PUBLIC HOUSING RESIDENTS HATE THE POLICE
Fritz Umbach
Ivory Alford paused, hunting for the right phrase. She was trying to capture for her grandson, Nicholas, how she and her neighbors in her South Bronx public housing development had viewed the police at the explosive close of the 1960s. Recalling the Housing Police who had patrolled the projects in those years, she settled on a simile to express her emotions, still forceful after four decades, about law enforcement in a neighborhood that had once epitomized bleak urban realities. “The officers,” she pronounced, leaning in for emphasis, “were like family.”1
This nostalgia may surprise many today, particularly against the backdrop of countless popular and scholarly depictions of hostility between nonwhite residents and the police as a fact of big city life—and public housing in particular. But memories such as Ivory Alford’s resonate broadly with those who still recall the New York City Housing Authority Police Department (HAPD), an autonomous police force that, between 1952 and 1995, served the roughly one out of ten New Yorkers who made public housing their home.
The tenants’ sense that the Housing Police were the “last neighborhood cops” developed from the conditions under which the force unavoidably operated: the need for foot patrol; the distinctive demographics of its personnel; a decentralized organization; and structural ties to the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) management. These unusual characteristics created opportunities for tenants to influence both community order and law enforcement practices in ways that surprised the few outsiders who paid any attention to the new force, which operated largely out of sight of the vast majority of New Yorkers. Because of the reciprocal nature of their interactions with the officers who served them, NYCHA tenants only partially shared in the contempt for the police that many city dwellers began to express in the 1960s. Thus, at a time when minorities in northern cities identified police brutality as a threat more grave to their communities than unemployment, inadequate housing, or unequal education, NYCHA’s growing population of black and Latino tenants repeatedly declared their approval for the officers patrolling the city’s low-income developments. The relationship between NYCHA residents and their police was indeed exceptional (Figure 9.1). As residents frequently described it, “Housing” was “our police force.” Ask older NYCHA residents and former Housing officers to explain this seeming exception to received urban truths and you will likely get an earful about the HAPD’s thirty-year experiment with crime-fighting strategies that would later be called “community policing.”2
Figure 9.1 Housing Officer Cynthia Brown with children, April 1974. Courtesy of the New York City Housing Authority.
As NYCHA’s glass-and-brick empire expanded after World War II and its complexes progressively broke with the street grid, public housing became isolated from the services provided by the NYPD—particularly as that department increasingly shifted to what it termed a “radio motor patrol” style of policing.3 Recognizing that the protection provided by the NYPD was “not particularly suited to project needs,” in 1952 the Housing Authority reluctantly formed its own Property Protection and Security Division. This new police force, however, would increasingly differ not only from the NYPD but also from other departments nationwide as a consequence of both NYCHA’s policy decisions and project designs. Elsewhere in the country, excessive reliance upon squad cars meant, as historian Lawrence Friedman notes, “a ton or more of steel separated the motorized officer from the community.” By creating its own police force, NYCHA avoided this “ton of steel” divide as well as a grab bag of urban law enforcement problems that had accompanied the drive to “professionalize” policing. Housing’s path was dictated not by national trends in police practice but by the unique law enforcement requirements of NYCHA’s distinctive complexes. The Housing Police were free to evolve in their own direction.4
As police departments increasingly pulled officers out of neighborhoods in order to fill squad cars, many urban communities in mid-century America experienced the loss of patrolmen walking stable beats. But NYCHA’s architecture spared its residents that fate, replacing it with what became known as “vertical patrols.” Designed to prevent crime, rather than merely arriving after one had been committed, housing officers’ regular beats included walking down busy stairwells and through long hallways, in the thick of the daily domestic worlds of NYCHA’s residents. Psychologist Morton Bard concluded in a 1970 study of NYCHA residents’ interactions with HAPD that the department was a “paradox in urban law enforcement.” Although NYCHA’s buildings had some of the highest population densities in the nation, they also represented the last place in America where “the citizen is still in direct and regular association with the police officer.”5
The HAPD was also, to a degree unprecedented nationally, a black and Latino police force. In 1965, when the Housing Police was the fourth largest force in New York State and the twenty-fourth largest in the country, 45 percent of Housing officers were minorities. Merely ten years later, that figure surged past 60 percent—all at a time when roughly nine out of ten New York Police Department officers were white.6 When New York’s roughly six hundred thousand public housing residents, over half of them minority by 1960, interacted with the Housing Police, they had a good chance of doing so with a black or Latino officer.7 Tenants’ perception that the Housing Police force was uniquely theirs stemmed from more than racial affinity, however.8 Many Housing officers both served and lived in public housing. Although NYCHA did not keep records documenting this phenomenon, Assistant Chief of Department Joseph Keeney— who ran the Office of the Chief in the 1970s—estimates that until at least 1980 one in five HAPD officers was also a NYCHA resident, with the number growing through the 1960s and peaking sometime in the 1970s.9
Until the mid-1970s, project tenants and housing officers relied on each other to enforce community norms. Many residents recall a braiding together of informal social controls and formal police presence. Maria Vasquez recalls of the HAPD in Manhattan’s Amsterdam Houses (1,084 units): “They did their jobs, but they knew the kids . . . they knew what apartments they came from. So if they did something wrong, they take you by your coat, take you to your parents.”10 Such recollections of officers who knew where to track down an errant teen’s mother are common among older NYCHA residents, in part because of a unique feature of the Housing Police in these years: record rooms. When the supervisors of the growing Housing Police detailed officers to a new development, they simply commandeered an apartment or basement space as an additional small office for the use of patrolmen (and they were all men until 1973). So it was in the record rooms of their assigned project, and not at a distant police station, that patrolmen filed their incident reports, collected their paychecks (until 1965), interviewed their suspects, kept their firearms, and reported to and from their daily tours.11 Record rooms ensured that nearly every manifestation of police presence or exercise of police authority, other than formal booking and incarceration, occurred locally. The proximity of record rooms could imbue NYCHA’s lively hallways and airy courtyards with a remarkable sense of security.
That the policing of the city’s public housing occurred within the compass of each NYCHA complex was a distinction with important consequences. As Raymond Henson—a building manager at the James Weldon Johnson Houses (1,310 units) in East Harlem in the late 1950s and early 1960s—remembers, managers conferred daily with the officers who “turned out” from the record rooms, exchanging details about tenant concerns and neighborhood conditions. Such discussions, Henson recalled, were as likely to be about “broken bulbs” in a hallway as an “apartment that had been broken into.”12 According to Henson, this daily contact allowed managers to hold “officers accountable” for problems in the complex. Former Housing officers concur. “The managers knew the families and they knew the cops,” explained one retired HAPD lieutenant who joined the force in 1965. “So if there were complaints, you heard about them right away even if you didn’t want to.”13 The daily interaction that evolved among Housing officers, building managers, and project residents also enabled the HAPD, as one retired officer put it in the colorful parlance of the city’s police, to “nip shit in the bud before it got the fuck out of hand.” The officer (and eventual detective) described his eight years as a patrolman in the Sound View houses (1,259 units) in the Bronx during the late 1960s and early 1970s: “If I saw someone from the roof selling fireworks, well you just knew that was gonna be a problem on the Fourth of July so you went and talked to their parents. . . . Or you see a husband and wife disputing on the street, so you stopped by their place later.”14
As both NYCHA tenants and HAPD officers tell it, however, the linchpin in the maintenance of the daily order they constructed together during these years was the Housing Authority’s system of fines for violations of NYCHA regulations. With the creation of the Housing Police in 1952, the power of such fines to shape daily life in NYCHA increased, as officers walking their beats wrote up tenants for violations of Housing Authority rules—from shaking mops out of windows to shattering lightbulbs in hallways—and conveyed that information to building managers. By 1959, HAPD officers were reporting an average of two hundred breaches of authority rules a month in the seventy projects they covered.15 As East Harlem social worker Ellie Lurie described the system of fines in 1955, managers saw the charges not so much as a source of revenue—they rarely even covered the cost of processing—but as a means to “pinpoint” for residents the social conventions contributing to “decent project living.” Moreover, the fines served “to bring the family into the manager’s office for a conference.” The authority left managers free to calibrate the “service charge” to the seriousness of the infraction and the circumstances of the family. Such broad discretion no doubt shaded into bureaucratic capriciousness on occasion. Former police commissioner Arthur Wallander, hired by NYCHA to study its housing force, faulted the authority in a 1957 report for a “lack of uniformity in imposing fines,” noting that charges for the same offense ran “from 50¢ to $15.00.”16 Some residents clearly would have agreed with Wallander. Lurie noted that tenants in the East Harlem developments where she worked “resented the arbitrariness” with which managers enforced fines. But she also concluded that the majority of residents, as one mother reported to her, thought the fines “forced people to raise themselves up and better themselves.”17
Less punitive than the criminal code but possessing more bite than a neighbor’s reproach, fines helped define and enforce community standards in the city’s public housing until the early 1980s. Consider the memories of Peter Grymes, the son of southern migrants to New York City; he grew up largely in the Bronx’s Castle Hill Houses in the late 1950s and early 1960s and became a Housing officer in 1968. Written up and summoned with his parents to the manager’s office several times for “loitering,” Grymes nonetheless credits fines with nudging residents to make “an effort to be responsible” and allowing Housing officers to signal “we mean business here” without having to make arrests.18 Terri Sheeps, a Castle Hill resident since 1967 and a tenant leader for more than two decades, also believes the fines sustained neighborhood standards of behavior because they made clear to residents that “we had a responsibility not only to our families but to our community.” Residents’ belief in the power of fines to reinforce order was so great that when budget cutbacks, policy changes, and court challenges of the 1970s made NYCHA reluctant to impose “service charges,” tenants’ organizations citywide demanded that NYCHA enforce the rules as vigorously as it had in the past.19 NYCHA’s willingness to maintain standards by imposing fines, tenant leader Gonzalez recalled, had demonstrated to residents that management took seriously their desires for “dignity in our homes.”20
This system of clear rules and swift (if occasionally arbitrary) fines characterized New York’s public housing for more than a quarter-century after the HAPD’s founding. By the mid-1960s, that system had come increasingly to distinguish NYCHA’s complexes from surrounding neighborhoods and, indeed, most of the nation. While the HAPD would continue to try to manage project orderliness by enforcing NYCHA’s regulations until the 1980s, outside of public housing a sweeping legal transformation between 1965 and 1972 made the task of regulating street life more difficult for ordinary police by invalidating the statutes they had previously depended on. At much the same time that courts began challenging order-maintenance laws, police critics began to question the wisdom of controlling panhandling, loitering, and other behaviors when rising crime rates suggested the real threats to public safety lay elsewhere. According to this argument, officers busily rounding up youthful vandals and disheveled vagabonds weren’t available to pursue the violent criminals who increasingly stalked both the city’s streets and—polls revealed—the public’s fears.21 The city’s overall arrest statistics tell the story: in 1964, more than four out of ten “collars” made by NYPD officers fell into the lowest grade of severity, but by 1970 such arrests had fallen to less than one-fifth of the total, as patrolmen increasingly turned a blind eye to minor crimes on the city’s streets.22 The same, however, was not true for NYCHA’s complexes.
Because the Housing Authority had become a distinct region within the city’s legal terrain, New York’s public housing developments followed a different course. Rules for daily conduct and a system of fines, established in a more paternalistic era, remained both on the books and enforced (albeit with wide variation and declining vigor). Through the 1970s and in some places into the 1980s, Housing officers continued to write up and apprehend tenants for comparatively minor infractions of NYCHA’s regulations. In 1976, for example, HAPD officers made 1,157 apprehensions for “bike riding,” 1,998 for “playing in a prohibited area,” and another 6,386 for loitering, noise, and even housekeeping violations. Indeed, that year HAPD officers made 13 percent more apprehensions for violations of NYCHA’s rules (9,991) compared to arrests under penal law (8,129).23 In ways that had become rare elsewhere in the city and the nation, public housing’s officers policed not just major crimes but minor disorder as well.
It would not have been surprising if HAPD officers, authorized to enforce NYCHA rules for remarkably small incivilities, had abused their broad discretion; police elsewhere had long done so, turning many African American and Latino neighborhoods in northern cities into tinderboxes of resentment by the late 1950s.24 Instead, the HAPD’s policy choices and daily practices largely spared New York’s public housing the bitter alienation between residents and the police that increasingly characterized city life beyond NYCHA’s complexes. Indeed, in ways large and small, minority communities signaled their preference for the brand of law enforcement they witnessed in NYCHA’s projects.
Of course, NYCHA in these years was no Shangri La of tranquil police-community relations. Nation of Islam members, for example, led a mob that briefly stormed a Brooklyn HAPD record room in 1962, insisting only their presence could insure justice for a fifteen-year-old detained inside. A decade later in East Harlem, two white Housing patrolmen were pelted by bottles hurled by an unruly crowd in the aftermath of a fatal shooting the night before by an HAPD officer.25 Nor did all Housing officers embody racial progressivism. In 1976, Robert Barbieri, a HAPD sergeant, served prison time along with three neighbors for repeatedly vandalizing a house in their all-white Staten Island neighborhood in an effort to dissuade a black Venezuelan-born psychologist and his Princeton-educated wife from moving into the home that they had rented with an option to buy.26 But NYCHA documents, press coverage, and tenant recollections demonstrate that such incidents were few and far between. New York’s African American and Latino communities generally drew a sharp distinction between the city and NYCHA police forces. As one African American recruit explained in 1973, “I wouldn’t want to work for the City Police Department. . . . Only [Housing] deals with the community.”27
In contrast to New York City at large, where the sources of power could seem remote and inscrutable, the very structure of NYCHA reduced municipal bureaucracy to an approachable size, allowing some residents individually and collectively to enforce responsible policing. NYCHA’s grounds may have sometimes been patchy and the tenants nearly always poor, but its building managers and Housing patrolmen, working out of local offices, were known by name to the residents who felt free to express grievances. In 1970, Ruby Hogans of the Pink Houses (1,500 units) in Brooklyn, reported an officer for handling her son a mite too roughly, but declined to file a charge because the officer in question was a “new member of the force” who had now “been made aware that people [in Pink Houses] are interested in the welfare of their children.”28 Hogans withdrew her complaint, content that through her actions the novice officer had learned the unspoken conventions—developed through countless daily interactions between officers and tenants—that governed policing in her complex.
In demanding changes in police behavior, NYCHA’s tenants not only raised their individual voices but also exerted the collective power that had developed in their communities—power that arose during the era of expanded rights and neighborhood activism ushered in by the War on Poverty. Historian Rhonda Y. Williams demonstrated in her extensive study of Baltimore’s public housing that, “in providing living space and setting forth rules governing working-people’s tenancy,” the government “set a standard for decent housing and government responsiveness for tenants as renters [and] citizens.” Structures built into public housing intended by NYCHA and other housing authorities to build community—such as tenants’ associations and patrols—quickly became vehicles for more politicized forms of engagement with the state.29 In New York, public housing tenants could mobilize relatively quickly on behalf of their communities in ways that the citizens of the city’s other poor neighborhoods could not. During the 1960s and 1970s, through lobbying of elected officials, demonstrations, and rent strikes (both threatened and actual), NYCHA residents demanded, and frequently secured, what they saw as their fair share of protection from the city’s law enforcement agencies. They achieved not only expansions in the Housing Police ranks but also alterations in HAPD practices.30 This record of collective action by NYCHA residents rarely figures in popular accounts of New York’s public housing complexes, which are more often portrayed by present-day observers as little more than depressing warehouses for their “demoralized” and “disorganized” tenants.31
In struggling to preserve the safety of their communities, the largely Puerto Rican and African American tenants filtering into postwar public housing by the 1960s often enlarged their engagement with the state and deepened their expectations of citizenship. They drew upon the collectivist traditions of their own cultures, in particular a heritage of community mothering well suited to the new public housing developments of East Harlem that were thick with children by the late 1950s.32 Even Lurie, a committed social worker at the time, found these networks of women in the city’s public housing hard to identify at first, although their effects were plainly visible.33 In 1957, as a representative of the East Harlem Project, Lurie went in search of neighborhood groups and leaders that her organization could help mobilize, with the assistance of private foundation funds, into a “voice for decisions which involved their own futures.” Only after two years of meetings with NYCHA residents in East Harlem did she encounter the most “formidable” association in the neighborhood: Los Vigilantes, an anticrime organization of mothers “well known” to their fellow tenants in the Lexington Houses (448 units). “In reflecting as to why this group had not been discovered earlier,” Lurie pointed to a male building representative (“domineering and easily threatened,” she observed) who had insisted that no other associations existed in the complex and blocked her inquiries. Only by outflanking him and making her own connections had Lurie discovered the “real” source of energy that had begun organizing the building’s tenants.34
As Lurie discovered, this group of six Puerto Rican women enjoyed prominent status in the building because of their roles as neighborhood caretakers, reflecting a seasoned tradition of “othermothers” and “activist mothering” that scholars have traced in African American and Latino communities.35 First, the women’s “high incidence of children” (twenty-seven) brought Los Vigilantes credibility in the building. Second, the hours they logged in their particularly visible meeting place—the benches outside the building’s laundry room—made staying involved with Los Vigilantes as inevitable for the building’s women as doing the week’s wash. Finally, the group had an “interest in promoting social change” among the broader “bench society” of mothers in the building. However modest their organization’s “office,” their accomplishments were significant: stimulating a mass protest of residents that persuaded the Housing Authority to install window bars on the first floor after a ground-floor tenant was brutally attacked; organizing the building’s “different fathers so that they would take turns at various times day or night, depending on their shifts, to help patrol the building” for several months after a rape of a child; working with the HAPD to “discourage the illegal use of [their complex’s] street by vehicles”; and winning from management the right to plant flowers around the complex—a practice NYCHA would later adopt systemwide.36
Tenant organizations mushroomed throughout the city’s low-income housing in the 1960s, fostered by NYCHA’s efforts and dollars. As historian Nicholas Bloom details in his study of the authority, after 1958 NYCHA increasingly worked to build community in the projects, hoping to stave off vandalism and disorder through tenant commitment. Official residents’ organizations, the authority calculated, could help it meet its management challenge. By 1965, all but twenty-eight of NYCHA’s 134 developments had tenant associations. The results, however, didn’t always match the authority’s expectations.37 To begin with, NYCHA discovered that funding tenant groups didn’t necessarily result in improved order. Tenant organizations, it turned out, were as likely to divide the authority’s residents as they were to bring them together. NYCHA—having created an official base for tenant power, however narrow, and having offered money, however little—now regularly found itself obliged to serve as a neutral arbitrator in what proved to be frequent clashes between black and Latino tenant factions over the new benefits. NYCHA, indeed, resorted on several occasions to hiring outside firms to oversee disputed tenant elections in an effort to bolster the integrity of the voting process and the credibility of the leadership that emerged.38
In addition, NYCHA wasn’t the only government agency hoping to enlist disadvantaged people in plans for their own uplift. President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty sought to persuade the poor of the virtues of bettering themselves by using their own political muscle—if only within the existing system—rather than relying on the allegedly enfeebling charity of the federal government or philanthropic institutions.39 By 1968, over one thousand “community action” groups opened offices in predominantly black and Latino neighborhoods across the country, four-fifths of them funded by the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), the agency administrating the bulk of the new Great Society programs.40 From 1964 to 1975, the authority’s complexes buzzed with the activities not only of NYCHA-backed groups but also a throng of community action organizations brought into existence by the OEO. To such organizations, NCYHA’s readily rented community facilities and clearly defined neighborhoods made the developments particularly attractive places to set up shop. Indeed, NYCHA officials publicly offered up the authority’s complexes as “social laboratories” for “involving the poor in planning and administrating the programs they require,” noting that “with the community facilities and the tenant body at hand, it is comparatively easy to test emerging hypotheses in community living.” By 1965, forty-nine of the authority’s one hundred community centers were operated by OEO or other volunteer associations.41
Whatever notions NYCHA and the OEO had regarding improving the lives of residents, tenants associations and community action groups tended to have ideas of their own, and these strong opinions often put them at odds with their government sponsors. Despite the variety of tenant organizations and their rapid growth through the 1960s and 1970s, they generally shared three goals that frequently conflicted with those of the housing authority’s personnel: expanded and more responsive HAPD service, stepped-up enforcement of Housing rules, and the eviction of troublemakers. The new spirit of collective action in NYCHA complexes, in other words, meant the Authority often found itself being held accountable by its own tenants for failing to use its institutional power to curb disorder in New York’s low-income housing.
This pattern was at work, for example, at an October 1966 Cooper Park Houses meeting on the subject of “rent parties.” Even though the building manager, responding to tenant demands, had already promised to evict the disruptive family hosting the “rent parties,” and despite the fact that the HAPD brass had agreed to step up that weekend’s patrols, the gathered residents and community leaders were looking for more durable changes. Linsy Hart, the tenant association president, and Mrs. Mildred Tudy, the former president who had recently been hired as an organizer for a local OEO community action group, took the assembled NYCHA officials to task. These two women—mothers and veteran civil rights activists—complained that the building manager was rarely forceful enough with the many Cooper Park families who violated Housing rules.42 Tudy and Hart insisted that NYCHA officials should be “more severe in these cases.” They put the Authority “on notice” that Hart’s tenant association and Tudy’s Community Progress Center would be watching to see that tenancy regulations were “firmly enforced” at Cooper Park. To these activists, preventive policing and community security required both fines and evictions—and they used their leadership positions to prod the authority to action.43
Such popular pressure, focused on neighborhood safety rather than individual rights or other causes historically championed by the political left, often remained invisible even to sympathetic outsiders. The radical social theorists and activists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven concluded at the time that NYCHA had successfully deployed tenants’ organizations to channel residents’ discontent “away from actions troublesome to the Authority” and into “middle-class” endeavors such as “project beautification.” Moreover, the maintenance of public order in NYCHA, the two academics argued, reflected the efforts and interests not of the tenants themselves but rather of the Authority, which wielded “policing practices” to “contain the poor” and “reinforce their powerlessness.” 44
Cloward and Piven’s analysis would have surprised Mildred Tudy, whose insistence that NYCHA enforce its rules against her unruly neighbors fit squarely with her concept of political action on behalf of her community. Indeed, Tudy, looking back decades later, described her central goal in a lifetime of activism in African American struggles as fighting for “ ‘basic needs’: the opportunity to be healthy and independent in one’s environment.” Demanding that the authority impose standards of behavior in Cooper Park was no exception to her politics. Rather, Tudy’s sense of her community’s positive right to the “basic need” of neighborhood safety meant individuals’ claims to their NYCHA lease should be conditional on responsible behavior. This fusing of group rights, conventional volunteerism, and more radical demands shaped Tudy’s participation in neighborhood campaigns that, over the course of forty years, included efforts to expand black employment and education opportunities, fight lead poisoning in poor communities, overcome racist violence, and protect what Tudy saw as poor people’s rights to government assistance.45
And Tudy was hardly alone. NYCHA’s new tenant associations often pressured managers for evictions. Until 1971, management could evict families for the criminal offenses of any of their members, but removing tenants was always a last resort for public housing managers who generally, as one noted, preferred stability and low turnover to evictions, as long as families paid their rent.46 Evictions for “non-desirability” occurred infrequently—even in the late 1950s, when NYCHA’s institutional power over tenants was at its peak. In 1958, 110 families were either evicted or asked to move out of federally funded complexes by the NYCHA: 7 for “noncooperation,” 15 for “breach of regulations,” and 88 for “objectionable conduct.” The 487 individuals involved represented merely 1.2 percent of all residents in the federal program. But the rarity of evictions does not seem to have lessened residents’ confidence in their power as a deterrent against misbehavior. As tenant leader Terri Sheeps reported, “eviction was absolutely key” to the fragile order the police, tenants, and management had forged in the Castle Hill Houses where she lived in the 1960s. Other tenant association leaders shared this belief and often demanded that NYCHA evict particular families for serious violations. Tenant leader Sarah Martin, for example, remembered residents throughout the city in the 1960s organizing to send petitions to building managers requesting action against unruly residents. NYCHA’s files from these years even contain numerous telegrams from tenant groups sent to the Housing Authority’s chairman identifying families they no longer wished to have as neighbors.47
From the late 1950s until the end of the 1970s, tenants’ most urgent and insistent political goal was the hiring of more Housing Police. At nearly every meeting with authority staff, in a flurry of letters to elected officials, and—starting in 1966—with increasingly strident demonstrations, residents demanded that NYCHA increase police coverage in their complexes. Indeed, between 1963 and 1980, New York’s public housing residents engaged in at least thirty-nine significant protests of varying kinds—demonstrations, rent strikes, sit-ins, and vigils—calling on NYCHA to provide more officers.48 Such activism by NYCHA residents neatly inverts Cloward and Piven’s notion that the housing authority aimed to disrupt tenants’ political aspirations by enforcing orderliness in its complexes. Instead, the records show that neighborhood order was frequently the purpose of NYCHA residents’ political struggles and that tenants believed they could achieve greater order by increasing the presence of Housing patrolmen.
The tenants’ most dramatic strategy in this campaign was the rent strike, a tactic borrowed from civil rights agitators in cities around the country. In New York, Mobilization for Youth (MFY) and other Lower East Side organizations launched a rent strike campaign against private landlords in 1964 designed to “disrupt the slum system.” Within weeks, however, the Lower East Side Rent Strike Committee had disintegrated. Accounts differ as to why this particular insurgency dissolved, but the failure of New York’s first wave of rent strikes was not the end of the story. MFY’s supporters and detractors alike have tended to omit from their rent-strike tales the occurrence of a second wave of strikes in 1968— this time undertaken by public housing residents on the Lower East Side and in Harlem and the Bronx, and all focused on getting more Housing officers into NYCHA’s complexes.49 This second, largely forgotten mobilization lasted far longer, gathered more support, and in many ways required greater courage of the tenants than the first strike had in 1964. State law provided seventy-six violations for which tenants could legally withhold rent from a landlord—from rodent infestation to plumbing defects—but insufficient security was not on the list.50 Public housing residents who withheld rent in a bid for more patrolmen enjoyed no such legal protections. Even so, a mother protesting with her children for more police for their Harlem housing development boasted to the Amsterdam News’s famed reporter Simon Obi Anekwe, the rent strike was, “one of the most beautiful things that ever happened here.”51
This “beautiful thing” also reflected a compromise of sorts between the radical ambitions of MFY’s staff and the practical needs of the poor whom they hoped to organize. Although MFY activists had assumed they could ignite the city’s oppressed in an uprising against callous municipal bureaucracies, the masses had instead inundated them with routine service requests—usually for access to those very agencies. One historian found, for example, that close to half of MFY’s casework in the summer of 1966 involved applications for public housing. Eager to push beyond the seemingly limited impact of social work in the mold of old-line settlement houses, MFY had to adapt its favored strategy of “direct action” to the residents’ expressed hopes of greater order through more police.52 It was an unlikely tactical compromise. MFY had, in fact, long cultivated a reputation for being antipolice, publicizing its practice of stationing lawyers at precinct houses to curb police excesses.53 But MFY soon learned that “maximum feasible participation” of NYCHA tenants, who generally supported the Housing officers patrolling their complexes, required a different strategy: not a war against cops, but a strike for more of them.
Launched in February of 1968, MFY’s rent strike for more Housing Police was a multi-neighborhood affair. MFY-led strikers in the Jacob Riis and Lillian Wald houses (1,190 and 1,860 units respectively) on the Lower East Side and the Paterson Houses (1,791 units) in the Bronx coordinated their effort with tenants in five additional complexes in Harlem: Manhattanville, Grant, Douglas, St. Nicholas, and Drew houses. Lawyers from or affiliated with MFY defended a majority of the tenants. MFY helped the residents deposit payments into escrow and then filed a lawsuit on behalf of tenants in the Lillian Wald Houses against the Housing Authority on the grounds that the complex lacked adequate police. The court ruled against MFY in that case (NYCHA v. Medlin) in June, but the strike continued for eight more months, punctuated by attention-getting vigils and demonstrations to keep the pressure on the authority. Only in January of the following year—when NYCHA commenced eviction proceedings—did the rent defiance end, having held together roughly four times as long as MFY’s much-discussed 1964 rent strike. NYCHA, however, quickly accepted back rent and restored the strikers’ tenancy.54 But both the strategy itself and the demand for more officers spread as other groups eager to lay claim to the popular movement for greater law enforcement in public housing took up the residents’ cause.
Consider, for example, the Young Lords Organization (YLO), a former Chicago Puerto Rican street gang eagerly reinventing itself in the late 1960s as a political movement in the style of the Black Panthers. YLO’s bold rhetoric and combative stance had caught the attention of Puerto Rican activists in New York. Organizing residents in Spanish Harlem, Young Lords leaders announced—in further emulation of the Black Panthers—a Thirteen-Point Program of political objectives in October of 1969. The manifesto’s twelfth item had called for “revolutionary war” against the “the businessman, the politician, and the police,” warning “ALL PIGS” that “BORICUA IS AWAKE!”55 Young Lord organizers working in NYCHA complexes, however, discovered they had to break with ideological purity; Nuyoricans in East Harlem’s public housing wanted more Housing Police officers, not a racialized war against them. And so 1970 found the Young Lords organizing NYCHA residents in a rent strike for an increased police presence in their communities. The Young Lords settled on the George Washington Carver Houses (1,246 units) for their campaign. Fifty-three percent of Carver’s residents were Puerto Rican, making it the most Latino of the many NYCHA developments that blanketed much of East Harlem with a nearly unbroken landscape of modernist high-rise towers. In December, the Young Lords announced their threatened strike at Carver with a disciplined sit-in at the manager’s office by 150 tenants, who chanted in unison their willingness to withhold rent until the authority provided them with more Housing Police officers.56
The willingness of NYCHA residents to risk their tenancy by withholding rent is certainly a tribute to the HAPD, as well as clear evidence of community support for “our cops.” Measuring the effectiveness of particular strikes, threatened and actual, is trickier. The promised rent strikes, for example, often failed to materialize because the Housing Authority frequently—if temporarily—reassigned police officers from elsewhere to pacify the protesting residents. After a single day of protest and a threatened rent strike at the Whitman Houses, for example, NYCHA committed additional officers immediately, prompting the tenant leaders to declare they were “holding off on the rent strike for now.”57 More broadly, on a systemwide level, the Authority significantly expanded the Housing Police in these years. NYCHA boosted the HAPD’s ranks by more than 17 percent in 1968, again in 1969, and by more than 7 percent in 1970—despite no more than minor increases in the tenant population. While City Hall had agreed in 1969 to base its subsidies of newly hired Housing officers on the number of new NYCHA units, the growth in the HAPD far outpaced that calculus. The 60 percent expansion that the Housing Police enjoyed during the most active years of tenant militancy (1968–1970) was roughly double the increase the force experienced during the previous six years of tenant quiescence—suggesting that the residents’ political pressure had real impact.58
Beyond the numbers, internal NYCHA documents reveal the extent to which the new tenant insurgency shaped the authority’s thinking. By the late 1960s, NYCHA officials recognized the need to contend with residents’ political leverage not just at individual projects but throughout the authority. When NYCHA’s top officials, for example, convened for a closed meeting about “Project Security Problems” in 1968, they acknowledged that citywide, the now “well organized tenants . . . are able to make their complaints known more readily than the general public.”59 Moreover, housing authority administrators took advantage of tenant militancy in their efforts to draw more money from the city’s coffers. NYCHA’s chairman, for example, concluded his 1968 plea to Mayor Lindsay for an increased housing subsidy by invoking the tenants as a political force to be reckoned with. “Unless . . . we voluntarily meet the demand . . . for enlarging our police force,” he wrote, “pressure from our tenants and their representatives will become so great that compulsory legislation may well be adopted.” 60
Against the backdrop of the dramatic civil rights battles that unfolded nationwide in the 1950s and 1960, the tenant activism that emerged out of the authority’s complexes—whether holding NYCHA accountable for enforcing community order or demanding that the city provide what residents saw as their fair share of policing services—can seem trivial. It was not. Even as cities elsewhere saw their public housing implode into national symbols of failure, public housing in New York survived America’s “urban crisis” in large measure because of the NYCHA tenants who drew upon their collective strengths to help preserve the security of their communities. In demanding that the Housing Police and NYCHA work on their behalf, the city’s public housing residents made their homes, and their daily lives, political—even if the goals of their activism deviated from the era’s more visible channels of protest and prominent ideologies of resistance.
The success of this tenant activism was built in part on years of relationships fostered by the unique structure of policing in NYCHA. These relationships did not happen by chance. With vertical patrols rather than squad cars, on-site record rooms rather than distant precinct houses, and officers who might be neighbors rather than suburbanites, tenants had every reason to consider Housing officers “our cops” rather than a hostile presence. The mutual understanding and structures for communication generated by years of such interactions, while not perfect, helped carry NYCHA, its residents, and its police through two decades of urban change and turbulence. Together, in the daily world of the sprawling complexes, the authority’s officers and tenants forged and practiced a distinctive form of community policing long before think tanks and foundations had even worked out a theory.