Carceral connections: The role of policing in the management of public housing in New York City

Abstract

Between 2006 and 2022, the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) attempted to address the fiscal and infrastructural crises in public housing through a number of controversial privatisation strategies. This contested push occurred alongside the pervasive role of policing in public housing. The New York City Police Department utilises several policing strategies specific to NYCHA communities, collaborating with the housing authority in the management of public housing residents. This article draws on qualitative content analysis of local policing strategies and public housing policy reforms in New York City to investigate how the state facilitates the displacement of disproportionately poor, non-white, public housing tenants while simultaneously sponsoring privatised redevelopment in their communities in ways that mirror gentrification processes usually studied in private housing. I focus on the content of and linkages between public housing-specific policing strategies and privatising public housing redevelopment plans. By examining police as collaborators within public housing policy, I uncover the entanglement of law enforcement in urban development, as well as the underlying roles and relationships between the state, capital and police in contemporary urban development and gentrification. The findings illuminate the processes of carceral urbanism, where the logics of the carceral state emerge as priorities throughout the urban governance of the contemporary neoliberal state in general, and public housing policy reform in particular.