Parenting the Dispossessed

• DOI: 10.1177/2153368717724507
• Date: 01 January 2018
• Published date: 01 January 2018
• Author: Jan Haldipur
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article
Race and Justice
2018, Vol. 8(1) 71-93
Parenting the Dispossessed:
ª The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/2153368717724507
“Stop, Question, and Frisk”
journals.sagepub.com/home/raj
Jan Haldipur1
Abstract
In the early 2000s, the New York City Police Department implemented policies that
called for the aggressive use of “Stop, Question, and Frisk,” in neighborhoods deemed
“high crime.” Drawing from approximately 3 years of intensive ethnographic field-
work in and around three precincts in the southwest Bronx, the current research
reveals how parenting youth who live in such neighborhoods is impacted by police
activity.
Keywords
policing, family, urban ethnography, New York, community
It is now roughly 7:10 pm and there is still no sign of Glenda, Leslie, or Todd.1 Within a
few minutes, I see Glenda waving from the passenger seat of a tan Chevrolet Malibu. The
car parallel parks and Leslie comes out of the back seat. Glenda and her husband Todd,
who I haven’t seen in more than a year, emerge from the front seat to join us. Todd is brown-
skinned, with neatly cropped, wavy hair. His shoulders are hunched and eyes glassy. He is
wearing dusty blue jeans, Timberland boots, and a worn blue t-shirt from his construction
job. He shakes my hand and begins to take out a cigarette before realizing we are late and
tucks it back in his pocket. “Man, I just got out of work. A man needs a cigarette, you know?
[laughs] Aw, shit, we gotta go inside, huh?,” he says in his gravelly voice.
We make our way through the front door of the drab brick building and sign in at the front
desk. Glenda and Leslie seem to take this seriously—writing out their names neatly
1 Department of Sociology, California State University, Long Beach, CA, USA
Corresponding Author:
Jan Haldipur, Department of Sociology, California State University, PSY-139, 1250 Bellflower Blvd., Long
Beach, CA 90840, USA.
Email: jan.haldipur@csulb.edu

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(many just speed though this process). Glenda writes Todd’s information out for him
as well.
Heading to the elevator, Glenda recognizes someone she knows and begins talking to her.
Todd, Leslie, and I wait in the elevator for her as Todd yells: “Glenda, elevator’s
leaving!”
Arriving on the 2nd floor, we make our way to a large conference room that is almost
fully packed. At the front of the room, sits an elderly black woman with a Yankees cap.
She is flanked by a middle-aged Latina woman and a skinny white male officer whose
white button-down shirt is adorned with his badge and an array of medals and decora-
tions. To the right of the room, a number of teenage “Explorers,” a New York Police
Department-sponsored youth group, are busy readying materials for the meeting. There
are approximately 15 rows of chairs, with 10 chairs in each row, all of them filled. After
we grab some paperwork and sign in at the front, Glenda picks out a row near the back
where the four of us sit.
The older woman commences the meeting, adhering closely to the ‘Robert’s Rules’
handbook. We start the meeting with the “Pledge of Allegiance” and a moment of silence
for 9/11. Leslie remained seated for the first part of the pledge, before Glenda yanks her
by her arm—“Leslie, get up!”
The older woman, who looked to be running the session, spoke softly, so much of the room
could not make out what she was saying. She introduced one of the New York Police
Department’s terrorism specialists who began to expound on who terrorists are (“they can
be anyone”), then identifies some Puerto Rican and Black Nationalist groups as terrorist
organizations. Seemingly out of the blue, Todd stands up and makes his way down the aisle,
muttering under his breathe, “Y’all are the Goddamn terrorists!” I initially assumed he was
just heading to the bathroom, but then Glenda whispers to me, “He couldn’t take it. He left for
good.”
Introduction
Roughly 20 min after Todd departed, Glenda and Leslie followed suit. They are tired.
After working a full day, they do not wish to hear officers from the 44th precinct boast
about how crime has declined in the neighborhood. To them, the more important
questions have to do with why their sons are so often the targets of aggressive policing
tactics.
Although the three are long-time residents of the neighborhood, this was their first
time attending a precinct community meeting. The decision to attend was not part of
some grand plan to become more civic-minded. Rather, the trio’s arrival was fueled in
great part by how their own sons, now in their late teens and early twenties, have
systematically been, in their words, “mistreated,” by officers in the precinct.
When I first met Glenda, a few years prior, we sat on a cement segment of space
near the entrance of her building in the courtyard of her apartment complex. It was
hot out, and we were clinging to the shade. As we made small talk about the

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Haldipur
73
neighborhood, she proudly pointed to the perch on which we were sitting and
motioned to the ground, “This is my porch,” she smiled, “and this,” pointing a few feet
in front of her, “is my veranda” [laughs].
Combined, Todd, Glenda, and Leslie have lived in their southwest Bronx neigh-
borhood for nearly a century. It is their home. Each has created family here through
blood ties as well as informal kinship networks. Since the late 2000s, however, the
physical space, the apartments, and the houses where they live and the public parks,
stores, and streets where they spend much of their time have been adversely affected
by police efforts to make the community more “safe.”
While so many of the residents I spoke to recognize appreciate the decrease in
particular crimes, they are quick to acknowledge the profound social consequences
experienced by the community as a result of aggressive policing tactics such as “Stop,
Question, and Frisk” (SQF) and “Broken Windows Policing”—also known as order
maintenance policing (OMP). In other words, while departmental statistics confirm
that only a relatively few residents actually commit crimes, the stop statistics suggest
that, in many ways, the entire community—and most often the community’s youth,
regardless of their delinquency status—was made to endure the policing strategies
designed to combat crime. The current research reveals that, as parents, the partici-
pants in this research experience a form of collective punishment that shapes their
lives and the ways in which they parent their young and young adult children.
This broad familial impact of policing is much like the broad familial impact of
imprisonment documented in corrections research. In talking with the significant
others of men serving time in California’s San Quentin Prison, sociologist Meghan
Comfort (2008) concluded that the lives of the men’s families are disrupted and
reshaped by the incarceration experience (see also Fishman, 1990, discussing how
men’s incarceration impacts the lives of the women in their lives). Comfort notes that
the families experience a form of “secondary prisonization.” Using this theoretical
framework, findings from the current research suggest that although the mothers and
fathers of the southwest Bronx are sometimes not the direct subjects of aggressive
policing tactics, they still experience an acute form of trauma vicariously through their
children, a “secondary policing” of sorts—which leaves them to bear both the emo-
tional and financial burdens of their children’s interactions with police.
This article explores this concept of “secondary policing,” as it relates to the experiences
and behaviors of the mothers and fathers in a highly policed community in the southwest
Bronx. Through intensive ethnographic fieldwork, I examine how parents’ day-to-day lives
are affected by aggressive policing, and, how they, in turn, organize and navigate the
complex boundaries of raising children in highly policed community settings.
Background
Parenting in the Era of Stop, Question, and Frisk (SQF)
In New York State, a 1964 piece of legislation (N.Y. Code Crim. Pro. Sec. 180(a))
gave law enforcement the authority to “stop, question, and frisk” an individual without

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a warrant based upon “reasonable suspicion” that he or she has committed or might be
in the process of committing a crime. This statute marked a notable change from prior
legal standards2 that required officers to have a higher level of proof of potential
criminality (probable cause) before stopping a member of the public (Jones-Brown,
Gill, & Trone, 2010). In 1968, along with its landmark decision in Terry v. Ohio,3 the
U.S. Supreme Court considered two New York City cases arising under this legisla-
tion. In Sibron v. New York, the Court ruled in favor of the defendant and against the
validity of the NYPD officer’s use of SQF. In the companion case, Peters v. New York,
the Court ruled in favor of the state—affirming the officer’s right to stop the defendant
based on reasonable suspicion that he was involved in a crime. The Terry decision
validated “reasonable suspicion” stops as an acceptable police practice across the
nation. At the time, the New York legislation was passed, and in a powerful dissent to
Terry v. Ohio, civil libertarians and defense attorneys expressed concerns about how
this expanded police authority might be used (see Terry v. Ohio dissenting opinion by
Justice William O. Douglas; Ronayne, 1964; Kuh, 1965).
In the late 1980s, as reports of a crime “epidemic” gripped the City, the NYPD was
pushed to...