By Kristen West Savali, Sept. 2, 2014, Theroot.com

Despite the looming specter of police brutality, which casts shadows over street corners, neighborhoods and homes across black America, 56 percent of black voters in New York City support “broken windows” policing tactics, compared with 61 percent of the city’s white voters, according to a new Quinnipiac University poll.

The controversial policing style frames community disorder and signs of neglect—such as broken windows, littering and loitering—as indicators of encroaching crime that will lead to more dangerous communities and must be addressed with the full force of the law.

In theory, broken-windows policing, and its variants stop-and-frisk, zero-tolerance and quality-of-life policing, are tactics used by officers who are hyperinvested in keeping communities safe, clean and crime-free. In practice, however, they provide opportunities for racial profiling and resulting antagonistic and abusive encounters between law enforcement and people of color.

This has been evidenced recently by the extrajudicial killing of 43-year-old Staten Island man Eric Garner, a father of six who died after being placed in an illegal choke hold by New York City police Officer Daniel Pantaleo. Garner’s crime? Allegedly selling untaxed cigarettes. He can be heard in the heart-wrenching minutes before his death telling officers that their continued harassment of him “ends today.” Moments later, the asthmatic man painfully wheezes his last words: “I can’t breathe.”