Expanding the Thin Blue Line: Resident Patrols and Private Security in Late Twentieth-Century New York

Abstract

In the late 1960s and 1970s, New York City experienced escalating crime alongside residents’ growing frustration with the inability of municipal officials and the police to curtail it. These forces led a range of New Yorkers, from those in low-income neighborhoods to those in business districts, to sidestep the police and reimagine their responses to crime. Increasingly, everyday residents formed neighborhood patrols and hired guards, while businesses and institutions employed private security forces. These developments forged a new role for private actors in the patrolling of city streets. Over time, as resident patrols waned and as security guards proliferated, the private sector gained significant new capacities to surveil and police public space. Additionally, by formalizing a cooperative relationship with private security forces, the New York police and municipal authorities captured these private resources for the expansion of the carceral state.

In January 1971, hundreds of Brooklyn Heights residents braved the cold to attend a community meeting at the St. George Hotel. Attendees crowded into a second-floor salon, but as the room swelled to capacity, the hotel relocated the group to the grand ballroom. There, for more than two hours, over 500 residents discussed the evening's topic: the neighborhood's rising crime.¹ “Crime, crime, crime is the greatest problem today,” proclaimed Benjamin Rosenberg, vice chairman of the Better Brooklyn Committee, an umbrella group of civic associations. Everyone in the crowd seemed to agree. Indeed, reported robberies and muggings in the area had increased 73 percent between 1969 and 1970; they jumped another 79 percent the next year.²

Heights residents no doubt hoped that representatives from the local precinct would offer solutions. What they heard, however, sounded more like resignation. The police “do not have the cure” for rising crime, Captain Robert Geary of the 84th Precinct professed to the crowd. Geary likened the police's role to that of a physician treating a terminal illness: “He can write a prescription that will help ease the pain, but a complete cure does not seem possible.”³

With the police overwhelmed, these New Yorkers sought alternative answers. “Police effort alone is not sufficient to check crime in our community,” concluded the Brooklyn Heights Association (BHA), the city's oldest ongoing neighborhood association.⁴ The BHA had recently organized an “Eyes on the Street” program and distributed “incident-report forms” for residents to record suspicious activities.⁵ By the January meeting, however, the Association was considering bolder steps: organizing a resident patrol and hiring private guards to keep watch on the neighborhood.⁶

Brooklyn Heights was one of many neighborhoods anxious about crime in the late 1960s and 1970s. Although politicians and media figures fed (often racialized) concerns about crime, rising crime was also a material reality causing real harm. And while fear of and harm by crime was experienced at widely disparate levels across race and class, rising crime and constrained municipal budgets together became powerful enough forces to provoke a wide range of New Yorkers to reimagine responses to crime that had heretofore relied solely on the police.⁷ Everyday residents formed neighborhood patrols or hired guards, while businesses and institutions employed private security forces. All this shattered what had been a state monopoly on the official surveillance of public spaces. As resident patrols and private security guards spread, they normalized the role of private actors in patrolling the streets.

Though both everyday residents and business consortia converged on the need for supplements to government service, their efforts followed different directions. Residents typically understood patrols to be preventative and provisional: their mere presence would help dissuade would-be criminals. In contrast, groups of real estate owners, institutions, and businesses recognized the more permanent benefit of having guards at their command patrolling public streets. These groups used their resources to professionalize security forces, to gain greater acceptance for guards’ presence on public streets, and to push guards to absorb functions previously the domain of the police. Businesses and real estate owners benefited from new mechanisms, such as Business Improvement Districts, that enabled private sector coalitions to bring greater numbers of guards onto city streets.

At first, municipal and policing officials expressed little enthusiasm for residential and private security patrols. However, as crime continued to rise and as municipal budgets strained in the early 1970s, a series of liberal and Democratic mayoral administrations began to encourage their growth, but also aimed to retain state authority. Officials developed new programs to train and mentor resident patrols. The police also worked with private security to coordinate patrolling and exchange information. These programs ensured that a growing percentage of resident and security patrols worked with local precincts, serving as their “eyes and ears.” Resident patrols and private security had created a rift in state dominance over public space, and the result was twofold: businesses and real estate owners gained a more prominent role in the policing of public space through the security forces they employed, and municipal authorities channeled private patrols into the service of the carceral state.

Scholars of policing and incarceration have well documented how government mechanisms to police and imprison expanded at the local, state, and federal levels through new programs, enriched funding, and sterner sentencing.⁸ But private actions also played a crucial, if overlooked, part of this story. Initiatives launched by residents and private coalitions vastly expanded the role of these actors in surveilling and policing public streets, especially through security guards, which spread rapidly at the end of the century. City and police administrators simultaneously absorbed and directed resident patrols and private security forces into municipal programs.⁹

Although residents established patrols and private security forces primarily to supplement and not to replace public policing, their growth demonstrated how New Yorkers looked beyond a seemingly overwhelmed local government to contest crime.¹⁰ Additionally, and in contrast to predominant interpretations of neoliberal shifts, the spread of private initiatives to address crime did not occur simply as a result of top-down efforts by elites, officials, or free market ideologues.¹¹ A large selection of New Yorkers helped expand the surveillance of streets beyond the police. That so many New Yorkers sought out new mechanisms to address crime, an issue generally understood as the exclusive domain of the state, marks how expectations for government provision diminished, and transformative alternatives to government advanced, in the years before the city nearly went bankrupt in the mid-1970s.

“Crime-Fighting … Is Approaching a Complete Breakdown”: The Rise of Resident Patrols

Crime rose across the country in the 1960s, but New Yorkers found their experience particularly alarming. Reported robberies jumped from 6,579 in 1960 to 74,102 in 1970; burglaries leaped from 36,049 to 181,694.¹² While this increase reflected more meticulous crime reporting, homicides—the most reliable crime measurement—nearly tripled between 1970 and 1960.¹³ New York's “crime wave of the 1960s,” as Eric Schneider explains, “was neither a reporting artifact nor the result of a media-driven moral panic.”¹⁴

Rising crime exacerbated the growing frustration many residents felt toward the police. These sentiments resonated particularly among African Americans, long subject to unwarranted criminalization and police violence along with indifferent policing.¹⁵ While whiter and monied areas encountered more responsive and respectful policing, concerns about police inefficiency and corruption ran rampant throughout New York in the late 1960s. Researchers from the Center for Policy Research, for example, found that frustration with police responsiveness extended from low-income African American and Puerto Rican residents, who no longer reported crime because “the police will do nothing,” to white residents who lived “among the wealthiest and most fashionable” areas.¹⁶ There, residents shared stories such as one woman's, whose purse was stolen, found a police officer, and noticed the two men she believed responsible, only to be told: “Sorry lady, I'm on my coffee break.” Such examples paled in comparison to experiences common in lower income areas of color, but nonetheless firmed up the belief that police were unable to respond to crime. In 1966, for example, Mayor John Lindsay's Law Enforcement Task Force found a “lack of strong public support for the police in the performance of their duties.”¹⁷ The New York Times similarly noted that year how “the belief in police corruption is pervasive, shared alike by the citizen in the ghetto and the citizen in a luxury apartment on the East Side.”¹⁸ In the early 1970s, investigations by the Times and the Lindsay-appointed Knapp Commission would confirm what residents already knew: much of the New York Police Department (NYPD) was crooked.¹⁹

Concerns about corruption and unresponsiveness did not change the fact that residents commonly called for more and better policing as the principal solution to crime. But even residents uncritical of the police had to confront how—as Brooklyn Heights residents discovered—the police were blunt about the limited protection they could offer. In 1968, for instance, Captain Richard Di Roma of the “crime-ridden” 24th Precinct on the Upper West Side, told community members that police were only able to “play checkers” with muggers. “We increase the patrols on one street and they move to the next.”²⁰

As concerns about crime and the city's inability to curtail it grew, residents formed patrols. In Manhattan Beach in Brooklyn, a largely white and middle-class area, neighbors organized a car patrol “to combat [the] growing menace of burglaries and armed robberies” after failing “to get these conditions corrected by the authorities,” one resident described.²¹ Each night, three teams of two volunteers—whose occupations ranged from musician to doctor—took to the streets in improvised patrol cars in shifts between midnight to 5 a.m.²² Most nights their activities hardly resembled the plots of popular television procedurals like The Mod Squad or Dragnet. An especially eventful night involved the community's cantor, Arnold Schraeter, witnessing a burglar exiting a home and giving chase, causing the intruder to drop the stolen goods he was carrying.²³ (Pursuing criminals was generally discouraged; participants instead typically recorded relevant details and contacted police.)

No doubt that for many white communities, fears of growing populations of color heightened worries about crime. Between 1950 and 1970, the African American population more than doubled to 19 percent, and Puerto Rican and Latino Americans rose from 3 to 16 percent.²⁴ White residents regularly blamed rising crime on growing populations of color. This was true for many residents of Crown Heights, where the first major citizen patrol of this time, the Maccabees, formed in 1964. While the precipitating acts leading to the formation of the Maccabees were the attempted rape of a rabbi's wife and the robbery of a blind newspaper salesman, the growing African American population alarmed white residents.²⁵ Founder and rabbi Samuel Schrage proclaimed that the Maccabees—who served as escorts for residents and as “crime spotters” for police—were “fighting crime and criminals, without distinction as to color or creed,” but many African American residents expressed concern that the Maccabees would target innocent black residents.²⁶ Over the next few months, some African Americans did support and join the Maccabees, though whether this was because they found Schrage's words to be true or whether they had exhausted all other means to combat crime is not known.²⁷

More commonly, African Americans formed their own patrols. In Harlem, Reverend Oberia Depsey of the Upper Park Avenue Baptist Church led 200 armed volunteers in escorting women to church and reporting drug dealers.²⁸ The Black Citizens Patrol also traversed Harlem streets while brandishing machetes and making citizen arrests.²⁹ In Bedford-Stuyvesant, seventy-three community groups came together to form the Community Protection Organization that organized three-person patrols, while African American shopkeepers concerned with holdups formed their own patrol.³⁰ Patrols were accompanied not just by a demand common among white communities—more police—but also a demand for better policing as well as for greater educational and job opportunities to address crime at its roots.

Patrols also spread throughout public housing, where African Americans and Puerto Ricans made up 72 percent of residents by the late 1960s.³¹ The Housing Authority Police Department (HAPD) operated independently of the NYPD, and its decentralized organization and pioneering use of community patrolling helped its force—about half of whom were of color and roughly one-fifth of whom lived in public housing—gain support among residents.³² But many of the Authority's 150,000 residents believed that the HAPD's 1,100 patrolmen, spread out over 1,738 buildings and surrounding properties, were simply overwhelmed.³³ As a result, dozens of tenants of St. Nicholas Houses in Harlem started the first tenant patrol in 1966.³⁴ By early 1968, patrols had formed in several other public housing developments in Queens and Brooklyn.³⁵ That year, persistent tenant demands compelled the Authority to hire hundreds of additional officers, but officials had also come to believe in the value of resident patrols.³⁶ Patrols, officials noted approvingly, “have provided a significant deterrent to crime and vandalism.”³⁷ They authorized each development to spend up to $4,000 each year for training and equipment for patrols and hired the founder of the St. Nicholas patrol to assist tenants in forming new units.³⁸ Patrols spread rapidly, from about twenty-five in 1968 to ninety-three by 1970, which involved an extraordinary 8,650 volunteers who fanned out over 495 buildings.³⁹

Mayor Lindsay, in contrast, was initially reluctant to support resident-led anticrime initiatives.⁴⁰ During his first term, the Lindsay administration had declared a “war on crime,” deeming lawbreaking “the number one issue in New York.”⁴¹ But when the Maccabees formed, Lindsay told Crown Heights residents that “safety is the job of the City, not the individual.”⁴² Police officials were similarly discouraging. “There is no redress for errors that untrained volunteers make,” captain Edward Jinkins proclaimed after the Maccabees took to the streets. “The Police Department trains a recruit for nine months, in techniques and in the rights of civilians—and even we make mistakes sometimes.”⁴³ Instead, Lindsay—a firm believer in the power of government to address urban problems—aimed to put 5,500 additional officers on the streets, add an extra platoon to cover the high crime period between 6 p.m. and 2 a.m., and oversee the implementation of the 911 emergency system.⁴⁴

Despite officials’ discouraging response, the eruption of block associations helped ensure the continued growth of resident patrols. During the 1970s, “the Decade of the Neighborhood,” as Suleiman Osman describes it, a “spirit of localism” infused cities as residents organized to improve local conditions and amplify their voice in governance.⁴⁵ Block associations became the principal site through which neighbors came together to address local concerns. As the Federation of Laurelton Block Associations in Queens put it: “Concerned with schools? Crime? … This is the way to protect your neighborhood and your home. Together. Block by block.”⁴⁶ By the end of 1970, the number of block associations had reached over 3,000 and spread from low-income neighborhoods of color to wealthy white areas of Manhattan.

Crime was just one among many issues these groups tackled, but as neighbors gathered in living rooms to discuss their most pressing concerns, crime certainly hovered at or near the top. The Laurelton group, for example, focused on installing “new, brighter street lighting” and improving “police protections.”⁴⁷ Many associations, however, took the more ambitious step of forming patrols. By the end of 1972, car patrols operated in at least 75 neighborhoods and the police estimated around 15,000 men and women volunteered in tenant and neighborhood foot patrols.⁴⁸

Municipal and police officials warmed to these initiatives as they grew in popularity and as officials continued to face criticism for an inability to contain crime. In 1971, a Lindsay-appointed committee concluded that “crime-fighting and criminal justice in the city is approaching a complete breakdown.”⁴⁹ The selection of Patrick V. Murphy as Police Commissioner in 1970 also helped enhance patrols’ reception. Appointed at a time in which local police had become “strangers to most people,” Murphy supported initiatives that aimed to build relations with residents and “encourage the flow of information from citizens to police.”⁵⁰ What's more, in the early 1970s, municipal officials grappled with increasingly constrained budgets, inspiring a greater openness to new solutions—particularly ones that cost little. New York entered a protracted period of fiscal turmoil after the 1969 national recession; between 1970 and 1974, for instance, the city lost 219,000 jobs in manufacturing, 83,000 in sales, and 10,500 in the FIRE (finance, insurance, and real estate) sectors.⁵¹ Struggling to maintain municipal services as tax revenues declined, Lindsay became receptive in his second term to augmenting the role of private citizens and the private sector in realms previously dominated by city government.

In 1973, the mayor announced a $5 million “Block Security Program,” a powerful endorsement of residents’ mounting initiatives against crime. Recognizing that “more and more local groups are sponsoring self-help security programs,” the program awarded up to $10,000 in matching funds for block associations to purchase equipment like walkie-talkies, radios, and lighting.⁵² “Many groups have already joined together in self-help, anti-crime programs for their blocks, forming citizen and tenant patrols, serving as trained block-watchers, buying high-intensity lighting, and hiring private guards,” Lindsay explained. “We hope to greatly expand such self-help efforts throughout the City in a broad effort to reduce the opportunity for crime.”⁵³

“This Street Patrolled by Uniformed Guard”: The Rise of Private Guards

Despite the growing unease about crime, hardly all New Yorkers believed that the problem required them to patrol the streets. Indeed, the number of private guards grew rapidly in the 1960s in New York and across the country in response to crime and civil unrest. The decade brought substantial growth in law enforcement personnel (42 percent) and expenditures (90 percent), but this was matched by an equivalent rise in private security personnel (42 percent) and an even greater increase in private security expenditures (150 percent).⁵⁴ As more businesses and institutions employed guards, however, they overwhelmingly remained in privately owned spaces, such as industrial plants, universities, and retail stores.

In contrast, guards were rare on city streets. But some neighborhood groups concluded that the expense of hiring a private guard compensated for the hassle of rounding up sufficient volunteers for a patrol and the potential risk involved in patrolling streets themselves. On occasion, this occurred in African American areas—such as in 1970 when small merchants in Harlem hired a guard to patrol 125th Street—but security guards predominately appeared in areas with large populations of white residents who had the economic means to pay for them.⁵⁵ Guards were initially most common on blocks of the affluent Upper East Side and the gentrifying Upper West Side, a neighborhood beset by crime but with a growing number of middle-class white residents willing to contribute toward the salary for a nightly guard.⁵⁶

Block associations stressed that the point of a guard was less to pursue criminals than to deter crime from happening at all. They argued that a guard and an accompanying sign reading “this street patrolled by uniformed guard” had deterrence value. “Our guard isn't Attila the Hun, but he doesn't have to be,” John Applegate of the 102-103 Streets Block Association explained. “Most people are still not brazen enough to commit a crime in full view of anyone who bears any resemblance to a law-enforcement officer.”⁵⁷

By the early 1970s, private guards spread to middle-income, typically white areas of the outer boroughs. In 1971, the Manhattan Beach Community Group (MBCG) ended its citizen patrol owing to a lack of volunteers, even though “the entire community has been under severe tension and fear,” the group wrote to Commissioner Murphy.⁵⁸ Most recently, a physician's wife had been murdered. Despite reaching out to the police, the MBCG believed that the neighborhood was unlikely to be allocated additional officers: “All over the city people are clamoring for more police protection, but there is none to be had for lack of money.”⁵⁹ After several months of fundraising, 400 families agreed to commit $100 a month for the MBCG to contract with Mercury Intelligence Service to provide year-round patrols. “The security guards have a list of paid-up members,” the MBCG told residents, “and only those homes will receive their protection and attention.”⁶⁰ The policy was designed to encourage residents to contribute to the costly service, but the warning highlighted the nature of private security: it protected those who paid for it, not the general public.

In addition to the hurdle of costs, neighborhood groups could also be stymied by resistance to the idea of hiring a guard to patrol public streets. Local police initially proved unenthusiastic about private guards.⁶¹ What's more, many security firms refused to contract with resident groups who wanted to hire a guard for their block.⁶² Neighborhood groups also contended with the fact that the private security industry suffered from a host of problems, from ineffectiveness to outright corruption. A 1971 Justice Department–funded study found the typical guard “an aging white male, poorly educated, usually untrained, and very poorly paid.”⁶³ The job was undesirable, turnover was high, and commonly little was done by security firms to provide initial or ongoing training.⁶⁴ The industry received little regulation or oversight. While New York ranked among the states with “better statutes, in terms of standards and scope,” this was hardly high praise, given that licensing and regulation of the industry were “at best, minimal and inconsistent.”⁶⁵ Indeed, a study of New York guards concluded that most remained “ill-prepared for their jobs in terms of training and personal abilities.”⁶⁶

The issue troubled community groups. One Upper East Side block quickly went through three guards—including one who spent his shift in a bar and another in his car sleeping—before finding a guard they believed was up to the task.⁶⁷ Similarly, Manhattan Beach residents found after hiring their guard that “for the wages paid, the type of individual attracted to the job is not of the highest calipher [sic],” Vice President Edward Eisenberg explained.⁶⁸ As a result, “the patrol was a deterrent to the foolish,” another resident fretted, “but not the professional.”⁶⁹

Pioneering efforts by well-resourced private sector groups in Morningside Heights and in Midtown began to tackle the major hurdles hindering the spread of security guards, and at costs well beyond the means of block associations. These groups deployed a single force of guards, had a direct hand in their training, encouraged guards to take a more active role in policing streets, and worked to develop relationships between these forces and the police. The Morningside Area Alliance (MAA) used all these tactics to bring guards to the streets of Morningside Heights, a largely residential neighborhood of middle-class whites with a smaller African American area in its northern tip. The group—composed of fifteen area educational, religious, and health service institutions, such as Columbia University and Riverside Church—had formed in 1947 “to promote the improvement of Morningside Heights as an attractive residential, educational and cultural area.”⁷⁰ But by the 1960s, the MAA believed member institutions “cannot fully perform their work of educational, religious, and health services if people are fearful for their own safety and the security of their personal property.”⁷¹

The MAA first considered forming a security patrol early in the 1960s but encountered a series of challenges. While several member institutions employed guards, they overwhelmingly patrolled only on institutional property and buildings. “The present institutional guard staff,” the board of directors concluded, “cannot patrol the streets without neglecting essential duties on institutional grounds.”⁷² The group then contacted major security guard firms, but found that these too had experience operating “only on private property.”⁷³ What's more, these companies were hesitant to expand guards’ domain from private property to public streets. When the group reached out to Burns Security—one of the nation's largest agencies—the firm's manager expressed reluctance “about having his men patrol the city streets. His organization is generally used to protect life and property on private premises.”⁷⁴

The group ultimately found a willing partner in Interstate Industrial Protection, with whom they set to work on improving training, supervision, and garnering support for guards patrolling streets. After several years, the collaboration resulted in an innovative and “modern approach to residential security,” Interstate described.⁷⁵ The twelve-man unit wore light blue unfirms adorned with a nightstick and handcuffs.⁷⁶ Led by a former New Jersey policeman, the force's command center on Morningside Drive was “the next closest thing” to Police Headquarters “on the private side of law enforcement.”⁷⁷

The group continued to focus on improving the patrol's reputation, professionalization, and purview in the years ahead. MAA switched the force's name to the Morningside Community Patrol (MCP), appointed a supervisor who provided ongoing trainings, and hired a Security Director who regularly met with “block associations, tenant organizations, and shopkeepers to discuss security problems.”⁷⁸ Even more notable was a shift in guards’ roles. By the early 1970s, rather than the force deterring crime simply through its presence, guards began to take a more active role in actual policing. The MCP believed that residents and workers wanted “the criminal caught in the act, prosecuted and deterred from practicing in our community.”⁷⁹ The patrol therefore became involved in activities that were previously the exclusive domain of police, from stopping muggings and car break-ins, to chasing down suspects.⁸⁰ It also established a walkie-talkie network that linked all guards, a new patrol car, headquarters, and an institutional security office that wanted to “be informed of all security problems faced by the Community Patrol.”⁸¹

The MCP essentially became a parallel force to the police: a trained, supervised, and coordinated private security force actively policing streets on foot and by car. The group found that these efforts helped improve its reception among the local precinct—with whom the MCP began coordinating its efforts—as well as the public. The patrol received a growing number of “appreciative letters or calls from a person who is grateful for the Patrol's help.”⁸²

About sixty blocks south, in the bustling Midtown business district, a private consortium of real estate owners also brought private guards onto city streets. The initiative was led by the Association for a Better New York (ABNY), formed by in 1971 by real estate mogul Lewis Rudin and other prominent real estate and business leaders to help New York retain its status as “the prime corporate headquarters in the world.”⁸³ The organization launched a range of projects to address New York's declining economic health and to keep its commercial buildings occupied, such as advertising campaigns touting the benefits of locating businesses and headquarters to the city.

Of all the issues troubling New York, Rubin believed crime to be “the most important, the most serious problem.”⁸⁴ In 1972, he announced that the ABNY pledged “an all-out commitment of our resources to stop crime.”⁸⁵ The group unsurprisingly concentrated on the Midtown area, in which its members had the greatest economic stake. With a distressed municipal budget ruling out more policemen, the ABNY focused on how to deter crime “without shifting any police from any other area in the city.”⁸⁶ The group expanded the domain of the guards already patrolling the buildings and lobbies in central Midtown to include the streets immediately surrounding these buildings.⁸⁷ It also paid for doormen and superintendents to be trained to serve as “block watchers” so that they could properly report crimes and suspicious behaviors to the police. These actions marked a subtle but profound shift of moving private security onto public property.

The initiative was “strongly backed” by municipal and police officials, the Times noted.⁸⁸ This contrasted with the reception faced by many block associations that hired a private guard. Indeed, just like the MAA, the ABNY succeeded in forging a collaborative relationship with the police, who had often been indifferent or even hostile to private security spreading onto public streets (that ABNY's leadership consisted of prominent real estate and business figures no doubt helped facilitate this warmer reception). Lindsay applauded the plan, noting, “The war on crime can only be effective if we have the strong involvement of the public in every way.” The Manhattan police commander welcomed the effort because the police “were not able to do the job required.”⁸⁹

The program relied on area real estate and business owners who agreed to devote resources to what had principally been a public service. But ABNY leaders made clear the necessity of such steps. At a press conference announcing the initiative, a reporter asked ABNY leadership whether they resented “the fact that your membership pays millions of dollars in taxes to a city government that's supposed to do the job, and now you've got to do it yourself.” Alton Marshall, President of Rockefeller Center, replied in anger: “That's the kind of attitude which … business and the private sector has wallowed in for many years in this city and in this country—the old Roosevelt theory to let government do it.”⁹⁰ “There is no reason,” he argued to reporters, “why the 30,000 private security people can't be organized to supplement the police.”⁹¹

Marshall's assertion signaled what large-scale initiatives by the ABNY and the MAA shared with the block associations, and where they diverged. A growing range of New Yorkers now believed that they needed to be active in affairs previously the domain of government, and they worked to bring patrols onto city streets. But neighborhood groups generally saw forming a patrol or hiring a guard as small-scale and temporary; none depicted this step as an effort to permanently shift the nature of policing. To the ABNY, in contrast, the crisis of crime could be an opportunity for sweeping change. This change was not one the powerful actors behind the group had long-ago conceived and been lying in wait to enact. Rather, in the early 1970s, as the economic costs of crime rose and as faith in municipal government declined, they began to imagine a new solution to crime—one that could lead to an ongoing, citywide private security force.

The ABNY took further steps the following year. The group announced that it would extend its network of dedicated security guards from fifty to over 300—some of whom were armed—and expand the number of Midtown streets on which they patrolled.⁹² The program was rebranded as “Operation Interlock,” as its radio network directly connected guards with the police.⁹³ Municipal and police officials applauded this Midtown expansion, but the ABNY nurtured even grander visions. It foresaw a network of private security that could extend “from neighborhood to neighborhood and then borough to borough.”⁹⁴ A special antenna the ABNY had installed on the Exxon Building to link the network of Midtown security guards could connect guards across the city.⁹⁵ The goal, Rudin explained, was to create a network of private guards that would spread “into the Fordham Road area [in the Bronx], into the Steinway Street area [in Queens], into Brooklyn.”⁹⁶ In commercial areas, real estate and business owners could hire guards; in residential ones, block associations could do so.

While such ambitious and extensive visions failed to materialize beyond Midtown, these projects nonetheless facilitated major shifts in urban policing. Business consortia and block associations expanded the coordinated surveillance of public spaces beyond the police to a growing number of private actors. The MAA and ABNY foresaw an even greater role for private patrols. They provided training for private security networks, they gained media attention and political support, and they also began to shift the role of guards from visual deterrence to active policing. Visitors to and residents of Morningside Heights and Midtown would have encountered something new: a coordinated, uniformed private security force patrolling city streets.

“You Can't Wait for the City”: The Fiscal Crisis and Resident Responses to Crime

New York's troubled economy reached its nadir at mid-decade when financial institutions refused to underwrite additional municipal bonds, restricting the city's access to private capital, and ushering in a period of fiscal crisis.⁹⁷ State and federal officials prevented potential bankruptcy but, alongside financial and business elites, forced strict budget cutbacks. Crime had continued to rise even before the crisis. In 1974, reported rapes, robberies, assaults, and burglaries all increased over prior years; murders climbed from 1,117 to 1,645 between 1970 and 1975.⁹⁸ The ensuing austerity measures nonetheless resulted in the layoff of several thousand officers, nearly 15 percent of the force.⁹⁹

These conditions reinforced the perception of many neighborhood groups that government alone could not combat crime. As cutbacks unfolded in the spring of 1975, for example, representatives from over 100 block associations in Queens convened. “You can't wait for the city,” co-organizer Lillian Powell proclaimed. The convention chair noted how local groups were increasingly “working closely with the Police Departments in many neighborhoods to form security patrols”—an astonishing development on display throughout the city.¹⁰⁰ In Hollis Hills, for example, forty community members patrolled six nights a week.¹⁰¹ In Inwood, the Block Observation Patrol surveilled between West 207th Street and 218th Street, with neighbors organizing raffles to pay for their equipment. In the largely African American areas of Crown Heights and Flatbush, twenty-five community groups came together to form the “Civilian Radio Patrols” in which residents patrolled on foot and by car in uniform with radios connected directly to the local precinct.¹⁰²

Patrols also received support from new organizations like the Citizens Committee of New York (CCNYC), which formed to encourage volunteerism to fill gaps left by municipal cutbacks. Crime awareness and prevention constituted key aspects of this work. The CCNYC produced pamphlets such as Lend a Hand for a Safer New York, which detailed how residents could counteract police layoffs by organizing foot patrols, car patrols, and block watcher programs and also included lengthy sections on patrols and block watchers in additional publications, such as its New York Self-Help Handbook (1977). Representatives also appeared alongside police at community meetings. The CCNYC's Mort Berkowitz spoke to 600 Sunset Park residents along with the local commanding officer, instructing the audience on how to form block associations to combat crime.¹⁰³ The CCNYC also provided small grants of up to $400, funds especially important as block associations spread to greater numbers of low-income neighborhoods of color. These grants, the CCNYC noted, would help cover “the cost of essential equipment and materials,” such as whistles, flashlights, and walkie-talkies.¹⁰⁴

Facing ongoing economic turmoil, police and municipal officials under Democrat Abraham Beame (1974–1977) continued to encourage community anticrime initiatives. Beame hardly entered office an ideological devotee of offloading government services, but as the fiscal crisis unfolded, he welcomed low-cost measures that offset municipal cutback. Though the city was unable to maintain resources for the Block Security Program, police officials stepped up programs that trained and supervised residents eager to participate in anticrime initiatives. “In light of the present fiscal and manpower crisis,” Police Commissioner Michael Codd believed, “it is imperative that as many civilian volunteers as possible become involved in the Department related programs.”¹⁰⁵ By late 1977, more than 32,000 residents had gone through its block watcher training.¹⁰⁶ The NYPD also expanded the Civilian Observation Patrol (COP) program, launched in 1973, which provided training materials and courses specifically for patrol groups “to observe street conditions, incidents and to report crimes and violations to local police.”¹⁰⁷ Officials intended these civilian groups to “act as extended eyes and ears of the Police Department”; many had a direct radio connection to their local precinct.¹⁰⁸ By 1977, COP groups were active in nearly 65 percent of precincts.¹⁰⁹ While resident patrols were typically oriented toward supplementing police, these programs expanded and made official these relationships, and strengthened police oversight.

These developments parallel national shifts. Early in the decade, “Citizen crime prevention programs were not encouraged by law enforcement agencies; citizen patrols, especially, were often disparaged as ‘urban vigilantes,’” a major Justice Department study stated. “By the end of the 1970s, however, law enforcement agencies had embraced the concept of an active citizen role in crime prevention.”¹¹⁰ During this time, for example, the National Sheriffs’ Association launched its Neighborhood Watch program with a grant from the Justice Department's Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA). Especially targeting suburban and rural areas, the program encouraged local groups to monitor the streets and homes of their neighborhoods.¹¹¹

The growing enthusiasm for an active citizenry launched several federal programs. In 1976, Congress created the Office of Community Anti-Crime Programs (OCACP) within the LEAA to provide funding for citizen anticrime efforts.¹¹² Since its founding in 1968, the LEAA had principally funded law enforcement activities, but the OCACP earmarked $30 million in its first two years to provide federal funding directly to community activities for the first time.¹¹³

By 1978, the LEAA awarded generous grants to nearly a dozen New York patrols, mostly in low- and moderate-income areas of color. The East Harlem Community Corporation and the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition's volunteer patrols each received a quarter million dollars.¹¹⁴ Bedford-Stuyvesant's Central Brooklyn Coordinating Committee used its $235,514 grant to support patrolling, escorting, and block-watching programs as well as youth recreation and victim assistance programs.¹¹⁵ This level of funding could transform grassroots initiatives. In Midwood, Brooklyn, a largely white middle-class neighborhood, residents had already formed block associations and foot and car patrols before the Midwood Kings Highway Development Corporation (MKDC)—an umbrella organization for the area's civic groups and block associations—received almost $275,000 in federal funding between 1978 and 1979.¹¹⁶ The MKDC hired a former police detective as its anticrime project director and a community organizer who assisted residents in forming over 200 new block and tenant associations, leading to a 1,500-strong volunteer patrol covering a 200-block area seven nights a week.¹¹⁷

The continued resolve of residents, along with encouragement from government and private sources, helped patrols grow into the next decade. With the city still recovering economically, the number of police officers bottomed out at 22,170 in 1981, the lowest since 1954.¹¹⁸ At the same time, New York's crime rank among large cities rose from fifteenth in 1978 to ninth by mid-1980.¹¹⁹ Officials within Democrat Ed Koch's administration (1978–1989) viewed civilian involvement not only as a potentially effective, inexpensive means of combatting crime, but also as fitting within the mayor's broader governing vision of turning to residents and the private sector to supplement municipal services. While Lindsay and Beame had somewhat tepidly expanded initiatives that looked to private actors and the private sector to deal with problems like crime, Koch entered office certain that the city's precarious economy required aggressively pursuing opportunities outside government to supplement or even entirely take on services that had previously been provided by the city. Residential patrols—especially those that could be incorporated into official programs—fit well within this model.

In contrast, groups that strayed too far from municipal control faced significant ire. Officials repeatedly condemned the Guardian Angels, for example, who began patrolling subways in 1979 to deter and even physically stop crime. Officials denounced the Angels, claiming the group provoked violence, a perception likely fueled because the group was largely composed of young African and Latino Americans. The group's founder, Curtis Sliwa, in turn routinely criticized the police and municipal leadership as ineffective in combatting crime and refused to cooperate with officials.¹²⁰

Koch and police officials therefore promoted programs that would train, supervise, and channel residential groups toward serving as “eyes and ears” of the police. “What we are trying to do, literally, is to organize every block and every building in this city and to give people the tools with which to help themselves,” explained Richard Shapiro, director of the NYPD's Civilian Participation Program (CPP), which oversaw the Blockwatcher program, radio patrols, and Civilian Observation Patrols.¹²¹ By 1981, the police worked with over 110 patrol groups.¹²² In Brooklyn Heights, police trained over fifty residents who used their own cars (marked with a removable lamination and light) with radio transmitters they purchased.¹²³ “You just can't go to meetings and ask for more police,” Brooklyn Heights Association executive director Judy Standon proclaimed. “You have to do something yourself.”¹²⁴

But overwhelmingly, the willingness of thousands of New Yorkers to volunteer their time drove anticrime initiatives to a high point in the early 1980s. The number of residents actively involved in anticrime programs doubled between 1978 and 1982, to 150,000.¹²⁵ While in 1977, 60 groups and 5,000 people participated in patrols, these numbers leaped to 135 groups and 15,000 people by 1982.¹²⁶ Between 1978 and 1983, the number of block watchers expanded from 30,000 to 81,000.¹²⁷ Participants in the civilian radio program grew to 12,000, and those volunteering in car patrols jumped to over 7,000.¹²⁸ “If the citizenry of the city just sits back and complains, there will be more victims,” explained Alan Stolzer of the 400-volunteer-strong Interfaith Civilian Patrol that surveilled Riverdale each day.¹²⁹ In the Bronx, 125 members of the Morris Park Community Association were “on the streets seven nights a week, reporting suspicious activities, escorting the elderly, [and] defusing potentially dangerous situations.”¹³⁰ In Prospect Heights, 300 African American residents patrolled the streets, while in northern Manhattan 300 Latino car service drivers formed a radio motor patrol.¹³¹

Even if only a small percentage of residents directly participated in such activities, they nonetheless became a major presence on city streets. While years earlier, it was uncommon to see anyone but a police officer patrolling, by the early 1980s a resident likely lived on or traversed a block patrolled by community members. Nearly 70 percent of residents believed that “citizens’ neighborhood patrols” reduced crime, a higher percentage than those who pointed to “more police on foot.”¹³² Private security guards, meanwhile, continued to gain a greater foothold. Though resident patrols received more attention from officials and the press, resident and especially private sector groups continued to turn to private guards to combat crime and supplement municipal resources. They would ultimately have a more lasting effect on the policing of city streets.

“Our Guards Are Beholden Only to Us”: Private Security after the Fiscal Crisis

By the mid-1970s, the number of guards in New York reached upwards of 100,000.¹³³ The fiscal crisis only hardened the notion that residents needed to offset declining municipal services. In Crown Heights, for example, residents ended community patrols and instead hired guards, several recently laid off from the police.¹³⁴ “President Ford says New York should take care of New York,” explained the chairman of the Crown Heights Jewish Community Council, “so Crown Heights will take care of Crown Heights.”¹³⁵

Residents spoke explicitly of how guards offered relief from troubled municipal services. In 1977, Manhattan Beach families contributed $100 a year to hire the Pinkerton Agency to surveil the neighborhood.¹³⁶ “The patrol is able to respond within minutes,” the Manhattan Beach Community Group explained, “while the police often take as much as 25 minutes.”¹³⁷ On the wealthy Upper East Side, guards patrolled across 91st and 92nd Streets and on several nearby blocks east of Park Avenue. Asked by a reporter why each block did not instead donate the $25,000 a year they spent on guards to the city for police protection, one resident replied: “Why should we? We get more protection this way. Our guards are beholden only to us.”¹³⁸

These private guards indeed represented a distinctive approach to crime. Municipal policing was hardly dispersed equitably and justly, but private security was directed by one overriding criteria: the ability to pay for it. Areas with greater capital—from residential neighborhoods to business districts—used their resources to employ guards to secure the barriers around their districts.

In 1982, a New York magazine feature recounted how “New Yorkers are hiring their own troops in the war on crime.”¹³⁹ Residential groups not only helped to bring private security into a number of middle-class and affluent white areas, but also facilitated guards taking on characteristics of the police. Many guards carried guns, and patrolmen typically wore uniforms that looked “almost exactly like a regular police officer.”¹⁴⁰ They not only surveilled public spaces but also actively apprehended suspected lawbreakers.¹⁴¹

Consortia of businesses, real estate owners, and institutions had an even greater influence in the spread and expanding purviews of guards. The Morningside Area Alliance's force not only increased to twenty-five guards by 1974, but those guards also regularly collaborated with police.¹⁴² MAA's Executive Director, Eugene McDermott, started his position just ten days after he retired from a twenty-six-year career with the NYPD. No doubt this background enhanced the Alliance's relationship with the local precinct, with whom McDermott was in “constant contact.”¹⁴³ McDermott even coordinated Alliance patrols with the precinct's roll call officer to avoid duplication of patrolling. Alliance institutions also worked with the police on a new initiative called “High Visibility Patrols,” which brought together fifteen police officers with twenty-five security guards who received training to patrol the outside of their institutions.¹⁴⁴

The ABNY's Operation Interlock similarly enhanced both its presence and its coordination with police. Each year it included additional personnel who patrolled a greater portion of Midtown streets for longer periods of time. By the early 1980s, Interlock operated twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, with security personnel affiliated with more than 300 buildings patrolling streets with high-frequency walkie-talkies linked directly to their own network as well as to the police.¹⁴⁵ “The police usually respond in a matter of minutes,” gushed Helmsley-Spear vice president Peter Terlecky.¹⁴⁶

Traditional private sector consortia like the MAA and ABNY were soon joined by groups of real estate and business owners that utilized new legal mechanisms to target public space. Over 1976 and 1977, state legislators established four special assessment districts throughout New York that relied on an innovative scheme in which area property owners collected funds via a mandatory tax. The goal was revenue for business districts to pay for things such as promotion and sanitation services to better compete with suburban areas. Legislators also opened the door for districts to pay for private security that would “be appointed ‘special patrolmen’ by the police commissioner.”¹⁴⁷ This proved to be an especially attractive option in the years ahead. The ninety property owners who made up the assessment district in downtown Brooklyn hired armed security guards along with a five-person cleaning crew.¹⁴⁸

By the early 1980s, unlike any time in recent history, private security personnel formally watched and patrolled city streets. Across New York state, the total number of guards doubled between the early 1970s and early 1980s to more than 120,000, with those in New York City exceeding the number of law enforcement officers.¹⁴⁹ By the mid-1980s, a New York Times poll indicated that one in five residents lived in a building or on a block that paid for “additional security,” with an additional three out of five expressing a willingness to do so.¹⁵⁰ In the coming years, security guards would take on a larger and larger share of the private surveillance of city streets.

Resident Patrols and Private Security in the 1980s

In the 1980s, thousands of residents remained active in anticrime initiatives, but involvement slowed. By the end of the 1980s, the number of participants in car patrols remained consistent from earlier in the decade at about 7,000, but those involved in tenant or foot patrols declined to about 10,000, and the number of active block watchers dropped to 15,000.¹⁵¹ Authorities continued to channel residents into official programs, but enthusiasm among law enforcement officials also diminished. While the notion that an informed citizenry was important to crime prevention remained, law enforcement shifted toward emphasizing more passive activities, such as being aware of area crime trends and properly securing one's residence.¹⁵² This was evident both in New York and in the direction of national and federal programs. By the early 1980s, the Justice Department ended programs that directly funded community groups.¹⁵³ Its wildly popular public education campaign featuring McGruff the Crime Dog, which debuted in 1980, initially promoted resident watches and community awareness, but soon switched to more general antidrug and antigun violence campaigns that did not rely on resident participation.¹⁵⁴ Programs like Neighborhood Watch, which had spread rapidly across the country, began to level off in the 1980s.¹⁵⁵

In New York, several factors contributed to this stagnation. Other than the handful of organizations that received major federal grants, most groups were never afforded much in the way of resources or protection. This made patrols difficult to maintain, especially in the lower-income areas disproportionately incumbered by crime in which block associations grew significantly in the late 1970s. Additionally, while crime declined in the early 1980s, rates for murder and other violent crimes sharply increased at mid-decade.¹⁵⁶ Anxiety over violent crime, coupled with growing panic over crack, likely caused many residents to lose their enthusiasm for patrolling.¹⁵⁷

In contrast, the private sector had greater resources to provide training, develop relations with police, and simply pay to replenish forces when numbers diminished, all of which ensured the continued growth of security guards. By the mid-1980s, security guards significantly outnumbered police in New York.¹⁵⁸ Guards also continued to move into new realms, from public housing projects to federal buildings and courthouses. Nationally, the number of security guards doubled between 1970 and 1989 to 900,000.¹⁵⁹ “Private security,” a National Institute of Justice study concluded in 1990, “is now clearly the nation's primary protective resource.”¹⁶⁰

Perhaps most striking was the continued acceleration of private guards in public space. In New York, neighborhood groups remained an important source of employment, but most of this growth occurred through the private sector, especially as associations of real estate owners, institutions, and businesses followed the lead of the MAA and the ABNY in coordinating large private security forces. In 1984, at the South Street Seaport, for example, a forty-nine-member security team began patrols, while on Roosevelt Island, former police official Neil Hetherington led a thirty-five-member security force.¹⁶¹

Business Improvement Districts (BIDs), the successors of the special assessment districts first enabled in 1976, especially brought security forces onto public streets. Two dozen BIDs formed by the early 1990s. BIDs spent the largest portion of the tax revenue that filled their budgets on security, coordinating teams of guards from Union Square to the Hub area of the South Bronx to Jamaica, Queens.¹⁶² In wealthier business districts, BIDs often managed huge forces, such as the 150 security guards hired by the BIDs around Grand Central, Bryant Park, Times Square, and 34th Street.¹⁶³ Former police officials often commanded these forces. Richard Dillon, for example, a thirty-two-year police veteran, oversaw the Grand Central and Bryant Park area patrol.¹⁶⁴

These forces blurred meaningful distinctions between private and public policing. Not only were security firms and patrols commonly led by former police officials, but security guards themselves could even be police after the department ended its prohibition on officers working as guards in 1984.¹⁶⁵ Additionally, government agencies spurred by the era's emphasis on privatization and cost cutting became one of the fastest growing sectors employing private security.¹⁶⁶ A 1987 analysis declared that “nearly as much money is now paid by governments to private security companies as is spent for public law enforcement by the federal and state governments combined.”¹⁶⁷

The NYPD proclaimed that it had “no objection to private patrolling if it is closely supervised and coordinated with the police.”¹⁶⁸ In 1986, it launched the “Area Police/Private Security Liaison” program to facilitate such cooperation. This program provided training for private security and organized monthly meetings for security managers and the police to collaborate and share information.¹⁶⁹ Larger BID forces remained in even greater contact with local police to coordinate their efforts; individual guards were also commonly directly connected to the police radio network. Indeed, the police now treated private guards not as competitors but as forces with whom they could collaborate and influence.

Conclusion

By the late 1960s and 1970s, a wide range of New Yorkers believed crime had escaped the capacity of the police and municipal officials to contain. This concern caused New Yorkers to reimagine their response. The growth of private initiatives to combat crime complicates depictions of neoliberal shifts driven solely by elites or market ideologues. Indeed, a vast array of New Yorkers helped to broaden the surveillance of streets beyond the police. Residents had different effects on shifting these boundaries over the long term. But an extraordinary range of neighborhood groups, institutions, and business interests together catalyzed the expansion of private actors policing city streets.

This transformation illustrates more than the surprising origins of a major neoliberal shift. It also demonstrates how neoliberal policy required certain extensions of state power.¹⁷⁰ Indeed, the NYPD continued to grow in both resources and numbers in the late twentieth century, reaching a peak of over 40,000 officers by the year 2000, even as police increasingly collaborated with private patrols.¹⁷¹

Ultimately, private security and not residential patrols proliferated in public spaces. A greater array of constituents—neighborhood groups, educational and religious institutions, real estate owners, businesses—embraced private security. Additionally, private sector groups in particular used their resources to sustain the spread of security guards, far exceeding what block associations could do for residential patrols. These initiatives were also part and parcel of liberal and Democratic officials’ growing receptiveness to private sector influence over public space—a shift evident in other initiatives such as the emergence of private groups that managed and raised money for parks.¹⁷²

Like other market-oriented solutions, private security was more accessible to those with greater resources. Low-income areas of color lacked both effective policing and the resources to pay for private security, while grappling with higher rates of crime. In the early 1980s in an area of Bedford-Stuyvesant with the city's greatest homicides rates, for example, African American residents formed a patrol only to soon disband out of fear.¹⁷³

The growth of private security forces reflected the gaining power of affluent residents and private sector consortia to directly influence the policing and surveillance of public space. At the end of the 1980s, for example, businesses in the 149th Street-Third Avenue area of the Bronx employed a patrol involved in twenty arrests per month.¹⁷⁴ Private forces also enforced permissible behaviors, activities, and peoples. Real estate owners and businesses used private security to harass the growing poor and homeless populations—disproportionately African American—out of public space in the 1980s and in the decades since.¹⁷⁵ Indeed, the populations least able to afford private guards were simultaneously most likely to be on the receiving end of private forces’ enforcement of who and what was deemed permissible in public space.

At the same time, security forces also extended the reach of the carceral state. As a series of liberal and Democratic administrations and police officials encouraged the growth of private security, they also sought ways to ensure that police authority remained paramount. Over the late 1980s and 1990s, the NYPD expanded its Area Police/Private Security Liaison program to include more than 1,000 private security organizations.”¹⁷⁶ Additionally, police encouraged private forces to patrol explicitly as “eyes and ears of the NYPD” and function principally to contact police. Operation Interlock used a radio network that bypassed 911, generating over 1,000 calls to the police each year by the late 1980s and resulting in over 100 arrests.¹⁷⁷ Police also worked with security forces in encouraging them to make arrests, which allowed local precincts to concentrate on “more ‘valuable patrolling,’” as local Inspector John Timoney described the police's relationship with the Grand Central BID's security team.¹⁷⁸

New York was hardly alone in this transformation. In the 1990s, the Justice Department launched Operation Cooperation to “encourage partnerships between law enforcement and private security professionals.” “No city or metropolitan area,” the Department noted, “should be without at least one public-private cooperative program.”¹⁷⁹ Less than a decade later, the Justice Department counted over 450 active law enforcement–private security partnerships programs in the nation, up from around sixty ten years earlier.¹⁸⁰ There are now over 1.1 million private guards across the country (as opposed to 662,000 police officers), engaging in a broad array of activities associated with public law enforcement, such as patrolling, surveillance, and investigation in both preventative and responsive functions.¹⁸¹ In cities and suburbs, throughout schools, malls, office buildings, hospitals, and public streets and spaces, private security guards have become nearly ubiquitous. Private sector influence over the surveillance and policing of public space thus extended the reach of the carceral state in a process that coupled together two of the most profound historical transformations of the late twentieth century.