My street in Brooklyn is at the crossroads of three major trucking routes through Brooklyn. This street has also always been a popular place to do illegal or paralegal stuff. The reasons for that are open to debate but being in the shadow of the bridge certainly has something to do with it. That tends to drive away some of the families that would speak out on other streets, and there are no large apartment buildings, either—at least, not yet...
Anyway, for these and other reasons, a particular corner half a block from me has become the place to stand around looking for work if you're an immigrant from Guatemala or the Bahamas. Groups of guys have been looking for work in this location since, I'd say, about 2004. When I was briefly employed as a floor refinisher around that time, our crew actually picked up a couple of guys from that very corner. They were great workers and much more concerned about looking clean than we were: They brought a clean set of brightly colored athletic clothes in a duffel bag and changed into them as soon as work was over.
So from time to time I see some cops over there talking to these guys. And I always wonder what they are telling them. Sometimes they're writing a ticket, sometimes just talking. So, yesterday morning I was walking by and I saw a short, fat police officer with a shaved head addressing them. He had these guys—all of them black or latino—sit down in a row on the steps of a large municipal building, then he started marching up and down in front of this assembly, pivoting his arms from the shoulder as he gave a little speech to them.
Wanting to overhear what was being said, I slowed my walk to a stroll as I passed. "I don't want to see you guys in a big group," he said. "You can be in little groups of three and four. Then we can look the other way. But you can't get too bunched up. I don't want to see a group of twenty people standing on the corner."
So that's the policy... I guess. I could tell the cop sympathized with the immigrants, who desperately want to work. And I wonder who it is who would complain if there was a larger group. Are they trying to keep pictures out of the press or just trying to "maintain order"? With the foreclosure crisis spiraling out of control the way it is, we may see a couple of Lehman Brothers traders joining them soon!