How the Rockefeller Laws Hit the Streets: Drug Policing and the Politics of State Competence in New York City, 1973–1989

Abstract

Recent studies have shown that the punitive drug laws enacted in the mid-1970s led to a sharp increase in incarceration only in the mid-1980s, when city police departments started policing street-level drug markets much more intensively. The case study of New York City in the wake of the Rockefeller Drug Laws of 1973 presents an explanation. Only when new policing ideas, popular dissatisfaction with street crime, and the revival of the city's fiscal capacity coalesced as part of a larger project to rebuild urban governance in the aftermath of the fiscal crisis of the 1970s did New York turn toward street-level drug enforcement. An examination of the political history of street-level drug enforcement offers a better understanding of the history of New York's war on drugs, as well as a new chronology of the political dynamics of state rebuilding in the 1980s.

In May 1973, “with panoply and fanfare and some caustic words for his critics,” New York State Governor Nelson Rockefeller signed into law the nation's most punitive drug laws.¹ Intended to remove ostensibly incorrigible “pushers” from the state's communities, the legislation established severe penalties for the sale and possession of narcotics and other drugs, imposing mandatory life terms with the chance of parole; a concurrent measure set new mandatory minimums for second felony offenders.² Critics and impartial analysts alike predicted that New York State's prisons would overflow. New York City Mayor John Lindsay, the Rockefeller laws’ most prominent opponent, predicted that the state's prison population would grow by at least 50 percent in the first year alone.³ Prosecutors and corrections officials girded themselves for a crush of new felony cases and prison commitments.⁴

Yet in the immediate aftermath of the Rockefeller laws’ enactment, drug-related incarceration did not grow much at all in New York State. For several years, drug felony sentences as a share of total state prison commitments remained roughly what they had been before the Rockefeller laws.⁵ Then, after 1975, the share of New York's prison population incarcerated for drug offenses actually declined sharply. As late as 1983, a full decade after Rockefeller had signed the most punitive drug legislation in American history, the percentage of New York State prison inmates incarcerated for drug violations was lower than it had been in the early 1960s, during the heyday of what historians have termed the treatment era.⁶

As David Weiman and Christopher Weiss have shown, the punitive turn of the late 1960s and early 1970s yielded a major increase in drug-related incarceration in New York only in the mid-1980s, as a consequence of sharp changes in policing practices in New York City, where nearly 80 percent of felony drug arrests during this period occurred. After policing street-level drug markets sporadically through much of the 1970s, the New York Police Department (NYPD) launched a concerted campaign against them; the resulting felony arrests sent the proportion of New York State inmates incarcerated for drug offenses soaring—from under 10 percent at the start of the 1980s to nearly 35 percent at the end.⁷ This pattern was hardly unique to New York—in Chicago, for instance, drug arrests as a share of all arrests fell steadily from 1976 to 1982 before rising sharply in the mid-1980s.⁸ To note, this is not to diminish the immediate political impact of the punitive laws of the 1970s, much less their repercussions for the people charged under them. But it is to note that the impact of the laws emerged most heavily only once the NYPD and other police departments turned them into an engine of mass incarceration. And it is to suggest that the rich literature on this crucial episode in America's war on drugs still lacks a critical chapter.⁹

The Rockefeller laws did not immediately produce much higher rates of incarceration, as Weiman and Weiss detail, because until the early 1980s, the New York Police Department consciously chose not to enforce them at the street level, effectively defying the intent of state law and the national war on drugs. To understand why the Rockefeller laws finally did contribute to soaring rates of incarceration, we need to examine the local politics of enforcement with respect to informal economies—the question of why politicians and state officials tolerated violations of the law at some moments (and in some spaces) but not at others.¹⁰ Specifically, we need to determine why the NYPD started intensively policing street-level drug markets in the mid-1980s after consciously choosing not to do so for more than a decade.

This question presents a puzzle because none of the most likely explanations, by themselves, can make sense of precisely when New York turned toward street-level enforcement. Popular dissatisfaction with street crime played an important role in the NYPD's decision to start policing street-level drug markets. But crime rates, though still high by historical standards, had actually been falling for several years when the NYPD launched its first major enforcement initiative. The federal War on Drugs provided resources and incentivized local officials to pursue local drug wars through grants and (later) changes in civil forfeiture laws. But such inducements had failed to sway the NYPD from its nonenforcement policy for over a decade, and when local officials did launch local campaigns in the mid-1980s, they envisioned them as a response to federal inaction. The rise of “proactive,” “order maintenance,” and “problem-oriented” policing paradigms in the mid-to-late 1970s (recast as “broken windows” policing in the early 1980s) provided an intellectual rationale for street-level enforcement.¹¹ Yet NYPD officials did not envision street-level drug policing as part of a broader strategic crime-control plan; they launched their campaigns with little advance strategic planning, generally marshalling academic arguments after the fact. Edward Koch's ascent to the mayoralty in 1978 brought to power a conservative, tough-on-crime coalition.¹² But Koch placed little priority on street-level policing in his first term, and by the mid-1980s his position on drug policing differed little from his progressive challengers—who often critiqued him for not doing more. New York's economic and fiscal recovery in the mid-1980s removed a key constraint that had prevented the NYPD from policing more actively in the 1970s, but it hardly contradicted the other considerations that had guided the NYPD's policy of nonenforcement, and of course there existed many other competing claims on these newly available resources. The proliferation of crack markets in the city helped to lock in the NYPD's turn toward street-level enforcement. But crack became a major concern to the NYPD only in the spring of 1986, more than two years after the department's turn toward street-level drug policing. Nor was the turn to street-level drug policing as a whole a straightforward effort at gentrification, or a simple response to the political demands of gentrifiers—though its logic as a governing strategy meant that it became entangled with gentrification in specific places, particularly the East Village and the Lower East Side.

The developing literature on urban policing in the 1980s suggests that, while local political actors everywhere were responding to broad structural contexts of disinvestment, concentrated poverty, and dwindling federal support, their choices were also driven by distinctive local political and institutional dynamics. In Chicago and Los Angeles, as in New York, street-level drug arrests rose sharply in the early-to-mid-1980s, in the years before the proliferation of crack cocaine.¹³ Chicago's turn toward street-level enforcement was shaped by the progressive mayor Harold Washington's battles with the city council and the Chicago Police Department (CPD) and by rising attention to youth violence, which many politicians and the press associated with gangs; in that context, Washington and the CPD began to “target drug use and sales as a proxy for gang activity.”¹⁴ In Los Angeles, too, the LAPD expanded the local war on drugs as part of a mid-1980s effort to attack street gangs; local factors such as the arrival of the 1984 Summer Olympics and Mayor Tom Bradley's gubernatorial ambitions also contributed.¹⁵

New York City's shift toward street-level drug policing occurred only when new policing ideas, popular dissatisfaction with street crime, and the revival of the city's fiscal capacity coalesced as part of a larger project to rebuild urban governance in the aftermath of the fiscal crisis of the 1970s. New York's local war on drugs unfolded in the context of the political imperatives of the crisis of governance that had wracked New York and other American cities since the mid-1970s—an era of deindustrialization, insolvency, and collapsing city services. By the mid-1980s, the worst of that crisis had passed, but it left two important political legacies that formed the immediate context for New York's turn toward street-level drug policing. First, the failure of public services in the 1970s had called the state's competence and authority into doubt, leaving it prone to challenges by private alternatives.¹⁶ Second, the economic crisis of the 1970s had redoubled policy makers’ efforts to attract and maintain investment and affluent residents—a major theme in city politics since at least the 1960s, and one that now moved to the very center of city governance.

New York turned to street-level drug policing when it did because it offered a way to address these particular dilemmas of urban governance. First, it allowed the government to perform concern and capability at a time when the NYPD lacked an effective strategy for reducing serious crime: the displacement of street-level markets was something the city could do and also something it could communicate to citizens through the discourses of statistics and dramatic visuals. Second, street-level drug policing promised to aid the city's effort to reclaim urban spaces for “legitimate” uses—an important component, city policy makers believed, of a broader project to encourage capital investment and the presence of middle-class residents. In the end, New York's turn toward street-level drug policing was an effort to reassert state authority—an attempt to demonstrate, in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary, that public authorities were not altogether impotent to combat urban disorder and that cities could be, at least to a degree, masters of their own fate.

The Rockefeller laws and street-level drug policing clearly shaped the lives of tens of thousands of Americans, and are important in their own right. But these topics also illuminate broader questions of interest to historians—particularly historians of the carceral state, recent American political history, and the history of American cities. This local story puts the relations between—and sometimes the competing interests of—different political actors at the center of the war on drugs.¹⁷ As political scientists and legal scholars have long emphasized, disjunctures between what the law promises (or commands) and what happens on the ground constitute an integral feature of American governance—particularly in policy areas such as criminal justice, where governance involves actors at multiple levels of government, each with different institutional interests and political constituencies.¹⁸ Historians of the carceral state have been unusually attuned to the fact that local implementation does not follow automatically from the formulation of policy at the state or national level.¹⁹ Yet we still know much more about the development of national and state law, policy, and programs than we do about how those policies were implemented and administered on the ground.

In the case of drug policing in the wake of the Rockefeller laws, foregrounding the politics of enforcement calls attention to political influences that shaped street-level policing in the mid-1980s, not the least of which was the rise of real estate capitalism and the governmental imperatives bound up with it.²⁰ This helps us take a broader view of the role of federal policy in shaping the urban war on drugs. Though Ronald Reagan appears only in passing, federal policy is very much central to the history recounted here—but its primary impact was indirect. New York's local war on drugs unfolded within the context of a broad, federally subsidized racial and economic segmentation of metropolitan America that dated back decades, and which entered a new phase with Reagan's New Federalism and the deregulation of the finance sector.²¹ By concentrating poverty in segregated and disinvested communities of color, these policies had multiplied the challenges of urban governance; by tying the fiscal capacity of local states to the rising finance, insurance, and real estate industries, they had encouraged city officials to think of city politics as a competition for investment and affluent residents and to forge a link between order, value, and state competence. These conditions, more than direct financial incentives, helped the federal government to secure local buy-in for a war on drugs that many local officials—including relatively conservative ones like New York City Mayor Edward Koch—had viewed with skepticism.

By highlighting the roles that political actors from across the ideological spectrum played in an undertaking often associated with Reagan, the history of New York City's war on drugs also challenges scholars to reexamine the relationship between ideology and partisanship, on the one hand, and the structural and institutional features that shape policy making, on the other.²² One of the major themes of the carceral state literature in recent years has been the central role of liberals in the war on crime and mass incarceration.²³ By stressing the bipartisan nature of America's insistence on “governing through crime,” scholars have questioned a liberalism-vs.-conservatism narrative of post–New Deal American political history. Rather than seeing conservatives as “tough on crime” and Democrats as ready to go along for the sake of electoral success, these scholars view politicians from both parties as searching for strategies that would allow them to govern without substantial economic redistribution or challenges to the racial order.

Not only were key episodes in the war on drugs bipartisan; in the case of 1980s New York, ideological-political positions themselves could sometimes be less significant than the broad dilemmas of governance with which policy makers of many ideological stripes found themselves confronted. Perhaps it is not surprising to see Ed Koch, the self-styled “liberal with sanity” whose coalition responded to his racially coded “get tough” rhetoric, leading the push for a local war on drugs. It might be more surprising to see Democrats well to Koch's left challenging him over who could be tougher on street-level drug markets. The key to this puzzle is recognizing that these liberal-progressive Democrats, like the “New Democrat” Koch, embraced street-level drug policing less out of ideological conviction or a desire to claim the political center than because it offered a strategy that promised to address dilemmas of municipal governance in the era of Reaganism. By cutting across the usual ideological and partisan categories, this history helps us to see categories such as the New Democrats as political-narrative constructs that existed in uneasy tension with patterns of governance sometimes better understood in nonpartisan terms.²⁴

Finally, the history of street-level drug policing in New York casts new light on the construction of the neoliberal state—the turn toward deregulation, privatization of formerly public functions, de-socialization of goods and services, municipal austerity, and other related shifts in governance characteristic of American cities in the last quarter of the twentieth century.²⁵ While the neoliberalization framework has yielded considerable analytical fruit, the bundling of historical developments under the heading of “neoliberalism” raises some important questions. How do we make sense of the fact that key groups of neoliberals disagreed on fundamental issues?²⁶ What if core components of neoliberalization—for instance, business-oriented economic development and market-led privatization—came into conflict? Why did so many progressive politicians, community activists, policy intellectuals, and mezzo-level bureaucrats find themselves entangled in processes of neoliberalization? Why did outer-borough neighborhood groups play an important role in the development of public/private parks governance? Why did progressive teachers help pioneer public school choice? And why did some community activists demand more street-level drug policing?²⁷

This essay proposes that we make sense of such puzzles by thinking of neoliberal state building as a process by which a wide variety of actors sought to reconstruct and reenvision the local state's capacity and competence in the wake of the crises of the 1970s. Many of them were committed privatizers, but many were liberals or career policy makers and bureaucrats in search of strategies to recover the local state's capabilities—often in pursuit of traditionally liberal objectives. Mayor Koch and Police Commissioner Benjamin Ward, for example, were contesting assumptions of public ineptitude when they embarked on street-level policing; they aimed to reassert the state's legitimacy in the face of private (in some instances “market-based”) alternatives to the provision of public goods. They certainly drew upon neoliberal assumptions—about the importance of property values, the “business climate,” and the city's international image—but they wanted to rebuild the state, not to shrink it. Ward in particular believed he was working in pursuit of a democratic vision of “the public”—what he called a “renaissance of our City's cosmopolitan street life.”²⁸

But as reformers like Koch and Ward tried to rebuild public capacity in the face of privatist, market-based alternatives, they reached accommodations that nevertheless embedded market logic and racial and class privilege in new institutional forms that have proven extraordinarily difficult to dislodge. And so, the history recounted here not only gives us a fuller understanding of how the neoliberal city emerged—and the multiple paths that neoliberalization took—but also helps us to make sense of why these forms have emerged in cities that regard themselves as the most progressive places in America.

It may also be that historians should conceive not only of multiple paths to neoliberalism, but also of different types of neoliberal cities.²⁹ New York is an unusual city, but its recent history is representative of a process that has shaped other affluent, politically progressive cities—London and San Francisco are two other leading examples—in which a relatively vital public realm has produced substantial private value. In New York, unlike in many big cities of the western hemisphere, the affluent and wealthy have not withdrawn from public space and institutions; rather, through a variety of mechanisms—the rise of conservancies and business improvement districts, the workings of the city's public school choice system—they have secured privileged access to them and an outsized role in their management. That New York has long been an unusual American city helps to explain why it became a different type of neoliberal city. Possessed of so staggering a base of taxable capital, New York is the last big city where one would have expected to see the kind of crisis of governmental competence that occurred in the 1970s. In fact, while New York worked to extend the New Deal social state well into the postwar decades, many other cities already faced the concerns over local fiscal competence and economic health that would hit New York so hard after 1969.³⁰ In the 1970s those anxieties moved to the center of New York's political life.³¹ But only a few years after they did, the deregulation-driven boom in finance, insurance, and real estate and the expansion of the tourism and creative economies made available the resources for governance projects like those chronicled here. From this conjuncture of anxiety, affluence, and inequality, a different kind of neoliberal city emerged—a luxury city that remains committed to its public institutions, but which has remade those institutions in ways that have rendered them less democratic.

The stability of New York State's drug felony imprisonment rate after 1973 resulted in part from declining rates of indictment and conviction.³² Some prosecutors worked to blunt the laws’ potential impact: noting that the laws’ constraints on plea bargaining applied only after indictment, New York County District Attorney Richard Kuh adopted a policy of allowing small-scale methadone sellers, threatened under the Rockefeller laws with mandatory life sentences, to plead pre-indictment to Class-A misdemeanor charges—an exercise of discretion, Kuh argued, necessary to assure “humane and rational dispositions.”³³

But most important was the shoe that did not drop. As one study noted, the Rockefeller laws “implied” an enforcement policy of aggressive street-level policing.³⁴ Yet the New York Police Department did the opposite: rather than feeding thousands of users and street-level sellers newly exposed to imprisonment by the Rockefeller laws into the criminal justice system, the NYPD cut back dramatically on the number of drug arrests it made (Table 1).

Table 1. Felony drug and felony non-drug arrests in New York City, 1970–1975 (New York City Police Department, Statistical Reports, in Joint Committee on New York Drug Law Evaluation, The Nation's Toughest Drug Law, 90)

New York City officials chose consciously to work at cross purposes from Rockefeller and the state legislature. The Rockefeller laws’ general unpopularity in the city likely factored into this decision: Mayor John Lindsay was the most outspoken opponent; much of the city's legislative delegation had voted against the measures; and nearly the entire criminal justice establishment opposed them.³⁵ But the NYPD's policing approach also reflected the department's own policy learning and institutional prerogatives. In 1969, Lindsay and Police Commissioner Howard Leary had launched an intensive drug policing campaign featuring an emphasis on street-level arrests as well as greater coordination with state and federal authorities—they had, in brief, introduced the policy implied by the Rockefeller laws before their enactment.³⁶ Like Rockefeller, Lindsay and the NYPD had been motivated by a belief that narcotics use was driving a (widely perceived) increase in property crime—a major popular concern in communities of all kinds in late 1960s New York.³⁷ As a consequence of this crackdown, in three years between 1967 and 1970, the number of felony drug arrests in the city had risen from 7,199 to 26,378.³⁸

But intensive street-level drug policing had not produced the effects Lindsay and the NYPD had hoped. Such a policy was extraordinarily expensive: one study found that nearly a full man-week of effort was required to obtain the evidence necessary to make a street-level sale arrest stand up in court.³⁹ Drug cases seemed to soak up valuable criminal justice resources toward no discernible ends. In part because mass drug arrests had overwhelmed the courts, the conviction rates for those arrested on felony drug charges had been a low three-in-ten.⁴⁰ And with no meaningful decline in property crimes, the city seemed to have little to show for this massive investment of public resources.

Two other concerns also increased disillusionment with the street-policing experiment. First, powerful voices within the local criminal justice establishment had begun, with renewed force, to disparage the idea of treating narcotics addiction through the criminal justice system. “As long as drug abusers are treated as outlaws,” Lindsay's Criminal Justice Coordinating Council wrote in its 1972 annual report, “any real progress in helping them or even making them harmless will be impossible.”⁴¹ Second, a series of corruption scandals (immortalized in the 1973 film Serpico) had exposed the opportunities street-level drug policing afforded unscrupulous officers. The Knapp Commission investigations that grew out of these exposés found that, in addition to the usual shakedowns, officers had sold drugs, helped to finance drug sales, and shielded sellers from arrest in a variety of ways—by revealing the identity of government informants, tipping off dealers about wiretaps and upcoming raids, and even kidnapping key witnesses.⁴² Such corruption not only indicated the NYPD's limited capacity to police street-level drug markets effectively, but also made drug policing a target for anticorruption reform. The NYPD's subsequent anticorruption reforms thus included a “general prohibition on self-initiated enforcement actions.”⁴³

And so, beginning in 1972, the city and its police department largely abandoned the street-policing experiment and shifted its attention to mid- and upper-level traffickers. When, in 1973, the enactment of the Rockefeller laws impelled the NYPD to review its policy of street-level non-enforcement, the department consciously chose to continue its own policy in defiance of Rockefeller and the state legislature.⁴⁴ Then, two years later, New York's fiscal crisis hit. With the city on the verge of bankruptcy, the NYPD dismissed some 4,000 police officers and instituted a five-year hiring freeze, which would cost it an additional 8,000 officers by attrition.⁴⁵ Faced with these capacity constraints, the department responded by reallocating nearly all of its resources still committed to street-level drug policing to other functions.⁴⁶

The first major departure from this policy of non-enforcement came, not at the NYPD's initiative, but rather because political leaders, businesses, and media outlets in Harlem pushed Mayor Abraham Beame for more enforcement. Nearly everyone involved in this campaign recognized that street enforcement represented only a palliative and that a real solution to the problems of drug abuse and street crime would begin with a commitment to full employment and other “root causes” measures.⁴⁷ Yet more intensive street policing was something the government appeared relatively able and perhaps willing to provide, and which could be put into operation quickly. In late 1975, the Amsterdam News had declared a community-level “war on crime,” calling for greater action against street-level “pushers.”⁴⁸ Press coverage, in turn, galvanized the neighborhood's political leaders, most notably Manhattan Borough President Percy Sutton and Congressman Charles Rangel. Sutton, who had recently joined the Auxiliary Police and taken to patrolling northern Manhattan himself, was gearing up to challenge Mayor Beame in the 1977 Democratic primary on an anti-crime platform; Rangel's appointment to the newly formed House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control in August of 1976 afforded him a platform for calling attention to drug sales in the neighborhood.⁴⁹ In November of 1976, Sutton, Rangel, Beame, and Police Commissioner Michael Codd observed the Eighth Avenue drug markets from a camouflaged police van; this convinced Beame and Codd to sign off on an effort called Operation Drugs, which sent some 150 uniformed personnel and 75 members of the Narcotics Division into the neighborhood to make street-level arrests—nearly 5,000 in the course of the next four months.⁵⁰

Foisted on the department by Beame, himself acting at the insistence of Harlem's political and media establishment, Operation Drugs never really received buy-in from the NYPD. Police officials speaking anonymously described the operation as “a cynical and perhaps futile product of political pressure.”⁵¹ Whatever skepticism Harlem residents themselves may have felt toward more intensive street-policing proved well founded: the city, unable and unwilling to devote the resources required, engaged not in street-level drug policing, but in simple street sweeps, making Operation Drugs an exercise in harassment for many neighborhood residents. Newspaper reporters who combed the arrest records learned that many of the arrests were for disorderly conduct, not for drug sales or possession, and that they had occurred because “crowds of young men refused to move off street corners when told to do so.”⁵² Unsurprisingly, prosecutors found that the “number and quality of arrests we are getting from the police is way down.”⁵³ The entire episode seemed only to affirm the position the NYPD had taken in the early 1970s. Only when the department's own political and governing imperatives aligned with those of politicians would street-level drug policing return, and endure.

Even as Operation Drugs wound down to a close, policy intellectuals had begun to revisit the assumptions that had guided the NYPD's retreat from street-level enforcement. In 1977's Buy and Bust, Mark H. Moore of Harvard's Kennedy School recast street-level policing as a way of regulating the narcotics market within the statutory context of prohibition: the police could not eliminate drug sales, he argued, but they could reduce the number of new users by raising the cost of drug transactions. With this goal in mind, Moore urged police departments to engage in buy-and-bust operations to make dealers suspicious of unknown buyers and to eliminate copping areas through active policing—there should be “no area,” he wrote, “to which an inexperienced user could come and expect to find heroin.”⁵⁴

Moore's arguments for more intensive street-level drug policing fit within a broader movement—among police reformers, politicians, and scholars—away from the “reactive,” “crime-oriented,” cruiser-bound style of the late 1960s and early 1970s and toward “proactive,” “order maintenance,” and “problem-oriented,” street-present strategies. By the time the order-maintenance approach received its most famous formulation in George Kelling and James Q. Wilson's 1982 essay “Broken Windows,” its tenets were already broadly familiar: when New York City Mayor Edward Koch sent Kelling and Wilson's article to Police Commissioner Robert McGuire shortly after its publication, McGuire replied that the essay “broadly confirms this Department's conclusions regarding the efficacy of foot patrols in the City's neighborhoods,” detailing the results of an experimental foot patrol program on the Lower East Side.⁵⁵ Unlike later mayors and commissioners, who saw “broken windows” policing primarily as a crime-control strategy, Koch and McGuire focused on the response it promised to elicit from the public. In his note to McGuire, Koch wrote that Kelling and Wilson's article had “nothing to do with crime but rather with fear”; McGuire did see order-maintenance policing partly as a crime control tool, but he also emphasized the “favorable public impression” it left, suggesting that it offered a way to “make clear to the public the Department's commitment to restore a feeling of safety and security to all the streets of the City.”⁵⁶

Yet the lingering effects of the mid-1970s fiscal crisis placed sharp constraints on such initiatives. Mayor Koch, the self-proclaimed “liberal with sanity” who had ascended to the mayoralty in 1978, had won election in part by appeal to “traditionally Democratic white working-class and middle-class voters … through his racially laced antiwelfare and law-and-order rhetoric.”⁵⁷ Yet notwithstanding a few targeted efforts (such as antigraffiti and antirobbery initiatives), he declined during his first term to prioritize policing over public education, saying he would not allocate money to hire more police officers until the city could stop laying off teachers.⁵⁸

This began to change in the fall of 1980, ostensibly in response to public pressures. “In New York City—in every city in the country—personal safety and anger at the escalation of crime is the No. 1 issue,” Koch declared. “The people of this city want something done about it [and] I want something done about it….”⁵⁹ His initial program centered on judicial reforms and consisted mostly of recommendations to the state legislature, “designed to insure ‘swift and tough’ punishment after conviction” (though Koch also proposed pretrial detention).⁶⁰ Then, in the summer of 1981, Koch and the NYPD began to break from the policing strategies of the 1970s. In July, Police Commissioner Robert McGuire announced the formation of a new unit of 100 plainclothes officers to “battle drugs in public places.” Officially a response to a surge of complaints from “members of community boards and private citizens at meetings attended by precinct commanders,” the unit targeted primarily highly trafficked public spaces and parks in workplace and tourist neighborhoods: Times Square, the Financial District, and Bryant and Washington Square Parks.⁶¹ A year before Kelling and Wilson's article presented its theoretical rationale for doing so, Koch envisioned a “broader [campaign] against ‘quality-of-life’ offenses.”⁶²

As these initiatives were unfolding, neighborhood organizations called for official action against open-air drug markets. Perhaps the most sustained campaign came from the Lower East Side, a neighborhood undergoing both disinvestment and gentrification.⁶³ The Lower East Side market illustrated particularly clearly how informal economies developed as features of disinvestment and austerity. Using empty tenement buildings as staging grounds, the Lower East Side drug market leveraged the landscape of disinvestment; and as the city's largest Spanish-language newspaper observed, in the age of deindustrialization and a declining public sector, the industry represented an “integral part” of the neighborhood economy—as an industry, it was among the neighborhood's largest employers, particularly for young people (on the Lower East Side, predominantly Puerto Rican) hit hard by the disappearance of manufacturing and government jobs.⁶⁴ With decent transit connections and proximity to wealthier neighborhoods, it served a predominantly middle class clientele with heroin and, increasingly, with cocaine.

By the early 1980s, the Lower East Side drug market was growing quickly, drawing business from Central Harlem.⁶⁵ In response, Manhattan Borough President Andrew Stein issued a report entitled “Illegal Drugs on the Lower East Side: A Call for City Action,” which immediately spurred Koch to create a Lower East Side Narcotics Task Force.⁶⁶ When stepped up enforcement efforts failed to curtail the market's growth, residents took to the streets in a series of marches and candlelight vigils. In March 1983, some 300 protesters—a coalition of block organizations, religious congregations, and other community groups—paraded from First Avenue and East 9th Street to Mayor Koch's apartment building in Greenwich Village.⁶⁷

At the same time, the budgetary constraints of the 1970s and early 1980s had begun to loosen. With the financial and real estate sectors growing rapidly, New York City's expenditures grew (in real terms) by 24 percent between Fiscal Year 1981 and Fiscal Year 1985.⁶⁸ The city's fiscal recovery permitted the NYPD to hire some 12,000 new officers, roughly the number it had lost to the fiscal crisis.⁶⁹

Neighborhood-level discontent and loosening fiscal constraints opened the door for the city's first sustained campaigns against open-air drug markets since the early 1970s. In January 1984, McGuire's successor, Benjamin Ward, launched a new campaign to “retake” selected public spaces through a highly visible and publicized policing initiative.⁷⁰ The program, “Operation Pressure Point” (OPP), launched with more than 200 police officers descending on the Lower East Side “to clean up” New York's “‘supermarket’ of illegal drugs,” primarily through the use of buy-and-bust arrests.⁷¹ Several months later, the NYPD launched a second OPP campaign in Central Harlem.⁷² With these campaigns, New York made a highly visible, sustained commitment to “quality of life”-style policing, focusing particularly on open-air drug markets.

Operation Pressure Point was primarily the idea of Commissioner Ward, whom Koch had appointed at the beginning of 1984 following a congressional investigation into police brutality in New York. Ward, who had grown up in Weeksville, Brooklyn, and had joined the NYPD as a patrolman in 1951, became the city's first Black police commissioner.⁷³ By his own recollection, Ward was embarrassed by the presence of the huge open-air drug market he saw on his daily commute from Queens to One Police Plaza—and was particularly distressed that European news film crews were shooting it as evidence of “the typical American scene.”⁷⁴ “I saw it as a problem that needed to be solved in some way,” he recalled.⁷⁵ Ward faced some initial resistance from within the NYPD. Some managers harbored lingering fears of corruption; some officers viewed the open-air markets as places to boost their arrest numbers—a resource rather than a problem.⁷⁶ Mayor Koch, whose support Ward felt he needed to ensure himself the resources OPP required, told Ward to go ahead with the program even though he thought it unlikely to work—“the courts are going to let them go,” Ward remembered Koch saying.⁷⁷ Ward ascribed Koch's subsequent strong support to the fact that the operations garnered positive press and that community groups pushed for stronger antidrug market measures.⁷⁸

Operation Pressure Point quickly stirred up opposition from churches and community groups. Still fearing corruption, the NYPD deployed patrolmen with little experience in the neighborhood; many of the officers were recent graduates of the police academy, part of the hiring spree of the early 1980s.⁷⁹ Unsurprisingly, community leaders found that officers “[couldn't] tell the good guys from the bad guys” and were “grabbing our children … because they think everyone black and Hispanic is a drug dealer….”⁸⁰ “Some residents admitted,” an internal NYPD study found, “that they are frequently more fearful of the officers than the addicts and dealers.”⁸¹ Both Koch and the NYPD believed that most of the drug dealers chased off the streets by OPP simply moved—to nearby streets, into the subways, into public housing projects, from one park to another.⁸²

Even so, OPP became a political success for Koch. Local media coverage was “nothing but favorable.”⁸³ One of the city's leading tabloids, the New York Daily News, ran a two-page photo spread lauding Koch and the NYPD for “giving the ABCs back to the neighborhood,” complete with action shots of surveillance, searches, and arrests and a shot of Koch and Ward inspecting a collection of seized drugs and weapons.⁸⁴ The New York Times ran a similarly illustrated feature.⁸⁵ A year into the first OPP campaign, Koch could cite not only arrest statistics, but also sharply declining robbery and homicide rates in the neighborhoods covered, and even in adjoining ones.⁸⁶ Armed robberies had decreased by 47 percent and homicides by 60 percent on the Lower East Side; in Harlem, the second staging area, robberies fell by some 39 percent in the first eleven months of OPP 2.⁸⁷ Statistics like these eluded the questions of whether crime simply moved, whether falling rates of violent crime in the staging areas were due to the OPP campaigns or caused by some other set of factors, and whether they were permanent or merely temporary. But decontextualized, statistics like these provided a language with which Koch and the NYPD could assert the city government's competency at a moment when it had little success decreasing crime city-wide.

In 1986, when Koch and Harlem Congressman Charlie Rangel mobilized America's big-city mayors to pressure the Reagan administration to devote more resources to the war on drugs (which the U.S. Conference of Mayors assailed as “grossly underfunded”), they pointed to OPP as a local success story—a model that could be scaled up if the federal government supplied the fiscal resources.⁸⁸ “[I]t is clear that Operation Pressure Point is a tremendous success which may show the way for controlling the epidemic of dangerous drugs that threatens our nation,” Koch wrote in an op-ed. “Is it not … correct to say that Americans could stop the drug epidemic in America if we really wanted to? I believe that Operation Pressure Point has demonstrated what can be done … in American cities.”⁸⁹

A number of Koch's progressive adversaries concurred. When, in 1985, City Council President Carol Bellamy (who also ran in the general election on the Liberal Party line) challenged Koch in the Democratic primary, she called for more police officers and for a city-wide extension of OPP.⁹⁰ Policy intellectuals, too, suggested that OPP might serve as a model. Mark H. Moore lauded the NYPD for finally putting his ideas into practice.⁹¹ James Q. Wilson (who had presaged such arguments in Thinking About Crime) likewise argued that demand could be rendered elastic, because some sellers had territory they felt comfortable with and would be reluctant to move.⁹² Mark A. R. Kleiman, a research fellow at the Kennedy School, argued that by raising the cost to buyers of “looking for a safe place to buy” and to sellers of “looking for customers they can trust,” “fewer drugs will change hands.”⁹³

Community-level political leaders and organizations in other neighborhoods had yet to see firsthand the civil liberties abuses wrought by OPP. But they well understood the threat street-level drug markets (and drug markets operating in abandoned housing) posed to their own neighborhood-based community building projects, especially their efforts to rebuild their housing stock following the arson and abandonment of the 1970s. For these reasons, the NYPD's expansion of OPP and similar initiatives often garnered the support of neighborhood leaders—indeed, it sometimes came at their insistence. In the spring of 1985, Councilman Fernando Ferrer of the Bronx got in touch with Deputy Mayor for Operations Stan Brezenoff to propose a Pressure Point area in his district.⁹⁴ When the NYPD launched a related program called Operation Closedown to “spur the eviction of tenants” convicted of selling narcotics in Crown Heights, both the local community board and Congressman Major Owens applauded—“I've been wondering when our turn would come,” Owens remarked.⁹⁵ In 1985, a coalition of “homeowners, tenant groups, block associations, and churches” in the West Bronx staged a series of marches and demonstrations that led to meetings between the NYPD and community leaders, and then to “additional foot patrol on streets with the heaviest activity and with selective attention to several specific vending locations.”⁹⁶ In Brownsville and East New York, Reverend Johnny Ray Youngblood of the East Brooklyn Churches coalition pressured the NYPD (through Koch) to take stronger action against the “plague of drug locations in our area”; the NYPD in response promised to make “a strong, good faith effort … to close 40 drug locations by the end of 1985.”⁹⁷ Everywhere, Ward found, favorable media coverage raised public expectations. “[E]veryone wants their own Pressure Point,” he said.⁹⁸ The NYPD even struggled to withdraw from its original campaign on the Lower East Side because it had “raised community expectations” with regard to what the police can accomplish.⁹⁹

New York City's shift toward street-level drug policing occurred only when new policing ideas, popular dissatisfaction with street crime, and the revival of the city's fiscal capacity coalesced as part of a larger project to rebuild urban governance in the aftermath of the fiscal crisis of the 1970s. Street-level drug enforcement promised to assert the competence of the local state, which had been cast into doubt by the experiences of the 1970s and the rise of private alternatives to what had been public functions: it allowed the city to do something about crime at a time when the NYPD had had relatively little success at reducing rates of serious crime. By reclaiming public spaces from the drug economy, the local state could also seek to restore an idealized vision of cosmopolitan street life; it could aim to reconstruct a neighborhood-situated social order built around middle-class norms and legitimate economies, which in turn would permit the NYPD to leverage citizen surveillance to build a governing capacity it could hardly possess on its own.¹⁰⁰ And by doing these things, it could take an important step toward restoring the fiscal and economic well-being of the city and its neighborhoods.

Much as the punitive turn of the 1970s “tapp[ed] into a vein of public opinion furious about the alleged incompetence of liberal crime control strategies,” so may the policing practices of the 1980s be understood as an effort to reassert the local state's competence in light of the failure of the crime control strategies of the 1970s.¹⁰¹ Whatever the Rockefeller laws had done, they had not substantially reduced property crime or street violence, and they had not tipped the balance in local struggles between “legitimate” and “illegitimate” users of public space. The failure of state (and federal) drug policies and the municipal austerity regime of the 1970s had created space for a host of market- and community-based security solutions, some of which, like the Guardian Angels, represented a challenge to the state's authority and an everyday reminder of the state's incompetence.¹⁰² It had also left the local state exposed to community-level demands for a kind of policing that would support the normative uses of public space the political establishment claimed were so vital to the city's well being.

Street-level drug markets became a problem not just because they were linked to a rising discourse of community “order,” but also because they came paired with a feasible, ready-made solution. The long-range effectiveness of this solution may have been dubious. But nonetheless it was something the city government could do that would produce immediate, visible, highly publicized results; and moreover, the discourse of statistics afforded a language with which potentially dubious claims of state competency could be legitimized. For Koch, the “plague of street dealers” targeted by OPP represented “the transcendent urban problem of our time” because it had become “a dreary symbo[l] of human failure,” evoking in people “a sense of despair and contempt for the ability of law and government to deliver them from crime and addiction.”¹⁰³ Ward's seemingly bland statement to newspaper reporters the morning of OPP's launch suggested that the NYPD, too, felt the need to make a public demonstration of its own capability and competence: “I can't not do anything,” he remarked. “I must do something.”¹⁰⁴

The policy departures of the early-to-mid-1980s must also be understood in the context of a broad effort in the wake of the 1970s economic crisis to restore (or “stabilize”) public spaces by making them more amenable to normative uses.¹⁰⁵ To Ward, accessible public space was fundamental to a good city, for it provided “access to those city amenities (parks, museums, libraries, theatres, etc.) that enrich and define urban living….”¹⁰⁶ This emphasis on the value of public space, however, worked in concert with a longstanding discourse, dating from the 1960s and particularly pronounced from the mid-1970s onward, on the need to attract and maintain a tax-paying middle class. Both Koch and Ward envisioned New York's “urban crisis” as, in part, a product of the middle classes’ withdrawal from urban spaces and neighborhoods; they assumed the city's recovery depended upon the restoration of the middle classes and the modes of social control Koch and Ward believed a middle class presence enabled.

The key to restoring public spaces, city officials believed, lay in encouraging a visible presence of normatively behaving people within them: once such people had become predominant in a particular public space, the theory went, they could enforce social norms—citizen surveillance would effectively extend the NYPD's order-maintenance capacity. The social thinking that underpinned this approach dated back at least to the 1960s, when urbanists such as Jane Jacobs had introduced the concept of “eyes on the street,” an idea extended by William H. Whyte in the early 1980s and embraced by the emerging parks conservancies and business improvement districts.¹⁰⁷ An idealized notion of community self-regulation also informed Kelling and Wilson's broken windows theory and the rising law enforcement paradigm of community policing, which cast police departments and communities as “co-producers” of public safety.¹⁰⁸ With respect to street-level drug markets, the task of the police within this framework was to re-regulate public space such that small-time sellers became seen as neighborhood “outsiders.” Ward, in particular, envisioned street-level drug enforcement as the first phase of a police–“community” partnership that would reconstruct “community-based” social control and behavioral standards: “We try to mobilize the community to take charge of their neighborhood, once we get the outsider/drug dealers out of there.”¹⁰⁹ Where OPP was most successful, an early study noted, buyers and sellers did indeed become “‘outsiders,’ their presence readily apparent to OPP personnel and to residents, many of whom were eager to report them to the police.”¹¹⁰ (The NYPD set up special drug complaint hotlines to facilitate precisely that.¹¹¹)

Though Ward in particular would not have conceived of it as such, the project of “restoring” public spaces was inescapably racialized. To the degree that it involved the influx of more affluent people to neighborhoods that had seen historic disinvestment, it required the whitening of those neighborhoods. And in the context of ongoing racial bias in policing, it would result in the displacement, not only of people actually involved in illegitimate economic activities, but also of people who simply belonged to social categories the police associated with illegitimate economic activities, effectively designating a wider range of public spaces as (in the sociologist Elijah Anderson's conceptualization) “white space”—places “informally ‘off limits.’”¹¹²

The class and racial logics of spatial re-regulation ensured that, in neighborhoods with hot real estate markets, debates over street-level drug policing became bound up in larger contests over gentrification. Initially, neighborhood activists and block associations had viewed street-level drug enforcement as a tool in the fight against gentrification. Some participants in the 1983 East Side antidrug marches had held signs that said “Stop Gentrification”; one woman had explained to the Greenwich Village community paper The Villager that residents felt their neighborhood had been “zoned for drugs” so as to break down community resistance to redevelopment.¹¹³ By 1985, this language had largely vanished, and many Lower East Siders had come to view OPP as part of a broader effort to make their neighborhood safe for the forces of gentrification. The Lower East Side Joint Planning Council professed that, while they were “grateful when drug traffic is under control,” they “are convinced safe streets for Lower East Side residents was not the objective of this police crackdown.” Rather: “As rising rents and the new boutiques attest, the area is being made safe for well-heeled outsiders, not the working-class people who have traditionally lived here.”¹¹⁴ As the campaign unfolded, voices could be heard applauding what the city was doing as a way of improving real estate markets. “Not only are young couples coming in because of it,” noted one real estate agent, “but parents are buying apartments for their sons or daughters attending N.Y.U.”¹¹⁵ A feature in the Sunday New York Times made it practically official: “The Fortunes of the Lower East Side Are Rising,” the headline read: “Thanks to Operation Pressure Point, Art Galleries Are Replacing Shooting Galleries.”¹¹⁶

Ward hated the idea of himself as an agent of gentrification, and there exists no particular reason to doubt his claims that gentrification per se was not an objective of OPP.¹¹⁷ Yet in practice, the project of “stabilizing” communities by re-regulating public spaces was inescapably bound up with the processes of neighborhood transition, and it was no accident that the Pressure Point campaigns saw their greatest success in gentrifying neighborhoods. While not the aim of street-level drug enforcement, gentrification was a wholly foreseeable consequence, facilitated by the very logic of the NYPD's governing strategies.

As street-level drug policing spread from the Lower East Side to encompass neighborhoods across the city, the number of felony drug arrests soared, returning to the levels reached during the abandoned street-policing experiment of the late-1960s and early-1970s. As a consequence of these local policy shifts, nearly three times as many people were now being fed into the legal regime established by the Rockefeller laws—since modified, but still highly punitive (Table 2, Figures 1–3).

Table 2. Felony drug arrests in New York City, 1978–1989 (Office of Information Technology Services, “Adult Arrests 18 and Older by County: Beginning 1970,” https://data.ny.gov/Public-Safety/Adult-Arrests-by-County-Beginning-1970/rikd-mt35, accessed Aug. 2, 2019. See Figures 1–3 for drug felony and misdemeanor arrests by borough, 1970–2018.

Figure 1. Drug arrests in Manhattan, 1970–2018. Office of Information Technology Services, “Adult Arrests 18 and Older by County: Beginning 1970,” https://data.ny.gov/Public-Safety/Adult-Arrests-by-County-Beginning-1970/rikd-mt35, accessed Aug. 2, 2019.

Figure 2. Drug arrests in the Bronx, 1970–2018. Office of Information Technology Services, “Adult Arrests 18 and Older by County: Beginning 1970,” https://data.ny.gov/Public-Safety/Adult-Arrests-by-County-Beginning-1970/rikd-mt35, accessed Aug. 2, 2019.

Figure 3. Drug arrests in Brooklyn, 1970–2018. Office of Information Technology Services, “Adult Arrests 18 and Older by County: Beginning 1970,” https://data.ny.gov/Public-Safety/Adult-Arrests-by-County-Beginning-1970/rikd-mt35, accessed Aug. 2, 2019.

Crack cocaine's rising popularity in 1985 and 1986 only deepened New York City's commitment to street-level drug policing.¹¹⁸ The fact that crack's proliferation corresponded with a reversal of four years of declining crime statistics—a development that was, Ward lamented to Deputy Mayor Stan Brezenoff, receiving “considerable media attention”—produced strong pressures within the administration and from the press for a vigorous, aggressive official response.¹¹⁹ Moreover, the NYPD and the Koch administration quickly theorized a relationship between crack and rising crime rates (which turned on the brevity of the crack “high” and the addictive qualities of the drug).¹²⁰

Equipped with these motives and rationales, the city initiated a new round of street policing—organizing Tactical Narcotics Teams (TNT), which “flood[ed] the streets” of selected neighborhoods with undercover officers who conducted buy-and-bust operations.¹²¹ The operation differed from OPP in that it focused specifically on crack and did not entail a visible uniformed presence. But as the closest study of the program notes, Koch and Ward launched the program despite “persistent skepticism within the NYPD and among government officials that [street-level drug policing] was anything more than a ‘numbers game,’” in large measure because “the results of Operation Pressure Point suggested that TNT had a good chance of being seen by the public as successful.”¹²² Ward also created a new, special Anti-Crack Unit and, acting on the assumption that crack represented a more dangerous commodity than previous drugs, city officials also launched “a campaign to make more arrests that would hold up in court as serious felonies.”¹²³

In the first years of OPP, the odds were “overwhelming” that a person arrested for buying, selling, or carrying drugs in an NYPD street sweep would not go to prison.¹²⁴ Only 37 percent of drug arrests resulted in felony charges, and only one-third of those arrests led to indictments.¹²⁵ Yet the sheer number of arrests produced by street-level drug policing quickly added up, and over time, repeat arrests left sellers and buyers exposed to more severe penalties. After 1985, city efforts to make crack arrests stand up in court; investment by the city, state, and federal governments in prosecutorial, court, and carceral capacities; and, likely, a hardening of attitudes toward drug offenses on the part of judges further swelled the incarcerated population.¹²⁶ New York Governor Mario Cuomo and the state legislature accommodated the rise of mass incarceration by financing new prison construction through the state's Urban Development Corporation, which could issue bonds without voter approval.¹²⁷ Finally, Cuomo proposed and signed a strict anti-crack law, intended specifically to subject more small-time sellers (many of whom were being arrested for misdemeanor possession) to Class D felony charges.¹²⁸

On the eve of OPP, drug offenders had represented some 10 percent of New York State inmates; by the end of the decade, that figure neared 35 percent. These arrests had helped drive the state incarceration rate to roughly triple what it had been in Koch's first year in office.

By the time Koch and Ward left office in 1989, street-level drug policing was locked in—in spite of new revelations of police corruption reminiscent of the scandals that had contributed to the NYPD's decision to step back from street-level enforcement in the early 1970s.¹²⁹ Street-level drug policing formed one important aspect of a broader style of “quality-of-life” policing that sought to remove the symptoms of urban disinvestment, displacement, and poverty—not only drug markets, but also homelessness, street peddling, and other informal economies—less out of a theoretical conviction that addressing small crimes would prevent big ones than in response to the same political imperatives that had guided the city's turn toward street-level drug enforcement.¹³⁰ David Dinkins, the liberal Democrat who pried Koch loose from City Hall in 1989, vowed to “retak[e] the city” from “the pushers and the muggers”; in the midst of the crack epidemic (the most violent years in New York's modern history), he secured the money to hire 6,000 additional patrol officers.¹³¹ Those officers helped Dinkins's successor Rudy Giuliani and his police commissioner William Bratton as they developed Kelling and Wilson's broken windows theory into a strategic blueprint for crime control, implemented through the CompStat system. Adopting a more aggressive approach to select low-level offenses such as marijuana possession in “high-crime” neighborhoods in part as a mechanism for fingerprinting and checking for outstanding warrants, Giuliani and Bratton extended the racial and class logics of street-level drug policing to encompass the city as a whole.¹³²

By the early twenty-first century, the open-air drug markets of the 1980s had largely disappeared, and New York's crime rate had begun a remarkable decline.¹³³ New York City and New York State revisited the punitive approach to drug policy, reforming the Rockefeller Laws in 2009, removing mandatory minimums, and creating opportunities for diversion to treatment programs. Yet even as drug felony convictions fell, the NYPD continued Bratton's use of pretextual misdemeanor arrests and stop-and-frisk searches, sending thousands of low-level users and sellers, not to prison, but into jails and lower courts.¹³⁴ In the last decade, the NYPD has cut back on enforcement toward some small-scale drug offenses (particularly marijuana possession), though broken-windows policing remains the department's basic strategy.

This essay has recounted the story of one dimension of a historical phenomenon—mass incarceration—that is now widely recognized as racist and classist. The particular process detailed here—the rebirth of street-level drug policing—was racist and classist, too: people at the bottom of the urban hierarchy, the overwhelming majority of whom were low-income people of color, paid a high price for efforts primarily designed to benefit more affluent New Yorkers.¹³⁵ Yet this history also has a tragic dimension, which underscores the deeply embedded nature of inequality in contemporary American cities.¹³⁶ Most people in all parts of the city preferred to live without the presence of street-level drug markets and the violence that inevitably surrounded them; most New Yorkers wanted easier access to public space, and many people in poorer communities believed drug markets comprised an obstacle to their efforts to improve their own neighborhoods. For these reasons, it is not surprising that many community activists supported stronger street-level drug enforcement—indeed, they often demanded that the city commit policing resources to areas that were not top priorities for the Koch administration or the NYPD, even as they argued that a real solution demanded greater community investment, antipoverty and employment programs, improved health care, and better schools and housing. Yet not only did street-level drug policing in the context of racial injustice throughout the criminal justice system exact terrible costs on individuals, families, and communities, but it also emerged less as a complement than as a competitor—both in terms of access to resources and in how the tasks and techniques of governance in the city were framed—to the more fundamental social policy approaches these community activists preferred.¹³⁷ This bitter irony is indicative of the obstacles to progressive reform in a city where racial inequality and exclusion are so deeply entrenched; and perhaps it helps us to better grasp the forms of power that have allowed policing to remain so central to social and economic governance in the most progressive and cosmopolitan American communities.