Collateral Consequences of Criminalization

Collateral consequences, or “invisible punishments,” refer to the negative effects of criminal justice involvement that typically manifest outside of the traditional sentencing framework (Reference Hagan and DinovitzerHagan and Dinovitzer 1999; Reference Travis, Mauer and Chesney-LindTravis 2002). Rather than being imposed by the decision of a sentencing court, these effects occur by default through associated social processes. To date research on collateral consequences has focused primarily on the manner in which felony convictions “mark” former prisoners long after the conclusion of their incarceration. Such consequences include exclusion from public or government-assisted housing, employment-related barriers, ineligibility from public benefits, voting restrictions, and deportation (Reference Stuart, Armenta and OsborneStuart et al. 2015).

Research has successfully leveraged demographic data and large-scale surveys to uncover the myriad effects of incarceration on individuals and communities. However, far less is known about the collateral consequences of escalating street-level criminalization, such as increased police surveillance, stop-and-frisks, infraction citations, and low level arrests. Unlike incarceration, the daily, street-level manifestations of criminalization seldom show up in official statistics, which makes analyzing their spill-over effects relatively more difficult. Moreover, the sociology of policing has focused primarily on the experiences and perspectives of officers (Reference BittnerBittner 1967; Reference ReissReiss 1972). While this scholarship has produced rich accounts of how officers’ subjective understandings shape interactions with the public (Reference Van Maanen, Manning and Van MaanenVan Maanen 1978; Reference StuartStuart 2014; Reference StuartStuart 2016; Stuart and Herbert Forthcoming), citizens’ understandings and experiences during these exchanges require more investigation (see Reference StuartStuart 2015).

Over the past five years, a small handful of ethnographic and self-report studies have redirected attention to the perspective of policing's targets, particularly the urban poor. These accounts uncover a number of serious, though potentially contradictory effects regarding street-level criminalization. One of the most prevalent consequences is “system avoidance,” defined as the tendency of individuals to avoid vital social institutions (Reference BrayneBrayne 2014). Reference GoffmanAlice Goffman (2014) finds that individuals with outstanding warrants and parole and probation violations intentionally avoid institutions and private spaces, such as hospitals and places of employment, for fear of being discovered and apprehended by authorities. Drawing on nationally-representative panel surveys, Reference BrayneSarah Brayne (2014) confirms that compared to those with no criminal justice contact, individuals who had contact with the criminal justice system had 31 percent higher odds of not obtaining medical care when they needed it. Importantly, those who had merely been stopped by police avoided medical institutions at the same rate as those who had been convicted. Other researchers focus on various interpersonal consequences of street-level criminalization. As Reference RiosVictor Rios (2011) documents, some individuals develop a dangerous and self-defeating form of hypermasculinity by engaging in physical and sexual domination of their peers. Others commit additional crimes and break rules in an attempt to reclaim dignity and intimidate those who wish to criminalize them. Still others attempt to overcompensate in their appearance and behaviors in order to communicate to authority figures that they are not criminal.

Existing studies of street-level criminalization thus catalogue a range of responses taken up by those subject to elevated levels of law enforcement. However, as researchers continue to seek out additional populations and locations for further case study, it is imperative that we first reconcile these discrete and, at times, contradictory outcomes within a more generalizable theoretical framework. Fortunately, the findings to date provide a useful starting point. Despite the diversity of individual reactions to criminalization, there is a unifying thread running throughout: namely, the central role of perception. As Reference BrayneBrayne (2014) alludes, perceptions of current or future criminalization may be as consequential in shaping individuals’ behavior as the criminalizing practices themselves. Indeed, all of the above responses to criminalization–whether it is avoiding hospitals (Reference GoffmanGoffman 2014) or acting lawful (Reference RiosRios 2011)–are born out of individuals’ subjective perceptions and understandings of criminal justice actors’ tendencies and motivations, as well as their anticipations of how these authorities will most likely “read” and act toward particular situations. As the link between criminalization (a structural condition) and individuals’ responses (human action), these indigenous understandings and patterned behaviors fall squarely within the realm of culture (Reference BourdieuBourdieu 1977; Reference SwidlerSwidler 1986; Reference Small, Harding and LamontSmall, Harding, and Lamont 2010). Cultural analysis, then, provides the most appropriate conceptual tools for analyzing the concrete mechanisms by which criminalization engenders shared systems of perception among its targets.

The Cultural Context of Criminalized Neighborhoods

In recent years, the study of culture has moved back into the center of social scientific study. Contemporary research no longer conceives of culture as monolithic values, and rarely discusses it as intergenerational, pathological, or independent of structural conditions (see Reference HannerzHannerz 1969; Reference SwidlerSwidler 1986). Adopting a “cognitive view” (Reference DiMaggioDiMaggio 1997), these scholars instead conceptualize culture as a constellation of evaluative schema, scripts, and repertoires that people use to make sense of their social context. Culture influences action “not by providing the ultimate values toward which action is oriented, but by shaping a repertoire or ‘tool kit’ of habits, skills, and styles from which people construct ‘strategies of action’” (Reference SwidlerSwidler 1986: 273). This article focuses on one particular element of this tool kit, namely, “frames.” Formulated most notably in Reference GoffmanErving Goffman's (1974) Frame Analysis, frames refer to the interpretive lenses through which we observe the social world and make sense of experience. Frames encode our evaluations and expectations about events, behaviors, and consequences. In doing so, they provide guides for ongoing social action.

Research into the sources and consequences of cultural frames has moved in two related, yet distinguishable directions. On one hand, social movement scholars and media sociologists use the concept of frames to explain the development and adoption of public opinion (see Reference Benford and SnowBenford and Snow 2000; Reference GamsonGamson 1992). This research generally asks how various constituencies (i.e. the media, journalists, politicians, social movement organizations, and voters) construct, contest, and mobilize around particular meanings of public issues and events. Whether the media frames nuclear power, for example, as “progress” or a “devil's bargain” shapes (though certainty does not over-determine) how members of the public make sense of accidents at nuclear power plants (Reference Gamson and ModiglianiGamson and Modigliani 1989). On the other hand, scholars interested in more interactional and micro-level processes leverage the concept of frames to explain how and why individuals “read” and act in response to more immediately encountered phenomena (Reference Small, Harding and LamontSmall, Harding, and Lamont 2010). These researchers focus on the subjective meanings that individuals construct regarding, for instance, the micromovements of others (Reference LeeLee 2009) or the built environment of their neighborhood (Reference SmallSmall 2004). This article pursues this second line of inquiry, as it is more concerned with the impact of aggressive policing on residents’ micro-level, in situ readings than their engagement with broader public opinions about policing.

By investigating how residents develop and deploy frames at the interactional level, this article builds on and advances a number of influential studies of urban poverty. Important for the proceeding analysis, much poverty research examines the cultural frames that emerge in poor neighborhoods amid inadequate police protection and the resulting threat of criminal victimization (for reviews see Reference WacquantWacquant 1998; Reference RiosRios 2011). For example, writing on inner-city neighborhoods in the mid-twentieth century, Reference ClarkKenneth Clark (1965: 86) notes that “the lowering of police vigilance and efficiency” led to the “unstated and sometimes stated acceptance of crime and violence as normal.” Historical accounts indicate a similar condition in LA's Skid Row. Until the 1990s, city leaders publicly instructed the LAPD to patrol the neighborhood with a deliberately “light touch,” so as not to displace its poor residents into surrounding, more well-to-do neighborhoods (Reference GoetzGoetz 1992; Reference Haas and HeskinHaas and Heskin 1981). The Los Angeles Times captures the results of this formal policy in a 1989 story, aptly titled “Well That's Just Skid Row.” According to the column, Skid Row residents had become so “inured to street violence” that “the brutal slayings of two people within two blocks of each other the night before drew far less attention than the taping of an episode of the television show, ‘Beauty and the Beast’” (Reference CitronCitron 1989: B3). Inadequate policing and the normalization of crime thus contributes to a “wholesale restructuring of the social, temporal, and spatial organization of everyday life” in which “simply maneuvering one's way through the streets is a major dilemma…that cannot but affect all aspects of neighborhood life” (Reference WacquantWacquant 1998: 30).

Reference AndersonElijah Anderson's (1990) concept of “street wisdom” is arguably the most systematic examination of the specific cultural frames that can emerge as a result of normalized crime. Reference AndersonAnderson (1990) demonstrates that without adequate police protection, poor residents are forced to take safety into their own hands, and in doing so, they often develop a sophisticated form of street wisdom, an interpretive framework that “allows one to ‘see through’ public situations, to anticipate what is about to happen based on cues and signals from those one encounters” (1990: 5). Equipped with this orientation, “streetwise” residents avoid victimization by conducting what we might think of as a “folk criminology,” in which they re-interpret their world through the eyes of hypothetical criminals. This cultural frame significantly impacts three important spheres of community life, providing a powerful guide for: (1) residents’ self-presentation in public, (2) residents’ “daily round,” and (3) residents’ capacity and willingness to exert informal social control.

As residents become adept at their folk criminology, their self-presentation in public is dominated by attempts to display “safety signals” (Reference AndersonAnderson 1990). These are behavioral cues, gestures, and movements intended to ward off danger and reduce unwanted interactions. As Reference MerrySally Engle Merry (1981) describes, one of the most effective safety signals is to maintain a determined, businesslike manner:

Streetwise residents thus understand that their self-presentation in public has to, above almost all else, communicate that they are a poor target for victimization.

The cultural influence of police neglect and routinized victimization is similarly found in research on the daily round of the urban poor–that is, the day-to-day routines by which residents satisfy their basic needs (Reference Logan and MolotchLogan and Molotch 1987). In order to remain safe, residents constantly consult their street wisdom to re-interpret and act toward their immediate physical and social environment. In his study of a housing project inundated with gangs during the 1990s, for example, Reference VenkateshVenkatesh (1997) writes that “the manner by which [residents] can move about in [the neighborhood] and surrounding spaces–both where they can visit and how they get there–is effectively altered once they are forced to acknowledge and incorporate street gang inscriptions” (104). By consulting their folk criminology and anticipating the behaviors of those who might do them harm, streetwise residents thus learn to identify and avoid “hot spaces” (Reference Gotham and BrumleyGotham and Brumley 2002), “no man's lands” (Reference SuttlesSuttles 1968), “no-go areas” (Reference KlinenbergKlinenberg 2002), and other places associated with potential victimization.

Problematically, as residents internalize and naturalize this cultural frame, they tend to withdraw from public sociality, which can carry detrimental consequences. Reference MerryMerry (1981: 194) reports that the most cautious residents elect to “stay at home at night, and often prefer not to venture outside alone even in the daytime.” In doing so, however, they are less able to meet new acquaintances, interact with peers, and build the social capital that is consistently shown to help mitigate the negative effects of poverty, unemployment, and homelessness (see; Reference DesmondDesmond 2012; Reference Morrill, Snow and WhiteMorrill et al. 2005). Revealing the direst consequences of self-sequester, Reference KlinenbergKlinenberg (2002) finds that disaster-related deaths are far more prevalent in neighborhoods where residents are fearful to enter into public, as they are less likely to come into contact with those who might otherwise provide aid.

Closely related to the erosion of public sociality, residents’ preoccupation with criminal victimization is purported to exacerbate “social disorganization,” defined as “the inability of a community structure to realize the common values of its residents and maintain effective social controls” (Reference Sampson and Byron GrovesSampson and Groves 1989: 777). In Reference JacobsJane Jacobs’ (1993 [1961]) now-classic formulation, residents become unable to serve as capable guardians, or “eyes on the street.” In the absence of adequate social control, these neighborhoods become susceptible to even more crime, igniting a dangerous feedback loop. It is important to note that this relationship between a lack of informal social control and elevated crime has been a driving rationale behind the turn to zero-tolerance models of law enforcement inspired by the broken windows theory. Proponents of this theory argue that increased police visibility and aggressiveness will reduce residents’ previous fear of crime, and in turn embolden residents to become more active eyes on the street (Reference Wilson and KellingWilson and Kelling 1982; Reference Hinkle and WeisburdHinkle and Weisburd 2008).

In short, throughout the urban poverty literature we can discern a central (though not always explicit) concern with the cultural frames that develop amid inadequate police protection and the resulting threat of victimization. In recent years, however, policing has intensified to historic levels in many of America's most impoverished neighborhoods. While the crime-reduction capacities of zero-tolerance policing remain in serious question (see Reference HarcourtHarcourt 2001; Reference Hinkle and WeisburdHinkle and Weisburd 2008), one thing is certain: Residents are increasingly subject to aggressive and repeated police detainments, interrogations, citations, and arrests for otherwise mundane behaviors. For the urban poor, these interactions often carry the possibility of eviction, homelessness, unemployment, and loss of social services and benefits. These communities are, in a word, “doubly burdened” by the simultaneous threats of both victimization and criminalization. They are overpoliced, yet often remain underprotected.

Against this backdrop, this article asks: How does the omnipresent threat of criminal justice contact influence the cultural frames of poor urban residents? After a brief description of the setting and methodological approach, the remainder of the article analyzes the cultural collateral consequences of street-level criminalization. The analysis devotes particular attention to the manner in which aggressive law enforcement, and the cop wisdom it engenders, influences residents’ self-presentation, daily round, and informal social control. The article concludes by considering the implications of criminalization on poor urban communities, offering theoretical implications for legal consciousness scholarship and social disorganization research, and presenting evidence regarding the proliferation of cop wisdom in other communities.

Setting and Methods

The following analysis draws on ethnographic data from Los Angeles’ Skid Row district–an impoverished, predominantly black neighborhood that is home to one of the most intensive zero-tolerance policing campaigns to date. The fifty block area, located on the eastern flank of the downtown LA's financial district, is home to approximately 12,000–15,000 residents. Two-thirds of the total population resides in the large collection of single room occupancy (SRO) hotels and small apartments built in the early and mid-twentieth century. Roughly seventy two percent of SRO residents are black, and have a median annual income of just over $4,500. Almost ninety percent of SRO residents are unemployed, while forty-five percent report a mental illness or disability (Los Angeles Housing Department 2005). Widely considered the “social service hub” of southern California, Skid Row is characterized by an unrivaled density of nonprofit service organizations, boasting over 40 percent of all city shelter beds and over 25 percent of all county shelter beds (Reference DeVerteuilDeVerteuil 2006). With one-third of the population classified as homeless, the neighborhood has long held the title of “homeless capital of America.”

Skid Row and the surrounding four miles of downtown fall under the jurisdiction of the Los Angeles Police Department's (LAPD) Central Division. In 2006, under the direction of LAPD Chief William Bratton, Central Division launched an aggressive zero-tolerance policing strategy in Skid Row, called the Safer Cities Initiative (SCI). Deploying an additional 80 police officers to Skid Row's 0.85 mile area, SCI immediately made the neighborhood home to arguably the largest concentration of standing police forces in the nation (Reference Blasi and StuartBlasi and Stuart 2008, Reference BlasiBlasi 2007). In the first year alone, Central Division officers made over 9,000 arrests and issued 12,000 citations. Adhering to the broken windows theory of policing (Reference Wilson and KellingWilson and Kelling 1982)–which calls on officers to crack down on low-level infractions and misdemeanors–these arrests and citations were largely for minor offenses like sitting on the sidewalk, loitering, littering, and jaywalking.

Data on the impacts of this policing strategy were collected over the course of five years of ethnographic fieldwork, beginning in early 2007. Throughout that time, I spent between 10 and 30 hours per week in the neighborhood. I concentrated my time in Skid Row's public spaces, private residences, and neighborhood institutions. I shadowed and informally interviewed a range of residents and peer groups, as well as patrol officers and LAPD supervisors. The bulk of this article draws from data collected while observing the daily activities of two loose groups of residents. The first group consisted of residents who regularly congregate and socialize in and around Skid Row's two “pocket parks,” often to play chess, talk current events, or exercise. Beyond the time spent interacting in public, I shadowed several of these residents throughout their daily round, into their SRO units, and throughout their court hearings. The second group consisted of roughly 14 street vendors who set up small sidewalk shops along Skid Row's main thoroughfares. Like many impoverished urban areas, Skid Row is characterized by an active informal economy (Reference DuneierDuneier 1999; Reference GowanGowan 2010; Reference VenkateshVenkatesh 2009), which rests at the heart of inhabitants’ myriad strategies to make ends meet. Skid Row's vendors sold a variety of products and services, from clothing and canned food to haircuts and cash loans.

These diverse resident groups provide ideal “cases” for examining the impacts of aggressive street-level criminalization on the community context more generally (Reference RiosRios 2015). Rather than focus on individuals involved in serious criminal activity, who were likely to have experienced frequent police contact and punishment even before the arrival of zero-tolerance policing (see Reference GoffmanGoffman 2014), this article instead directs attention to the mundane behaviors and people that are newly or increasingly criminalized as a result of aggressive law enforcement. This allows the analysis to more precisely isolate the distinct effects of policing while revealing more generalizable social relations and processes.

Ethnographic methods–defined as a form of social research “based on the up-close, on-the-ground observation of people and institutions in real time and space”–is uniquely suited “to detect how and why agents on the scene act, think and feel the way they do” (Reference WacquantWacquant 2003: 5). My fieldwork was specifically intended to uncover residents’ lived experiences as they came into contact with the police and cycled through the criminal justice system. I observed approximately 1,500 police-citizen interactions, which allowed me to systematically analyze how street-level criminalization impacts residents’ commonsense understandings of their world, and how they act on this local knowledge. Given the heavy police saturation and aggressive enforcement in the area, I was able to take detailed field notes on the periods leading up to, during, and long after these exchanges. Observations were recorded in the stepwise fashion advanced by Reference Snow and AndersonSnow and Anderson (1987), which consists of making mental and jotted notes in the field, and then expanding jottings in detailed and extensive field narratives following each day's observations.Footnote ¹ Adhering to an abductive approach (Reference Tavory and TimmermansTavory and Timmermans 2014), I subjected these fieldnotes to multiple rounds of coding, in dialogue with relevant literature. Research questions and foci of inquiry were honed through theoretical sampling, as prominent themes and salient patterns emerged from the data.

The Omnipresent Threat of Police Contact

For Skid Row residents, the threat of police contact looms constant. According to the most comprehensive survey to date, residents report being stopped, questioned, and frisked by officers and released without charge an average of 5.3 times per year (Los Angeles Community Action Network 2010). Residents report that during almost three-quarters of these stops, they were handcuffed, searched, and had their names run through a warrant database. However, these numbers likely underestimate the prevalence of police interactions. One of the residents I came to know, a middle-aged black woman named Diane, described street stops as so regular that they had become, in her words, “almost like bathing.” Officers routinely stand at busy intersections, stopping, interrogating, and ticketing entire groups of pedestrians that are unable to traverse the intersection rapidly enough. This occasionally includes those who require canes, walkers, and wheelchairs. I myself was stopped and/or questioned fourteen times in the first year of fieldwork.Footnote ²

The SCI policy mandates that officers engage in such continuous street stops. In conversations and interviews, Central Division leadership articulated that at least one purpose for detaining and interrogating individuals in this fashion is to enable officers to search for narcotics or evidence of other criminal behavior. In the words of a senior officer:

Assuming that any individual may be involved in more serious crimes, officers routinely subject a host of mundane and seemingly-innocuous behaviors to intense scrutiny.

The markedly lowered threshold for street stops is exemplified in the manner in which even a resident's outward physical disability can constitute grounds for officer suspicion and further investigation. A 2010 LAPD document, for example, justifies officers’ repeated street stops of residents who rely on wheelchairs and walkers:

This extreme police vigilance is not lost on Skid Row residents, for whom repeated stop-and-frisks generate spiraling legal entanglements. With each successive police interaction, residents face an increased likelihood and length of incarceration. Consider the experiences of a black resident, named Tex, who split his nights between SRO rooms and the street. One day, in 2009, Tex was walking with several bags of belongings. He stopped to buy a single cigarette (or “loosie”) from another pedestrian. Tex set down his bags beside him in order to fish out his loose change from his pocket. Before he could do so, however, two officers on bicycles appeared seemingly out of nowhere. They detained, handcuffed, and searched him against a nearby wall. They ran his name through the warrant and parole databases. After finding no immediate grounds for arrest, the officers issued him a citation for LAMC 41.18(a)–a municipal ordinance that prohibits pedestrians from obstructing the sidewalk. According to the officers, his belongings, which he had set down only moments earlier, were impeding the flow of pedestrian traffic. With his sole income coming from a monthly General Relief (GR) check of $221, Tex resigned that he would not be able to pay the nearly $200 fine. After sleeping on the streets for eight months, the fine increased to over $500 and a warrant was issued for his arrest. Tex only became aware of this when he was rustled from his tent at 6:15 am. He had overslept the legal “camping” hours designated by LAMC 41.18(d)–a prohibition against sitting, lying, or sleeping on the sidewalk. The officers arrested him on account of his current offense, outstanding warrant, and unpaid fines. After spending three days in jail, the judge issued Tex a twelve-month suspended sentence and an additional $195 fine. He warned Tex that any future citations or arrests would result in a far harsher sentence.

Even short jail stints like Tex's carry dire consequences. Arrest and incarceration rendered at least five residents I came to know unable to pay their rent on time, which led to their prompt eviction. As they sat behind bars, their landlords removed and dumped all of their belongings onto the sidewalk in front of their buildings. They were also burdened with the stamp of “abandonment” on their rental histories, which made securing affordable and adequate housing even more difficult.

Becoming “Copwise”

Skid Row residents quickly recognize that refraining from illegal activity is insufficient to eliminate unwanted, unwarranted, and sometimes violent police contact and its residual consequences. In response, some residents engage in additional, proactive strategies to more effectively avoid and avert officer scrutiny. These residents recognize that, far from behaving randomly, officers adhere to what police scholars describe as an “ideal economy of intervention” (see Reference BittnerBittner 1967). While officers certainly saturate the neighborhood at an overwhelming level, residents recognize that officers’ time, resources, and attention are nonetheless finite; officers cannot possibly intervene in every instance in which it might be possible or “necessary.” This forces officers to privilege certain individuals and behaviors as the most appropriate targets of their immediate scrutiny and intervention.

Residents convey a striking awareness of officers’ dilemma. One afternoon, I stood in one of Skid Row's small parks with a middle-aged black man named Dante. The two of us watched through the park's iron gates as two patrol officers stopped, questioned, and eventually arrested a young black man on the adjacent sidewalk. Dante snickered at the sight. Seconds later, Dante articulated a common understanding of patrol practices by drawing a striking analogy between the police and a predatory animal stalking its prey:

For residents like Dante, successfully avoiding unwanted police contact thus hinges on residents’ ability to accomplish two tasks. First, residents must adequately decipher the general tendencies, considerations, and “psychology,” in Dante's formulation, that motivate officers’ actions. In other words, they must decipher what counts as a privileged police target. Whereas residents in dangerous neighborhoods employ a folk criminology to anticipate victimization, residents in criminalized neighborhoods are forced to engage in what we can think of as a “folk ethnography of policing.” To conduct this lay analysis, residents compile “data” that they collect during their own run-ins with police, as well as during those instances that they witness or hear about secondhand.

Skid Row's public spaces and peer groups provide a key forum that allows residents to disseminate and collectively interpret their data on police actions. As they stand in small circles discussing politics, sports, and past exploits, residents devote considerable time to comparing (and contesting) rival analyses regarding why they were able to escape police contact while others may have failed to do so. On one occasion, I stood with Tex and a small group of similarly-aged black men as the conversation turned to Tex's citation and eventual arrest. As he retold the story and relayed the continual hardship it was causing him, another man in the group, named Big Ron, began piecing the scene together. In a somewhat paternalistic tone, he offered Tex an explanation for his initial police stop:

Big Ron's folk analysis illustrates how residents collaborate to make seemingly unpredictable police interactions more legible by attempting to “see like a cop.” Residents put themselves in officers’ shoes to re-interpret the surrounding street scene, pedestrians, and public behavior so as to anticipate who and what will become subject to additional police scrutiny. Seeing like a cop thus relies a double interpretation: in order to anticipate how an officer will behave, residents must anticipate how officers are anticipating problematic and suspicious people typically behave. As Big Ron contends, such problematic actions include striking up conversations with unknown pedestrians and exchanging cash.

Importantly, these folk analyses are more than a thought experiment. This re-interpretive project gives rise to the second requirement for avoiding unwanted police contact: After residents adequately decipher officers’ tendencies, they must attempt to adjust their own appearances and behaviors in order to carve symbolic and physical distance between themselves and officers’ privileged targets. In doing so, residents restructure their daily lives, down to the level of bodily comportment, so as not to be mistaken for those they perceived to be more “deserving” of police contact. Three of the most discernible adjustments occur in the realms of self-presentation, the daily round, and informal social control.

Self-Presentation in Public: Performing “Innocence Signals”

Paralleling the manner in which residents in dangerous, under-policed neighborhoods strive to cultivate and refine their outward presentation of safety signals (Reference AndersonAnderson 1990; Reference MerryMerry 1981), residents in hyper-policed neighborhoods develop the technique of displaying what we can think of as “innocence signals.” In Skid Row, residents carefully manage their outward appearances and demeanor in order to reduce their relative suspicion in the eyes of officers, to more conspicuously differentiate themselves from officers’ privileged targets. Like safety signals, this distancing project extends all the way down to residents’ corporeal conduct. Residents make conscious efforts to avoid the subtle actions and unconscious gestures that they anticipate to attract additional police scrutiny and thus lead to a detainment and interrogation.

By far the most prevalent of the innocence signals that Skid Row residents broadcast are those aimed at communicating sobriety, or at least some disassociation with crack cocaine use. One such resident was Mike, a black former auto mechanic. A proud graduate of Narcotics Anonymous (NA), Mike had spent 10 years of his early adulthood battling a crack addiction. He frequently shared his “war stories” with me as we stood watching the nearby street scene. He was quick to point out those he perceived to be, in his words, “A-1 certified dopefiends,” and thus likely to be detained by passing officers in a matter of minutes. One afternoon, he taught me how to recognize addicts:

Mike mimicked uncontrollable fidgeting as he spoke.

Much like a poker player's “tell,” residents interpreted these kinds of habitual movements–what many refer to as “dopefiend shit”–as the precise behavior that betrays addicts’ underlying and “true” identities and intentions to on-looking officers. Mike continued:

While Mike was clearly being hyperbolic, his statements illustrate that residents recognize the need to constantly perform sobriety and noncriminality for an audience of officers that fixate on even the most miniscule of gestures, including behaviors as innocent as self-grooming.

Mike's friends share his sensitivity to innocence signals. When the group of men convene and catch up with one another each week, they capitalize on their familiarity with and aversion toward dopefiend shit in order to engage in a peculiar form of entertainment and friendly competition. From their vantage point safely inside the park, the men make wagers on which nearby pedestrians, based on their outward appearance and behaviors, are most likely to draw the notice of officers and become subject to a stop-and-frisk. The men frequently cast their spotlight on subtle behaviors that, while liable to escape an untrained eye, the men believe are likely to prompt a stop-and-frisk. Once, as we stood chatting in the park, Steel, a black man in his fifties, pointed to a young Latina woman, no older than twenty-five, as she paced back and forth outside of the park. She continuously chewed on the drawstring of her dark red sweatshirt. She occasionally spoke to passersby, perhaps soliciting them for money. “Check it,” Steel said in a soft whisper, as if not to alert her that we were watching. “See how she keeps tugging at her hair? She's in bad shape, man. … That right there is a dead giveaway. Watch. Money says when five-oh [the police] hits that corner, they're about to jam her up.” Another man named Tony suddenly appeared at my shoulder as Steel finished speaking. “Naw dog,” he interrupted, “if it's my money, it's on this one over here: Squeaky Clean.” He pointed to a mentally-disabled man seated on the curb who meticulously picked at his clothing, attempting to remove small pieces of lint or dirt that only he could see. “Yup,” Tony continued, “Squeaky is going to jail today.” However, the next passing patrol car singled out neither of these individuals. Instead, the officers detained and arrested a different man walking past. Seeing this, Steel and Tony grumbled in lighthearted disappointment, joking that they had both “lost.”

This game serves as more than simple entertainment to pass the time with friends. These exchanges also hold an important instructional quality. As residents debate the fates of those around them, they catalogue and continually reinforce the “dos” and “don'ts” for effectively staying off the police radar, for example: refrain from sudden or nervous movements and curtail excessive self-grooming. Residents are quick to point out those who are unable or unwilling to follow these rules, while building an exclusive community with those who are.

Residents’ concerns with outward signs of criminality and their associated performances of innocence carry important sociological implications. Throughout the late twentieth century, urban sociologists documented that the looming threat of victimization and the resulting street wisdom led to elevated levels of distrust. Suspicion of fellow inhabitants prompted residents to internalize and reproduce the negative stereotypes of the urban poor, which stimulated internal differentiation and mutual distancing as residents constructed rigid moral dichotomies between themselves and their neighbors–as “respectable” versus “shady” (Reference Drake and CaytonDrake and Cayton 1945), “decent” versus “street” Reference AndersonAnderson (1999), or “good” versus “ghetto” (Reference JonesJones 2010). This process was particularly pronounced in Skid Row districts. As Reference BahrHoward Bahr (1973: 287) described over four decades ago, “Skid Row is where…the resident must fight a continual battle to maintain enough self-esteem to live. He may stress little things which set him apart from other men, or continually remind that his past was different, that he is not a ‘bum’ like many of those around him.”

With the arrival of zero-tolerance policing and street-level criminalization, however, residents have been forced to double down on these negative images. Living under the constant threat of police contact, they are even more pressed to highlight and enlarge the symbolic distance separating them from their “less respectable” neighbors. For if residents fail to demonstrate their own elevated level of decency, the result is no longer simply the loss of a preferred sense of self or a failure to secure a favorable identity. In highly-policed neighborhoods, residents who fail to publically convey decency run the risk of winding up in handcuffs or jail. Yet, as they hone their cop wisdom, alter their self-presentation in public, and reduce unwanted police contact, residents become locked in a zero-sum game: Since officers are not simply going to cease conducting street interrogations (organizational mandates demand as much), the most copwise residents end up redirecting and displacing police attention onto those residents who are more “deserving” of it. This emerging cultural frame thus exacerbates the internalization and actualization of stigma among the urban poor.

The Daily Round: Re-Interpreting Space and Time Through the Eyes of Officers

Cop wisdom not only encourages residents to monitor and adjust their public appearances and behaviors; it also spurs them to renegotiate their daily round. Residents learn that even the best innocence signals can be rendered moot if deployed in those contexts that give rise to elevated police scrutiny. As a result, residents’ folk analyses can turn from questions about problematic self-presentations to questions about problematic places and times. By seeing like a cop, residents attempt to discern the particular meanings that officers attribute to certain streets, buildings, and public spaces, as well as the significance granted to specific hours, days, and weeks. This strategy resembles the interpretive work documented among housing project residents who must navigate between the crossfire of feuding gangs (Reference VenkateshVenkatesh 1997). In Skid Row, residents must also concern themselves with steering clear of the LAPD's localized war on drugs.

Tyrell, a soft-spoken black resident, exemplifies how this re-interpretive process manifests in mundane, yet hardly trivial, daily action. After several police detainments on the streets adjacent to his SRO building (two for blocking the sidewalk and one for loitering), Tyrell worried that a subsequent police stop might result in unmanageable fines and the potential of jail time. Facing this dilemma, Tyrell attempted to pinpoint the factors that he believed to be most responsible for his stop-and-frisks. As he relayed one day, the common variable he discovered in each instance was that officers had observed him standing or walking too closely to idle groups of pedestrians that had congregated along the sidewalk. He explained:

Following the ordeal, Tyrell began deploying a number of strategies that he hoped would decrease his chances of being “caught up” near suspicious sidewalk groups again. First and foremost, he re-routed his daily paths through the neighborhood streets to avoid not just those he knew to be associated with drug activity, but virtually any area that attracted large groups. This particularly included the sidewalks near the neighborhood's major service providers, community organizations, and public toilets. Displaying even more dedication to avoiding police contact, Tyrell timed all his walking routes from his front door to the various bus stops in the area. He discovered that if he could sync his walking times with the transit schedule, he could effectively eliminate the need to stand idly on the sidewalk.

Residents’ efforts to move purposefully through neighborhood spaces and avoid idle chit-chat often made fieldwork difficult and frustrating. In early field notes, I described Tyrell and several other men as “fast moving targets” as they breezed past me during serendipitous encounters on the street. On two occasions, Tyrell and I concluded our brief greetings some twenty feet apart, with Tyrell walking backwards, refusing to slow his brisk pace toward his ultimate destination. On one occasion, I jogged to catch up with him. To my surprise, we arrived at the bus stop just as the bus pulled to the curb. We took our seats and began the twenty-minute ride to a nearby discount grocery store. Tyrell apologized for his earlier brevity and explained why he could not afford to miss this particular bus. Since his most recent detainment, he had begun restricting his movements beyond his SRO room to the early mornings. Tyrell pointed out of the nearby window to illustrate his point. On the sidewalk, two officers stood questioning a middle-aged black woman who struggled against her handcuffs. Tyrell narrated the scene:

Anticipating how officers anticipated their more privileged targets to behave–including these individuals’ sleep schedules–Tyrell was typically off the streets and self-sequestered in his room by the early afternoon. On our return to his SRO building, Tyrell breezed past a group of neighbors who stood just outside the front door. Pointing back at the group, Tyrell warned me that “it's just a matter of time before five-oh comes by rubber-necking and wants to see what's up. I'm not trying to be a part of that.”

Like Tyrell's re-interpretation of various times of the day, residents also draw on their cop wisdom to assign new significance to particular days on the calendar. For Skid Row residents, the first few days of each month can be simultaneously relieving and anxiety-filled. Like many other poor neighborhoods, a significant portion of residents are dependent on monthly social welfare payments, whether it is a GR, Veteran's Benefit, Supplemental Security Income (SSI), Social Security, or disability check. These payments are typically distributed in the first week of the month, a period that residents refer to as “Mother's Day.” During Mother's Day, residents are once again able to pay their rent, buy groceries, wash clothes, settle debts, and afford entertainment. Yet, Mother's Day also promises intensified patrols and increased police stops. During this period, Skid Row's already-busy streets teem with additional activity and a higher number of seemingly-idle bodies as residents trek out to run their various errands. Compounding this dilemma, Central Division leadership and beat officers openly rationalize that with more money in residents’ hands and circulating through the neighborhood, this period will yield the highest number of narcotics arrests. As a result, the division's brass calls for increased narcotics investigations and street stops.

Following an unexpected detainment and arrest just after he received his GR payment, Houston, a razor-thin black resident, resolved to “put his blinders on” when he ventured into public around Mother's Day. This meant refraining from public conversations with strangers and nonstrangers alike:

Houston's modifications to his daily round attest to the lengths residents go to literally synchronize their lives with the rhythm of policing.

It is necessary to briefly pause here to highlight the recursive logic underlying copwise residents’ cognitive schemas. These re-interpretations of people, space, and time reveals that residents build their cop wisdom on a foundation provided by street wisdom. At the same time, however, cop wisdom also intensifies street wisdom. In the course of their efforts to anticipate and avoid police contact, residents become even more heavily invested in noticing and avoiding potential signs of criminality and danger given off by others as well as themselves. While a resident like Tyrell designs his daily round primarily to preclude police contact, he does so in a way that necessarily reduces his presence in situations that might lead to criminal victimization. In order to avoid being misrecognized by police as an opportunistic street criminal, for instance, Tyrell avoids traversing poorly lit streets at night, where these kinds of offenders might be inclined to search for victims. One ironic result of cop wisdom, then, is that it indirectly leads some individuals to more stridently avoid those who might do them harm. This elevated safety, however, comes at a price.

Residents’ paranoiac adjustments to their daily round carry important implications for the perpetuation of urban inequality, as cop wisdom leads residents to intentionally constrict their opportunities for public sociality. These transitory public interactions that criminalized residents strive to circumnavigate are anything but trivial (see Reference Morrill, Snow and WhiteMorrill et al. 2005). Particularly for the urban poor, these moments are vital for developing “disposable ties” (Reference DesmondDesmond 2012)–the short-lived social relations between new acquaintances that result in reciprocal or semi-reciprocal resource exchange. In the face of inadequate primary and kin-based social ties, many of the urban poor rely heavily on disposable ties with virtual strangers in order to make ends meet, whether it is moving in with one another, pooling income, or raising children. As Reference DesmondMatthew Desmond (2012) finds, bus stops are one of the quintessential sites for developing disposable ties. These are locations that gather people with similar needs and provide idle time for low-stakes small talk with strangers.

Problematically, in Skid Row, as in other poor neighborhoods (Reference RiosRios 2011; Reference GoffmanGoffman 2014), even bus stops have become subject to heavy police surveillance and enforcement. The cultural frame that develops in response renders the necessary contexts (public space) and behaviors (impromptu conversations between strangers) as things to be actively avoided. Scotty, an unemployed black resident in his thirties, is a case in point. Scotty was excited when he received a lead on an off-the-books job at a shipping warehouse on the edge of Skid Row. Yet, when he arrived at the pre-determined time and found the building locked, he quickly grew anxious. He continued banging on the door, but only waited twenty minutes before rapidly heading home. “I can't be standing out there like a sitting duck,” he told me the next week. “How's that gonna look to these cops? Like I'm casing the joint, that's how.” Scotty complained that, due to his fear of being misrecognized by the police, he felt fearful to ask nearby pedestrians for information or help. Dejected, Scotty returned to the warehouse once more before finally giving up on the potential job.

Of course, not all residents are so averse to public space. Indeed, many continue to inhabit public spaces and rub shoulders with strangers. Yet, as the next section reveals, when they do so, this contact is frequently characterized by apprehension, fear, and even hostility toward fellow residents.

Informal Social Control: “Cooling off the Block”

Many residents of criminalized neighborhoods simply do not have the option of self-sequester and isolation. For some, basic economic survival requires that they spend much of their waking hours in highly trafficked public spaces. Skid Row's street vendors constitute one such group. The nature of their economic enterprise precludes the possibility of simply sidestepping those people, places, and times that are most likely to draw heightened police protection. Turning a profit often requires remaining stationary and visible for multiple hours at a time, in a location that provides a steady flow of potential customers. While afternoons and Mother's Day may bring intensified police patrols, these periods also promise a substantial increase in profits. Faced with this dilemma, these residents mobilize their acquired cop wisdom in an alternative manner, by carving distance from officers’ privileged targets through more active and confrontational means. In order to forestall police contact, these residents physically banish and displace particular individuals, behaviors, and scenarios from the immediate vicinity.

Throughout my fieldwork alongside the vendors, I was struck by the rigorous public order they maintained along the adjacent sidewalks. They constantly tidied the sidewalk, quelled arguments, and directed street and sidewalk traffic (see also Reference DuneierDuneier 1999). Of all the activities they regulated, however, none received more concerted reproach than drug-related behavior. Upon noticing a nearby pedestrian attempting to roll a marijuana blunt, load a crack pipe, or solicit narcotics from other pedestrians, the vendors would gang up to reprimand the individual and forcefully run them off the block. During one illustrative occasion, a young dealer in crisp clothing and bright red sneakers walked slowly past the collection of sidewalk shops with two desperate-looking customers in tow. He stopped to dig into his pockets and handed a small, clear plastic baggie to one of his customers. Noticing the transaction, a heavy-set vendor named Keith called out to him. “Hey man,” he yelled, “I can't have you pushing that poison out here. That shit ain't cool!” At first the dealer did not budge. However, three other vendors quickly extracted themselves from their ongoing sales to take several steps toward the dealer and order him to vacate the area. Seeing he was outnumbered, the dealer put his product back in his pocket and ordered his now-confused customers to follow him up the street.

Continually interfering into the local drug economy and collectively ensuring public order, the vendors appear to be acting as quintessential examples of Reference JacobsJacobs’ (1993 [1961]) famed eyes on the street. At first glance, the vendors’ behavior also provides modest confirmation of broken windows hypothesis that when residents observe intensified police patrols, they will feel compelled to more actively engage in informal social control. I made a concerted effort to question the vendors about neighborhood conditions prior to the launch of SCI in 2006. To a man, they verified that their voluntary regulation of surrounding activity had not been as forceful prior to the escalating levels of police contact that they witnessed or experienced firsthand. Yet, fieldwork observations also revealed that the men undertook these new informal controls as a result of a mechanism that was drastically different than that outlined in the broken windows thesis. The vendors did not become more active eyes on the street because the influx of police decreased their fear of crime and criminals. Rather, they began intensely regulating their surroundings because the influx of police increased both their fear of police and their heightened probability of police contact.

In fact, prior to the launch of SCI, the vendors treated nearby drug activity with notable ambivalence. A number of the vendors described a tacit “understanding” and “truce” between themselves and local drug dealers. A vendor named Larry, for example, emphasized that the two economic sets of actors draw from the same customer base; the presence of drug sales often increased his own profits. “It was live and let live,” he told me one evening as we stood next to his inventory, which included several piles of snack food and sodas. “To be honest, there were days when I made more money when cats were out here selling that chronic [marijuana]. When people get high, they get the munchies. … I was right there to hook them up.”

This unspoken truce eroded, however, once the men began to feel the effects of the LAPD's new enforcement strategy. One evening, I asked Keith, Larry, and another vendor, named Jerome, to detail their experiences. Like Tyrell and Houston, who adjusted their daily round so as not to be caught up near officer's “real” targets, the vendors described their own criminalization as a case of mistaken identity.

Through what they understood to be repeated cases of mistaken identity, the vendors thus concluded that the visible or even suspected presence of narcotics activity was likely to result in police suspicion and intervention. While the vendors accepted that they could not eliminate police encounters altogether, they recognized that they were not powerless. As Larry's role play captures, they tried to reduce their odds of police contact by constantly re-reading the street scene through the eyes of officers and preemptively expelling likely police targets before officers arrived on the scene and carried out this task through more formal, blunt, and punitive means. Referring to this pre-policing task as “cooling off the block,” the men cemented a system of informal social control that neither Reference JacobsJacobs (1993 [1961]) nor Reference Wilson and KellingWilson and Kelling (1982) had likely imagined. When the eyes on the street are compelled to see like a cop, the resulting regulation is primarily intended to diminish the reach, impact, and effectiveness of the police. As the remainder of this section details, these informal controls also carry the potential to further undermine community cohesion, undercut the possibilities of individual and collective mobility, and internally reinforce territorial stigma.

Discussion and Conclusion

The meteoric expansion of the criminal justice system and the spread of zero-tolerance policing subject the daily lives and activities of much of America's urban poor to a historic level of police surveillance and enforcement. This study unites research on the collateral consequences of criminal justice and cultural analysis to offer a more systematic approach for understanding the diffuse effects of street-level criminalization. Drawing on the idea of cultural frames, the analysis shows that police hyper-vigilance leads residents to cultivate cop wisdom in order to better circumvent intrusive police contact. By re-reading their physical and social environment through the eyes of passing officers, residents aim to better distance themselves from those individuals, behaviors, and scenarios they surmise to attract officer scrutiny. In Skid Row, the resulting tactics for circumventing the police carry the alarming potential to hinder social capital, spur a hostile and racialized public order, and further actualize stigma. The cultural frames individuals develop throughout interactions with police officers thus mediate their ongoing routines and relationships in a manner that “adds up” to a shared cultural context. It is important to note that we need not view cop wisdom, or any other cultural frame, as monolithic or deterministic. Rather, individuals often hold multiple and even competing frames that they deploy in different contexts and at different times (see Reference HardingHarding 2007).

Conceptually, cop wisdom reconciles poor residents’ discrete and, at times, contradictory responses to criminalization currently found in the literature. This study shows that while individuals may resort to contrasting coping techniques–one person might alter their self-presentation in public, another might avoid particular places, and still another might forcibly banish suspicious looking people–these responses are united by a common interpretive project in which these individuals attempt to anticipate officers’ perceptions of a given scenario. With each successive police encounter, individuals gain additional opportunities to compile and analyze an increasing volume of data about officers’ likely perceptions, tendencies, and behaviors in a given scenario. The variance in coping techniques is thus a product of both past experiences and the situational exigencies at hand.

This article advances sociolegal research in several additional respects. For legal consciousness scholarship, the analysis of cop wisdom directs attention to an unexamined mechanism by which the law shapes the subjectivities and actions of citizens. Here I am referring to the process of “role taking” (Reference BlumerBlumer 1986; Reference StrykerStryker 2003) by which Skid Row residents anticipate and internalize the perspective of formal legal actors, in this case police officers. Throughout foundational and contemporary writings, legal consciousness scholars have intentionally shifted focus away from the perspectives of attorneys, judges, and other formal legal actors to ask how everyday people draw the line between acceptable or unacceptable behaviors (Reference MerryMerry 1990). This move has allowed researchers to better capture how ordinary citizens understand and behave regarding the law. The preceding pages suggest, however, that legal consciousness scholarship can benefit from “re-injecting” these formal legal actors back into our analyses, albeit in a revised manner.

To date, researchers have explained the variations in how citizens view and respond to potentially problematic behavior, such as sexual harassment or offensive public speech, by pointing to demographic factors, including race, class, and gender (Reference NielsenNielsen 2004), or contextual factors, such as workplace or national culture (Reference MarshallMarshall 2003; Reference SaguySaguy 2003). Yet, as the Skid Row case reveals, citizens often engage in these normative evaluations based on the evaluations they anticipate that local legal actors will make. Recall that Skid Row residents form normative judgments about things like homelessness or drug activity largely through the eyes of officers. This means that factors like demographics and context still matter, but they necessarily occupy a different position in our explanatory models. These factors will remain associated with citizens’ contrasting schemas primarily because individuals of varying races, classes, and genders (who live and work within different contexts) are exposed to very different legal actors that are operating in accordance with different imperatives. If everyday people are indeed attempting to “see” like one formal legal actor or another, future analyses should make explicit attempts to identify which actor this may be in a given situation, how citizens concretely take on this role, and how these thought experiments inform their subsequent actions.

The findings also advance research on informal social control. Social disorganization theorists tend to operate on the premise that an increase of informal control is an unambiguous improvement for disadvantaged communities (Bursik and Grasmick 1993; Reference ShawShaw 1929; Reference Sampson and Byron GrovesSampson and Groves 1989). This increase is seen as a rather straightforward sign that residents have grown more willing to collectively solve neighborhood problems. Yet, as this article demonstrates, not all increases in informal control are equally beneficial. In Skid Row, the increase in street-level criminalization reshapes precisely who and what residents come to define as a “problem” in the first place. Although the vendors increased their voluntary regulations, they did so to the ultimate detriment of community cohesion and vitality. To date, social disorganization research has been primarily concerned with the quantitative levels of informal controls–that is, the extent to which voluntary regulation increases or decreases as the result of internal and external stimuli. However, this study indicates that informal controls have a critical, though surprisingly neglected qualitative dimension. Any increases in voluntary regulation mean little and remain decontextualized if we do not also consider who and what is the ultimate target of these regulations.

Regarding the generalizability of cop wisdom, recent scholarship and national events provide evidence that this cultural frame is hardly unique to Skid Row. Indeed, cop wisdom proliferates among criminalized communities across the US and the globe. Over the last several years, the American public has become familiar with the names of an increasing number of young black men killed at the hands of police–names like Oscar Grant, Eric Garner, and Michael Brown. In reaction to these deaths, parents of young black men have sought to instill their children with a form of cop wisdom intended to reduce the probability of police contact and violence. One such parenting strategy has come to be known simply as “the talk” (Reference AmberAmber 2013; Reference Brunson and WeitzerBrunson and Weitzer 2011). The talk consists of a set of concrete instructions about how to behave when police officers may be nearby. Much like the catalog of dopefiend behaviors compiled and avoided by Skid Row residents, the talk lists a number of “don'ts” for young black men as they move through public spaces: Don't walk through unknown residential neighborhoods. Don't carry any dark or metallic items that can be mistaken for a gun. Don't leave any store without a receipt. Don't put your hoodie up. Don't run. The ubiquity of the talk in black households across the nation alerts us to the fact that an entire segment of the American population has been forced to become copwise, with all its advantages and disadvantages, as a rite of passage into adulthood. However, in instructing their children how to decrease the risk of misrecognition by officers, parents inevitably socialize their children to account for, internalize, and act upon the racial and class-based stereotypes that might color an officer's perceptions. As they instruct their children how to avoid acting like the “real” criminals, parents unwittingly provide an early lesson in lateral denigration and distancing.

The Skid Row data indicate that precisely how residents in other communities will act on their cop wisdom depends largely on how they are policed; it will depend on what particular appearances and behaviors officers deem suspicious, out of place, or generally worthy of further investigation. This is ultimately an empirical question, as well as a call for future comparative research. In Skid Row, officers direct much of their attention toward narcotics activity, which leads residents to adopt the corresponding innocence signals. In other neighborhoods, officers may be more concerned with interceding in different matters, such as gang activity or prostitution. Residents’ innocence signals will likely follow suit. For example, if officers perceive whiteness as a sign of innocence, residents may regard such individuals not as liabilities, as is the case in Skid Row, but rather as assets. While we would need to observe responses to policing in, say, the Bronx, East St. Louis, or Detroit to uncover the specific tactics residents use to avoid or reduce police scrutiny in those places, we will nonetheless continue to find that (the threat of) unwanted police contact intimately shapes residents’ perceptions of and interactions with their social and physical environment. We will also find that cop wisdom constricts certain social relationships and activities while emboldening others.