Race, Space, and the Regulation of Surplus Labor: Policing African Americans in Los Angeles's Skid Row

Abstract

This essay examines the joint racial and class domination exercised in Los Angeles's Skid Row. Known widely as the “homeless capital of the United States,” Skid Row has become home to a predominantly African American population, drawn to the area by social services that have been purposefully relocated from other parts of the city. Through the partnership of criminal justice and social welfare institutions, this population is “reprogrammed” in work-training programs and siphoned into subpoverty jobs under threat of incarceration. These institutions serve as instruments of labor extraction and control, sanctioning “nonproductive” means of subsistence, enforcing capitalist norms of leisure, and strengthening the symbiosis between the state and the owning class, all under the auspices of a race-neutral “broken windows” theory of law enforcement.

Keywords:

• broken windows
• homelessness
• policing
• Skid Row
• welfare

Notes

The data for this analysis were obtained through a combination of archival, ethnographic, and interview-based methods of sociological inquiry. Much of the data derive from more than 15,000 pages of public records provided under the California Public Records Act by the Los Angeles Police Department, Office of the City Attorney, and Skid Row service organizations, acquired in a series of earlier research projects. These records include meeting minutes, internal memoranda, administrative procedures, financial records, and email correspondence between service organizations, police, and government officials. Information contained in archival documents was supplemented with interviews with actors involved throughout the area's historical development, as well as ethnographic fieldwork in today's Skid Row.

David Harvey, Spaces of Capital: Toward a Critical Geography (New York: Routledge, 2001), 297.

Karl Marx, Capital: An Abridged Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).

Ibid., 352.

Peter Linebaugh, “Karl Marx, the Theft of Wood, and Working-Class Composition: A Contribution to the Current Debate,” Crime and Social Justice: Issues in Criminology 6 (1976): 5–16; Steven Hahn, “Hunting, Fishing, and Foraging: Common Rights and Class Relations in the Postbellum South,” Radical History Review 26 (1982): 37–64; Cyril D. Robinson, “The Production of Black Violence in Chicago,” in Crime and Capitalism: Readings in Marxist Criminology, ed. David F Greenberg (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 279–333.

Marx, Capital, 372.

Hahn, Hunting, Fishing, and Foraging.

Ibid., 51.

Karl Marx, “Population, Crime, and Pauperism,” New York Daily Tribune, September 16, 1859.

Thierry J. Noyelle and Thomas M. Stanback Jr., The Economic Transformation of American Cities (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1984).

Jennifer Wolch and Michael Dear, Malign Neglect: Homelessness in an American City (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1993).

Ibid.

According to government guidelines, “affordability” is determined by a rent-to-household-income ratio of 30 percent.

Wolch and Dear, Malign Neglect.

Paul Starr, “The Meaning of Privatization,” Yale Law and Policy Review 6 (1988): 6–41.

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Jaime Peck, Workfare States (New York: Guilford, 2001).

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Ann Withorn, “Friends or Foes? Non-Profits and the Puzzle of Welfare Reform,” in Albeda and Withorn, Lost Ground, 145–161.

Gilda Haas and Allan David Heskin, “Community Struggles in Los Angeles,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 5 (1991): 546–564; Edward G. Goetz, “Land Use and Homeless Policy in Los Angeles,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 16 (1992): 540–554.

Los Angeles Community Design Center, Skid Row: Recommendations to Citizens Advisory Committee on the Central Business District Plan for the City of Los Angeles: Part 4, Physical Containment (Los Angeles: Los Angeles Community Design Center, 1976), 14.

See Samuel E. Wallace, Skid Row as a Way of Life (New York: Bedminster Press, 1965); Howard M. Bahr, Skid Row: An Introduction to Disaffiliation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).

Wolch and Dear, Malign Neglect; Gary Blasi, Policing Our Way out of Homelessness? The First Year of the Safer Cities Initiative on Skid Row (Los Angeles: Inter-University Consortium Against Homelessness, 2007).

Los Angeles Community Action Network, Black Paper: Demographics and Skid Row Los Angeles (Los Angeles: Los Angeles Community Action Network, 2010).

Gary Blasi and Forrest Stuart, Has the Safer Cities Initiative in Skid Row Reduced Serious Crime? (Los Angeles: UCLA School of Law, 2008).

Blasi, Policing Our Way.

Blasi and Stuart, Safer Cities Initiative in Skid Row.

William J. Bratton and Sean W Malinowski, “Police Performance Management in Practice: Taking Compstat to the Next Level,” Policing 2 (2008): 259–265.

Richard Winton and Kristina Sauerwein, “LAPD Tests New Policing Strategy; Chief Picks Three Areas as Proving Grounds for His ‘Broken Windows’ System to Fight Crime,” Los Angeles Times, 2003, 1; Sonya Geis, “L.A. Police Initiative Thins Out Skid Row,” Washington Post, March 15, 2007, A3.

James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling, “Broken Windows,” Atlantic Monthly, March 1982, 29–38.

David Garland, The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Bernard Harcourt, Illusion of Order: The False Promises of Broken Windows Policing (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001).

Harcourt, Illusion of Order, 2001.

See Gary Stewart, “Black Codes and Broken Windows: The Legacy of Racial Hegemony in Anti-Gang Civil Injunctions,” Yale Law Journal 107 (1998): 2249–2279; Andrew Gelman, Jeffrey Fagan, and Alex Kiss, “An Analysis of the New York City Police Department's ‘Stop-and-Frisk’ Policy in the Context of Claims of Racial Bias,” Journal of the American Statistical Association 102 (2007): 813–823; Loïc Wacquant, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009).

Robert J. Sampson and Stephen W. Raudenbush, “Seeing Disorder: Neighborhood Stigma and the Social Construction of ‘Broken Windows,‘” Social Psychology Quarterly 67 (2004): 319–342.

Chris Rojek, “The Convoy of Pollution,” Leisure Studies 7 (1988): 20–31.

Tim Cresswell, In Place, out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).

Los Angeles Community Action Network, Black Paper.

Ryan Vaillancourt, “The Halo Effect,” Los Angeles Downtown News, June 12 2009, 1.

Blasi, Policing Our Way out of Homelessness.

Ari B. Bloomkatz, “Skid Row Haven Was Drug Site, Police Say,” Los Angeles Times, August 12, 2009, A1.

City Council File Number 02-2214, “Serving Homeless Population.”

Data for the analysis comprised 622 citations processed during a free legal clinic hosted by the Los Angeles Community Action Network (LACAN), between January 1 and November 4, 2009. LACAN is a grassroots community organization made up of current and formerly homeless Skid Row residents, and it has hosted a Citation Defense Program since 2004. The program enables residents to utilize legal services free of charge to challenge their citation.

Wacquant, Punishing the Poor, 200.

Forrest Stuart, “Constructing Police Abuse After Rodney King: How Skid Row Residents and the Los Angeles Police Department Contest Video Evidence,” Law and Social Inquiry, forthcoming.

Chris McGreal, “Banned by Bush, UN Investigator Reveals America's Housing Shame,” The Guardian, November 13, 2009, 26.

Edna Bonacich, Jake Alimahomed-Wilson, and Forrest Stuart, “Confronting Racism, Capitalism, and Ecological Degradation: Urban Farming and the Struggle for Social Justice,” paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, Atlanta, August 14–17, 2010.