Down, Out, and Under Arrest ─ Policing and Everyday Life in Skid Row

Forrest Stuart gives us a new framework for understanding life in criminalized communities throughout America. The idea of community policing” and of stop-and-frisk and broken windows is just part of the picture, which includes people on both sides of the issue of keeping order in Skid Row communities. Stuart’s is a dramatic demonstration of how to understand the daily realities of America’s most truly disadvantaged, an understanding that requires a sharp focus on the pervasive role and impact of the police. Policingzero tolerance” models in particularis reshaping urban poverty and marginalization in 21st-century America. Stuart immersed himself for several years in the notorious homeless capital of America,” which is to say, Skid Row in Los Angeles. It has the largest concentration of standing police forces anywhere in the United States. On their side, the police practice what Stuart calls ”therapeutic policing”a form of virtual social work that is designed to cure” the poor of individual pathologies. On the side of the homeless, Stuart finds a cunning set of techniques for evading police contact, which he dubs cop wisdom” and which the poor use for intensifying resistance to roustings by the police. The police are tasked with day-to-day management of the growing numbers of citizens falling through the holes in the threadbare social safety net. We see daily patrol practices and routines that amount to hyper-policing” in skid row districts. The continuous threat of punishment aims to steer homeless individuals away from self-destructive behaviors while providing incentives to drug recovery, employment, and life skills (in nearby meta-shelters). Minority upheavals now underway across America underscore the divide between cops and the urban poor (almost all of whom are black or Latino). Stuart joins Alice Goffman in revealing the underlying, and often tragic, dynamics.

Forrest Stuart is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Chicago.