ABSTRACT
New York City's municipal policies and practices grew increasingly hostile toward people of color, poor people, and immigrants in the 1990s. In essence, Wilson and Kelling argued that showing intolerance for the smallest crimes would nurture an anticrime environment. Applying the theory into mass citywide policy and practice, Giuliani identified “homeless people, panhandlers, prostitutes, squeegee cleaners, squatters, graffiti artists, ‘reckless bicyclists,’ and unruly youth as the major enemies of public order and decency, the culprits of urban decline generating widespread fear.” Lack of time, resources, and perhaps most importantly, the absence of confidence that anything will be done to redress the harm, often keep the people most affected by police misconduct from formalizing their complaints. Systematic patterns of police brutality and arbitrary killings are purposefully obfuscated by the state. Despite activism from the mothers and families of police brutality killings, as well as multi-issue and multi-racial coalitions, the persistence of high-profile police brutality cases continued.
