Testimony before the New York City Police Department concerning the proposed revisions to Chapter 19 of Title 38 of the Official Compilation of Rules of the City of New York dealing with the issuance of parade permits

By Alex S. Vitale Ph.D.

November 27, 2006

One Police Plaza

Good afternoon. My name is Alex Vitale and I am a professor of sociology at Brooklyn College, where I teach courses in criminology and sociology of law. My research and writing focuses on police policies and procedures related to political protests. In addition to writing for scholarly journals I have co-authored two reports with the New York Civil Liberties Union on the NYPD’s policing of demonstrations at the 2004 Republican National Convention and the February 15, 2003 anti-war demonstration on the East Side of Manhattan.

I would like to discuss several policy implications of the proposed rule changes before you. I am certain that other speakers today will present testimony concerning the legal implications of the proposed rule changes and the infringement on first amendment rights. Others will address the appropriateness of these hearings and the police department’s role in making changes to the permit process. While these are important topics to consider, I want to focus instead on three policy objections to the proposal that stem from an analysis of the ways in which the NYPD handles demonstration activity.

The NYPD’s overall approach to protests can be characterized as one of command and control. Since at least 1998, the NYPD has been developing a model of protest policing designed to micro-manage all aspects of political demonstrations in keeping with their commitment to the broken windows philosophy of policing. This philosophy calls for the police to use aggressive zero-tolerance methods to eliminate disorderly behavior as a way to restore order more broadly to public spaces, which will in turn contribute to an aura of lawfulness. The implication is that unchecked disorder leads to the production of a climate of fear and the abandonment of public space to the criminals.

In applying this philosophy to demonstrations, the NYPD has emphasized the need to control any and all disorderly, disruptive, and illegal activity in the interest of preserving the peace. The toleration of any of these behaviors, according to this approach, will lead inexorably to chaos and lawlessness. To achieve this command and control approach, the police rely on huge numbers of officers, extensive use of barricades, restrictions on the granting of permits, and large numbers of arrests and the use of force against even minor violations of the law. This approach is inflexible, expensive, prone to escalations of force, and undermines the vibrancy of civic engagement that is vital to a strong democracy.

                                                                                                                              Page 2

I will now focus on three aspects of this approach that I believe will be exacerbated by these rules changes:

1) Expense: the NYPD uses more officers per capita for handling protests than any other police force in the country. Cites like Washington, D.C. and San Francisco routinely use only one tenth the number of officers per demonstrator of the NYPD, even though those cities have frequent large demonstrations in densely populated areas. Major European cities also utilize a much smaller number of officers per demonstrator. The proposed rule change will make this problem worse. It will result in more police targeting more events at great cost to the tax payer. In essence, the NYPD is creating a justification for more expenditures in its own budget without oversight by the city council.

2) Escalations: Since the NYPD started using the command and control model there has been an increase in confrontations between the police and the public resulting in more arrests as well as injuries to police and demonstrators alike. Beginning with the Million Youth March in Harlem in 1998, the NYPD’s insistence on inflexible and restrictive micro management has contributed to the escalation of confrontations at demonstrations and the generation of bad will between the police and the public. Incidents like the Matthew Shepard funeral march in October of 1998, the World Economic Forum protests in February 2002, and the United For Peace and Justice anti-Iraq war demonstration in February 2003 showed the failures of this model. In each case, the police took what could have been a peaceful, non-violent demonstration and turned them into a much more disruptive event in which hundreds were arrested and police and demonstrators injured because of the NYPD’s insistence on eliminating any disorderly or disruptive activity no matter the consequences. These new permit rules will serve to encourage this inflexibility and willingness to use force against non-violent demonstrators.

3) Undermining Democracy: A strong democracy needs a vital and engaged civil society. These rule changes will undermine public participation in the democratic process. Innovation and improvement in politics can only come from experimentation and the fomentation of conflicting interests and ideas. New York’s strength has historically been a product of exactly this vibrant confrontation, which is an inherently disorderly and disruptive process. While the police have a role to play in insuring that there are ground rules for this process that protect the public safety, they should not be given the power to sanitize this process out of existence. These rules give them the power to do just that.