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Running Head: SELLING THE AMERICAN DREAM

Selling the American Dream:

How Vague Laws, Language Barriers, and Gentrification

Cause Unjust Arrests of Chinatown’s Street Vendors

Hannah Chu

John Jay College of Criminal Justice

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Abstract

This paper discusses the legal problems Chinatown street vendors face. With a history of

persecution by the government, street vendors still struggle with unclear laws, a language barrier,

and the effects of neighborhood gentrification. These problems contribute to not only the street

vendors’ confusion, but also law enforcements’ confusion. Through multiple interviews with

Canal Street vendors, I learned the stories of their unjust arrests and how they were treated by the

justice system. In addition to the interviews, I researched vending laws and found other research

on the legality and practicality of street vending. This paper will finally explore why some

proposed solutions will not work in New York City.

Keywords: street vending, informality, miscommunication, language barrier,

gentrification

Note: All of the street vendors’ names (with the exception of Chun Yin) are pseudonyms.

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Selling the American Dream:

How Vague Laws, Language Barriers, and Gentrification

Cause Unjust Arrests of Chinatown’s Street Vendors

Street vendors contribute to the diversity that defines New York City. Their convenience,

often-inexpensive products, and unique goods attract tourists and native New Yorkers, but these

quirky trinkets and foods come at a price. The owners are immigrants who earn their living

selling goods that most people find cute yet too steeply priced. They struggle to make a profit

and support their families while sitting in the freezing winters and scorching summers. To make

it worse, their unfamiliarity with the language and laws of New York causes frequent trouble

with the police. Although sellers struggle with legal issues for a myriad of reasons, this paper

will focus on the language barrier and legal confusion that creates added tension between the

NYPD and Chinatown street vendors.

On October 28th, 2015 on Canal Street, a street vendor, Chen, was arrested for violating

a street vending regulation. Her cart was half an inch (measured by an NYPD officer), too far

from the street curb. The officer had approached her and measured her cart as he accused her of

purposely violating the law. The reason her cart was half an inch too far from the curb was

because an NYPD detective's car was parked a foot onto the curb. If she had moved her cart any

closer, it would have hit the police car and warranted another arrest. However, her excuse was

not “good enough” and she was detained and later fined for her violations (D.Lee, personal

communication, October 20, 2015).

Chen shares this experience with many Chinatown street vendors. In fact, street vendors

have been the government’s long-term targets. In the late 1600s, Manhattan’s small Dutch

village first implemented street vending laws when local businesses complained about street

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merchants who offered a cheaper alternative to shopping at the markets. In 1707, the village

passed a law that banned all street vending because of the detrimental effect on businesses;

however, the law was soon repealed because it was unenforceable (Devlin 2010). A vendor

market emerged in 1886 in the Lower East Side, an ethnic enclave, which was the first major

surge of vending. By the early 1900s, vending faded away because of the wars in Europe and

America’s strict immigration laws. However, once 1965 hit, an “economic stagnation” caused an

influx of new immigrants to settle, which catalyzed a rise in street vendors (Devlin, 2010).

After the 1970s, however, newly imposed laws limited the amount of licensed vendors to

eight hundred fifty-three which made street vending difficult. Over the decades, New York City

has maintained different limits on vending licenses which pushes many immigrants to become

illegal vendors. However, this limit is not the only reason why many sellers are considered

illegal. Vague laws confuse non-English speaking sellers and cause them to unintentionally sell

without licenses and permits. According to Juan, a Canal Street fruit vendor who speaks

proficient English, a person must obtain a seller’s license first to be able to sell anything (Juan,

personal communication, December 3, 2015). This license is fairly easy to get. However, there is

a second permit required to be able to have a cart on a public street. This permit is extremely

difficult to get because of the city’s limit on vending carts. He believes this is part of the reason

why many Chinese sellers are detained by the NYPD. Many Chinese immigrants do not realize

they need a second permit to legally sell from a cart.

The city, however, is not faultless in this regard. Ryan Thomas Devlin, a Ph.D. in City

and Regional Planning (2010), believes vending laws are so vague because of “multiple agencies

and governing bodies with the ability to produce and enact legislation.” The NYC Council (the

primary governing body of the city) appoints the Dept. of Health and Mental Hygiene, the Dept.

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of Transportation, and the Dept. of Consumer Affairs authority in vending regulation. With so

many committees making laws, miscommunication occurs, causing overlaps and gaps in vending

regulations. This “space of dissonance between legal intent and actual implementation” (Devlin,

2010) of the laws only complicates the NYPD’s job in deciding which vendors are violating

unclear laws while vendors do not know the actual law.

This raises the question: Do citizens have the right to work as street vendors? Obviously

since laws have been created to regulate street vending, citizens have the right. As Rodrigo

Meneses-Reyes and Jose A Caballero-Juarez, professors of Urban Planning, state, “constitutional

courts have decided that the urban poor have a right to work on the streets, under certain

circumstances.” However, if these circumstances include “[n]o vending pushcart shall be located

[…] within twenty feet of any entranceway to any building, store, theatre [etc.] or other place of

public assembly, or within twenty feet from exits...” (§ Int 0434-2010, 2013) do people really

have the right to work as street vendors? Lets visualize this provision. An average New York

street’s width is four to five feet based on ten different measurements I took around the Lower

East Side. So according to this law, a street vendor cannot have a cart in front of a business even

if he or she was at touching the curb. Therefore, abiding by this law is essentially impossible,

unless a street vendor can magically make another fifteen feet of street appear. So although

citizens have the right to work as a street vendor, the regulations prevent them to work legally in

almost all of New York City.

These laws may be purposely unclear and/or absurd because the city wants to increase

revenue from fines the NYPD distributes to the vendors. According to the 2013 local law to

“reduce the maximum fine amount for violations of vending regulations and define unrelated

violations of vending rules and regulations as separate offenses,” there are multiple fines that are

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kept under one thousand dollars. Although the amount of money fined seems relatively small, the

chances of violating a regulation more than once is very high because of all the discreet details

that are integrated into the law. Taking into consideration the profit seller’s actually make and

the accumulation of fines, this amount is relatively excessive. However, all this money goes to

the city so none of the committees are motivated to resolve this problem with vague laws since

they are making a profit.

This “informality” in law as Devlin (2010) defines it, exacerbates another issue that is

extremely prevalent in Chinatown. Miscommunication because of a language barrier between

Chinese immigrants and the NYPD causes unneeded tension in the community. Chun Yin, a

Chinese trinket seller on Canal Street, has had frequent run-ins with the NYPD. Her problem

started when her husband (whom she married in order to obtain American citizenship to achieve

the American Dream) suffered a severe stroke. The stroke left him disabled and wheelchair

bound. In order to support him and her two young children, Yin took over her husband’s vendor

business. She, as the legal spouse of her husband, had the right to take over the business

according to the 2013 law which states “a holder who becomes totally or permanently disabled

and wishes to transfer his or her specialized vending license to his or her spouse … shall notify

the Department. Such license shall be issued in his or her name, upon his or her submitting proof

of the conditions upon which such transfer is based.” Note that it does not state which specific

department a spouse should notify, which created problems for Yin.

While she was attempting to notify the local government of her request for a transfer of

license, she continued to sell because she needed to make money to feed her family and pay for

the medical care of her husband. During this period of time, she was detained multiple times by

the NYPD for being an illegal vendor. Every time, she was held overnight in a jail cell in the

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Lower East Side leaving her two children, aged six and nine at the time, at home alone with her

disabled husband. She told me this was what worried her most because she was leaving

“essentially three children who could not take care of themselves” at home alone. She pleaded

with the policemen but because her English skills are very limited, she was unable to clearly

communicate with the police her worries. She says that “the NYPD did not understand what

[she] was begging for and would not release her.” No translator was ever present or offered to

her leaving her perplexed.

Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (42 U.S.C. §2000d et seq.) states that “police

agencies that receive any federal assistance must take reasonable steps to ensure that their

[translation] services are meaningfully accessible to those who do not speak English well. Not to

do so could constitute national origin discrimination.” Yin was not offered any translation

services nor did she fully understand why she was taken to jail. She went through the same

process multiple times because her request for a license transfer was not getting processed. Then,

an Asian American advocate whom she calls “her shining sun,” Don Lee, heard about her legal

problems. He was touched by her story and fought tirelessly to stop the NYPD from

continuously detaining street vendors who did not know their rights.

Don Lee, a community activist for over a decade believes “the NYPD targets Chinese

street vendors because they know the Chinese won’t fight back. They think it is easy to target the

Chinese since it is wrong in our culture to disrespect authorities and lose face.” He believes the

main cause of unjust arrest is the language barrier. However, Lee believes the solution to the

language barrier would be difficult, since “many times the translators that are provided are

untrained or unqualified.” The only thing that could be done about the language barrier would be

to train officers to be sensitive and understanding to people who they cannot communicate with.

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The language barrier that policemen face is not a recent issue. In fact, studies on how a

language barrier affects the dynamic between citizens and the police date back to the mid-1900s.

H. Walter Thorne (1979), a scholar in Educational Leadership, led a study in 1979 that observed

the effects of training police officers to communicate effectively. He believed that “anything that

would improve the interpersonal relationship between the police officer and the offender would

benefit everyone” in that he or she would be less likely to repeat the crime. This would support

Lee’s suggestion that the officers working in Chinatown should get to know who they are

working with.

Furthermore, Thorne designed his study to be a training program for police officers in the

academy. It consisted of a set of questions that dealt with how the officer would handle a

situation in which communication was unclear. They attended these classes for four hours over a

six week period. The officers-in-training also completed homework that focused on clear

communication. Then they would complete a similar test they took entering the program. These

scores determined whether these officers improved their communication skills with “offenders.”

The study showed that the training did not help at all because the instructor for the program did

not “emphasize the conflict aspects of police interaction with offenders” (Thorne, 1979, p.33).

However, it could have been ineffective because the officers had no field experience yet since

they were still training and they did not have hands-on communication training during the

program. The prioritization of communication was misplaced in their case.

More recent research has been done by the Vera Institute of Justice to try resolve the

language barrier problem. In Overcoming Language Barriers: Solutions for Law Enforcement by

Susan Shah, Insha Rahman, and Anita Khashu (2007), a similar solution is proposed. Their first

tip on “bridging the language barrier” is for officers to know who they are serving – meaning for

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officers to be familiar with the community they are serving. They go on to suggest educating the

staff about language access such as availability of translators and other resources such as paper

copies of the Miranda rights in different languages. Another tip is to train already bilingual staff

which could be the most effective since this prevents any probability of miscommunication. This

research is especially helpful because it includes policies that could be established in order for

there to be transparency when it comes to arresting an “offender” who does not understand

English.

According to a 2012 study by Pradine Saint-Fort, Noëlle Yasso, and Susan Shah,

Engaging Police in Immigrant Communities, the best way to fix the problem is to get to the root

causes. They suggest implementing policing programs that are monitored regularly, maximizing

resources, getting police involved in their communities (such as teaching safety classes), and

focusing on the vulnerable by engaging with them directly and offering support such as English

classes. Although these suggestions have already been effective in some counties, it may not

work in big cities such as New York City, which is not a small town where the police are

necessarily a part of the community. A police officer most likely will not know everyone he

passes on the street; therefore, other, more creative solutions need to be implemented.

Lee believes the most effective way to fix the unwarranted arrest is “Justice System

reform. People often think the issue is with the most visible branch of law enforcement - police

and enforcement agents - and take their frustration out on them. Reality is the District Attorney's

office as well as the Judge's actions often encourage and reinforce these unfair and unjust

actions.” Unfortunately, the justice system often overlooks street vendors since they are not seen

as “important.” Wang, another Canal Street fruit vendor, was arrested because she was selling in

front of a business with the business’s permission. She was never read the Miranda Rights, (the

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right to remain silent and to a court-appointed attorney), and though she was given a translator,

the translations were incorrect. From this case, we can extrapolate a few problems with the

current legal system. First of all, her arrest was unconstitutional because she was never read her

rights, so the case should have instantly been dismissed. Second, since she was appointed a

public defender (which is a whole different issue), the defender wanted to take the plea deal

because he had so many other cases to worry about. (Wang, personal communication, December

3, 2015) Wang took the plea deal and it led to a criminal record which means she will most likely

be unable to find a more stable job.

According to Lee (2015), “some business owners have even been arrested for selling

outside their own stores.” He asked the Assistant District Attorney (ADA), “would it make sense

for the owner to open up a business right outside to compete with his own store?” The ADA

answered, “It’s possible.” He believes that the DA’s Office is purposely keeping things

ambiguous even if the case looks clear cut because they want the prosecution. Many judges may

also have an intrinsic bias against these street vendors because they cannot and do not see things

from the vendor’s perspective. These actions cause law enforcement to continue what they are

doing which aggravates the problem of unjust arrests.

Another reason street vendors are targeted is the push for gentrification in Chinatown.

According to the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (2013), “local

governments drove areas of accelerated gentrification and have encouraged and assisted the

gutting of Chinatowns. Government policies have changed these traditionally working class,

Asian, family household neighborhoods into communities that are now composed of more

affluent, White, and non-family households.” Not only are families moving in, many small

hipster cafes and quaint restaurants have been opening up in Chinatown. This is because

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“government incentives and policies have accelerated gentrification by enabling the conversion

of industrial use [of the neighborhood] to luxury condominiums; the proliferation of high-end

businesses on certain streets; and the increase in luxury condominiums and hotels in

Chinatowns” (AALDEF, 2013).

The government rather fund these luxury projects instead of supporting programs for the

low-income immigrants in the neighborhood. They might think that by getting rid of the street

vendors, the immigrants will start to leave and disperse into different communities allowing for

an “improved” Chinatown (which wouldn’t even be a Chinatown at that point).

Although Chinatown has been enduring gentrification, it has continued to be “havens for

low-income immigrants and workers not only because of the continued need for affordable and

culturally appropriate services and goods, but also because of the many people fighting to

maintain their existence” (AALDEF, 2013). This is probably the ultimate reason why street

vendors have remained relevant in Chinatown and have not been chased out yet.

Limitations of this Research

A limitation to my research was finding street vendors that were willing to talk to me.

Many believed I was working for the NYPD as an undercover detective even after I tried to gain

their trust by speaking the language and showing them a short explanation of the paper in

Chinese, however, they were still too afraid to talk. The ones who I did interview asked to

remain anonymous, which is why I used pseudonyms for their stories.

Another limitation I faced was looking for other scholars’ research. Not many articles

have been written about street vending so I only really read around four articles that were

directly related to street vending in Chinatown. I had to rely on research about working on public

streets.

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Works Cited

Devlin, Ryan Thomas. (2010). Informal Urbanism: Legal Ambiguity, Uncertainty, and the

Management of Street Vending in New York City. UC Berkeley: City & Regional

Planning. Retrieved from: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/948005rd

Fort, P., & Yasso, N. (2012). Engaging police in immigrant communities: Promising practices

from the field. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Dept. of Justice, Office of Community Oriented

Policing Services ;.

Li, B., Leong, A., Vitiello, D., & Acoca, A. (2013). Gentrification and Displacement on the East

Coast. Chinatown: Then & Now, 2-31. Retrieved from:

http://aaldef.org/ChinatownThenandNowAALDEF.pdf

Meneses-Reyes, R., & Caballero-Juarez, J. A. (2013). The right to work on the street: Public

space and constitutional rights. Planning Theory, 1473095213503967;

Reducing the maximum fine amount for violations of vending regulations and defining unrelated

violations of vending rules and regulations as separate offenses., § Int 0434-2010, 2013

Shah, S., & Rahman, I. (2007). Overcoming language barriers: Solutions for law enforcement.

New York, N.Y.: Vera Institute of Justice.

Thorne, H. (1979). An empirical investigation of the effect of management training on the

communication effectiveness of police officers.

Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 42 U.S.C. §2000d et seq.

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