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About Us - MORRIS JUSTICE: a public science project

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The Morris Justice Project is a collaborative research team of neighborhood residents in the south Bronx and members of the Public Science Project, the CUNY Graduate Center, John Jay College, and Pace University Law Center. Sponsored by the Public Science Project, we have spent two years documenting experiences of policing in our 40 block community near Yankee stadium.

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Safety: Documentary Interviewing People Incarcerated at Rikers Island

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Safety: Documentary Interviewing People Incarcerated at Rikers Island

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Aliens of England Best Alien Documentary Film Part

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Cleveland Best Alien Documentary Film Part

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Physical Evidence of Alien Best Alien Documentary Film Part

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Safety: Harlem Parent Organization Against Violence

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Safety: Harlem Parent Organization Against Violence

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Jean Corbett-Parker shared the story of her son's death and her fight to prevent violence on the very streets in Harlem that her son warned others about.

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Jay Z: 'The War on Drugs Is an Epic Fail'

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Why are white men poised to get rich doing the same thing African-Americans have been going to prison for?

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Safety: Voices from a 2012 Protest Against Stop-and-Frisk

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Safety: Voices from a 2012 Protest Against Stop-and-Frisk

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Several thousand people marched down Manhattan's Fifth Avenue on June 17 to demand an end to the New York Police department's controversial Stop-and-Frisk tactic. The silent march, organized by the NAACP and a coalition of nearly 300 other groups, sought to draw attention to the damage the massive spike in street interrogations is causing to communities of color.

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Safety: The Fight for Trauma Care on Chicago's South Side

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Safety: The Fight for Trauma Care on Chicago's South Side

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The Fight for Trauma Care on Chicago’s South Side

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According to a 2013 study, Chicago gunshot-wound victims more than five miles away from a trauma center were likelier to die. According to a Nation analysis of city data, nearly a fifth of Chicago residents live five or more miles away from a trauma center, most of them on the South Side.

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Safety: Personal Story of When Family Members are Imprisoned

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Safety: Personal Story of When Family Members are Imprisoned

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A racist system. A brother in jail. One teenage girl turned to animation to make sense of it all.

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Safety: Timeline of NYC Crime Statistics

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Safety: Timeline of NYC Crime Statistics

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This week's feature story, The Tragedy of Louis Scarcella, explores the context of the now-infamous Brooklyn detective's career. It explained how the culture of policing changed over the years in response to the city's rising crime rate. Crime, in many ways, shaped the modern history of New York City.

And so here is a timeline chronicling the rise and the fall of crime in New York City:
See also this week's feature story: The Tragedy of Louis Scarcella

February 1960: U.S. unemployment rate is 4.8 percent.

1963: there are 548 murders in New York City.

1964: New York City hosts the World's Fair, dedicated to "Man's Achievement on a Shrinking Globe in an Expanding Universe."

1967: 746 murders.

1968: At a crime conference, the Manhattan Borough President, the Bronx Borough President, and the Brooklyn District Attorney declare that police corruption helped spark the rising crime rate. "It is senseless to believe youngsters do not see this or to expect that it will create in them a respect for the law," said Manhattan Borough President Percy Sutton.

1969: 1,043 murders.

April 1970: Officer Frank Serpico details NYPD corruption for a New York Times expose. "Graft Paid to Police Here Said to Run into Millions," reads the A-1 headline.

October 1970: Mayor John Lindsay names Patrick Murphy NYPD police commissioner.

December 1972: Lindsay's Knapp Commission issues its final report on police corruption and suggested reforms.

1972: 1,691 murders.

1974: NYPD ends overnight subway patrols in order to have more officers to combat daytime crime.

May 1975: U.S. unemployment rate is 9 percent.

1975: New York City is close to broke. Mayor Abe Beame's staff drafts a statement announcing that the city is defaulting on $100 million in loans. The city's lawyer files a bankruptcy petition at the State Supreme Court. At the last moment, officials avoid bankruptcy by agreeing to deep budget cuts.

1977: David "Son of Sam" Berkowitz murders six and injures seven more over a 13-month span.

July 1977: Blackout. Looting and fires. More than 3,700 arrests. More than $300 million cost to the city. Post cover the next day reads, "24 Hours of Terror."

May 1979: Six-year-old Etan Patz goes missing during a walk to the bus stop in SoHo. Becomes the first kid on a milk carton.

1979: There are more than 250 felonies each week in the subway system.

[

January 1980: Metropolitan Transportation Authority chairman Richard Ravitch says that he does not let his 14-year-old son ride the subway at night.

1980: Census tallies 7 million people in New York City, 800,000 fewer than a decade earlier.

1980 or so: Crack cocaine arrives in New York City. It is unlike any other drug. It is very cheap and very addictive and highly profitable. Parents fall into addiction. Junkies rob. Dealers battle for territory.

June 1982: Transit Authority worker Willie Turks is beaten to death by a group of white men in Gravesend, Brooklyn, the first in a string of high-profile racially motivated murders over the course of the decade.

November 1982: U.S. unemployment rate hits 10.8 percent, the highest of the post-World War II era.

1982: Police force dwindles to around 22,000 officers, down from around 34,000 in 1975.

December 1984: Bernhard Goetz shoots four youths on the subway, becomes a hero to many New Yorkers.

1986: Michael Griffin is beaten by a group of white men at Howard Beach, Queens. During his attempt to escape, he is hit by a car and killed.

April 1989: Trisha Meili is raped and beaten while jogging through Central Park. Daily News cover the next day reads, "Wolf Pack's Prey: Female Jogger near death after savage attack by roving gang."

August 1986: 16-year-old Yusef Hawkins is beaten and shot to death by a mob of youths in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn.

1990: Upon taking office, Mayor David Dinkins begins a police hiring spree. Nearly 8,000 officers join the NYPD over the next two years.

February 1990: Rabbi Chaskel Werzberger is fatally shot by by a jewel thief fleeing the scene of an attempted robbery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

September 1990: Tourist Brian Watkins is stabbed to death when he tries to protect his parents from a group of muggers on a midtown Manhattan subway platform.

September 1990: "Crime-ravaged city cries out for help: Dave, Do Something" declares a Post headline.

1990: Murder rate hits record-high of 2,245.

1992: 1,995 murders.

1994: Shortly after taking office, Mayor Rudy Giuliani names Bill Bratton NYPD police commissioner. Bratton applies the Broken Windows theory of policing, which stresses enforcing quality-of-life laws.

1994: The NYPD begins using CompStat, a computerized crime-tracking system, to identify the highest-crime blocks in the city.

1994: 1,561 murders, 400 fewer than 1993's total.

November 1995: Subway token booth clerk Harry Kaufman is killed when a group of young men pour gasoline into the coin slot and light the booth on fire in East Flatbush, Brooklyn.

1995: 1,177 murders.

1998: 633 murders.

April 2000: U.S. unemployment rate drops to 3.8 percent, the lowest it has been since the '60s.

January 2002: Mayor Michael Bloomberg takes office and names Ray Kelly police commissioner. Kelly increases the department's use of stop-and-frisk.

2002: There are 97,296 stop-and-frisk incidents.

2008: there are more than 500,000 stop-and-frisk incidents.

March 2010: Construction on the Barcays Center begins in Downtown Brooklyn, marking a turning point in the development and gentrification sweeping across the borough.

November 6, 2012: For the first time in the city's recorded history, there are no reported shootings, stabbings, or murders on this day.

2012: 414 murders.
Send story tips to the author, Albert Samaha

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The Rise and Fall of Crime in New York City: A Timeline

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This week's feature story, The Tragedy of Louis Scarcella, explores the context of the now-infamous Brooklyn detective's career. It explained how the culture of policing changed over the years in response to the city's rising crime rate. Crime, in many ways, shaped the modern history of New York City.

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Safety: Everything Is Not What It Seems with Body Cameras

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Safety: Everything Is Not What It Seems with Body Cameras

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Now watch the same encounter filmed from the police car's dash camera.

That didn't add much clarity, did it?

Professor Stoughton said that after watching both videos, most people usually say: "It looked like he pushed the officer, or he fell because he was going to get hit by the door."

Why? Here's a hint: Of those who said they trusted the police at the beginning of this quiz, said the officer was knocked down by the driver or the door. Of those who said they tend to distrust or strongly distrust the police, said the officer was knocked down by either of those. (These results are updated every few minutes based on quiz responses.)

Now here is the same incident, from a bystander's smartphone. Watch and listen.

So here's what really happened: The man jumped out because he was trying to get away from a bee inside his car. All that flailing had nothing to do with the officer. It was all about the fear of getting stung.

The video also shows that the officer was not knocked down by the man in the car, or the door - he was too far away.

Why might some of us have missed these details?

Let's take a deeper look at the responses.

Readers who said at the start that they had a high level of trust in the police or tended to trust the police were more likely to believe that the officer faced a very threatening, or somewhat threatening, situation, according to our updated results. For those who said they distrusted the police, or tended to, the interaction looked less dangerous for the officer.

People who generally trust the police

Saw a serious threat

People who generally distrust the police

Saw a serious threat

This confirms what Professor Stoughton has found in his own presentations with judges, lawyers and students: What we see in police video footage tends to be shaped by what we already believe.

"Our interpretation of video is just as subject to cognitive biases as our interpretation of things we see live," Professor Stoughton said. "People disagree about policing and will continue to disagree about exactly what a video shows."

Race can also play a role. While Professor Stoughton's work did not seek to determine how the race of the driver affected viewers' conclusions, numerous studies have shown that some sort of conscious or unconscious bias is present in all of us, including law enforcement.

Body cameras can have a positive impact. In San Diego, complaints about officers fell 40.5 percent and use of "personal body" force by officers dropped by 46.5 percent after officers adopted body cameras, according to a 2015 report from the city's police department.

But Professor Stoughton said that as such videos become more commonly used in court to either bolster or dispute the accounts of police officers, people must be careful how they interpret the footage, keeping in mind the cameras' limits and viewers' biases.

"People are expecting more of body cameras than the technology will deliver," Professor Stoughton said. "They expect it to be a broad solution for the problem of police-community relations, when in fact it's just a tool, and like any tool, there's a limited value to what it can do."

Given that, and looking back at the videos and this experiment, has your view of policing and the role of video changed? Read responses from other quiz-takers then

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Now watch the same encounter filmed from the police car's dash camera. That didn't add much clarity, did it? Professor Stoughton said that after watching both videos, most people usually say: "It looked like he pushed the officer, or he fell because he was going to get hit by the door."

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Safety: NYPD Officers on Stop-and-Frisk, This Led to Repeal

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Safety: NYPD Officers on Stop-and-Frisk, This Led to Repeal

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The Hunted and the Hated: An Inside Look at the NYPD's Stop-and-Frisk Policy

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Safety/Education: History of Students Treated As Criminals

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Safety/Education: History of Students Treated As Criminals

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At least 22 states make it a crime to disturb school in ways that teenagers are wired to do. Why did this happen?

André Chung

One Monday morning last fall, at Spring Valley High School in Columbia, South Carolina, a 16-year-old girl refused to hand over her cellphone to her algebra teacher. After multiple requests, the teacher called an administrator, who eventually summoned a sheriff's deputy who was stationed at the school. The deputy walked over to the girl's desk. "Are you going to come with me," he said, "or am I going to make you?"

Niya Kenny, a student sitting nearby, did not know the name of the girl who was in trouble. That girl was new to class and rarely spoke. But Kenny had heard stories about the deputy, Ben Fields, who also coached football at the school, and she had a feeling he might do something extreme. "Take out your phones," she whispered to the boys sitting next to her, and she did the same. The girl still hadn't moved. While Kenny watched, recording with her iPhone, Fields wrenched the girl's right arm behind her and grabbed her left leg. The girl flailed a fist in his direction. As he tried to wrestle her out of her chair, the desk it was attached to flipped over, slamming the girl backwards. Then he reached for her again, extracting her this time, and hurled her across the classroom floor.

The other kids sat unmoving, hunched over their desks. The teacher and the administrator stood in silence. As Fields crouched over the girl to handcuff her, Kenny tried to hold her phone steady. Her legs were shaking and her heart was hammering in her chest. If this was really happening, she thought, someone needed to know about it-someone, apparently, outside that room. "Put your hands behind your back," Fields ordered the girl, sounding excited, out of breath. "Gimme your hands! Gimme your hands!"

Finally, in an unnaturally high voice, Kenny blurted: "Ain't nobody gonna put this shit on Snapchat?" The administrator tried to quiet her down, saying her name over and over, but she would not be silenced. "What the fuck?" she said, her voice rising further. "What the fuck?" Then she hit the Post button on her phone's Snapchat app.

Videos taken by Kenny and other students ended up online, and the story went viral that night. The girl who was thrown was black, like Kenny, and the footage of her being flung across the classroom by a white police officer inflamed debates about race and law enforcement. Hillary Clinton tweeted that there was "no excuse" for such violence, while the singer Ted Nugent praised Fields for teaching a lesson to "a spoiled, undisciplined brat."

After Fields handcuffed the girl, another deputy arrived to escort her out of the classroom. She would be released to her guardian later that day. Then, according to Kenny, Fields turned to her. "You got so much to say?," Fields asked. "Come on."

Kenny did not speak. She got up and put her hands behind her back.

The next day, theprincipal called the incident "horrific," and the school-board chair said it represented an "outrageous exception to the culture, conduct, and standards in which we so strongly believe." Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott, who oversees the officers at Spring Valley, said he was sickened by the videos and was investigating his deputy's actions. He added in passing that Niya Kenny had been arrested for "contributing to the chaos." None of the other officials mentioned her name.

Kenny's case did not receive much attention from officials because it was not unusual. Her arrest was based on a law against "disturbing school," a mysterious offense that is routinely levied against South Carolina students. Each year, about 1,200 kids are charged with disturbing school in the state-some for yelling and shoving, others for cursing. (In fact, the girl who was thrown from her desk was charged with disturbing school too, though the public uproar focused on the use of force.) State law makes it a crime to "disturb in any way or in any place the students or teachers of any school" or "to act in an obnoxious manner." The charge, which has been filed against kids as young as 7, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, is punishable by up to 90 days in jail or a $1,000 fine.

At least 22 states and dozens of cities and towns currently outlaw school disturbances in one way or another. South Dakota prohibits "boisterous" behavior at school, while Arkansas bans "annoying conduct." Florida makes it a crime to "interfere with the lawful administration or functions of any educational institution"-or to "advise" another student to do so. In Maine, merely interrupting a teacher by speaking loudly is a civil offense, punishable by up to a $500 fine.

In some states, like Washington and Delaware, disturbing-school laws are on the books but used relatively rarely or not at all. In others, they have become a standard classroom-management tool. Last year, disturbing school was the second-most-common accusation leveled against juveniles in South Carolina, after misdemeanor assault. An average of seven kids were charged every day that schools were in session.

Each year in Maryland, Florida, and Kentucky, about 1,000 students face the charge. In North Carolina, the number is closer to 2,000. Nationwide, good data are hard to come by. Some states, like Nevada and Arizona, do not track how many times juveniles are charged with this offense. (In Arizona, a court official would tell me only that the number is somewhere between zero and 5,375 arrests a year.) But figures collected by The Atlantic suggest that authorities charge juveniles with some version of disturbing school more than 10,000 times a year. This number does not even include older teenagers who are charged as adults.

Over the years, judges around the country have landed on various definitions of disturbance. In Georgia, a court concluded, a fight qualifies as disturbing school if it attracts student spectators. But a Maryland court found that attracting an audience does not create a disturbance unless normal school activities are delayed or canceled. In Alabama, a court found that a student had disturbed school because his principal had had to meet with him to discuss his behavior; an appeals court overturned the ruling on the grounds that talking with students was part of a principal's job.

Just this summer in New Mexico, a federal appeals court upheld a school police officer's decision to arrest and handcuff a 13-year-old who had repeatedly burped in gym class, ruling that "burping, laughing, and leaning into the classroom stopped the flow of student educational activities, thereby injecting disorder into the learning environment." The decision reads like an Onion article, albeit one that goes on for 94 pages.

When teenagers talk back, scream obscenities, or otherwise behave badly, adults must call them out and hold them accountable. That's how kids learn. In time, most kids outgrow their delinquent ways. Police and policy makers who defend these laws say they make classrooms safer. But the laws have also been used to punish behavior that few reasonable people would consider criminal. Defiance is a typical part of adolescence, so putting teenagers in jail for swearing or refusing to follow an order is akin to arresting a 2-year-old for having a meltdown at the grocery store. It essentially outlaws the human condition. And the vagueness of the laws means they are inevitably applied unevenly, depending on the moods and biases of the adults enforcing them. In South Carolina, black students like Kenny are nearly four times as likely as their white peers to be charged with disturbing school.

The original school "disturbance" in South Carolina, the one that started it all, was flirting.

During the Progressive era, with women beginning to vote and race riots breaking out across growing urban centers, lawmakers seized on flirting as a menace to social order. New York City police set up flirting dragnets, using "pretty blonde girls as bait," according to a syndicated newspaper column from June 1920. "The enormous recent growth of the crime of flirting ... must be ascribed to a growing laxity of conduct in general, and also to the rise of the short skirt," the article continued. "It should be promptly and drastically suppressed."

In 1919, a South Carolina state lawmaker and attorney named John Ratchford Hart, distressed by incidents of men flirting with students at the all-white women's college in his district, proposed a law to prohibit any "obnoxious" behavior or "loiter[ing]" at any girls' school or college in the state. Violators would face up to a $100 fine or 30 days in jail.

From Our November 2016 Issue

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From the beginning, the disturbing-school law was intended to keep young people in their place. But it would evolve with threats to the status quo. Forty-eight years later, after black students organized a series of nonviolent marches against segregation in the rural enclave of Orangeburg, South Carolina, the county's representative in the statehouse-a former teacher named F. Hall Yarborough-proposed a bill to broaden the law to criminalize obnoxious behavior at all schools, single-sex and coed. Yarborough was alarmed not only by the uprisings in his own district but by civil-rights and antiwar protests on campuses across the country. He spoke obliquely of the activists he hoped to fend off with the expanded law. "I'm interested in keeping outside agitators off campus," he told the Associated Press. The bill sailed through the statehouse. No hearings were held.

Not long after that, black students from South Carolina State College led a multiday protest against a segregated bowling alley in Orangeburg. One night, after the protesters had returned to campus, someone threw a banister that hit a state trooper in the head. Police opened fire, shooting 30 unarmed students and killing three black teenagers, in what would become known as the Orangeburg Massacre. The governor signed South Carolina's newly expanded disturbing-school bill into law three weeks later.

It's hard to overstate the tension that crackled through the country back then. Peaceful protests far outnumbered violent ones, but it did not necessarily feel that way. From January 1969 to April 1970, more than 8,200 bomb threats, attempted bombings, and actual bombings were attributed to student protests. "These are not just college students out on a panty raid," a Texas legislator warned his colleagues. "These are revolutionaries dedicated to destroying our system."

In the midst of the turmoil, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1969 against a Des Moines, Iowa, school district, finding that students had a right to protest peacefully on school grounds. In this case, the Court said, the teenage plaintiffs could wear black armbands in protest of the Vietnam War, as long as they did so without "materially and substantially" disturbing class. Justice Hugo Black issued an ominous dissent. "It is the beginning of a new revolutionary era of permissiveness in this country," he wrote. "Groups of students all over the land are already running loose, conducting break-ins, sit-ins, lie-ins, and smash-ins."

Following the federal ruling, state and local officials passed a flurry of laws that would punish students who were disturbing class, anywhere from universities to elementary schools. At the time, it's worth remembering, black students weren't just protesting; they were also integrating white classrooms, backed by the federal government. "As soon as we started introducing black bodies into white schools, we got these laws," says Jenny Egan, a public defender for juveniles in Maryland who regularly represents clients charged with disturbing school. "That's not a coincidence."

The maneuvering was part of a broader legislative cold war: As Michelle Alexander documents in her book, The New Jim Crow, after the Civil Rights Act dismantled formal segregation, politicians stopped demanding "segregation forever" and began calling for "law and order."

In September 1970, President Richard Nixon's Commission on Campus Unrest reported that more than 30 states had passed nearly 80 laws to counter student unrest. It warned that "legislators in a majority of states have passed antistudent and antiuniversity laws that range from the unnecessary and ill-directed to the purely vindictive." Amid the hysteria, some legislators proposed laws that were already on the books: In Kansas City, Missouri, police came out against a new disturbing-school statute because it would have duplicated not one but five existing city laws. Maryland lawmakers worried that the state's disturbing-school law "could be applied to a kindergarten pupil throwing a temper tantrum."

Still, the laws did not become integral to school discipline until the 1990s, when fears of rising gang- and drug-related violence-followed by a series of high-profile school shootings-led to the widespread installation of police officers in school hallways. By 1998, more than 100 South Carolina school districts, including Niya Kenny's, had brought in police, formally known as "school resource officers." After the Columbine High School shootings in Colorado the next year, South Carolina's Safe Schools Task Force recommended increasing the number of officers, and the state's Department of Education requested $14 million to pay for them-double the previous year's budget. (The fact that a full-time officer was employed at Columbine but was unable to stop the shooters did not seem to discourage hiring in other districts.)

By the early '90s, America's juvenile crime rate had begun to drop, a trend that would continue for the next two decades. It would be logical to assume that school police officers contributed to this decline. But there is little reliable evidence to support or refute that theory. What we do know is that the drop in crime began before police arrived in most schools. And once police were in place, they tended to keep busy. According to an analysis of 2,650 schools published in the Washington University Law Review earlier this year, students at schools with police officers were significantly more likely to be reported to law enforcement for low-level offenses than students at schools without police, even after controlling for the neighborhood crime rate, the demographics of the schools, and a host of other variables.

Previously, principals had needed to call the police to make an arrest; by the late '90s, in many schools, the police were already there. And while they were not technically supposed to get involved in workaday school-discipline issues, the disturbing-school laws rendered all manner of common misbehavior illegal. Some officers worked hard to build relationships with students and resolve problems before they escalated. But most did not have adequate training to manage adolescents, who are wired to proclaim their independence. "Most law-enforcement officers are trained to assert authority, to take control of the situation," says Mark Soler, the executive director of the Center for Children's Law and Policy, who has trained school police officers. "In a school context, that's bad advice." From 2000 to 2016, according to South Carolina's data, the disturbing-school charge was filed against students in the state 33,304 times.

The handcuffs Deputy Fields used on Kenny were tight, pressing against her skin. "I just had this one tiny hope," she told me later, "that he might just try to scare me and let me go."

This was Kenny's second time taking Algebra I. She'd failed it as a freshman, too busy socializing to do math. But as a senior, she was more focused: She had to pass the class in order to graduate. Until that morning, everything had been going according to plan. She had an A, and the teacher seemed to like her. If, for example, she took out her phone in class, he would give her a look, and she'd put it away.

Fields took her to another room, where Kenny says he and the administrator started yelling at her. "What did you think you were doing in there?," Fields asked. Kenny started to wonder whether she had misjudged the situation. If the deputy's actions were so wrong, why was she the only one saying so? "I started thinking I was the bad guy," Kenny told me. "Like maybe I'd done the wrong thing." Suddenly she thought of what her mother would say about her arrest. She started crying, and Fields asked for her phone. She handed it over but admitted that she'd already posted the video.

André Chung

Around 12:30 in the afternoon, another deputy led Kenny outside-still in handcuffs-to meet a police van. (Officers at Spring Valley can decide to release a student to a guardian after an arrest, as they had done with the girl who was thrown, but not with Kenny.) Standing there, in front of her school on Sparkleberry Lane, where she'd run cross-country and sung in the gospel choir, she started sobbing. The handcuffs were not a prop. She was going to jail. That's when she decided she would never come back to Spring Valley High School. As with many kids who get arrested at school, something shifted in her head, and she concluded that she did not belong there anymore.

Kenny climbed into the police van, which took her to the Alvin S. Glenn Detention Center, in Columbia. She had recently celebrated her 18th birthday, and would be processed as an adult. Inside the facility, an officer ordered her to take off her boots so they could be searched. Then she was fingerprinted, photographed, and led into a holding room with about 20 other detainees. The room was frigid, and she crossed her arms to keep warm. Someone asked her why she was there, and she said that she'd yelled at a police officer in school. "Yelling?" a correctional officer said. "And they booked you in here for that?"

After a bond hearing, where she was told she would be let go until her court date, Kenny was sent back to the holding room to wait for release. With nothing else to do, she watched a TV mounted in the corner, which was playing the evening news on mute. That's when Kenny saw a video of her Algebra I classroom flash across the screen. "Did you see that?," Kenny shouted. "That's my classroom! That is why I am in here!" The other detainees looked over to watch. "Everybody was like, 'Are you serious? You don't need to be in here,' " she told me. "I was like, 'All right, I'm not going to get in trouble with my mom.' "

Shortly after 8 o'clock in the evening, about nine hours after her arrest, Kenny was released. Her mother, Doris Ballard-Kenny, hugged her in the parking lot. "I saw the video," Ballard-Kenny said. "I am proud of you." Standing outside the jail's barbed-wire fence, Kenny looked tired but resolute as she spoke to a TV reporter. "I had never seen nothing like that in my life, a man use that much force on a little girl," she said, shaking her head back and forth. "A big man, like 300 pounds of full muscle. It was like, no way, no way. You can't do nothing like that to a little girl."

That night, Kenny couldn't sleep. She had a crushing headache, the kind that comes from crying for too long. In the morning, she asked her mother to take the day off work to be with her. For the first time since elementary school, she was scared to be home by herself.

"Before this, I had a sense of pride for Spring Valley High School," Kenny's mother told me later. "It's one of the better schools in Columbia. A lot of the affluent kids go there." Spring Valley regularly makes The Washington Post 's list of America's "most challenging" high schools, based on the number of advanced tests taken by students. It is not a violent school or a destitute one. But in the course of a single day, it had unraveled some of the most important lessons she had instilled in her daughter. "She has always been taught to speak up for people. If you see an injustice being done, help the person," Ballard-Kenny said. "That's what she was doing. And it's almost like it's making what I taught her obsolete."

Kenny's arrest was not the first disciplinary controversy in her school district; in fact, a group of black parents had already created an association to help students who felt they'd been unfairly disciplined under the disturbing-school law and district policies. In the year leading up to the incident, the district had set up task forces on diversity and discipline, and hired a chief diversity officer to help address these concerns.

But the law-and-order culture remained powerful at Spring Valley-as it does across the state. Although Ben Fields was fired two days after the incident, he was not accused of committing any crime. Nor was the teacher or the administrator, both of whom kept their jobs (the administrator has since transferred to a school about an hour north of Spring Valley). None responded to requests for comment. In a survey of South Carolinians conducted by Public Policy Polling shortly after the videos went viral, almost half of the respondents said they opposed the decision to fire Fields. Only a third supported the decision. About 100 Spring Valley students-some of them football players who had been coached by Fields-walked out of class in protest of his dismissal. No one was arrested. An email from the school-board chair, released to The Atlantic in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, shows that administrators knew about the protest in advance but felt that stopping it would have caused "more disruption of school" than allowing it.

"We were just upset," says Caleb, a black student who helped organize the walkout. (He requested that I use only his first name.) He acknowledged that Fields had used "definitely, probably, too much force-a little bit," but, he said, "we didn't think he deserved to be fired." Caleb did not know Kenny, but he had seen the video from the classroom, featuring her yelling "What the fuck?," and he had little sympathy for her. "I wouldn't have been surprised if someone had said, like, 'Man, this isn't right,' " he says. "But cursing, yelling, screaming like that definitely was not necessary." Like other students I met, Caleb seemed to expect more self-control from a teenage girl than from a sheriff's deputy.

As a society, our understanding of teenagers has not caught up to the science. In the past 15 years, neuroscientists have discovered that a teenager's brain is different in important ways from an adult's brain. It is more receptive to rewards than to punishment, and the parts that control impulses and judgment are still under construction. Which means that back talk and fake burps are predictable teenage acts-to be corrected, not prosecuted.

In September, almost a year after the arrests, the local solicitor, Dan Johnson, dropped the disturbing-school charge against the girl who had been thrown. The girl had indeed disturbed school, Johnson wrote in a 12-page explanation of his decision, but the case had been "compromised" by the firing of Fields-a punishment that might prejudice "prospective jurors" against the deputy's side of the story. (The fact that this girl was underage and therefore would have faced a judge, not a jury, went unmentioned.) He also noted that hospital X-rays taken after the arrest suggested that the girl's wrist had been fractured, but he declined to charge Fields, citing insufficient proof of a crime. (His report included a statement from Fields claiming that the girl had resisted arrest and punched him twice during the encounter, and that her desk had fallen over "because of the momentum that [her] movements had created.")

Johnson also dismissed the disturbing-school charge against Kenny. "There is simply not enough evidence to prove each and every element" of the alleged offense, he wrote. Kenny's attorney had expected such a dismissal, which happens in about one‑fifth of juvenile arrests in South Carolina. But damage had already been done. Regardless of GPA, race, or prior offenses, students who have been arrested are nearly twice as likely as their peers to drop out of high school, even if they never go to court, according to a 2006 study by the criminologist Gary Sweeten. "Just being arrested can have long-term consequences," says Josh Gupta-Kagan, an assistant professor specializing in juvenile justice at the University of South Carolina School of Law. "Teenagers start to see the school as out to get them."

"America generally loves crime and punishment-this idea that punishment somehow corrects behavior, that it teaches kids a lesson," says Jenny Egan, the Maryland public defender. In reality, the more involvement kids have with the legal system, the worse their behavior gets. Kids who get arrested and appear in court are nearly four times as likely to drop out of high school, Gary Sweeten found. But most people in the chain of decision making-from the state lawmaker to the teacher to the principal to the school police officer to the prosecutor-do not realize how much damage their actions can do, Egan says: "I don't think a majority of people in the system understand what it does to a child to put him in handcuffs and take him to court-at the very moment when he is trying to figure out who he is in the world."

Kids facing disturbing-school charges in South Carolina are typically offered punishment outside the court system, such as community service. If they've already taken this option in the past-or if they've been convicted of other charges on top of disturbing school-they can be incarcerated or placed on probation, a layer of surveillance that boosts their chances of getting re-arrested for things as trivial as missing a day of school. In many juvenile cases, judges will make parents a party to the case, meaning that they are legally bound to report a child who comes home after a court-ordered curfew or violates any other probation condition.

"It's so easy to get into the system and so hard to get out," says Aleksandra Chauhan, a public defender for juveniles in Columbia. The system clings to kids. Which is why advocates like Chauhan argue that arrests should be a last resort, the nuclear option reserved for truly dangerous cases, not ejection buttons pressed whenever adults run out of patience. "We criminalize juvenile behavior that is considered normal by psychologists," she says. "We are creating criminals. I really believe that."

The unexpected standout inreforming disturbing-school laws is the state of Texas. Until recently, Texas had one of the worst records in the country on juvenile justice. Police were charging 275,000 kids a year with "disrupting class" and other low-level offenses. Nearly three in five students were suspended or expelled at least once between seventh and 12th grade, according to an in-depth analysis of nearly 1 million Texas students that came out in 2011. Over time, the Texas school system had become a quasi-authoritarian state, one that punished some kids far more than others.

When it came to clear-cut offenses, like using a weapon, African American students were no more likely than other students to get in trouble in Texas. But they were far more likely to be disciplined for subjective violations like disrupting class. Even after controlling for more than 80 variables, including family income, students' academic performance, and past disciplinary incidents, the report found that race was a reliable predictor of which kids got disciplined.

Then, five years ago, a juvenile-court judge invited Wallace B. Jefferson, the chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court, to spend a day observing her courtroom. Jefferson watched in silence as parents and children, most without lawyers, stutter-stumbled through formal legal rituals many of them did not seem to understand. He was startled not just by the power imbalance but by the fact that he hadn't known about it before.

The first African American on the state's Supreme Court, Jefferson had spent most of his career defending organizations and corporations, not children. He'd never realized how the legal system was funneling kids from schools to detention centers. "These are families in distress-very often uneducated parents trying to deal with troubled youth, many of whom have mental-health issues," he told me. "If it were my kid, I would be in that courtroom filing pleadings to dismiss. But many of the kids were from broken homes and very modest financial means." After his day in juvenile court, Jefferson met with Texas legislators to see what could be done. It turned out that many were as disgusted by the status quo as he was. They were tired of reading news stories about kids getting charged with disrupting class for spraying perfume or throwing paper airplanes. It was a waste of taxpayer dollars, not to mention embarrassing.

"I guess it made some people feel good, like they were tough," John Whitmire, a state senator who joined forces with Jefferson, told me. He had chaired the Texas legislature's criminal-justice committee for almost two decades, and no one would have called him soft on crime. "I'm as tough as anybody there is on adults and on juveniles who will cut your throat and hurt you violently," he said. "But the screwups, whether adult or juvenile, I believe we have better results if we work with 'em." Like other lawmakers I interviewed, Whitmire made a point of mentioning that he himself may have been charged with disrupting school if the law had been enforced during his own childhood.

It took a lot of "talk, talk, talk," as Whitmire put it, but lawmakers on the left and the right answered Jefferson's call. Among other changes, they reined in the state's law against disrupting class. Texas students could no longer be charged with this offense at their own schools. Nor could students younger than 12 be charged with any low-level misdemeanor at school. Before charging older kids, officers had to write up formal complaints with sworn statements from witnesses-and some schools were required to try common-sense interventions (like writing a letter to parents or referring the student to counseling) before resorting to a legal charge.

The reforms took effect on September 1, 2013, the beginning of a new school year. Two months later, David Slayton, the head of the Texas Office of Court Administration, checked the charging data for juveniles. "I was floored," he told me. "It had dropped like a rock." He asked his staff to send him the data each subsequent month to make sure the numbers weren't a fluke. They weren't. That year, the number of charges filed for minor offenses like disrupting class dropped 61 percent. Thanks to the reforms, some 40,000 charges were not filed against kids. And there was no evidence that school safety suffered as a result. The number of juvenile arrests for violent crimes, which had been declining before the reforms, continued to fall, as did the number of expulsions and other serious disciplinary actions in schools. "It's been a remarkable achievement for our state," Slayton said. "The pendulum has swung back a little bit."

Over the years, South Carolina lawmakers have tried to do what Texas has done. After Kenny's arrest, several told me they were hopeful that reforms would finally happen, given all the bad press that the viral videos had brought to the state. Even Sheriff Lott, the official in charge of the officers in Kenny's district, has called for changes. "You could chew gum and be arrested, technically, for disturbing school," he told me. "There's too much discretion."

In April, a bill that would have eliminated the charge for students at their own school, like the one Texas had passed, came up for a subcommittee hearing in the South Carolina legislature. A solicitor and former teacher named Barry Barnette testified against the proposal. "There's kids that will not obey the rules. And you've got to have discretion for that officer," he said. "I wish it was a perfect world where the students were always well behaved and everything. It's not that way." A representative of the South Carolina Sheriffs' Association issued a statement arguing that the disturbing-school law should stay in place because without it, officers might be forced to charge students with more-serious offenses-like disorderly conduct or assault and battery.

This argument sounds sensible, but in fact both of those charges can carry less serious penalties under South Carolina code than the disturbing-school charge-a point that was not made at the hearing. Chauhan, the public defender in Columbia, testified in favor of the bill, as did an ACLU lawyer. In the end, it never made it past the subcommittee.

This year, lawmakers in Massachusetts and Virginia also tried to reform their disturbing-school laws. In each case, critics repeated the same essential objection: Police need to have this tool in their toolkit. It didn't seem to matter that police have access to hundreds of other tools, from disorderly conduct to disturbing the peace to a variety of other catchall charges.

In August, frustrated by a lack of action, ACLU lawyers filed a federal lawsuit against the state of South Carolina, alleging that the disturbing-school law is overly vague and violates due-process rights guaranteed under the Fourteenth Amendment. "The Disturbing Schools statute creates an impossible standard for school children to follow and for police to enforce with consistency and fairness," the complaint said. The lead plaintiff is Niya Kenny.

When I last saw Kenny, in March, over dinner at a Red Lobster near Spring Valley High School, she was wearing oversize glasses, a knit cardigan, and purple Puma sneakers. Her mother sat next to her, wearing an #EveryBlackGirl T-shirt. Kenny ordered raspberry lemonade and seafood pasta, apologizing for how tired she was. She hadn't slept the night before. A childhood friend had been robbed and shot to death a few days earlier, and she'd come directly from the funeral.

After dropping out of high school, Kenny had started taking classes four days a week at a continuing-education center for adults. Getting a GED had seemed like the fastest way to move on with her life. Still, she was aware that she was missing out. "I should be prom-dress shopping," she told me. "Paying my senior fees to get my cap and gown." Instead, she was spending most of her time outside of her GED classes working at a fast-food restaurant a mile from the high school. Every week or two, a stranger would recognize her: "Are you the girl from the news?" Sometimes, depending on her mood, she'd say, "No, that's not me."

Kenny said she was thinking about joining the military. Her arrest record should be expunged under South Carolina law, now that the charges have been dropped, but she will still have to disclose the arrest before she can enlist.

This is not the first time someone in her family has been accused of disturbing school, as it turns out. In 1968, the year South Carolina enacted the expanded disturbing-school law, Kenny's great-great-granduncle, the Reverend H. H. Singleton II, sent his children to a white school for the first time. Someone burned a cross on his lawn and another outside the church where he preached. Twenty years later, Singleton was fired from his job as a middle-school teacher, accused of causing a "disruption"-through his involvement in the local NAACP chapter, he had supported a group of black high-school football players who were protesting a coach's decision to bench a black quarterback. It took two years, but a court eventually ruled that he'd been wrongfully terminated, and he returned to school. Now Kenny and her mother are hoping the ACLU lawsuit will interrupt this pattern. "I'm looking at it long-term," Kenny's mother said. "Ten years from now, when kids are reading their South Carolina history, they will read the name Niya Kenny."

When I asked Kenny what else lawmakers should do to fix the system, besides changing the law, she answered without hesitation. Take police officers out of schools, she said, and replace them with counselors. It sounds sensible, particularly in schools, like Spring Valley, that have relatively few violent incidents. Starting this school year, the U.S. Department of Justice, which helps fund the officers in Richland County schools, is requiring more outside oversight and training to ensure that they are not involved in enforcing classroom discipline in the future-the result of an audit that began before Kenny's arrest. (The department is also conducting a civil-rights review of what happened at Spring Valley.) But the idea of removing officers altogether is not being considered in her district or across most of the country.

Once police are invited into the schoolhouse, they're rarely asked to leave. Debbie Hamm, the superintendent of Kenny's district, is quick to note that Spring Valley is a "very orderly school." But she would not recommend removing the officers: "The safety and security-and the feeling of safety and security-in our schools is really, really important."

Sheriff Lott says he has never considered removing the officers from any Richland County schools. "That one incident doesn't define our program," he told me. "Every day, we have 87 school resource officers who are doing a great job. Our focus is not on how many kids we arrest but on how many problems we prevent." Last school year, according to the sheriff's department, deputies "successfully resolved" 6,251 conflicts. Lieutenant Curtis Wilson, a spokesperson for the department, told me that a successful resolution includes a range of outcomes, from counseling students to arresting them. "Let's say you have a victim," says Wilson, "and we are able to successfully identify the [perpetrator] and remove him from the school. Now school can continue. So that is a successful resolution."

In September, Kenny moved to New York City for an internship at the African American Policy Forum, a think tank. After moving her into a Brooklyn apartment, she and her mother went to a nearby Chipotle. Kenny, social as always, chatted easily with one of the employees. The woman suggested that Kenny come work there for extra spending money, and they set up an interview for the next day. "They didn't even know who she was," Kenny's mother told me happily.

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At least 22 states make it a crime to disturb school in ways that teenagers are wired to do. Why did this happen? One Monday morning last fall, at Spring Valley High School in Columbia, South Carolina, a 16-year-old girl refused to hand over her cellphone to her algebra teacher.

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Safety: Reversing the Harsh "Three-Strikes" Prison Law

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Safety: Reversing the Harsh "Three-Strikes" Prison Law

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Safety: Re-Entering the Community after Prison

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Safety: Re-Entering the Community after Prison

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Just over half of the African American male population in New Orleans is unemployed, partly because of former encounters with the criminal justice system that make it incredibly difficult to find work. In the city, there are a handful of organizations that work to help prisoners upon their release through forms of support like housing and job training. "Basically, everybody in my community is in prison," says Dianne Jones, who heads one of the first re-entry programs to serve women in New Orleans. "A s a black mother, I feel as if the system was designed to fail me here." In this short documentary, we uncover the processes and pitfalls of re-entering society after being incarcerated.

We want to hear what you think. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

About This Series

Original short documentaries produced by The Atlantic

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What Happens When a Prisoner Is Released?

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Just over half of the African American male population in New Orleans is unemployed, partly because of former encounters with the criminal justice system that make it incredibly difficult to find work. In the city, there are a handful of organizations that work to help prisoners upon their release through forms of support like housing and job training.

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Safety: The Story Behind Each Murder in the Bronx 40th Precint

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Safety: The Story Behind Each Murder in the Bronx 40th Precint

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To understand how murder lives on in a city that has seen crime fall to historic lows, The New York Times is taking a deep look at the 40th Precinct in the South Bronx. Articles in this series will examine the life and death of each person murdered in 2016 in the precinct, among the few places in the city where crime remains stubbornly high.

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Safety: Documentary on the History of Mass Incarceration

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Safety: Documentary on the History of Mass Incarceration

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Slavery. Jim Crow. Criminalization. Links in a chain of racial inequality, forged by political and economic motives. Watch trailers & learn more.

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Safety: The Story Behind Each Police Shooting in 201

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Safety: The Story Behind Each Police Shooting in 201

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Skip to main content

The Counted is a special Guardian project to record all people killed by police in the United States this year.

We have gathered information from official databases and crowdsourced counts to create a full and detailed view of killings by law enforcement agents in the US.

This page shows the names and, where possible, faces of those killed since January 1 2015, as well as other details about the manner of their deaths and the status of any investigations into the incidents.

You can see these incidents mapped throughout the United States, and read more about the methodology of the project here.

We are actively searching for more information about many of these cases. If you have anything you can share with us, you can send us details by clicking here and filling in the form. You do not have to share identifying information about yourself.

You can also join our community on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to keep track of The Counted and share more information.

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The Counted: people killed by police in the United States - interactive

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The Guardian counted the people killed by US law enforcement agencies in 2015 and 2016. Here are their stories

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Safety: Media Hype about Juvenile Delinquents, 1990s

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Safety: Media Hype about Juvenile Delinquents, 1990s

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In the mid-1990s, after a decade of soaring juvenile crime, some social scientists warned the violence would only get worse. Reality proved otherwise.

The Superpredator Scare

In 1995, John DiIulio, Jr., then a Princeton professor, coined a phrase that seemed to sum up the nation's fear of teen violence: "superpredator." In the previous decade, teenage crime rates had exploded. Television news led with story after story of seemingly incomprehensible violence committed by children as young as 10. Many criminologists feared the trend would continue, and DiIulio warned that hundreds of thousands of remorseless teen predators were just over the horizon.

The "superpredator" caught the attention of reporters and politicians, some of whom used it to push for the continued overhaul of a juvenile justice system they considered too lenient. By the end of the 1990s, nearly every state had passed laws to make it easier to try juveniles in adult courts or to increase penalties for violent juvenile crimes.

But what happened to the "superpredators" of the 1990s? And what's changed since in how the nation deals with youth crime?

Transcript

More on the Story

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In the mid-1990s, after a decade of soaring juvenile crime, some social scientists warned the violence would only get worse. Reality proved otherwise. In 1995, John DiIulio, Jr., then a Princeton professor, coined a phrase that seemed to sum up the nation's fear of teen violence: "superpredator."

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Safety: NYPD Raid of Grant and Manhattanville Houses, 2014

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Safety: NYPD Raid of Grant and Manhattanville Houses, 2014

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Robert Stolarik/JJIE

NEW YORK - Whenever LaQuint Singleton found himself about to get into a fight out in the courtyards or in the small playground in front of his building at the General Ulysses S. Grant Houses, he would run and find his mom, Venus. He'd scamper up the stairs and go up to her looking for protection. Back then, Singleton was a good student who regularly attended school and attended church service every Sunday. One day, in an attempt to impress the older teenagers and men, he carried a gun to give to another resident. He was arrested, and spent six months in Rikers Island waiting for his case to wend its way through the criminal justice system - and then another year after he was sentenced.

"They sent him to the Island, and he came back a monster," Venus Singleton said, sobbing on the steps of an apartment building on Old Broadway, referred to as the DMZ by people on both sides of the blood feud between the Grant and Manhattanville Houses. "That boy they sent back is not the same boy I sent them. The department of corrections turned my son into a monster. I love my monster, but that's what he is. That's what the Island did for me."

Now, Singleton said, more monsters are about to be made.

Wednesday morning, police officers came knocking on Singleton's door looking for her son. She scrambled to get some clothes. She wasn't dressed yet. She didn't know it at the time but those raps on her door were part of the largest gang raid in the history of the city.

See more photos of life and strife between the two houses HERE

At 6 a.m., hundreds of officers in flak jackets swept through both the Manhattanville and Grant Houses in West Harlem as helicopters swooped overhead as part of what law enforcement officials said was the largest gang raid conducted by the NYPD. Some members of the New York press corps were tipped off about the raid and were there as well, waiting for the sweeps to commence.

Police arrested 40 suspects as part of a massive 145-count indictment of 103 people in a range of crimes, including the murder of 18-year-old basketball star Tayshana "Chicken" Murphy, 19 shootings, gang assaults, beatings and conspiracy. Of the remaining suspects, 39 were already in custody, including Murphy's brother, while the others remain at large.

In a press conference later Tuesday afternoon, NYPD Police Chief William J. Bratton and Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. said the teens and men rounded up at the two housing projects are members of 3Staacs gang and their rivals, the Make It Happen Boys and Money Avenue. Residents said the suspects grew up together and are friends with affinities to their houses, and are not part of anything resembling a formal gang.

"The terror that the many thousands of people who live there must have felt over these last several years," Bratton said explaining his presence at the early-morning raid during a press conference at 1 Police Plaza in downtown Manhattan Wednesday afternoon. "They're not fighting over drug turf, it's just mindless, senseless violence."

Vance agreed, and said the violence was not fueled by money or drugs, but by bad blood that dates back decades.

"These three gangs were not sophisticated drug trafficking organizations, far from it. They were young people protecting their territories from imaginary threats and avenging the murders of fellow gang members," he said. "For at least four years, these gangs waged a campaign of violence simply for the sake of violence."

Over the course of 4 1/2 years, investigators from the NYPD's Gang Division and the Manhattan district attorney's Violent Criminal Enterprises Unit reviewed hundreds of hours of cellphone videos and surveillance footage, phone calls from Rikers Island and more than a million Facebook and other social media posts to build their case.

The indictment lists some of those posts:

On or about September 13, 2011, defendant Davon Goulbourns, a/k/a "Hef," caused or permitted to be posted on Facebook messages to rival gang member Brian Cabrera in part and in substance bragging about the killing of Tayshana "Chicken" Murphy and stating, "THASS WHY NIGGAS FRIED THE CHICKEN," to which Cabrera in part and substance responded, "NOW IMAAA KILL YUHH." On or about September 14, 2011, defendant Jordan Laster a/k/a "Wop," caused or permitted to be posted on Facebook a status update in part and substance stating, "MY NIGGAS BODIED A GRANT BITCH." On or about September 14, 2011, defendant Ty-Kwan Allen, a/k/a "Ty," caused or permitted to be posted on Facebook a status update in part and substance mocking the murder of Tayshana "Chicken" Murphy and stating, "I LIKE MY CHICKEN DEEP FRIED."

"No one in this city should hear gunshots or be afraid to have their child go to school or their parents go to the grocery store," Vance added.

Vance's comments about the young people arrested in the historical raid came a day after he said in remarks at a conference on public health and incarceration at Columbia University that his office's business model is failing young people in the criminal justice system.

"Parents are losing their children - multiple children potentially - to prison and perhaps to an early grave," Vance said at the press conference Wednesday.
They had spent the last year telling anyone who would listen that they needed help to defuse the tension among young people at the houses.
Taylonn Murphy and Derrick Haynes know all about the pain of early graves. Murphy and Haynes both have lost family in the blood feud between the two housing projects. Haynes' brother was the first homicide in the feud, and in September 2011 Murphy's daughter, a promising basketball star, was gunned down just feet from her apartment in the Grant Houses.

They had spent the last year telling anyone who would listen - local politicians, police officers, Columbia University bureaucrats, nonprofits - that they needed help to defuse the tension among young people at the houses. They pointed down 125th Street and said that there was nowhere for the children and teenagers in the Manhattanville and Grant houses - just corners. They had dedicated recent years to trying to change the culture of violence to avoid the kind of massive show of police force that unfolded earlier that morning. They said the violence isn't so mindless and senseless as the commissioner described when you look at it from their point of view.

"These kids don't have nothing to do," Tayshana's father, Taylonn, said, making a disgusted, frustrated sound as he finished each sentence. "We're just going to keep trying to do what we're doing. We asked the city for help and we got a raid."
They said the violence isn't so mindless and senseless as the commissioner described when you look at it from their point of view.
The two men along with Arnita Brockington, the mother of Tyshawn Brockington, one of the two men, along with Robert Cartagena, convicted in the killing of Murphy, began reaching out to children and teens on both sides of the feud, imploring them to find another way to handle their project-fueled animosity. The three, by going on patrols of the houses, making themselves available to the young people in both Manhattanville and Grant, and encouraging dialogue were able to broker an uneasy peace for months. They brought the older teenagers and young adults to workshops with job counselors to try to get them work, or at least on lists where they could get work.

In that time, Haynes and Murphy acted like tireless salesman with a single-minded pitch: to convert Old Broadway, a short avenue separating the two projects that acts as a neutral zone, into a permanent play street with basketball courts, street volleyball and other games for children to play; and to convert the shuttered beauty salon into a community center. They continued to make the pitch to a local television news cameraman, but they appeared haggard and dispirited.

Later in the afternoon the day of the raid, the two men stood on Old Broadway near the still shuttered storefronts. They were visibly crestfallen and weary. They talked about how the chaos of that morning's police raid was what they had been working so hard to avoid. But, they said they are not going to give up on their mission.

"They arrested this generation of kids, a whole generation, but there's another generation behind them," Murphy said. "That's who we have to look out for now. We can't just do the same thing and arrest them when they get old enough."

Singleton came over and exchanged a hug with both men. She knows them well. Singleton operates her own impromptu Neighborhood Watch with other mothers in the Grant Houses. They had reached out to her son over the years, and they came to offer their support when LaQuint was nearly killed in a shooting earlier this year.
"They arrested this generation of kids, a whole generation, but there's another generation behind them. ... We can't just do the same thing and arrest them when they get old enough."
She watched a little boy, no older than 7, walking past with his mother and father to the corner store. When the little boy came out clutching a bag of Cheetos, she watched as her parents led him into the Manhattanville Houses.

"Aw, look at him, ain't he cute," she said.

Seeing the boy reminded her of her son LaQuint's transformation from innocent, average kid to what she called a "monster." She remembers how quick he was to fight when he came back. She said he turned into a "drifter kid" because sometimes he would just sit and stare at the wall. When she tried to inquire what was wrong he would just rock back and forth saying, "Nah, nah, nah," over and over until his voice drifted into an imperceptible whisper.

"A little kid like that," referring to the boy with the Cheetos, "he could get caught up in this. He looks so innocent now. If things don't change, he'll get infected, too. In four or five years he'll be the one running through the courtyard with a gun."

Her son learned to fight in Rikers Island, she said. He was put in there with rival houses and he had no choice.

"If he didn't fight he'd get hurt," she said. "He would tell me, 'I got to, ma, I got to. If I don't they're going to hurt me.' He wasn't no fighter. When he came back he'd throw his hands up for anything."

She said she guessed that's what would happen the night of the raid, after all the suspects were processed.

"All these kids they took away today are going to be at war tonight," she said. "If they put them on the Island, they're fighting. "

Singleton motioned to the Manhattanville Houses and said she hasn't been there in years. She has a cousin who she loves but joked she can't even remember what she looks like because she lives there. She said she can't risk going in because the young men have a "beef" with her son. Feeling unsafe, she left Old Broadway and headed back to the Grant Houses. She hadn't spent that much time that close to Manhattanville - a few minutes' walk away - in years.

When she returned to her side of 125th Street she encountered some teenage neighbors. They started talking about what had transpired that morning. The teens said the police had ransacked their apartments but no one had been arrested. One boy, a developmentally challenged 16-year-old from Grant Houses named Jeffery, had a fresh knot on the left side of his head. He said it was from one of the police officers who had slammed him on the ground and driven his knee into his head.

He took Singleton aside and asked for advice. He wanted to get some plastic beads, colorful religious trinkets, from the botanica store across the street, but he didn't know which ones to buy.

"I'm looking for something to keep me safe," he said.

Without hesitation she responded: "Go over there and ask for St. Michael and Santa Clara. They'll give you protection."

As he turned to leave she reminded him to make sure he got them blessed. He nodded in affirmation.

When asked what he needed protection from, Singleton paused.

"I don't know," she said. "He didn't say."

Jeffery was out of luck. There was no one at the shop to provide blessings on Wednesday, so he left without them.
Financial supporters of The JJIE may be quoted or mentioned in our stories. They may also be the subjects of our stories.

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Harlem Residents: We Asked City for Help, We Got a Raid Instead

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Taylonn Murphy and Derrick Haynes know all about the pain of early graves. Both have lost family in a blood feud between the Manhattanville and Grant Houses in West Harlem where NYPD conducted a massive gang raid yesterday morning.

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Safety: Militarization of Police from the Black Panthers to Ferguson, 1960s-2010s

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Safety: Militarization of Police from the Black Panthers to Ferguson, 1960s-2010s

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SWAT teams were created in the 1960s to combat violent events. Since then, the specialized teams have morphed into a force increasingly used in routine policing, most often to serve drug warrants,sometimes with disastrous results. Which raises the question - are we too militarized?

SWAT: Mission Creep

The percentage of SWAT teams serving towns with populations between 25,000 and 50,000 has increased from 13% in 1983 to more than 80% in 2007. (Source: Peter B. Kraska, "Militarization and Policing-Its Relevance to 21st Century Police," 2007)

Peter B. Kraska, a criminologist at Eastern Kentucky University, estimates that 80 percent of SWAT deployments are for serving drug warrants. (Source: Peter B. Kraska, "Militarization and Policing-Its Relevance to 21st Century Police," 2007)

Transcript

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Obama will restrict grenade launchers, military equipment from local police CNN

Retro Report: When SWAT Teams First Appeared on City Streets The Takeaway

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SWAT teams were created in the 1960s to combat violent events. Since then, the specialized teams have morphed into a force increasingly used in routine policing, most often to serve drug warrants,sometimes with disastrous results. Which raises the question -- are we too militarized?

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Safety: Rockefeller Drug Laws to Medical Treatment, 1970s-2010s

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Safety: Rockefeller Drug Laws to Medical Treatment, 1970s-2010s

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In the 1970s, frustration over heroin related, urban crime led to the War on Drugs. Today, heroin is back. But the users, and the response, are very different.

How Heroin Addiction's Rural Spread Changed an Inner City War on Drugs

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, America's inner cities were wracked by an epidemic of heroin addiction and the crime that went with it. New York State responded with harsh drug laws, including mandatory minimum sentences up to life in prison for selling just one ounce of heroin. Soon, other states and the federal government adopted similar laws, and the nation's prisons filled up with non-violent drug offenders, mostly young black men.

From time to time over the past 40 years, efforts were made to treat heroin addiction as a public health instead of a crime problem. But they were not successful.

Transcript

More on the Story

40 Years After 'War on Drugs,' Heroin Becomes a Public Health Crisis The Takeaway

Related Coverage

Heroin, Survivor of War on Drugs, Returns With New Face The New York Times

How did U.S. drug laws go so awry? Retro Report examines 40 years of heroin in America. The Week

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How Heroin Addiction's Rural Spread Changed an Inner City War on Drugs

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In the 1970s, frustration over heroin related, urban crime led to the War on Drugs. Today, heroin is back. But the users, and the response, are very different. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, America's inner cities were wracked by an epidemic of heroin addiction and the crime that went with it.

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Gangs of New York City and How Close You Live to Them

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Gangs and street crews can be found in every pocket of the city, according to this map based on information provided by the NYPD. Clearly, not everyone in these areas are in a gang, but their territories bleed over many neighborhoods. Are you on their turf? Find out.