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No Place on the Corner: The Costs of Aggressive Policing
Winner, 2019 Goddard Riverside Stephan Russo Book Prize for Social Justice, given by the Goddard Riverside Community Center
The impact of stop-and-frisk policing on a South Bronx community
What’s it like to be stopped and frisked by the police while walking home from the supermarket with your young children? How does it feel to receive a phone call from your fourteen-year-old son who is in the back of a squad car because he laughed at a police officer? How does a young person of color cope with being frisked several times a week since the age of 15? These are just some of the stories in No Place on the Corner, which draws on three years of intensive ethnographic fieldwork in the South Bronx before and after the landmark 2013 Floyd v. City of New York decision that ruled that the NYPD’s controversial “stop and frisk” policing methods were a violation of rights.
Through riveting interviews and with a humane eye, Jan Haldipur shows how a community endured this aggressive policing regime. Though the police mostly targeted younger men of color, Haldipur focuses on how everyone in the neighborhood―mothers, fathers, grandparents, brothers and sisters, even the district attorney’s office―was affected by this intense policing regime and thus shows how this South Bronx community as a whole experienced this collective form of punishment. One of Haldipur’s key insights is to demonstrate how police patrols effectively cleared the streets of residents and made public spaces feel off-limits or inaccessible to the people who lived there. In this way community members lost the very ‘street corner’ culture that has been a hallmark of urban spaces. This profound social consequence of aggressive policing effectively keeps neighbors out of one another’s lives and deeply hurts a community’s sense of cohesion.
No Place on the Corner makes it hard to ignore the widespread consequences of aggressive policing tactics in major cities across the United States.
The impact of stop-and-frisk policing on a South Bronx community
What’s it like to be stopped and frisked by the police while walking home from the supermarket with your young children? How does it feel to receive a phone call from your fourteen-year-old son who is in the back of a squad car because he laughed at a police officer? How does a young person of color cope with being frisked several times a week since the age of 15? These are just some of the stories in No Place on the Corner, which draws on three years of intensive ethnographic fieldwork in the South Bronx before and after the landmark 2013 Floyd v. City of New York decision that ruled that the NYPD’s controversial “stop and frisk” policing methods were a violation of rights.
Through riveting interviews and with a humane eye, Jan Haldipur shows how a community endured this aggressive policing regime. Though the police mostly targeted younger men of color, Haldipur focuses on how everyone in the neighborhood―mothers, fathers, grandparents, brothers and sisters, even the district attorney’s office―was affected by this intense policing regime and thus shows how this South Bronx community as a whole experienced this collective form of punishment. One of Haldipur’s key insights is to demonstrate how police patrols effectively cleared the streets of residents and made public spaces feel off-limits or inaccessible to the people who lived there. In this way community members lost the very ‘street corner’ culture that has been a hallmark of urban spaces. This profound social consequence of aggressive policing effectively keeps neighbors out of one another’s lives and deeply hurts a community’s sense of cohesion.
No Place on the Corner makes it hard to ignore the widespread consequences of aggressive policing tactics in major cities across the United States.
224 pages, Paperback
Published November 27, 2018
24 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
June 16, 2023
A descriptive, yet ultimately disappointing read due to its lack of critical engagement with the data collected and the role that police play in denying people basic rights and liberties. If, as Haldipur states in the conclusion, a return to community policing allows for people to "reclaim their rights as citizens," this tacitly admits that police actually deny people their rights in areas that police routinely criminalize and are prone to retaliating against (think of how the man who recorded Eric Garner's death was arrested and police mocked the slogan "I Can't Breathe" with their own version: "I Can Breathe"). And with the history of racial minorities being bound to criminality by virtue of their class and spatial occupation, it is difficult to square how cooperating with police alleviates criminalization. For example, if CRIME, writ large, has still declined in lieu of stop and frisk being ruled illegal in New York, why is policing still disproportionately focused in so few neighborhoods? To these kinds of discrepancies, Haldipur has no answer in this book.
June 3, 2020
Very accessible and timely look at how aggressive policing has negatively affected communities of color. If you want to understand why people are protesting, why people have lost faith in police, and why the current forms of policing are eroding communities of color, just read this book.
January 3, 2022
Solid book
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews