Antiterrorist Policing in New York City after 9/11: Comparing Perspectives on a Complex Process

Human Organization, Spring 2005 by Bornstein, Avram

The security argument is the operative public logic of policing in most secular democracies (e.g. Bratton 1998). This perspective exists within a rational-Enlightenment paradigm that sees society as a thing to be measured in statistical forms and managed with policy for the common good. The security argument says that violence and suffering can be minimized in a society by empowering specialized state agents, police and soldiers, to defend against the threats of other states or domestic criminals. State organized force is a tool to be used efficiently and judiciously to establish order, safety, and security. Among social scientists, Silverman (1999) provides a valuable example from this perspective in his study of the reorganization of the NYPD administration in the 1990s. According to Silverman, rationally planned methods of preemption, like aggressive summonsing for "quality of life" violations, and of greater managerial accountability, such as increasing statistical scrutiny and decentralizing command, succeeded in lowering crime for everyone's benefit.

The civil liberties argument, often critical of security theory and practice, usually stems from a power paradigm. This paradigm is often suspicious of the "common good" inherent in the rational-Enlightenment vision of society and sees state agents as political participants in a contest between oppressed people and ruling groups, or between different factions of ruling groups. From this perspective, policing is not about defending the community, but fighting the community, or a segment of it, for a ruling group. For example, Parenti (1999) argues that the "war for all seasons"-the drug war-was introduced for "managing and containing the new surplus populations created by neoliberal policies" (45). As Reaganomics exacerbated existing inequalities of wealth, he argues, more police, mandatory sentencing, and prisons repressed the disadvantaged. The power paradigm contends that the rational-Enlightenment focus on security is only an ideological cover for what is really happening, which is a calculated political contest of power and domination.

The security-civil liberties debate, while ubiquitous in public discourse, is too narrowly conceived. Neither the security nor civil liberties orientations can exhaustively account for developments of antiterrorist policing in New York City. While relevant and useful, they are both too strategic. There are aspects of behavior that may be contrary to any clearly stated, or even knowingly concealed interest. Behavior cannot always be reduced to such instrumental logic or self-serving goals. Action may be more expressive of meaning or myth than organized around achieving clear ends, and humans sometimes do things contrary to self-preserving interests.

Psychologists and anthropologists often specialize in the interpretation of different kinds of behavior and meaning. When it comes to violence, psychological theories emphasize individual development and the role of frustration in the creation of aggression projected either toward the source of frustration or a substitute object. Desires to hurt or destroy often come from experiences of injury or loss that produce reactive aggression. From the cultural angle, anthropologists describe how aggression and violence are constructed through local meanings, shared languages, or other symbolic systems. Stories, myths, and social life become the emotional and practical framework through and in which individual and collective acts of violence are organized. With somewhat fluid disciplinary boundaries, both anthropology and psychology can explain violence with reference to issues of emotion, identity or recognition.