The Last Neighborhood Cops

New York City is an exception in the history of public housing. Unlike in nearly every other city in the United States, New York's projects have not been demolished or radically reconfigured, despite high-rise forms and forbidding scales. Until recently, social scientists and historians have not provided adequate explanations for this anomaly. Following on the heels of Nicholas Dagen Bloom's Public Housing That Worked (2008) Fritz Umbach contributes a nuanced and compelling history of the importance of policing, both formal and informal, in creating social order in New York City projects. His work makes a strong case for privileging community rights over individual ones, challenging a long line of historiography that champions the rights revolution of the 1960s. Umbach shows how the New York City Housing Authority (nycha) pioneered “community policing” in the 1950s, long before criminologists embraced the idea in the 1990s. In response to growing crime, in 1952 the nycha organized what became the New York City Housing Authority Police Department (hapd). It assigned officers to individual projects to conduct foot patrols, gain the trust of residents through everyday interactions, and enforce housing authority rules; arresting bad guys was a small part of the job. Project managers, not precinct commanders, supervised the officers with the goal of maintaining social order. Unlike their New York Police Department (nypd) counterparts, hapd officers were racially and ethnically diverse and often lived in the communities they policed. The strategy resulted in high levels of cooperation and tenant satisfaction. Tellingly, when nycha residents embarked on a rent strike in 1968, their primary demand was for more hapd officers. Residents wanted social order and were willing to sacrifice individual rights to sustain it

Business · Criminology · Historiography · Order (exchange · Police department · Political science · Politics · Precinct · Public housing · Social order · Sociology · Law · Public Administration · Urban, Neighborhood, and Segregation Studies

• To Protect and to Serve

  Open Access•Max Felker-Kantor•Crime and Justice•2024

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