The Making of the Orderly City: New York since the 1980s

Abstract

This article advances the concept of the orderly city, which has structural qualities and as a vision has dominated ideas about law and order in New York since the 1980s. The realization of the orderly city depended on the successful implementation of broken windows policing. This implementation required considerable reforms in the criminal justice system and the provision of substantial financial resources. Even then, without a considerable decline in serious crime rates, the city government would be unable to justify a war against minor infractions. The crime decline that occurred in the 1990s allowed the city government to equate the safe city with the orderly city. Moreover, as the economy of New York improved, the orderly city was promoted as a precondition of affluence. This article shows how these correlations are questionable and how the orderly city is based on morally and legally questionable actions such as racial profiling.

“What’s Happened to the People?” Gentrification and Racial Segregation in Brooklyn

“…Downtown Brooklyn and its environs also became the focus of transnational investment with thousands of luxury condominiums being built in the area (Chronopoulos 2016). In a general sense, the movement of whites to parts of Black Brooklyn epitomizes the back-to-the-city movement (Hyra 2015), the dynamic nature of New York's economy, the desire to live near "choice locations," a perception that New York is safer and more orderly (Chronopoulos 2020), and an acceptance of racial diversity by younger whites. There is also a gentrification ripple effect that many young whites are experiencing in Brooklyn.…”

From State-Sanctioned Removal to the Right to the City: The Policing of Asian Immigrants in Southern Brooklyn, 1987–1995

“…52 The expansion of police discretion also accompanied an expansion of the police force itself through the addition of over ten thousand uniformed officers during Giuliani's tenure. 53 While Giuliani's policies have been lauded for a reduction in crime, the era also saw a dramatic increase in reports of police abuse. 54 The NYPD enforced what Michelle Alexander has called the "New Jim Crow," or maintenance of the structural racism that existed before the midtwentieth-century civil rights reforms by developing and weaponizing the association of Black and other racialized bodies with crime and danger.…”

The Mass Criminalization of Black Americans: A Historical Overview

“…In the midst of sweeping criminal legal reforms and political-economic transformations in major and midsize US cities, the unprecedented surge in proactive police research and preventive policing experiments in the 1970s and 1980s spurred demands and financing for community-based, problem-solving reforms embedded within existing law enforcement institutions (Flamm 2005, Hinton 2016, Walker 2016. Rethinking traditional modes of rapid-response or beck-and-call police work, police researchers working in tandem with law enforcement practitioners and crime-control advocates in the 1980s and 1990s advanced new approaches and strategies for boosting proactive patrol work and disorder management in urban streets, public housing areas, and downtown city districts as well as suburban neighborhoods (Boyles 2015, Chronopoulos 2011, Kraska 2001, Umbach 2011. The "broken windows" paradigm editorialized by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling in 1982 is an exemplary product of the proactive policing reform movement.…”