Civilian Anticrime Patrols in 1970s New York: Crime, Self-Help and Citizenship in the Neoliberal City
By Joe Merton
Recent scholarship has done much to illuminate the so-called “neoliberalization” of New York during the 1970s and 1980s, in which a bold midcentury experiment in urban social democracy was dismantled in the wake of the city’s fiscal crisis and replaced by an agenda of municipal austerity, business-oriented economic development, and market-led privatization.[1] Much of this work identifies this process as a top-down transformation led by the city’s financial and political elite and resisted by many New Yorkers.[2] But what if New Yorkers did not always resist or passively receive this process but actively perpetuated it themselves?
The proliferation of citizen-led crime prevention initiatives in 1970s New York offers an alternative explanation for the city’s neoliberalization which foregrounds the agency of New Yorkers. The transfer of basic crime prevention responsibilities from public agencies to “self-helping citizens” across the decade – via the acquisition of private security, new anticrime technologies, volunteer “block watchers” programs or civilian patrols – was in part a response to the immediate context of police layoffs and rising crime. Yet in their emphasis on self-government and self-help, such efforts also did much to rationalize state retrenchment, reorient New Yorkers’ relationship with both public and private agents, and normalize an emergent neoliberal order. Civilian anticrime patrols thus offer an insight into the extent of popular participation in, even validation of, the neoliberalization of New York; in doing so, we might begin to answer the question of “what does the history of neoliberalism look like from the bottom up?”[3]
1970s New York witnessed an astonishing proliferation of citizen-led crime prevention initiatives. Non-profits, private corporations, and both city and federal agencies each offered funding for neighborhood-level “grassroots self-help activities” in the areas of crime and security.[4] While the city’s private security market expanded fifteenfold, new public-private partnerships between the city and the corporate sector privatized both policing and public space; one such initiative led by the Association for a Better New York gave Midtown Manhattan its own “private security force” and established New York’s first bank of CCTV cameras in Times Square.[5] Even the Police Department created a suite of programs, from 65,000 civilian “block watchers” to do-it-yourself crime prevention surveys and seminars, that would, according to its civilian participation programs director, “give people the tools to help themselves.”[6] Urban lifestyle media normalized these arrangements, dispensing crime prevention tips for readers’ everyday routines and presenting the acquisition of private guards or self-defense classes as regular consumer choices.
Civilian anticrime patrols were perhaps the most visible manifestation of this trend. By 1982, over 50,000 volunteers citywide were active in some form of civilian patrol, ten times that of the mid-1970s.[7] As Reiko Hillyer’s study of the multiethnic Guardian Angels has illustrated, patrols were often racially and socio-economically diverse, including cadres of suede-jacketed Black veterans in Harlem and car patrols of Latina and Hasidic housewives in Brooklyn’s Borough Park.[8] While affluent neighborhoods asked residents to make regular donations to their patrol, city programs offered significant matching funding - $9 for every $1 raised by the community - to support civilian-led schemes specifically in low-income communities.[9] And despite the prominence of the “block” in the spatial imaginary of their funders, patrols could be found in both high-rise public housing projects and upscale suburban idylls, and were as likely to be made up of renters as homeowners.[10]
The emergence and expansion of patrols in part reflected the material realities of 1970s New York. During the city’s fiscal crisis, police manpower was reduced to levels not seen since the 1950s, with departmental strength reduced by over 9,000 officers between 1975 and 1981 after a previous half-decade of cutbacks and hiring freezes.[11] Increasing rates of crime and disorder further undermined perceptions of public safety in city neighborhoods. Attempts to maintain service delivery amidst scarcity by closing or merging precinct houses or rationalizing street patrol via the use of one-man patrol cars distanced officers from the public and eroded perceptions of police efficacy. By the end of 1976, over one third of New Yorkers reported their confidence in the police’s dependability as “zero,” while the Police Department admitted its patrol force was barely able to respond to public demand.[12] Many civilian patrols and their sponsors responded to this context. Announcing plans for a “Community Self-Help Fund” in March 1976, the nonprofit Citizens’ Committee for New York City explained that “it is unlikely that New Yorkers can look forward to the full range of publicly-funded services enjoyed in the past,” and identified self-help crime prevention as a means of helping residents “make the difficult transition from an era of plenty to one of meagre public resources.”[13]
Image 1: The Lindsay administration’s block security program, launched in 1973. Copy attached to hearings before the House of Representatives Subcommittee on Crime on proposed Community Anticrime Assistance Act of 1973 (H.R 9175, H.R. 9809, H.R. 10602), 93rd Congress, 1st Session, 13 September 1973.
Civilian patrols were not, however, simply spontaneous, pragmatic responses to public austerity, but diverse ideological projects with deep and complex genealogies. Some, notably the city’s own block security program [image 1], unveiled in 1973, grew from radical experiments in neighborhood government and community control, while many others – in both affluent and low-income communities – exhibited a traditional conservative defense of homeowners’ property rights. Many patrols, especially in communities of color, reflected an innate suspicion or distrust of state authority forged by decades of police violence and neglect; others, prompted by the findings of the Kerner Commission, sought to restore police-community relations after the urban rebellions of the 1960s. Some identified as passive observers – their members approvingly quoting Jane Jacobs’s “eyes on the street” – while others endorsed more aggressive methods of order maintenance and spatial reclamation. Yet despite this diversity, civilian anticrime patrols constituted more than simply the conceptual “grab bag'' or “hodgepodge” attributed by Suleiman Osman to similar crisis-era initiatives in the parks system.[14] Instead, in their emphasis on self-help, individual responsibility and consumer citizenship, patrols offered several important ideological continuities which both complemented the city’s “neoliberalization” and provided a form of popular engagement with, even participation in, this process.
Civilian patrols valorized ideas of individual responsibility, redefining the relationship between the state and the individual citizen. Patrol groups identified themselves as enterprising individuals, laying claim to citizenship by assuming responsibility for services, including crime prevention, withdrawn or reduced during the fiscal crisis. Block association newsletters reminded residents of their “civic duty to get involved in anti-crime programs designed to secure our property and streets.”[15] Refusal to participate, by contrast, was seen as an act of civic irresponsibility, even an abrogation of citizenship. Those who did not enlist in Midwood’s Nottingham Association car patrol – perhaps because they balked at the cost or time commitment, objected to the concept, or opted to protest service cuts – were placed outside of the community; their exclusion made clear by their absence from Association newsletters, which listed the names of households signed up to the patrol.[16]
Public and private funders of civilian patrols also contributed to this reorientation of the relationship between state and citizen. The Citizens’ Committee’s self-help awards required successful patrols to supplement their grant with contributions from residents as a means of promoting, even monetizing, individual responsibility and self-reliance. Both the Committee and the city’s block security program asked patrols to identify their individual crime prevention needs themselves and then choose from a range of consumer goods – typically those focused on surveillance or the protection of property – offered by private providers. The role of state agencies such as the police in these arrangements was retained rather than withdrawn, but in a detached form: a partner not protector, providing consultancy or resources to prevent crime, but largely to further individual choice and responsibility and encourage self-help. In this way, state retrenchment and the arrival of private or voluntarist initiative in its stead was normalized for New Yorkers, establishing new models of governance based on residents’ assumption of individual responsibility and risk.
Civilian patrols also aligned citizenship with consumption. Besides acquiring anticrime technologies themselves, patrols detailed consumer recommendations and reviews of security products, including alarms and lighting systems, in their regular newsletters. Many patrols policed not only the streets but also the performance of police and criminal justice services; groups from Harlem to suburban Queens regularly encouraged members to identify as consumers in their interactions with the state and utilize consumerist discourses of efficiency, service, and value for money to push claims on public agencies. Brooklyn’s Midwood-Kings Highway Development Corporation even instigated a program of “legislative surveillance” whereby members observed courtrooms to evaluate judicial performance and monitor the progress of criminal cases.[17] Patrols thus also offered a vision of active citizenship defined by consumption, in which individuals’ pursuit of safety, security, even justice came via the acquisition of consumer goods or the assertion of consumer rights.
While patrols and their sponsors claimed their activities would reduce crime and restore a sense of community to a troubled city, their emphasis on individual responsibility often forged a narrow, privatized understanding of these concepts. Many patrol members conceptualized the crisis-era city as a series of private entities competing for scarce resources, rather than a larger, collective whole; their work an effort to preserve, in the absence of protection by the state, their own individual safety and security. Such an outlook legitimized the displacement of crime onto surrounding neighborhoods or blocks – a trend the Police Department argued was a regular outcome of civilian patrols’ work – and privileged private goals, notably the protection of property values, over the social welfare function of policing.[18] Patrol newsletters identified their communities as inherently self-sustaining, with the voluntarism of patrol members responsible for neighborhood safety rather than its comparative access to services or the political, economic and cultural capital of its residents.[19] Representations of patrols in lifestyle media and property guides did likewise, celebrating patrols’ voluntarism as a commodity to sell to potential investors whilst failing to acknowledge certain communities’ greater ability to maintain a patrol or withstand reduced city services.[20] Civilian patrols and their sponsors thus tacitly accepted widening neighborhood inequalities and the increasingly uneven distribution of resources while, in aligning crime prevention with the protection of property values, establishing a priority for urban governance which would come to predominate citywide.
Indeed, the realities of austerity meant that many patrols were unable to exercise individual agency or consumer choice as freely as envisaged. The Citizens’ Committee’s own internal evaluation of funded patrols in the Bronx revealed that while some projects proved self-sustaining, those in poorer neighborhoods faltered as members struggled to marshal the time or resources necessary to maintain a patrol. Other audits acknowledged that for less affluent communities, unable to supplement or sustain their award with donations from residents, “choice” meant prioritizing certain localities for patrol over others of equal need, or purchasing cheaper, substandard anticrime equipment over more reliable alternatives.[21] Such obstacles often proved insurmountable for patrols in low-income areas, and many proved unsustainable beyond the first year or two of operation. These findings, often from neighborhoods hardest hit by the withdrawal of regular police services, are indicative of the wider structural limitations of citizen voluntarism.
Civilian patrols played a significant role in New York’s transformation during the 1970s and 1980s. They provided normative representations of New Yorkers as innately enterprising and self-reliant, while implicitly endorsing the wider retrenchment of public institutions and downplaying neighborhood inequalities. At a moment of fiscal collapse, state failure, and pervasive fear of crime, they offered individuals the promise of autonomy and choice about how to protect their neighborhoods and a new consumerist discourse through which to articulate their security needs, even if few had the freedom to make such choices. Their membership – housewives, shopkeepers, taxi drivers – and the immediate locus of their activism – the individual block or neighborhood – emphasized their “bottom-up” quality, yet enfranchised exclusive understandings of community and citizenship and approaches to crime and urban governance which promoted privatization and the protection of property values. Patrols thus served to normalize the political and economic restructuring of New York and the emergence of the “neoliberal city,” while capturing many of its inherent contradictions and inequities.
Joe Merton is a Lecturer in Twentieth Century History at the University of Nottingham, UK. He has published in journals including the Journal of Urban History, Journal of Policy History, and the Historical Journal. He is currently working on a book on fear of crime and the transformation of New York during the 1970s and 1980s.
[1] Joshua Freeman, Working Class New York: Life and Labor since World War II (New York: New Press, 2000); Miriam Greenberg, Branding New York: How a City in Crisis Was Sold to the World (New York: Routledge, 2008); Kim Phillips-Fein, Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2017).
[2] For examples, see David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 44-48; Greenberg, Branding New York; Phillips-Fein, Fear City; Kim Moody, From Welfare State to Real Estate: Regime Change in New York City (New York: New Press, 2007).
[3] Sam Lebovic, “Introduction: Social Histories of Neoliberalism,” Journal of Social History 53 (2019), p. 1.
[4] Citizens’ Committee for New York City Community Self-Help Fund Prospectus, 16 March 1976, Box 220, Folder 1411, “Citizens Committee for New York City, 1975-1976,” Rockefeller Brothers’ Fund records, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, NY.
[5] Joe Merton, “John Lindsay, the Association for a Better New York, and the Privatization of New York City,” Journal of Urban History 45 (2019), pp. 556-577.
[6] “Neighborhood Security Patrols Double,” New York Times, 24 January 1982, p. R1.
[7] Ibid.; “Do-It-Yourself Patrols,” New York Magazine, 8 November 1982, p. 37.
[8] Reiko Hillyer, “The Guardian Angels: Law and Order and Citizen Policing in New York City,” Journal of Urban History 43 (2017), pp. 886-914.
[9] Testimony of Mayor John Lindsay to House of Representatives Subcommittee on Crime on proposed Community Anticrime Assistance Act of 1973 (H.R 9175, H.R. 9809, H.R. 10602), 93rd Congress, 1st Session, 13 September 1973.
[10] Testimony of Richard Shapiro to House of Representatives Subcommittee on Crime on proposed Law Enforcement Assistance Administration Reauthorization, 96th Congress, 1st Session, 3 April 1979.
[11] “PBA Head Denounces Plan for Civilian Anticrime Force,” New York Times, 12 December 1981, p. 31; “Police Will Increase Patrols in Summer,” Ibid., 19 May 1980, p. B1; Raymond Horton, Municipal Labor Relations in New York City: Lessons of the Lindsay-Wagner Years (New York: Praeger, 1973), p. 110.
[12] “In Guards We Trust,” New York Times, 19 September 1976, p. 198; “New York City Cuts Back Police Radio-Car Patrols,” Ibid., 26 July 1976, p. 49.
[13] CCNYC Community Self-Help Fund prospectus, 16 March 1976, Box 220, Folder 1411, “Citizens Committee for New York City, 1975-76,” Rockefeller Brothers’ Fund records.
[14] Suleiman Osman, “‘We’re Doing It Ourselves’: The Unexpected Origins of the New York City’s Public-Private Parks,” Journal of Planning History 16 (2017), pp. 164, 171.
[15] “Need Car Patrol Volunteers,” Nottingham Park News, January 1980 [emphasis added], Brooklyn neighborhood associations and civic organisations collection, Brooklyn Historical Society, New York, N.Y.
[16] “President’s Message: You Too Must Get Involved,” Nottingham Park News, December 1985, Ibid.
[17] William DeJong & Gail Goolkasian, The Neighborhood Fight Against Crime: The Midwood-Kings Highway Development Corporation (Washington D.C.: National Institute of Justice, 1982), pp. 1, 25-26.
[18] “Big Push on Crime Merely Pushes It Elsewhere,” New York Times, 1 June 1982, p. B1.
[19] “Will Our Patrol Continue?”, Nottingham Park News, November 1977.
[20] “The City’s Safest Neighborhoods,” New York, 19 October 1981, p. 30.
[21] SNAP evaluation and review, November 1977, Box 221, Folder 1413, “Citizens’ Committee for New York City, November-December 1977,” Rockefeller Brothers’ Fund records; Interview transcript with Schenectady Avenue Residents’ Block Association, 7 July 1977, Ibid.