Clean Halls, Broken Windows: Bringing Stop and Frisk Policing Inside New York's Apartment Buildings

• In Event: Regulation in All the Wrong Places: What In-Situ Research on the Operations of Law, Policing, and Informal Social Control Has to Tell Us About What We’re Doing Wrong and How We Can Do Better

Abstract

In Ligon v. City of New York, one of the trio of ongoing class actions challenging the stop and frisk practices of the NYPD, the plaintiffs directly confronted the policing tactics within the "Clean Halls" program of the NYPD. Since 1991, police precincts have enrolled thousands of privately-owned apartment buildings into this program, which enabled officers to conduct patrols of the stairwells and hallways of these buildings without first securing a warrant. During these patrols, the NYPD aggressively stopped, frisked, summonsed, and arrested tens of thousands of people for very low-level misdemeanors. These practices often unconstitutionally targeted residents of those buildings and their invited guests, and became themselves one of the principle "nuisances" of living in poor NYC communities. Many of the buildings enrolled in "Clean Halls" were indeed rife with criminal complaints and were in unsafe physical condition. Instead of pressuring landlords to correct problems like broken locks (and actual broken windows), the police response to these conditions was to simply lock up a sizable portion of the community, creating indelible criminal records that themselves often led to tenants' evictions from these buildings and persistent homelessness. Thus the "Clean Halls" program was emblematic of the height of Broken Windows-era policing: criminalizing whole communities while failing to address the underlying drivers of crime and poverty.

Author

• Molly Kovel, The Bronx Defenders