"I told them I'm a working citizen," says Suarez, 50, who works as a janitor in the city's courts. "I don't sell drugs, I don't buy drugs. I don't do drugs."
Suarez is one of many residents complaining of aggressive policing tactics—including unnecessary stop-and-frisks—at housing developments run by the New York City Housing Authority, or NYCHA.
The police tactics and tenant complaints are not new, but a federal class-action suit challenging the NYPD over thousands of stops and trespass arrests on NYCHA properties is.
What's also new is an effort by NYCHA to bring tenant leaders and police officials together to discuss the enforcement tactics and their impact.
The NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the Legal Aid Society filed the suit against the NYPD and NYCHA late last January, on behalf of 16 plaintiffs. The suit, Davis, et al. v. City of New York, charges that police officers routinely and indiscriminately stop and arrest black and Latino NYCHA tenants and their visitors for criminal trespass.
An earlier lawsuit, Floyd, et al.v City of New York, was filed in 2008 by the Center for Constitutional Rights. It alleged that the NYPD practices racial profiling in its stop-and-frisks of law-abiding City residents. The Center's recent review of citywide police stop-and-frisk records showed that stops grew to 575,304 in 2009, up from 531,159 in 2008. (While the police tactic is referred to as "stop-and-frisk," some of the police involve questioning rather than a suspect being searched.)
Some tenants blame the police-resident tensions on a flood of inexperienced officers unfamiliar with public housing. Before 1995, NYCHA developments were patrolled by a Housing Police force of officers who'd been walking the NYCHA beat for years. That experience was lost after the merger of the Housing Police with the NYPD 15 years ago. In 2003, NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly launched Operation Impact, a saturation program that sent thousands of rookie officers into so-called "impact zones"—places like housing projects where crime rates did not mirror the citywide decrease in crime.
Deborah Aviles, vice president of the Mott Haven Houses residents association, says that inexperienced officers are unaccustomed to dealing with public housing, half of whom live below the poverty line and 95 percent of whom are black or Latino.
"They're not experienced," Aviles says. "They're scared. So the first thing they're going to do is try to be tough."
At a meeting with a group of fellow tenants in the Mott Haven Houses community center a few weeks ago, Aviles passed out instructions on how to react when stopped by police. Hands shot up around the room as residents shared stories of interactions with police. Some claimed to have witnessed elderly residents being detained while police patted down their pockets. Others said they saw neighbors being handcuffed and put into police vans because they could not show ID.
Mayor Bloomberg, Kelly and other city leaders have defended the intensified police activity as a major factor needed to tackle crime rates in these neighborhoods.
