Zero Tolerance: Quality of Life and the New Police Brutality in New York City

by Andrea Mcardle, Tanya Erzen

Overview

Amadou Diallo, Abner Louima, Anthony Baez, Patrick Dorismond. New York City has been rocked in recent years by the fate of these four men at the hands of the police. But police brutality in New York City is a multi-dimensional phenomenon that refers not only to the hyperviolent response of white male police officers as in these cases, but to an entire set of practices that target homeless people, vendors, and sexual minorities.
The complexity of the problem requires a commensurate response, which Zero Tolerance fulfills with a range of scholarship and activism. Offering perspectives from law and society, women's studies, urban and cultural studies, labor history, and the visual arts, the essays assembled here complement, and provide a counterpoint, to the work of police scholars on this subject.
Framed as both a response and a challenge to official claims that intensified law enforcement has produced New York City's declining crime rates, Zero Tolerance instead posits a definition of police brutality more encompassing than the use of excessive physical force. Further, it develops the connections between the most visible and familiar forms of police brutality that have sparked a new era of grassroots community activism, and the day-to-day violence that accompanies the city's campaign to police the "quality of life."
Contributors include: Heather Barr, Paul G. Chevigny, Derrick Bell, Tanya Erzen, Dayo F. Gore, Amy S. Green, Paul Hoffman, Andrew Hsiao, Tamara Jones, Joo-Hyun Kang, Andrea McArdle, Bradley McCallum, Andrew Ross, Eric Tang, Jacqueline Tarry, Sasha Torres, and Jennifer R. Wynn.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814756324
Publisher:	New York University Press
Publication date:	03/01/2001
Series:	Fast Track Bks.
Pages:	316
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Andrea McArdle is a teacher in, and Faculty coordinator for, the Lawyering Program at New York UniversitySchool of Law.

Tanya Erzen has written for The Nation and Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. They are both doctoral candidates in the American Studies Program at New York University.

Table of Contents

	Foreword	vii
	Acknowledgments	xiv
	Introduction	1
I	Policing the Quality of Life
1	Turnstile Jumpers and Broken Windows: Policing Disorder in New York City	19
2	Policing Madness: People with Mental Illness and the NYPD	50
3	Giuliani Time: Urban Policing and Brooklyn South	85
II	The Police
4	Can Zero Tolerance Last? Voices from inside the Precinct	107
5	girlz in blue: Women Policing Violence in the NYPD	127
6	No Justice, No Peace	147
III	Activism
7	Mothers of Invention: The Families of Police-Brutality Victims and the Movement They've Built	179
8	International Human Rights Law and Police Reform	196
9	Police Brutality in the New Chinatown	221
10	An Interview with Derrick Bell: Reflections on Race, Crime, and Legal Activism	243
11	Organizing at the Intersections: A Roundtable Discussion of Police Brutality through the Lens of Race, Class, and Sexual Identities	251
	Bearing Witness	271
	Areas A, B, and C: An Afterwood	282
	Contributors	289
	Index	293