Guest Post by JUHI TYAGI AND KARN KOWSHIK

When most tourists visit New York City, what they see is the New York that you see on TV – Times Square, Carnegie Hall, a Broadway Show and maybe a visit to the Legendary Soup Nazi. Our view of the City, though, was vastly different. As one of the authors visited New York for the first time, in the wake of cop killings of young black men in Ferguson, Staten Island and East NY, what we saw was the transformation of neighbourhoods into armed police camps, and a city torn by sharp racial divide.

Maybe our experience of New York was coloured by where we lived and spent most of our time. A tiny apartment on the same street as the 79^th Precinct in Brooklyn; not far from where two NYPD officers were shot dead by a mentally unstable man in December 2014. In many of these neighbourhoods, the first piece of advice you got wasn’t about the coolest neighbourhood bar. It was: “On the streets, don’t run, don’t make sudden movements. If a cop stops you, keep your hands out of your pockets and don’t talk back. You don’t want to get shot.”

It was impossible to leave the house, or even look out, without seeing police in heavy armour carrying assault rifles. We encountered them in the local community park (often standing on either side of the walkway), and at every subway station in the neighbourhood. Soon after the two police officers were killed, there were SWAT teams guarding the precinct. We woke up each day only to run to our window, to see the activities of the 79^th precinct.

Why had they blocked off the road? Why were there men dressed like they were going to war?

We found a local newspaper online reporting that the NYPD was ready to become a ‘wartime’ police department following the killing of the two policemen and apparent social media threats of a shoot out on the 79^th and 81^st precincts received from the Black Guerrilla Family—an African-American Marxist revolutionary group that first came to spotlight in the late 1960s, during a time of profound racial tension.

We never saw another report about the Black Guerrilla Family, but the SWAT teams and police blockade continued. The police van parked in the middle of the road always had between two and four police inside, with one or two often standing beside the car to guard it. The parking lot adjacent to the police station had one to three vehicles; engines running, drivers ready. There seemed to be an arrival of new police, and intelligence into the neighbourhood. On a random morning as we walked in to the park, we saw two tall white men with suits, ineffectively hiding bullet proof vests, walk out of their black cars down in to the police station. Our houses, the neighbourhood, looked like a military zone. We huddled to discuss as Indian men and women how we had to be careful about the way we walked past the police or remember not to put our hands inside our jacket pockets. We could be seen suspiciously.

When viewed in isolation, this behavior was a police response to direct threats, but there was so much more going on. The city’s memory was still fresh with the death of Eric Garner. Accused of selling loose cigarettes on a street corner in Staten Island, Garner was put in an illegal chokehold by a few policemen, and died repeating “I can’t breathe.” The video went viral on YouTube, and is extremely disturbing.

Unfortunately, black people getting shot by cops for what seem like minor misdemeanors (selling loosies, stealing cigars, a child waving a toy gun) happen often enough in the US. Just last year a federal judge ruled the practice of stop and frisk as unconstitutional. Neither probable cause nor consent was proven and 87 percent of those stopped were black men. After Eric Garner, it seemed to us like things had almost – but only almost – come to a head. We saw people in Brooklyn wearing tee-shirts that read, “I can’t breathe.” In Manhattan, crowds estimated between 30,000 to 50,000 marched on the streets, carrying signs that said, “Black Lives Matter.” Reports said that protesters spat angrily at cops.

As the American flag flew at half mast on top of the 79th precinct; as the cops turned their back to Mayor Bill de Blasio after the death of the two police officers—blaming his new policies against stop-and-frisk – in our street corner we heard the homeless, the drunk, anyone who had momentarily eschewed fear, scream at the police van and at the SWAT teams: calling them racist and blaming them for the death of innocent young men.

As we walked down the street towards the subway, we walked past the police memorial at the spot where officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu had been shot on December 20, 2014. Among the flowers laid in front of the officers’ photographs was a poster titled ‘The Final Inspection.’ The poster depicted a police officer standing in front of his god for a verdict. He admitted, squaring his shoulder, that he hadn’t been true to the principals of the church ‘because those of us who carry badges can’t always be a saint…because the streets are awfully rough.’

In New York, there is anger on the streets. At times like this, it finds it’s way to the surface, but you can always feel the racial divide. It’s also a time of great churning, where thousands of people are willing to march on the streets, and willing to face assault rifles.

As Eric Garner’s step-father, Benjamin Carr, who we met standing silently at the periphery of the police memorial said, ‘the killing of the two cops hurts our cause. But did you watch the video of my son? The two police hi-fived each other when they brought my son down, and the white girl that was with the Hispanic boy who was arrested for filming my son, went scot free.’

The question that many are asking in New York, like in India, is: Who are the police there for?

Juhi Tyagi is a PhD Candidate in Sociology at Stony Brook University, New York. Karn Kowshik is a former journalist, turned mountaineer at Geck & Co.