NEW YORK — The stairways inside many of New York City’s public housing projects are dark when police patrol them, the lights in disrepair like so much else in the buildings.
“Those stairways are scary places,” Greg Donaldson, an associate professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told The Huffington Post. Donaldson has regularly accompanied police on what are called “vertical patrols,” in which two officers will go to the roof of a public housing building and then descend slowly through the stairs.
“You’re turning from one landing to the next,” he said. “There aren’t long sightlines.”
Police say that vertical patrols help prevent crime in the places where it so often lurks, while critics blame the tactic for unconstitutional police stops and arrests. Either way, vertical patrols have sometimes spelled tragedy for innocent residents — most of whom were black — and for police officers themselves.
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