Global Social Cleansing: Postliberal Revanchism And the Export of Zero Tolerance

Author(s): Neil Smith

Source: Social Justice, Vol. 28, No. 3 (85), Law, Order, and Neoliberalism (Fall 2001), pp. 68-74
Published by: Social Justice/Global Options
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Global Social Cleansing:

Postliberal Revanchism
And the Export of Zero Tolerance
Neil Smith

This

is a war

and we

are

going

to enjoy

it," enthused

Ray

Mallon,

police

chief of theCleveland District Constabulary in northernEngland, about his

new anticrime initiative.Before his fall fromgrace in a criminal corruption
case, Mellon was known as Britain's most aggressive, some say brutal, police
chief.His districthas thedubious distinction of using more teargas thanany other
in the country. He admires Margaret Thatcher, whose prime ministerial reign
included episodes of unprecedented police brutality against people of color, from
Brixton to Toxteth, and against British miners. Mallon nonetheless feels that
policing under the "iron lady" was "soft." "A villain will get up in themorning,
steal a newspaper and a pint ofmilk froma doorstep, snatch someone' s bicycle and
go on a shop-lifting spree," he explains. "By lunchtime he will have committed a
dozen crimes" (The Scotsman, 1997). His preferred artillery for thiswar on crime
is imported fromNew York City: the doctrine known as "zero tolerance."
Zero tolerance stems from a two-decade-old studyby two conservative social
scientists who proposed the "broken windows" thesis: ifpeople are allowed to
break windows with impunity,not only do smaller crimes lead tomore serious
ones, but the "disordered" appearance of the neighborhood perpetrates criminal
disorder (Wilson andKelling, 1982). The geographic signs of disorder produce the
disorder itself; zero tolerance for even minor crimes nurtures an anticrime

environment. The studywas written as U.S. liberal urban policy lay in decay, but
itwas only seriously applied in the 1990s when alternatives to that liberalismwere
being energetically constructed. Most inftuentially implemented inNew York
City by police chiefWilliam Bratton andMayor Giuliani, zero tolerancewas only
part of a much larger shift inU.S. urban policy. The bankruptcy of liberal urban

Smith isDistinguished Professor ofAnthropology and Geography at theGraduate Center of the

and director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics
City University of New York (CUNY)
(CUNY Graduate Center, 365 FifthAvenue, New York, NY 10016-4309; e-mail: nsmith@gc.cuny.edu).
He works on the broad connections between space, social theory, and history, and his books include
New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City (1996) and Uneven Development:
Nature, Capital, and theProduction of Space (1991). He is the author of more than 100 articles and
the American
book chapters, sits on numerous editorial boards, and has just completed Mapping
Century: Isaiah Bowman and thePrelude toGlobalization.
Neil

68 Social Justice Vol. 28, No. 3 (2001)

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Postliberal Revanchism and theExport ofZero Tolerance

69

policy after the 1970s lefta social and political vacuum that is increasingly filled
by official revanchism.
Revanche is French for revenge, and the revanchists of the late 19th century
comprised a reactionary, nationalist movement seeking revenge against the
perceived liberalism of theSecond Empire and theproletarian uprising of theParis
Commune. They sought to reassert a sense of traditional decency against the
incivilityof themob, workers, and foreigners and thedecadence of themonarchy.
Today' s new revanchists are rewritingurban and social policy in thewake of 20th

centuryAmerican liberalism (see Smith, 1996).

The founding document of the new U.S. revanchism is undoubtedly the
innocuously named Police StrategyNo. 5 bearing Giuliani' s and Bratton's names.
This was thedocument that launched "zero tolerance," although thisphrase never
appears in thepamphlet. "A decent society is a society of civility," itbegins, and
then lists a litany of people and "behaviors" thathave stolen the city from its
rightful citizens, creating "visible signs of a city out of control": streetpeddling,

panhandling, prostitution, squeegee cleaners, boom boxes, graffiti,public drink?

ing, loud clubs, speeding cars, litter louts, public urination, street artists, and
"dangerous mentally ill homeless people." (The lattereuphemistic convolution
was forcedby thefact thatalthough homelessness is not a crime, homeless people,
numbering perhaps 100,000 in the early 1990s, were the first targets of the new

revanchism.) The document's subtitle tells the strategy: "Reclaiming thePublic

Spaces ofNew York." Less formally,Giuliani and Bratton vowed to "clean the
city" of the "scum" thatapparently "threatened" decent people walking down the
street.Zero tolerance was passed off as an anticrime program. Actually, it is a

social cleansing strategy.

Zero tolerance was designed for local conditions and embodies a highly
localized language of order and disorder in public space. This did not, however,
prevent thedoctrine from traveling.William Bratton lefttheNew York City police
department in 1996 afteronly two years amid a public feudwith Giuliani overwho
should receive public credit for thezero tolerance strategy.Since then, in addition
toholding down jobs in several security corporations, sittingon theboard of the
Rite-Aid Corporation, and visiting Harvard's JFK School of Government as a

Research Fellow, he has toured theworld as a crime consultant. He addresses

police, criminology, and security groups and has consulted with police and
security forces on six continents about the implementation of zero tolerance
strategies. To theLondon-based Instituteof Economic Affairs he gave a keynote
speech on "Zero Tolerance: Policing a Free Society"; hewas called toJohannesburg
for top-level consultations with security officials about the explosion of crime in
thatcity and advised them that theyneeded much more visible policing; he also
consulted with the top brass in post-Pinochet Chile (Economist, 1996). George
Kelling, co-author of theoriginal "broken-windows" thesis,has also developed a
lucrative consulting career, sometimes joining Bratton on the circuit.

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70

Smith

The Cleveland Constabulary inEngland was only one of the earliest andmost
energetic importersof zero tolerance. Some London precinct commanders have
adopted the strategyand theNottingham police force has become the firstregional
constabulary to routinely arm itsofficers.After aNew York tripto see forhimself,
British Home Secretary Jack Straw has embraced the idea: "zero tolerance with a
British face" (Jardine, 1997; see also Taylor, 1998; Atkinson, 2001). A major
public dispute ensued and theBlair government has prevailed. Zero tolerance is
now

seen

as

complementary

strategy

to "urban

regeneration,"

the wholesale

gentrificationof central urban landscapes. In Scotland, theresponse has been more

circumspect, although gentrifyingGlasgow, inspired by zero tolerance doctrines,
has outlawed drinking inpublic spaces. New Zealand has embraced thepolicy and
Australia is debating it,with theNorthern Territories leading the cry for zero
tolerance down under. InBerlin, a Bratton visitwas followed by thecomputeriza?
tion of surveillance informationon homeless people, much as theNYPD did in
accordance with Police Strategy No. 5. To varying degrees, Dublin, S?o Paulo,
Barcelona, Bremen, Oslo, Vienna, and Stockholm have also integrated zero
tolerance approaches into their policing strategies. In Spanish, the strategy is
translatedas la tolerancia cero, and ithas made headway inArgentina (Albornoz,
1999; Belina, 2000; Brereton, 1999). Many more cities and national administra?

tions are considering it.

This globalization of zero tolerance has occurred with lightning speed,
suggesting that it is responding to very deep-seated and broadly parallel insecu?
rities across several continents. Its origins inNew York and responses to it there
help to illuminate itsbroader global significance.
The language of decency and civility inPolice Strategy No. 5 was heavily
overwritten by class and race norms. Itwas generally clear topoor New Yorkers
and especially people of color and many immigrants that these norms expressed

particularmiddle-class, white, often-suburban interests,ambitions, and identities.

The fierce demands forcivil order that increasingly defined revanchistNew York
in the 1990s were also savaged in themedia. Even theNew York Times wondered
aloud whether Giuliani was becoming "The Mussolini ofManhattan," or even
"Hitler on theHudson" (Barry, 1998). In fact, zero tolerance policing has led to an
increase inpolice brutality and abuse, with a rash of police murders, shootings,

beatings,

sexual

assaults,

wrongful

arrests,

and

various

forms

of

corruption,

suggesting a police force out of control. In thewake of one such incident, the
killing ofGuinean immigrantAmadou Diallo in a hail of 41 bullets fired by four
officers in the notorious "Street Crimes Unit," even the police union, itself a
bastion of revanchism, has complained that"zero-tolerance tactics" have become
a "blueprint for a police state and tyranny" (Cooper, 1999). When thepolice are
exercised about an imminent police state,we should presumably take notice.
In two years, theStreetCrimes Unit, a centerpiece of zero tolerance policing,

made 45,000

street searches of disproportionately minority youths and made

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Postliberal Revanchism and theExport ofZero Tolerance

71

10,000 arrests.Zero tolerance policing has encouraged race and class profiling that
places a premium on street arrests of suspects while minimizing concerns about
evidence. With the Street Crimes Unit, apprehension and arrestwere used as a
disciplinary measure against poor andminority youths,many ofwhom were never
charged or had theminimal charges dropped forwant of evidence. Operation
Condor was another zero-tolerance social cleansing program. It stipulated arrest
quotas for narcotics detectives working overtime, and officerswould cruise the
streets looking forpeople topick up on petty infractions,or simply on suspicion.
InMarch 2000, two undercover Condor officerswith theirquotas almost filled
approached Patrick Dorismond, a Haitian immigrantand off-duty securityguard,
and asked to buy marijuana. When Dorismond retorted angrily thathe was not a

drug dealer, the officers got into a fightwith him, drew a gun, and killed him.1
The end of liberal urban policy came early and hard inNew York. Although
the urban uprisings of the late 1960s signaled the bankruptcy of a liberal social
policy thathad dominated urban governance since the early decades of the 20th
century, official responses at the time, such as the 1968 Kerner Commission
Report, nonetheless perpetuated that liberalism. Itwas only in the 1970s that the
end of liberal urban policy came definitively into sight.Two events were crucial.
The firstcame in 1975 when New York City, on theverge of fiscal bankruptcy,
appealed to the federal government tobail themout. The citywas not unique; in
the midst of the deepest postwar recession, many cities were in a similar

predicament, butNew York's bankruptcywas economically and symbolically the

most threatening.Washington's refusalwas reported back to city residents in the
Daily News headline: "Ford toCity: Drop Dead!" The second event came a little
more than two years later.With Democrats runningWashington, JimmyCarter
convened a panel of "experts" to devise an ambitious new urban policy. The
guiding vision mirrored the assumptions ofNew Deal policies and the postwar
housing acts, namely that the fate of thenational economy is intimatelybound up
with the fate of the cities. In retrospect, and as Ford's response already indicated,
thiswas the last time the social and political economy of cities was conceived as

central to the fortunes of the national economy.

Whatever the assistance of the state,New York City tackled its bankruptcy
largely on itsown. The wages of public employees were slashed,many were fired,
services were cut back, and financiers and lawyers representing the large banks
and financial institutions,which held much of the city's debt, took over de facto
administration of thecity from theelected mayor and council. In thisera of planned
shrinkage, a new class and race discipline was imposed on city residents through
fiscal policy. Itmarked the beginning of a serious marketization of the city's
policies, which furtherjustified the dismantling of social services as contrary to
market rationality, as well as themassive provision of "geo-bribes" to attract
corporate capital or retain companies thatthreatened to leave thecity. "Jettison the
residents and subsidize capital" appropriately sums up the strategy.The collapse

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72

Smith

of public liberalism inNew York was nowhere more agonizingly visible thanwith
the 1989 to 1993 mayoralty ofDavid Dinkins. Amid another deep recession and
with as many as 100,000 homeless people on New York's streets, liberal urban
policy bared itself as utterly devoid of solutions. The New York Times ran a

blistering series on New York as "the new Calcutta."

By the end of the 1970s, theNew York "model of austerity" had also traveled.
Itwas being translated to theglobal scale by institutions such as the International
Monetary Fund. Struggling for a way to discipline bankrupt or near-bankrupt

national economies pleading for loans, the IMF's emerging strategyof structural
adjustment explicitly borrowed fromNew York's response to fiscal crisis (Tabb,
1981). The export ofNew York's postliberal revanchism today in thename of zero
tolerancemultiplies thisglobal trafficin class and race strategies.Where theNew

York structural adjustmentmodel of the 1970s marked thebeginning of the end

of liberalism and one of the first intimations of a global neoliberalism, the export
of "zero tolerance" strategies of social control helps to fill inone of the remaining
gaps in thatvision.
There isno evidence thatthenew revanchism is a response toheightened crime
or, at least inNew York, that social cleansing strategies actually reduce crime.
Violent crime peaked inNew York City in 1990 and was already 20% below its
peak in 1994, theyear zero tolerancewas implemented. The reduction in crime is
probably more closely related to theexhaustion of thecrack epidemic, whereas the
social cleansing of public space is integral to the larger strategic revanchism that
has taken over from liberal urban policy. A structuralopportunity created in the
intersticesof global social and economic change, it is equally part of a wider and
more visceral class, race, and gender revenge for the 1960s, for feminist and civil
rightsmovements, for immigration, erstwhile union power, and much more.
Zero tolerancemust be seen, therefore,as part of a larger shift in strategies of
social reproduction in a globalizing world. Social control is one element of social
reproduction.With unprecedented internationalmigration of labor on the one

hand, and the erosion of national economies on the other, structures of social
are less and less defined innational
asmuch as production?
reproduction?just
terms.Cities, which used toperform as thecombined hiring halls andwelfare halls
?reservoirs
of labor?now connectmore directly to theglobal economy as sites
of production rather than as sites of reproduction (see Smith, 1999). Entire social
groups that previously were more or less integrated into urban and national
economies have been "surplused" as part of this shift,raising thequestion of social
control. Further,whole new populations of workers, raised and socialized in one

place but recruited into theglobal economy towork in another very differentplace,
also prompt the issue of social control. It is not an accident thatNew York's high
profile police brutality cases such as Diallo and Dorismond, or the vicious
sodomization of Abner Louima, all involve immigrants. As geographer Erik
Swyngedouw has argued, the "rescaling" of global and local economies and

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Postliberal Revanchism and theExport ofZero Tolerance

73

systems of governance has created a certain vacuum of authority thatisbeing filled

by a range of authoritarian practices, including the emergence of a carceral state.
In theUnited States, even as serious crime levels decreased throughout the 1990s,
the number of people incarcerated has multiplied (Swyngedouw, 1996; see also
Parenti, 1999;Wacquant, 1999a and b).
The danger of zero tolerance globally, therefore, is not that itwill be trans?

planted whole in itsespecially brutalNew York form.The debates inEurope and

Australia have been accompanied by detailed reportage of theDiallo, Dorismond,
and other cases, as well as of thepatternofNew York police brutality and theangry
demonstrations itprovoked. For this reason, many interested police forces and
governments are shying away from the language of zero tolerance, often following
Bratton's own deliberately disingenuous lead. Bratton has adopted the older

contrary language of "community policing" to soften the decisiveness of "zero

tolerance." Rather, the danger is thatwhatever themodifications of language?
"zero tolerancewith a British face"??governments will nonetheless use theNew
York model to establish new authoritarian forms of governance. As sociologist
Loi'c Wacquant (1999b) has argued, Europe too finds itself in a "moral panic" in
the vacuum leftby a downsizing welfare state, likely resulting in the "extension
of social control compounded by exploding rates of imprisonment."
The danger is that theNew York model will, as in the 1970s, become the
template for a global, postliberal revanchism thatmay exact revenge against
different social groups in differentplaces, doing so with differing intensities and
taking quite differentforms. In Europe, an ameliorated New York model might

ratchet up authoritarian governance. In S?o Paulo, rocked by occasional police

killing sprees against streetchildren and homeless people, the language of zero
tolerance gives a professional and pseudo-scientific alibi to a farmore brutal and
militarized revanchism thanyet occurs inNew York. If, as Randy Martin (2000)
has argued, a critical analysis of "globalization" must startfrom thepremise that
globalization is before anything else a social project, then social cleansing passed
off in the name of decency and civility and carried into theworld on theback of
"zero tolerance" policing is a rapidly crystallizing antidemocratic formof global
social

control.

Thanks

to Julie Stewart for research assistance

and to Gordon McLeod

for

information on zero

tolerance inBritain.

NOTE
1. See the analysis by Rosen

(2000).

REFERENCES
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"Un Mito Peligroso:

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