Petty Crimes and Harassment: How Community Residents Understand Low-Level Enforcement in three High-Crime Neighborhoods in New York City

This paper examines how residents of high-crime communities understand so-called “quality of life” policing tactics and their effects on police-community relations. We demonstrate how focus groups offer a unique opportunity to understand how community members perceive police activity by giving research participants an opportunity to dialog with each other to collectively articulate the meanings of this complex issue. We draw on focus groups conducted in three New York neighborhoods with high levels of violence, police contact, poverty, and other indicators of concentrated disadvantage. One set of focus groups was conducted with Black and/or Latino males ages 16–20 living in each community, while another set was held with adult residents over age 30, who had lived in the community for at least 10 years. We closely examine how these two sets of community residents express concerns related to aggressive low-level enforcement actions in their communities and the concomitant issues of the over-policing of young men of color, the under-policing of what residents understand to be the primary threats to their personal safety, and the perceived lack of police accountability. We consider the implications of these findings for police-community relations more broadly.