Cooling Off the Block: Informal Social Control in a Hyper-Policed Neighborhood

• In Event: 291 - Presidential Panel. Young Ethnographers: The Police, Surveillance, and Violence: The Next Generation of Ethnographic Work

Abstract

Since the 1990s, “zero tolerance” and broken-windows-inspired policing policies have been increasingly deployed in impoverished communities of color. Drawing on five years of fieldwork in Los Angeles’ Skid Row neighborhood – home to one of the most aggressive policing campaigns to date – this research investigates how the recent upswing in punitiveness impacts the everyday, lived reality of the urban poor. Specifically, this paper asks how the intensification of policing influences processes of informal social control. Fieldwork reveals that while aggressive policing increases residents’ willingness to exert voluntary regulation, this regulation is explicitly intended to subvert and undermine policing. In order to lessen their likelihood of becoming subject to a detainment, citation, and/or arrest, residents act swiftly (and sometimes violently) to purge the immediate vicinity of those individuals and behaviors that they anticipate will draw police attention and investigation. This informal regulatory system engenders stringent prohibition against criminal activity, particularly drug use and sales. Problematically, it also promotes vigilantism against a set of non-criminal and previously-tolerated individuals and behaviors. This surrogate form of policing can serve to undermine residents’ rehabilitative efforts and chances of upward mobility, while also reinforcing the racial and class stigmas pressing down on neighborhood residents.

Author

• Forrest Stuart, University of Chicago