"These calls for “getting tough” also generated debate and bitter exchanges between different groups claiming to represent African Americans. Some critics insisted that “law and order” operated as a euphemism for anti-black and anti–civil rights sentiments. Leonard De Champs, chairman of the Harlem Chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), excoriated the NAACP, calling it “oppressive and Nazi-like for its Fascist proposals regarding law and order in the streets of Harlem and New York City’s other Black communities.” He charged that
Vincent Baker’s love for mandated jail sentences and tightened-up parole procedures conclusively proves that the NAACP is an effective enemy of the 1.2 million Black people in this city.
Floyd McKissick, a longtime civil rights activist and another leader of CORE, claimed that the NAACP’s punitive recommendations reflected the interests of the black middle class. He wrote that
the arguments used in the report of the NAACP smack suspiciously of the Ronald Reagan-George Wallace school of repressive ‘law and order,’ at any cost. They appeal to the fears and prejudices of citizens who have even a little bit worth protecting.
He pointed to “a gap of understanding between middle class and poor Blacks along economic lines” and explained that
we should know by now that the addition of more white cops in the ghetto solves nothing. The ones who suffer more from such measures are the poor blacks; not necessarily the guilty ones.
Instead of harsher punishment, McKissick called for community control:
The ghetto must be safe for its citizens, but it cannot be made so by police state tactics. All efforts must be directed toward the ending of conditions which breed crime and chaos; all efforts much be directed toward the development of a Black-orientated, Black controlled law enforcement agency—an agency dedicated to the aid and protection of Black people, not to their suppression.
During this period, a host of community groups and organizations set up treatment programs, many of which received New York City and state funds, intended to be more directly accountable to thecommunities in which they were embedded. Some grew out of churches and established community groups, while others were connected to more radical political organizing. For example, in March 1969, eighty volunteers and twenty-two drug addicts took over a three-story building in Harlem and set up a drug-treatment program. They hoped to bring attention to “the inadequacy of the state’s narcotic program and the entire health program for the black people.” The addicts involved told the New York Times that they had faced a maze of waiting lists and applications in their efforts to secure treatment. One had never heard back from a program he had applied to three years earlier in 1966. The journalist reported that all of the patients interviewed complained that the state’s drug addiction programs were “more punishment than rehabilitation.” One addict asked if “I should turn myself in to the state and be locked up for rehabilitation.” They contrasted the civic degradation of the state treatment programs with guerrilla programs, claiming that in the latter, they “talk to you like a man, not a statistic—the people really want to help you and it makes you want to help yourself.” After a police eviction order, the center was closed and the patients transferred to an “underground hospital.” In subsequent years, other groups also established treatment programs. The Young Lords, a radical group dedicated to Puerto Ricans’ self-determination, were integral to establishing a detox program at Lincoln Hospital.
Drastic fluctuations in policing further intensified frustration within urban communities. In 1969, the city initiated a major intensification in street-level enforcement of drug markets. At a press conference in September, Mayor Lindsay announced that the police department intended to shift the narcotics division’s 500-person force to the pursuit of upper-level drug arrests and direct the entire remaining patrols to prioritize narcotic arrests at the street level. This sweep produced a considerable uptick in narcotics arrests in New York City: they jumped from 7,199 in 1967 to 26,378 in 1970. Then, in 1971, at a high point in the surge of heroin use, the NYPD abandoned their campaign of intensive street-level drug policing. Police officials claimed that the policy was ineffective and expensive and resulted in low conviction rates because the court system did not have the capacity to process the arrests. The result was a dramatic fall-off in arrests. New York City police conducted over 24,025 felony drug arrests in 1970, 18,694 in 1971, 10,370 in 1972, and 7,041 in 1973."
- Julilly Kohler-Hausmann, Getting Tough: Welfare and Imprisonment in 1970s America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. p. 57-59.
