The assignment took me into the public housing complex where I observed radical destitution. One night, my unit entered a high-rise building in search of a young man who was possibly involved in a murder on an off-ramp of I-280. We took the steps up several floors, walking through trash and stench in dingy stairways. The building was barely habitable, yet crowded with families.

Prostitution and drug dealing were common around the premises of the Christopher Columbus Homes. At such places there was little chance for residents to escape poverty, but a huge chance to be incarcerated.

Increasingly, it felt like my job as a cop was to help separate a world of empowered white people from a world of marginalized Black people. Too often, this resulted in arrests by cops and imprisonment of desperate people living in places like public housing projects.

In the years since, I’ve come to understand that what I was witnessing was structural: persistent, socioeconomic inequality wrought by the isolation and concentration of impoverished minorities. I learned about these issues from the writings of William Julius Wilson, a sociologist who published a seminal work in 1987: The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy. The text was required reading in one of my graduate courses, and probably the most compelling during my doctoral studies.

Consider how Wilson, in his book, described the situation of the impoverished urban communities in the 1980s:

Today’s ghetto neighborhoods [sic] are populated almost exclusively by the most disadvantaged segments of the black urban community, that heterogeneous grouping of families and individuals who are outside the mainstream of the American occupational system.

Included in this group are individuals who lack training and skills and either experience long-term unemployment or are not members of the labor force, individuals who are engaged in street crime and other forms of aberrant behavior, and families that experience long-term spells of poverty and/or welfare dependency.

Wilson’s research focused on intergenerational, Black poverty in crime-plagued inner cities. The book included discussion of Chicago’s Robert Taylor and Cabrini-Green public housing projects. He could have easily developed his arguments by studying the Christopher Columbus Homes in Newark, walking beside me, observing underlying realities I was blind to as I carried out my policing.___