Managing Urban Disorder in the 1960s: The New York City Model
By Jarrod Shanahan and Zhandarka Kurti
Surveying hundreds of urban riots throughout the 1960s, the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, commonly known as the Kerner Commission, used strident language to capture how “white racism” underlay the grievances of rioters and called for a commitment to the War on Poverty as a remedy to urban unrest.[1] Yet far less scholarly attention is paid to the commission’s emphasis on counterinsurgency mechanisms — locally-specific, quasi-military strategies for pacifying unrest by politicking and/or force — geared toward managing disorder amid a deepening state of political and economic crisis.[2] An early example of crisis planning in New York City immediately following the recommendations of the Kerner Commission Report demonstrates that at the local level, counterinsurgency relied heavily on the partnership with agents of what is today called the non-profit industrial complex (NPIC), a nexus of private philanthropic organizations constituting a mediating “buffer” between capital and the working class, while channeling social movement energy away from radical change and into piecemeal, pro-market reform.[3]
The result was a strategy for pacification reliant not just on the brute force of police, but the cooperation of the burgeoning criminal justice reform non-profit sector and select “community leaders” deemed “responsible” by City Hall. As part of this power arrangement, organizations and leaders stood to receive considerable funding from philanthropic juggernauts like the Ford Foundation and a seat at the table alongside the city’s power brokers. Their contribution was to invent peaceable methods for repressing urban rebellions and, more broadly, to pioneer strategies for managing the lives of working-class people in a way that did not provoke revolt. As we discuss below, a key player in this burgeoning criminal-justice non-profit sector was the Vera Institute of Justice. First, a word is needed about the novel political moment in which this power configuration came to be.
As Ira Katznelson has explored in City Trenches, prior to the urban crisis, the problems facing black and Latino immigrant New Yorkers were largely ignored by urban political machines.[4] The urban rebellions of 1967 and 1968 made evident that the racial and class dynamics of post-war cities could no longer be neglected. In Watts, Newark, Detroit, and other cities, anonymous black proletarians broadcast in letters of fire and shattered glass the brutal endurance of structural racism in cities whose black populations were choked by restrictions to housing, employment, public services, political power, and basic dignity, enforced by a regime of violent policing. But while other cities smoldered, New York remained relatively quiet.
The most common explanation for New York’s relative calm credits Mayor John V. Lindsay with creating the nation’s first Urban Action Task Force, a neighborhood-based threat-management strategy that placed senior mayoral aides in the areas identified as most amenable to unrest and deputized local community leaders as agents of City Hall.[5] By incorporating the hitherto ignored grievances of working-class communities of color and marshaling their informal power structures as agents of counterinsurgency, Lindsay built an intelligence apparatus that offered practical insight into pacifying potential unrest. A daily “Crisis Calendar,” for example, alerted aides to racial tension in places like Brownsville and monitored the comings and goings of black and brown militants like the Black Panther Party.[6] It was this experience with managing disorder that Lindsay brought into his work with the Kerner Commission.
In the summer of 1967, President Johnson convened the National Advisory Committee on Civil Disorders to study and propose remedies for this generalizing state of disorder. While the commission is commonly called the Kerner Commission, after its chair, Illinois governor Otto Kerner, Jr., an indelible mark was made on its final report by the vice-chair, Lindsay. The young progressive had championed civil rights legislation and worked in tandem with President Johnson’s Great Society initiative to funnel money into working-class communities of color, in an example of the managerial liberalism that would define the administration.[7] Lindsay and his aides penned the introduction to the Kerner Report, which underscored the structural view of rioting that underlay the policy of his mayoralty. “What white Americans have never fully understood — but what the Negro can never forget — is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto,” they wrote. “White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.”[8]
The report’s bold language, its condemnation of white institutions, and its commitment to the War on Poverty were never taken up by the Johnson administration. On the other hand, the report’s strategy for managing the crisis without significant revision of the status quo would prove invaluable to future generations of police and politicians. The meat of this approach was outlined in the third section of the report, titled “What is to be Done?”, where the Commission recommended the development of Neighborhood Action Task Forces to establish “effective communication” between city officials and inner-city residents. The Commission also suggested the development of intelligence systems that would give police departments insight into which incidents needed to be effectively controlled before they sparked larger-scale disorder. Here, community leaders and residents were seen as frontline agents in gathering information on events that could lead to urban disorders. In a chapter called “The Administration of Justice Under Emergency Conditions,” the Commission proposed a comprehensive plan to supplement criminal justice agencies to deal with civil disorders as they occurred. New York City in the late 1960s provided fertile ground for testing these recommendations.
In early 1968, Lindsay convened the Mayor’s Committee on the Administration of Justice Under Emergency Conditions to plan the city’s response to mass unrest. Members included the commissioners of police, corrections, and social services, as well as the director of the Office of Probation, representatives of the New York City Bar Association and the five County Bar Associations, the Legal Aid Society, the Harlem Lawyers Association, the Puerto Rican Bar Association, the Bedford-Stuyvesant Lawyers, and the Vera Institute for Justice. The Mayor’s Committee was thus an impressive coalition of City agencies concerned with repression and social reproduction as well as progressive voices in criminal justice reform, most notably Vera, which was represented on the Committee by its founder, Herbert Sturz.
Founded in 1961 by Sturz and philanthropist Louis Schweitzer and bankrolled by the Ford Foundation, Vera’s original goal was to reduce case-loads in Manhattan criminal court and reduce jail overcrowding by maximizing pretrial bailouts. Schweitzer’s and Sturz’s efforts were part of a larger trend in the early 1960s in which philanthropists stepped in to manage the growing race and class tensions of postwar cities. Since its founding, Vera has blazed the trail for public-private cooperation around criminal justice reform. Over time, programs that Vera helped pioneer have become institutionalized aspects of the criminal justice system, such as pretrial supervision, which includes drug tests and monitoring attendance in programs.[9] In exchange for undertaking innovations in how the state polices and punishes, Vera received a seat at the table in the administration of the criminal justice system.
The report of the Mayor’s Committee’s invokes the Kerner Commission, arguing that “the administration of criminal justice very nearly collapsed in the many cities shaken by disorders during the summer of 1967.” This near-breakdown, they continued, “resulted mainly from long-standing deficiencies in criminal court systems and from the failure of communities to anticipate and plan for the emergency demands of civil disorders.” The Mayor’s Committee lamented the lack of convictions for crimes committed during the uprisings, noting that a majority of felony cases were thrown out due to lack of evidence, with little discrimination between “minor” and “major” crimes, and complained that judges “oriented to mass rather than individualized justice.” Moreover, logjams in the court system and staffing shortages resulted in long delays before prisoners could be released on bail. As a result, the Committee noted, detainees were crammed into overcrowded facilities lacking “adequate food, water, toilet facilities, and medical treatment,” as loved ones on the outside remained in the dark about their whereabouts and unable to contact them.[10] This was a problem not simply for the cause of due process, which surely concerned some actors on the Mayor’s Committee, but more importantly, the cause of tamping down radicalism in communities of color, the Committee’s unifying purpose.
The Mayor’s Committee thus envisioned a counterinsurgency strategy for New York City aimed at establishing order through mass arrests in a manner honoring the dual spirit of due process and urban pacification. To be effective, it would have to not simply respond to disorder, but also the legitimacy crisis which had engendered it. In other words, this would be a battle not just for control of the streets, but for the proverbial hearts and minds of working-class New Yorkers. The Committee’s priorities therefore bridged the “[a]rrest and effective prosecution of those who riot and engage in related criminal activity,” and “[p]rompt arraignment and judicial hearings for arrested persons under conditions which comply with the letter and spirit of due process and do not exacerbate community tensions.” The Committee, therefore, planned for large-scale prisoner arraignment and transportation, communication with the outside, and most importantly, humane facilities for mass detention following mass arrests. In addition to smoothing community relations and relieving crowding, an expedited process, the Mayor’s Committee reasoned, would also return police to the streets as quickly as possible to resume the pacification. Tensions inflamed by such police repression could be mitigated, the Committee believed, using “responsible community leaders,” commissioned “to act as impartial observers to report back to the community on all stages of processing of persons arrested.”[11] The careful selection of “responsible” leaders — in other words, pro-market, pro-state, and pro-conciliation with police and other authorities — underlay the contemporaneous efforts by the Ford Foundation, the primary funder of Vera in these early years, to steer the black power movement away from revolution and into reformist channels.[12]
The Mayor’s Committee addressed itself to two major problems: the mayor’s lack of executive power in moments of rebellion and the city’s inability to absorb a high volume of arrestees in the process of pacification. Beyond simply making recommendations, the Committee drafted and succeeded in passing Local Law No. 31, granting the mayor sole power to declare a state of emergency. During these times, the Mayor could move to ban weapon sales, institute a curfew, ban vehicular and pedestrian traffic, ban the sale of alcohol, and close “certain places of public assemblage” with the full weight of the police. The bill had to be amended when it was found to violate a state law that allowed for local governments to declare a state of emergency for up to five days — the law drafted by the Mayor’s Committee had originally called for fifteen. The Committee also passed several laws providing for expedited processing of arrestees, including allowing the sworn affidavit of a police officer to substitute for a court appearance, enabling cops to return to pacifying rebellion as quickly as possible after making an arrest.
To smooth this process, the Mayor’s Committee also designed a fast-track arraignment process, which by its account could arraign 250 people in an eight-hour window using a single judge, up to five prosecutors, four defense attorneys, three courts, and seven typists. The Committee planned eight such “arraignment centers” across the city, capable of processing six thousand arrestees in a single day. To handle whatever prisoners these arraignment clearinghouses failed to turn over in short order, the Committee arranged for the state correctional system to lease beds to the city.[13] But even this would not be enough. The Committee also planned in detail for the logistics of mass detention, with the intake facilities at 100 Centre St and 120 Schermerhorn Street acting as processing centers. Rikers Island was set aside as an option of last resort, with its beds to be vacated by shifting city prisoners into leased state beds in order to clear room for surplus detainees.[14]
The Committee was able to practice its plans in April 1968, when Columbia University was occupied by students and community members in protest of a plan to build an exclusive gymnasium in Morningside Park. The occupation was violently evicted, with over seven hundred arrests.[15] In its final report, the Committee casually noted how “appropriate parts of the plan were invoked with generally successful results during the student demonstrations this spring.” The bloody police riot was, in fact, an experiment of sorts and represented a police response to disorder deemed generally favorable by the Vera Institute and other emissaries of New York City’s liberal establishment.[16]
Vera’s participation in the Mayor’s Committee, while providing the trappings of civil libertarianism to an otherwise authoritarian scheme, was no doubt steered by the Committee’s stated imperative “[t]o protect the constitutional rights of all persons arrested.”[17] The Mayor’s Committee tasked Sturz’s Vera with not just designing but operating “Emergency Information Centers,” responsible for collecting names of detainees, their charges, and the status of their legal cases, and disseminating this information to family, friends, and lawyers.[18] Vera was also tasked with ironing out the logistics of granting the mayor powers just short of martial law, which remained ill-defined by the 1968 Committee report. Vera stepped into this vacuum, contracting with the NYPD to craft a plan in scrupulous detail.[19]
Vera’s follow-up plan, The Administration of Justice Under Emergency Conditions, specifies lines of communication and cooperation between the different agencies represented on the Committee and prescribes the monitoring of the mass detention “staging areas” by community representatives. Every step of the booking and arraignment process and its oversight was envisioned in detail by Vera.[20] For example, Vera proposed Polaroid cameras and pre-carbonated arrest forms in order to expedite the booking of arrested people and allow cops to return to the street to fight in the counterinsurgency.[21] Vera also suggested special cards for “essential personnel” to show police during curfew to prevent being detained erroneously. Vera also counseled police on how to avoid arresting people breaking curfew for “valid reasons,” which could be proven by identification papers substantiating their story or a satisfactory performance during interrogation. Ultimate discretion was to fall to the individual officer, who would be guided by “good judgment.”[22] “If these guidelines are adhered to,” the report concludes, “the purpose for which the curfew was ordered should be achieved with a minimum number of arrests and a minimum amount of friction between the police and the community.” Should civilians dispute that “good judgment” was used, they could complain to the local police station or seek out a representative of the Civilian Complaint Review Board after their release.[23] Responsibility for overseeing wrongdoing in the detention facilities would fall to the responsible community representative deputized to mediate between communities and the forces of pacification.[24]
If the National Guard were to be called in, Vera recommended they be used only for general security, not arrests. Beyond any civil libertarian concerns, Vera’s reasoning ran that “any arrest by a Guardsman will require his appearance in court at a later date and many of these men are from upstate.”[25] Vera also broke down in exact detail the detention capacity of various correctional facilities, including those in disuse due to their poor condition, which can be activated as pre-trial detention sites amid mass arrests.[26] The report lamented the unsuitable conditions of the existing city facilities for mass detention, “the weakest link in the city’s plan,” noting that the Committee’s plan to set aside Rikers for this purpose was untenable in the face of crowding. Further, Vera lamented that city overtures to the Department of Defense to procure detention space in New York City had proven fruitless. They, therefore, advocated exploring the erection of Quonset huts, temporary detention facilities made of massive steel semicircles, to be located either on Rikers Island or along the city’s piers, or else the repurposing of existing buildings for mass detention. The bottom line, the report lamented, was that “until additional facilities are available, the city cannot consider itself prepared for a major civil disorder.”[27]
The same was true about juveniles, who Vera planned to process at the Spofford juvenile facility in the South Bronx, and for whom there would still not be “adequate remand facilities” to accommodate a mass arrest. To deal with the delicate practice of arresting juveniles, Vera planned close cooperation with the Department of Probation, which “of course, will attempt to release as many youngsters as possible, but it will probably prove difficult to contact parents while a disorder is still in progress, and those parents who are contact may have a difficult time going to the juvenile center if they live in the area of the disturbance, or if a curfew is in effect at the time.” To remedy this, Vera proposed special passes, available at Probation Centers, for parents looking to travel to Spofford to retrieve their detained children after hours.[28] How parents would get to the Probation Centers without passes remained an unaddressed catch-22.
Vera also expressed chagrin at the City’s progress in recruiting a hiring pool of typists to process the high volume of paperwork associated with such a high volume of arrests, arguing that the City should contract “specialists from IBM” to design a high-tech data system for handling the potentially massive numbers of arrestees.[29] Vera accepted the task of operating the Emergency Information Center, capable of dispensing information about arrests, injuries, and relocations, and providing an important public face to the City’s counterinsurgency strategy.[30] The City had offered Vera and other criminal justice reformers a seat at the table in the administration of urban pacification, and it was enough to ensure their full cooperation in formulating a plan to detain tens of thousands of New Yorkers, should they rise up against the structural violence of racial capitalism.
Despite the assiduous labor Vera put into this planning counterinsurgency against rebellion by New York City’s working-class communities of color, when New York City teetered on the brink of “civil disorder” during the blackout of 1977, nobody thought to use their plan.[31] Instead, prisoners were crammed into the Tombs up to twelve per tiny cell, denied mattresses and phone calls, for up to a week.[32] But these reports, taken in sum, demonstrate that Vera and other progressive agents of New York City’s non-state civil society took on the technocratic tasks of building a local urban counterinsurgency strategy that put into practice Kerner’s recommendations for managing social unrest. Moreover, the absence of a Newark or a Watts in New York City did not mean this counterinsurgency was not operating on a daily basis in the years and decades which trudged along as the liberatory promise of the late 1960s receded ever more into the past. The deputizing of “responsible” — pro-capitalist, pro-state, and pro-conciliation — community leaders the Ford Foundation and its beneficiaries continued alongside a counterinsurgency strategy under which progressive reformers and carefully vetted “community leaders” from the NPIC have been granted a seat at the table alongside police and jailers.
Looking back to how New York City anticipated and managed urban unrest in the 1960s allows us to understand the structural role of the NPIC in pacifying social unrest and essentially depoliticizing social movements. To glimpse the legacy of this strategy in our present, one need only consider the alacrity with which Vera and another Ford Foundation beneficiary, JustLeadership USA, outmaneuvered grassroots abolitionist organizing to promote the planning and construction of an expansive $11 billion network of “state-of-the-art” jails across New York City, under the mantle of promoting “justice” for “the community.”[33] In a sign of the post-Kerner times, in his supporting remarks prior to its passage, Council Member Stephen Levin evoked the wise words not of law-and-order hawks Edward Koch or Rudy Guiliani, but venerated abolitionist activist-scholar Mariame Kaba.[34]
Jarrod Shanahan is an Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at Governors State University.
Zhandarka Kurti is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
[1] Stephen Gillon, Separate and Unequal: The Kerner Commission and the Unraveling of American Liberalism (New York: Basic Books, 2018).
[2] Stuart Schrader, Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019); Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (New York: Bantam, 1968), chapters 10–13.
[3] The canonical work on the non-profit industrial complex is INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded (Cambridge MA: South End Press, 2007). For an explicit discussion of the “buffer zone” see Paul Kivel’s essay in that volume, “Social Service or Social Change?” pp. 129-149.
[4] Ira Katznelson, City Trenches: Urban Politics and the Patterning of Class in the United States (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981).
[5] Joseph P. Viteritti, ed., Summer in the City: John Lindsay, New York and the American Dream (John Hopkins University Press, 2014).
[6] Barry Gottehrer’s The Mayor’s Man (New York: Doubleday, 1975) is a comprehensive account of this project, which saw Gottehrer become a close confidant of Five-Percent Nation leader Allah and use city funds to bankroll Abbie Hoffman’s iconoclastic Fuck the System. See also Nicholas Pileggi, “Barry Gottehrer’s Job is to ‘Cool It,’” New York Times Magazine, September 22, 1968. “Crisis Calendars” from the early 1970s are available at the John V. Lindsay Papers, Yale University, Boxes 53–58.
[7] John A. Andrews III, Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1998).
[8] Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, 1–2.
[9] Malcolm M. Feeley, “How to Think About Criminal Court Reform,” Boston University Law Review 98 (2018): 673–730, https://www.bu.edu/bulawreview/files/2018/06/FEELEY.pdf.
[10] Report of the Mayor’s Committee on the Administration of Justice Under Emergency Conditions (New York: Office of the Mayor, 1968), 1.
[11] Report of the Mayor’s Committee, 2–3.
[12] Robert Allen, Black Awakening in Capitalist America, excerpted in INCITE!, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, 53–62. Ferguson, Karen. Top Down: The Ford Foundation, Black Power and the Reinvention of Racial Liberalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).
[13] Report of the Mayor’s Committee, 4–6.
[14] Ibid., 8–10, 13.
[15] Sylvan Fox, “Pickets Circle Columbia; Class Reopening Delayed; 720 Protesters Arraigned,” New York Times, May 1, 1968.
[16] Report of the Mayor’s Committee, 18–19.
[17] Ibid., 7.
[18] Id., 15
[19] Criminal Justice Coordinating Council (CJCC) and Vera Institute of Justice, The Administration of Justice Under Emergency Conditions (New York: Vera Institute of Justice, 1969), 1–3. Despite the shared authorship, Vera undertook the work outlined in this lengthy report, itself prepared by Vera staff attorney Peter Nussbaum.
[20] CJCC and Vera, The Administration of Justice, 3–15, 18–26.
[21] Ibid., 67.
[22] Id., 15-17.
[23] Id., 17.
[24] Id., 29-31.
[25] Id., 18.
[26] Id., 27-29.
[27] Id., 33-34.
[28] Id, 40-41.
[29] Id., 44-45.
[30] Id., 57-61.
[31] New York City Board of Correction, Annual Report 1977 (New York: Board of Correction, 1978), 22.
[32] Kim Fein-Phillips, Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2017), 273.
[33]Raven Rakia and Ashoka Jegroo, “How the Push to Close Rikers Went from No New Jails to New Jails,” The Appeal, May 29, 2018, https://theappeal.org/how-the-push-to-close-rikers-went-from-no-jails-to-new-jails.
[34] https://twitter.com/nonewjails_nyc/status/1184915381938466816