-of-life enforcement" is not necessary on Wall Street. They do not accept the validity of the explanations and they know full well why the NYPD refuses to even try to enforce the rule of law on Wall Street.
It is time for the NYPD to listen to explanations from the Black and Latino communities about the reality of the NYPD's criminal injustice system. The Black and Latino communities would love a NYPD that made the reduction of serious blue collar and white collar crimes in the City its top priorities. If the NYPD adopts a strategy that does not require the Black and Latino communities to accept the NYPD's current (false) framing that defines their communities as the City's problem and Wall Street as the City's paragon, then the police and the Black and Latino communities' framing of the issues will no longer be inherently contradictory. Cooperation and mutual respect in struggling against the most serious crimes becomes a realistic possibility if the NYPD is willing to evolve and embrace the equal application of the rule of law to everyone in the City.
Criminology can help. The mother of all serious crime "hot spots" in NYC can easily be mapped using Geographical Information System (GIS) software. The system would generate nice tight crimson circles around the C-Suites of the twenty largest Wall Street banks and bank holding companies.
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