From ’Rabble Management’ to ’Recovery Management’: Policing Homelessness in Marginal Urban Space

Abstract

Over the past three decades, scholars have documented the emergence of a new model of urban governance predicated on the spatial exclusion of visible poverty. In order to revitalise and recommodify the prime spaces of the urban core, municipal leaders enlist the police to coercively relocate homeless people to marginal spaces. Unfortunately, little is known about the policing of homelessness in those areas into which homeless people are exiled. To address this lacuna, this article employs an ethnographic analysis of police patrols in Los Angeles’ Skid Row district. The findings demonstrate that, contrary to the dominant framework of exclusion, policing in marginal space takes on a disciplinary model of ‘recovery management’ designed to coercively shepherd homeless people into rehabilitative programmes and ameliorate the individual pathologies deemed responsible for homelessness. The article thus provides an analysis of how, why and with what consequences the policing of homelessness varies over space.

Keywords

discretion homelessness marginal space police Skid Row

Introduction

Over the past three decades, a number of cities across the globe have implemented ‘quality-of-life’ policing campaigns criminalising the behaviours and activities associated with homelessness. For a growing body of scholarship, this trend is evidence of an emerging model of urban governance that seeks to regulate visible poverty by means of spatial exclusion rather than rehabilitation or reintegration (for a review, see DeVerteuil et al., 2009; Beckett and Herbert, 2008; see also Young, 1999). The argument is now well-rehearsed: due to increasing pressure to redevelop and revitalise the urban core, municipal leaders have enlisted the police to systematically ‘purify’ streets and sidewalks. By expanding the number of commonplace behaviours subject to criminal law, police officers are granted new legal authority to expel homeless people from coveted public spaces (see Mitchell, 1997; Duneier, 1999; Beckett and Herbert, 2008, 2011). Considered the ‘zeitgeist’ of urban restructuring (Davis, 1992), spatial exclusion has quickly become the dominant framework—what DeVerteuil et al. (2009, p. 650) term an “obligatory point of passage”—through which discussions of homelessness, policing and public space must now proceed.

While the recent intensification in the policing of homelessness is undeniable, a growing number of commentators argue that the prevailing framework risks obscuring the increasingly varied and complex geographies of urban poverty and its corresponding social control (see Yarwood, 2007; DeVerteuil et al., 2009; Walby and Lippert, 2012). Specifically, existing studies focus narrowly on the policing taking place in what David Snow and Leon Anderson (1993) refer to as ‘prime’ spaces—spaces that are primarily used and valued by domiciled and ‘mainstream’ society. Rather than document more examples of the same, these critics urge researchers to begin examining policing in those ‘marginal’ spaces into which homeless people are being expelled (DeVerteuil et al., 2009; Cloke et al., 2008; Walby and Lippert, 2012).

This article takes up this charge through an ethnographic examination of policing in Los Angeles’ Skid Row district. By shifting focus to Skid Row—an area that homelessness scholars have long designated as a quintessential marginal space (Wolch and Dear, 1993; Huey and Kemple, 2007)—this article provides a more comprehensive spatial analysis, identifying how, why and with what consequences policing varies over space. Widely regarded as the ‘homeless capital of America’ (Nagourney, 2010), Los Angeles’ Skid Row is the site of one of the most intense order maintenance policing campaigns to this date. In an explicit effort to address homelessness on Skid Row’s streets, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) launched the Safer Cities Initiative (SCI), which redeployed 80 additional officers into the neighbourhood’s 50 square-blocks. Overnight, Skid Row became home to arguably the largest concentration of standing police forces in the United States (Blasi and Stuart, 2008). In the initiative’s first year alone, officers made 9000 arrests and issued 12,000 citations related primarily to quality-of-life offences. These numbers come at a rate that is as much as 69 times higher than other parts of the city (Blasi, 2007).

At first glance, SCI might be interpreted as yet another attempt to expel homeless people from urban space. However, extended observations of police patrols reveal an additional and heretofore overlooked policing function. In Skid Row, officers draw extensively on available quality-of-life laws as a resource to ‘shepherd’ homeless individuals into rehabilitative social services, including drug recovery, ‘life skills’, and employment programmes. Thus, while policing in prime space aligns with impulses of exclusion (Herbert and Brown, 2006), policing in marginal space takes on a more disciplinary, paternalist mode of poverty governance that attempts to address the individual pathologies deemed responsible for homeless people’s economic, social and moral failings.

The analysis proceeds in four parts. The first section describes recent policing campaigns to exclude homeless people from prime space and questions how officer discretion and differential spatial orders influence this process. In order to consider the role of these factors in marginal space, the second section reviews what is arguably the most influential study of both police discretion and policing in marginal space: Egon Bittner’s (1967) classic, The police on Skid Row: a study of peacekeeping. After briefly describing the contemporary Skid Row context and the methodological approach, the third section conducts an ‘ethnographic revisit’ to Bittner’s (1967) Skid Row. An ethnographic revisit is an intensive comparison of one’s own fieldwork with a prior ethnography of the same site, pinpointing variation between the two periods and accounting for historical change in local processes (Burawoy, 2003). The historical comparison demonstrates that, while Skid Row officers throughout the 20th century acted primarily as ‘rabble managers’ aiding in the exclusion of homeless people from the urban core by quarantining them in Skid Row, contemporary officers act primarily as ‘recovery managers’ acting on behalf of rehabilitative organisations to transform homeless people into sober, self-governing and responsible citizens. The concluding section discusses the implications of this shift for the regulation and construction of homelessness and homeless people more generally.

Spatial Exclusion and the Policing of Homelessness

For a large body of urban scholarship, the policing of homeless people—arguably the most visible index of economic and welfare state restructuring (Mohan, 2002)—has become a crucial lens for understanding larger transformations in urban governance and social control. As much of this work chronicles, global neoliberalisation (Peck and Tickell, 2002)—particularly deindustrialisation and deregulation—throughout the second half of the 20th century led to intense interurban competition to attract mobile capital and international finance. Facing the suburban flight of high-income earners and the depreciation of the urban core, city managers increasingly turn to entrepreneurial agendas to revitalise downtowns, maximise the profitability of retail spaces and provide boosts to the tourism and convention industry (MacLeod, 2002). Problematically, the growing presence of homeless people—dislocated by neoliberal policies devolving and privatising social welfare, eroding affordable and public housing, and reducing employment and wages—significantly obstructs this effort. Images of unkempt, unpredictable, and mentally unstable individuals along thoroughfares, in parks, and on benches inhibit designs to reinvigorate the urban centre as a viable site for capital accumulation.

In response, municipal leaders turn to innovations in law enforcement to expel homeless people from redeveloping downtown areas. To do so, cities draft new quality-of-life ordinances and revive neglected ‘civility laws’ that narrowly criminalise the behaviours upon which homeless people commonly rely for daily survival, including loitering, panhandling, sleeping, sitting on the sidewalk and other so-called ‘disorderly’ activities. These prohibitions on commonplace and often-mundane behaviours dramatically expand officers’ discretionary power to conduct stops, interrogations and searches, and issue ‘move-along’ orders for which they would otherwise lack legal authority and/or probable cause (Beckett and Herbert, 2011). For example, police officers throughout England and Wales deploy Anti-social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs)—broad prohibitions against “actions that cause or are likely to cause harassment, alarm, or distress”—to displace homeless individuals engaged in street drinking, panhandling or rough sleeping (Johnsen and Fitzpatrick, 2010). In Seattle, USA, officers rely on new trespass laws, parks exclusion orders and off-limits orders to banish homeless people from private and public areas (Beckett and Herbert, 2008, 2011). In Ottawa, Canada, conservation officers utilise vague ‘nuisance’ and ‘anti-camping’ by-laws to disperse homeless people from city parks and monuments (Walby and Lippert, 2012). As analysts of police discretion consistently remind, officers are not enforcing these laws ‘for the law’s sake’, but rather draw upon them as a resource to accomplish other, informal tasks for which they typically possess no direct legal mandate (Bittner, 1967; Herbert, 1997).

For criminologists and legal geographers, the widespread adoption of exclusionary policing tactics—increasingly directed toward the aesthetics and effects of homelessness rather than its causes—is evidence of a decline of the rehabilitative ideal in urban governance (Harcourt, 2001; Merry, 2001; Vitale, 2008). According to this argument, crime control no longer attempts to normalise or transform deviants. Instead, it is guided by a more modest, managerial goal of merely regulating the risks and inconveniences deviants pose to the public (Feeley and Simon, 1992). Consistently pursued to the detriment of the wellbeing of homeless individuals (see Walby and Lippert, 2012), this ‘post-disciplinary’ approach is happy to settle for broken citizens, so long as they are kept at an adequate distance.

In a forceful critique of this narrative, however, DeVerteuil et al. (2009) contend that current analyses have been remarkably slow to follow the regulation of homelessness beyond the boundaries of redeveloping downtowns to those marginal spaces into which this population is ‘disappeared’ (see also Walby and Lippert, 2012). As a result, existing research misses how law enforcement varies across space; how, despite prevailing depictions of policing as necessarily exclusionary and non-rehabilitative, police regulation of homelessness is spatially contingent, serving alternative functions in different spaces according to the social relations found in them. As policing research historically finds, officer discretion—how they elect to enforce the law—is shaped by a host of extra-legal factors, among which location is paramount (see Fyfe, 1991; Yarwood, 2007). Officers associate particular areas with particular spatial orders, or ‘normative geographies’ (Cresswell, 1996) that delineate what is right, just and appropriate within a given space. As Herbert’s work on the spatiality of policing reminds, officers

read situations against what is normal or typical for a location. … [T]he location of a given action shapes how they understand what is transpiring and how they should respond (Herbert, 1997, p. 21).

It is necessary, then, to begin investigating law enforcement in a marginal space like Skid Row. Unlike the urban core, Skid Row districts have been ceded to impoverished, homeless and other marginal populations. As a result, they are characterised by a contrasting normative geography that diverges significantly from that which is attributed to prime spaces. This divergence raises important questions. How do police officers patrol an area long designated as the ‘natural habitat’ of the property-less and powerless (Anderson, 1923; Snow and Anderson, 1993)? To what ends do officers deploy quality-of-life ordinances and civility laws in a space where homeless individuals are thought to ‘belong’?

Policing in Marginal Space: Revisiting Bittner’s Skid Row

Cities across the globe are increasingly concentrating their homeless populations in marginal space, particularly in ‘service-dependent ghettos’ (Wolch and Dear, 1993) exemplified by Skid Row (von Mahs, 2013). Yet, when policing in marginal space is considered at all, it is overwhelmingly presumed to pursue the same exclusionary, non-rehabilitative ends observed in prime space. Rather than expel homeless people, policing in Skid Rows is theorised to exert an inverse, centripetal pressure to contain and invisibilise homelessness (Davis, 1992; Harcourt, 2005). This common suggestion derives largely from the work of Egon Bittner (1967), arguably the most influential scholar on both policing in marginal space and officer discretion.

Examining Skid Row patrols in the mid 20th century, Bittner (1967) reveals a close relationship between officers’ conceptualisations of the neighbourhood and their daily law enforcement behaviours. Uniformly viewing Skid Row as a ‘rabble zone’—a site expressly intended to quarantine offensive populations (see also Irwin, 1985)—officers functioned as ‘rabble managers’, which primarily entailed preventing Skid Row’s problems from ‘spilling over’ into the rest of the city or onto the larger municipal radar, while also precluding its inhabitants from preying excessively upon one another. To do so, officers mobilised a host of vague status offences—including prohibitions against vagrancy and drunkenness—to provide the grounds they required to make a coercive intervention. Operating according to an ‘ideal economy of intervention’ (Bittner, 1967), officers directed their attention and resources to those individuals they perceived to represent the greatest threats to containment, systematically ignoring non-threats and at times only deciding formal charges after the fact.

In one oft-cited example, Bittner (1967, pp. 709–710) describes an officer’s differential handling of two Skid Row alcoholics, named ‘Dakota’ and ‘Big Jim’. Noticing a growing companionship between the two men, the officer predicted that Dakota would be likely to rob Big Jim. Relying on the availability of the drunk law, the officer elected to arrest and jail Big Jim, although not Dakota, in order to interrupt the anticipated chain of events. While both men were equally ‘guilty’ under the law, the officer deemed Big Jim’s arrest as more necessary under the larger rubric of rabble management. The officer predicted that, had he chosen to arrest Dakota instead, Big Jim would have simply struck up a liaison with a different man, who would have been likely to have robbed him as well.

Skid Row officers rationalised their discretionary treatment by appealing to a shared conviction that police action had no real or long-term effect on neighbourhood inhabitants. In the words of one officer, “[We] can’t do anything for them; they’re through and will never be anything” (McSheehy, 1979, p. 66). As a result, officers’ patrol practices were largely antithetical to rehabilitation and reintegration. While the occasional police intervention might have had the incidental effect of placing a Skid Row inhabitant in a more therapeutic setting, like a detoxification facility or hospital, this goal was peripheral at best. Other studies conducted at the time show that police interventions often exacerbated material destitution and encouraged a deeper commitment to the Skid Row sub-culture (for example, Spradley, 1970).

Following a brief discussion of the setting and methodological approach, the remainder of the article compares Bittner’s (1967) observations to officer behaviour in contemporary Skid Row in order to consider relevant alterations in the spatial order, policing imperatives and daily patrol practices.

Setting and Methods

Fieldwork was conducted as part of a larger ethnographic project investigating police practices in Los Angeles’ Skid Row. Located within the Los Angeles Police Department’s (LAPD) Central Division, Skid Row is a 50 square-block area east of downtown. The area contains approximately 15,000 inhabitants, who are predominantly African American (70–75 per cent). Roughly one-third of the population is characterised as homeless, sleeping in the streets, in shelters or in temporary housing. The remainder of the population resides in single-room occupancy (SRO) hotels and low-income housing. According to a 2005 Los Angeles Housing Department survey of 9113 SRO residents, the median was found to be $4588.¹ This places the majority of hotel residents below the 30 per cent mark for ‘very low income’ designated by the Census Bureau and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Approximately 45 per cent of the survey’s respondents reported a disability or mental illness. Ninety per cent of respondents report that they are unemployed.

From 2007 to 2011, fieldwork was conducted throughout Skid Row’s streets, parks, service facilities, community organisations and the Central Division station, documenting the manner in which police policies and practices shaped neighbourhood social dynamics (Stuart, 2011a, 2011b; Deener et al., 2013). In order to better understand contemporary patrol practices, 10–30 hours per week were spent shadowing officers while on patrol and during community relations events, including monthly community policing meetings as well as ‘public safety walks’ in which officers provided city officials and visitors tours throughout the neighbourhood. Fieldwork was supplemented by more than 15,000 pages of public records documents, including internal memoranda, email correspondence and meeting minutes provided under the California Public Records Act by the Los Angeles Police Department and Skid Row service organisations.

Re-envisioning Contemporary Skid Row: A ‘Recovery Zone’

While the daily task of maintaining Skid Row’s spatial order remains squarely in the hands of the police, officers’ conception of that order has significantly shifted in the almost five decades since Bittner’s (1967) observations. In official departmental statements and throughout regular interactions with fellow officers, local organisations and neighbourhood inhabitants, officers reference Skid Row not as a rabble zone, but as what officers explicitly term a ‘recovery zone’—that is, a site for (re)training homeless individuals in the attitudes, values and behaviours that will allow them to rejoin mainstream society.

The reach of this sentiment throughout the department’s organisational hierarchy and culture is captured in a series of monthly newsletters written by one of Skid Row’s senior lead officers (SLOs). In one particular edition, distributed by fellow patrol officers, as well as published on the official LAPD online homepage, the SLO reflects on the changes he has observed throughout his lengthy tenure in the neighbourhood

In my walks through skid row over twelve years, I have discovered the rehabilitative aspects of skid row. … The majority of the community desires to make skid row a true community for individuals struggling with the disease of addiction, homelessness and mental illness. … [A]n environment conducive to change in the lives of people struggling with a variety of issues…where people can have a better chance of taking their lives back.

The SLO goes so far as to dub Skid Row ‘the poor man’s Malibu’, thereby repositioning the neighbourhood as a low-cost alternative to the nearby and famous beach town of Malibu, California, which has become synonymous with drug rehabilitation and detox clinics catering to wealthy and celebrity clients, including Charlie Sheen, Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears. This analogy is a striking departure from the sentiments recorded during Bittner’s (1967) era. Rather than conceive of Skid Row as a permanent quarantine for untreatable and abnormal populations, today’s officers envision the neighbourhood as a transitional and rehabilitative urban space.

What explains this dramatic shift? Policing scholarship increasingly demonstrates that prominent local actors and power dynamics exert considerable influence over how a particular urban area is imagined, organised and ultimately policed (Smith, 1996; Yarwood, 2007; Vitale, 2008). The widespread adoption of the ‘community policing’ paradigm—broadly intended to increase responsiveness to citizen concerns and bring local law enforcement practices more in line with the demands of local stakeholders (Herbert, 2006)—has served to amplify this influence. In prime space, business and financial interests capitalise on newfound law enforcement partnerships to further reconstitute downtown areas as ‘bourgeois playgrounds’ (Smith, 1996). Forming an ‘extended policing family’ (Crawford et al., 2005), these interests collaborate to identify, intercept and remove those who obstruct consumption or are otherwise ‘out of place’ within the ongoing recommodification of space (Mitchell, 1997).

As is the case in prime space, revisions to Skid Row’s spatial order have been a result of local actors’ place-making endeavours throughout the late 20th century. Unlike prime space, however, Skid Row’s transition from rabble zone to recovery zone is the result of an influx of influential homeless organisations beginning in the 1990s that have come to dominate the neighbourhood’s physical and political landscapes (DeVerteuil, 2006; Stuart, 2011). Mirroring an international trend (von Mahs, 2013), the city subsidised the relocation of three ‘mega shelters’ into Skid Row in order to entice homeless people out of Los Angeles’ redeveloping downtown. At the heart of this effort, the city provided $6.5 million to the Union Rescue Mission (URM) to move eight blocks, from valuable land near city hall, to the epicentre of Skid Row. With the city’s financial support, the URM has since grown into the largest homeless shelter in the US, boasting an annual operating budget of over $15 million. Its five-storey, 225,000 square foot facility spans nearly half a city block. The city also facilitated the resiting of the Los Angeles Mission and the Midnight Mission—two similarly sized mega shelters—to less than a block from the URM. By the year 2000, these relocations made Skid Row’s 1.4 square km home to 40 per cent of all city shelter beds and 25 per cent of all county beds (DeVerteuil, 2006; Stuart, 2011).

Yet, the influx of mega shelters did more than merely amplify the capacity to exclude homeless people from downtown. Responding to federal reforms to homeless policy, the mega shelters ushered in a new model for regulating homelessness within Skid Row, thereby extending their role, and the larger identity and function of the neighbourhood, well beyond the previous dictates of quarantine. The Clinton administration’s 1993 ‘Continuum of Care’ plan redirected funding away from basic emergency shelter toward non-profits addressing the individual pathologies deemed responsible for homelessness, including substance abuse, mental illness, inadequate life skills and deficient workforce training (Sparks, 2012). In order to remain competitive for both public and private funding, homeless service organisations across the country replaced the traditional model of ‘three hots and a cot’ with a more interventionist, rehabilitative and ‘post-secular’ (Cloke et al., 2010) model centred on intensive residential recovery programmes. According to the executive director of the Los Angeles Mission at the time, the facility would no longer “just give men food, clothes, and a gospel service”, but instead specialise in “training [homeless individuals] to re-establish themselves in mainstream society” through “a rigorous schedule of job training, work duties, educational classes, spiritual counseling, and biblical instruction” (Martinez, 1995, p. 3).

Importantly, this revised model of service provision brought larger neighbourhood conditions squarely onto the mega shelters’ collective radar. With organisational longevity closely tied to their ability to attract and retain clients, the mega shelters placed intense pressure on the LAPD to initiate regular ‘homeless sweeps’ to more aggressively eliminate the ‘temptations’—including drugs, alcohol, informal economic activities, and sleeping on the sidewalk—that ‘enabled’ homelessness and ‘ambushed’ potential clients as they attempted to access recovery programmes (Holsinger, 1993; Rivera, 2006). With officers armed with mega shelter brochures and suddenly subjecting a host of previously permitted behaviours to citation, arrest and incarceration, such sweeps “[broke] a decades-old, albeit uneasy, truce, declaring war on the city’s homeless” (Decker, 2000, p. B1).

Over the next decade, the mega shelters capitalised on monthly community policing meetings to formalise their partnership with the LAPD, co-author local criminal justice policies and solidify a normative geography that is more congruent with their new organisational model. In fact, the Safer Cities Initiative was among the first major products of this collaboration. Meeting minutes and op-ed columns written by the mega shelter leadership confirm that the organisations played a central role in designing the Safer Cities Initiative as a means of reversing the ‘permissive approach’ of the previous era (see McNott, 2003, p. B24). In the wake of SCI’s launch, the mega shelters utilised their partnership with the LAPD to formally cement a new neighbourhood identity for Skid Row. In 2010, the URM and the city attorney’s office co-authored an injunction that officially redesignates Skid Row as the ‘Central City Recovery Zone’, explicitly delineating enrollment in one of the mega shelters’ recovery programmes as the primary ‘acceptable’ reason for entering the neighbourhood. The injunction calls on the police to target those with ‘illegitimate’ grounds for being present in the area, along with those who ‘interfere’ with the rehabilitative desire of others.

Policing the New Spatial Order: From Rabble Management to Recovery Management

Fieldwork reveals that the mega shelters’ place-making efforts shape officers’ perceptions regarding the neighbourhood’s most pressing problems, corresponding solutions and the most appropriate police role. Unlike officers in Bittner’s (1967) era, who viewed Skid Row’s deviance and despair as inevitable and unsolvable, contemporary officers are emphatic that the influx of rehabilitative programmes has created an environment in which any and every problem affecting the neighbourhood’s homeless population can be thoroughly treated. In one illustrative instance, a sergeant ushered me to an intersection that provided a clear view of all three mega shelters. With a wide sweep of his arm he instructed me to

Look around you at all the personal problems in this area: the vice, the homelessness, desperation and the anger. We could address all of this if the people here would just give the mission’s [mega shelters] a shot. They’ve got beds, case-workers, computers, food and really good programmes just waiting there for people to take advantage of them.

It is critical to note that this view prevails despite officers’ ready admission that the afflictions plaguing today’s population, particularly alcohol abuse and drug addiction, are far more severe than in the past.

Advancing the mega shelters as a comprehensive corrective, officers overwhelmingly account for the persistence of homelessness in the neighbourhood as a result of individuals’ unwillingness to ‘take advantage’ of the neighbourhood’s rehabilitative opportunities. As one veteran officer intimated

With the concentration of services for people down here there is really no excuse for most people. From getting to know this community, we’ve come to learn that the people who really want to get better do so quite quickly. They take full advantage of the services and they’re up and out. … This means that about 99 per cent of the people that remain down here are here because they choose to be here.

Officers refer to this segment of the population as ‘shelter resistant’. The increasing popularity of this term among law enforcement across the globe illustrates the depth to which the organisational imperatives and operational practices of social service providers now penetrates the explanation and regulation of homelessness (Wilton and DeVerteuil, 2006). Reflecting a neoliberal discourse that belies the role of structural causes, the term ultimately recasts homeless people as lacking the requisite personal responsibility to properly govern their own conduct.

Reducing homelessness to an individual’s active refusal of services, the discourse of shelter resistance animates a revised imperative for policing contemporary Skid Row. While officers in Bittner’s (1967) time principally served the role of rabble managers—upholding quarantine and quelling immediate disruptions—today’s officers act primarily as ‘recovery managers’. This new role centres on the task of decreasing individuals’ shelter resistance and increasing their willingness to enrol in rehabilitative services and programmes. As the lieutenant in charge of the daily administration of SCI concisely articulated

When you look out on the streets, most people have pretty much communicated to us that they aren’t willing to make good choices in their lives. So, our job is to help them make the right choice. … Ultimately, it’s our job to set the standard.

While recognition of the new recovery management role extends throughout the ranks of Central Division, the concrete task of helping homeless individuals ‘make the right choice’ is left largely to individual patrol officers. As in Bittner’s (1967) era, officers are relatively autonomous while on their beats. Facing a host of contingent situations and receiving little direct supervision, officers possess considerable discretion to determine precisely how to combat shelter resistance. Of course, this discretion is not without bounds. The law delimits the techniques officers are permitted to use in the service of recovery management (Herbert, 1997). Officers repeatedly lament that they lack the legal authority to simply load homeless individuals into their squad cars and physically deliver them to rehabilitative programmes. In fact, following a nationally publicised scandal in 2005, in which local law enforcement agencies were discovered transporting and ‘dumping’ homeless individuals on the doorsteps of the neighbourhood’s service organisations, Skid Row officers are under intense scrutiny and have been subject to costly litigation (DiMassa and Fausset, 2005).

At the same time, however, the law provides Skid Row officers with a powerful resource. Patrol officers mobilise available quality-of-life ordinances in order to indirectly compel homeless individuals into nearby mega shelters. By selectively enforcing municipal bans on otherwise innocuous public behaviours, officers attempt to manipulate the incentive structure and social ecology believed to enable shelter resistance and engender poor choices and behaviours. This effort manifests in three principal patrol practices: punishing long-term residence; enforcing perpetual movement within neighbourhood space; and constricting the availability of alternative resources. While each of these practices is rooted in slightly different explanations of, and remedies for, shelter resistance, all three adhere to a revised economy of intervention that directs police resources to those individuals and situations that compound resistance to the mega shelters. Additionally, while the same officer will regularly deploy each of the three practices over the duration of a shift, there are particular days and times when Skid Row officers tend to privilege one practice over others.

Punishing long-term residence

For officers, shelter resistance is learned and cumulative. Accordingly, the longer an individual is allowed to remain on the streets of Skid Row without accessing services, the more resistant that person becomes to those services. With each passing day, individuals become more accustomed to the conditions of homelessness and develop deeper associations with shelter-resistant peers. In the words of one patrol officer

After a while, they [homeless people] just stop wanting to get out of here. They fall into the lifestyle. Bottom line, we can’t let that happen.

In response, officers strategically enforce quality-of-life laws to create graduated levels of punishments that increase in accordance with an inhabitant’s perceived length of residence. This practice is exemplified in officers’ differential treatment of Skid Row ‘long-timers’ versus those they distinguish as neighbourhood ‘newcomers’. The following incident, recorded in fieldnotes, exemplifies this process

Officers Marshall and Diaz approached two African American men standing on the corner of Sixth and San Pedro Streets, sipping from tall aluminum cans wrapped in brown paper bags.² Officer Marshall addressed one of the men, “Charlie! Damn man. Again? You know the drill. Pour out those beers”. The two men immediately poured the contents of their cans into the gutter. Addressing the man he had referred to as Charlie, Officer Marshall continued, “I see you’ve got a new drinking buddy over here. You plan on bringing this guy down with you?”. Charlie replied, “Aw man, this is my homeboy”. Marshall looked toward the other man. “I haven’t seen you before. Let’s try to keep it that way, huh? Trust me, you don’t want to become this guy’s ‘homeboy’. Why don’t you take off and leave your homie with us?” The officer pointed in the direction of Midnight Mission as he reached for his handcuffs. The man appeared surprised that he was being excused without any further punishment, but promptly headed across the intersection toward the mission. Officer Marshall called after him, “Don’t let me see you again, you hear?”. Marshall approached Charlie and placed him in handcuffs. “We do this way too often, man. You ever going to learn?” He began patting him down. After running Charlie’s name through the warrant database, Officer Marshall wrote Charlie a citation for possession of an open alcoholic beverage (LAMC 41.27(d)). As he turned to leave, the officer glanced back toward Charlie and called out, “You know it’s going to be like this until you get your shit together. It’s your call”.

This interaction represents a contemporary analogue to Bittner’s (1967) example of Big Jim and Dakota. As in Bittner’s (1967) case, officers mobilise the formal law against only one individual, despite the two men’s equal ‘guilt’ under the municipal ordinance. Yet, in the contemporary case, rather than utilise selective enforcement to prevent a potential assault, Officers Marshall and Diaz issue Charlie a citation as part of a conscious and consistent strategy to teach both men the benefits of ‘using’ Skid Row correctly. Following the interaction, the officers conveyed a shared belief that, as Charlie’s permanent settlement is made more costly and uncomfortable, he will come to view rehabilitation in a more favourable light. Given this logic, officers tend to privilege this practice in the final days of each month, when impoverished individuals typically exhaust welfare payments and/or face eviction. Officers attempt to intercede before this influx of down-and-out individuals settles permanently in the neighbourhood.

Enforcing perpetual physical movement

While graduated penalties are intended to dissuade residence in the long term, officers also mobilise quality-of-life ordinances to impede settlement in a more immediate sense. This practice derives from an explanation of shelter resistance as primarily the result of drug and alcohol addiction; addicts refuse to enter the mega shelters programmes because they require immediate abstinence, a mandate that can bring serious physical and psychological discomfort. Adhering to the theory that individuals engage in drug and alcohol abuse predominantly at those times when they become sedentary, officers turn once again to quality-of-life laws—particularly a prohibition against obstructing the sidewalk and a prohibition on sitting, lying, or sleeping on the sidewalk—in order to enforce constant physical movement, thereby ‘hardening’ neighbourhood space against opportunities to consume controlled substances. This practice is most prevalent from the 1st to the 15th of each month, when officers anticipate that individuals will spend freshly distributed welfare payments on drugs and alcohol.

Officers routinely engage in this practice in a blanket fashion, parking their squad cars at one end of a street and walking the length of a block, issuing citations and instructing homeless individuals to ‘get up and move along’. In a conversation following one such occasion, an officer concisely articulated the logic behind his actions, stating, “It’s pretty hard to spark your crack pipe while you’re busy walking”. Officers are upfront with Skid Row inhabitants about their strategic mobilisation of the law. In 2006, for example, a SLO devoted the majority of his patrol to distributing a newsletter that outlined his reasons for issuing citations

When I began enforcing the sidewalk ordinance in my area it had less to do with sitting or sleeping on the sidewalk. … In Skid Row, people are not sitting or sleeping for ‘life sustaining’ reasons. During the day, many are sitting so they can use narcotics. When they are sleeping, it is more likely due to crashing from a four-day cocaine binge or bad heroin overdose.

Thus, enforcing quality-of-life laws allows officers, if only for a brief period, to preclude the drug-related behaviours that detract from the gravitational pull of the mega shelters. Even when they are unable to prevent consumption opportunities, officers articulate that by disallowing the opportunities to recuperate from side effects and withdrawal symptoms, they can force homeless individuals to reconsider their original poor choices in light of constant and harassing police contact. As one senior officer elaborated

Just imagine that you were getting woken up every single time you decided to drink too much. Come tomorrow, you might rethink climbing back into that bottle. In time, you’re going to seek out somewhere warm and safe, somewhere like the Midnight [Mission], where you’re not going to have an officer breathing down your back.

Similar to their views about long-term residence, officers advance that the stronger an individual’s addiction, the more difficult lasting rehabilitation and reintegration become. Engaging in this practice, officers re-envision themselves performing a ‘pre-social-service’ role, in which they use their law enforcement power to condition homeless people to become more receptive to mega shelter efforts.

Constricting the availability of alternative resources

In order to receive food, clothing and other services from the mega shelters, clients must demonstrate an increasing obedience to a strict set of behavioural rules, including bible study, definitive bedtimes and manual labour. For officers, prolonged homelessness results from individuals’ unwillingness to participate in this quid pro quo. Shelter-resistant individuals instead attempt to satisfy their daily needs without ever modifying their behaviour. During a community policing meeting, a SLO explained the danger of allowing individuals to procure food independently of the mega shelters

The bottom line is that, as long as they [homeless people] seek their needs on the street, there is no incentive to go to an organised, structured facility to possibly better themselves. They have the potential to enter a programme and get their lives together, rather than eating in the street where they can continue to destroy themselves.

In response, officers selectively enforce quality-of-life ordinances to constrict the availability of vital resources.

Interestingly, this practice is only indirectly aimed at homeless people. Instead, it targets groups and individuals from outside Skid Row’s boundaries that officers view as enabling shelter resistance. Just as Skid Row has long attracted impoverished and homeless populations from across the region, it also has an immense draw for independent philanthropic and religious organisations. This is particularly visible on Sunday afternoons, when congregations travel to Skid Row following religious worship to provide homeless people with in-kind assistance, including free coffee, oatmeal or used clothing. In response, officers issue these groups citations for obstructing the sidewalk. Following my observations of such encounters, officers communicated that, by eliminating what they refer to as ‘do-gooders’ and their giveaways, the police are limiting homeless people’s ability to physically sustain themselves without entering a mega shelter. As one officer stated

This shouldn’t be a vacation down here for people. To an extent you could say a big part of our job is to make this place as uncomfortable as possible so that people finally hit rock bottom and get themselves into a mission.

Eliminating alternative resources is thus designed to literally starve homeless people into social services. Manipulating the ability to satisfy the basic drive of hunger, officers advance this practice as particularly effective for enticing mentally disabled individuals into the mega shelters. According to a veteran patrol officer

We’ve got a fair share of mentally handicapped down here, and they don’t always respond to our instructions. But everyone needs to eat, right? Handicapped or not, we’re all going to go wherever we can get food. It’s survival, plain and simple. In reality, it’s all about figuring out new ways to get people into the system.

Taken together, one might interpret these three patrol practices as intended to remove homeless people from sight, as is the case in prime space. Extended fieldwork proved that this is not in fact the case. Officers allow for a considerable presence of homeless people in public, so long as these individuals can demonstrate adequate proof of their commitment to rehabilitation. During detainments and interrogations, officers ask individuals if they are in possession of photo identification badges issued by the mega shelters to current programme participants. Officers provide those who can produce this verification with a higher degree of leniency, while levelling stiffer penalties at those who cannot. Officers relay that they avoid overly harsh treatment of current programme participants, first as a reward and, secondly, in the words of one officer, so as not to “take them off the right path”.

Discussion and Conclusion

This article has been principally concerned with investigating how, why and with what consequences the policing of homelessness varies over space. Relying on an ethnographic examination of daily patrol practices, the analysis demonstrates that, contrary to the exclusionary, non-rehabilitative policing repeatedly documented in prime space, discretionary law enforcement in Skid Row takes on a more disciplinary, curative function that we can think of as ‘recovery management’. Rather than mobilise quality-of-life ordinances to expel homeless people out of the space, Skid Row officers mobilise available laws to modify behaviour within the space, curtailing opportunities for improper conduct and compelling homeless people into social services and recovery programmes housed in Skid Row’s mega shelters.

Neither does Skid Row policing merely function to quarantine homeless people, as had historically been the case (Bittner, 1967). This point is further borne out by the spatial distribution of quality-of-life citations³ in Skid Row and the adjacent downtown (see Figure 1). If officers are upholding historical precedent and mobilising available laws to prevent homeless individuals from spilling over into nearby prime space, we should expect to see a majority of citations issued around Skid Row’s borders. Instead, most citations are issued in the epicentre of Skid Row, only meters from the mega shelters’ doors. This supports the ethnographic finding that officers utilise their law enforcement powers to eliminate the ‘temptations’ that threaten to pull current clients away from these organisations’ services and programmes, and to provide resistant individuals with what one officer referred to as “one last nudge for them [homeless people] to start getting their life back together”.

Figure 1.

Citations issued in Skid Row and adjacent downtown, January 2010 through December 2011 (n = 741).

The distribution of citations additionally punctuates a primary source of spatial variations in policing practices. In both prime and marginal space, prominent local actors exert considerable influence over how a particular locale is imagined, organised and policed. While the police have always acted as the “maintenance men par excellence” (Lofland, 1973, p. 90) of the local spatial order, the spread of community policing and the expansion of police–citizen partnerships has amplified these actors’ ability to deploy officers’ discretionary law enforcement powers in the service of their place-making endeavours. Re-imagining the neighbourhood as a recovery zone, Skid Row mega shelters collaborate with the police to target ‘out-of-place’ individuals who transgress their desired normative geography by continually refusing services and programmes.

Identifying the divergent imperatives that guide policing in prime and marginal space yields important insights into how homeless people are differently imagined within the two contexts. Following Foucault (1977), any measure to ‘deal’ with a deviant necessarily plays a ‘productive’ role in defining and categorising that individual, shaping the very way that society perceives, understands and ultimately interacts with them (see Harcourt 2001). As those writing on exclusionary policing repeatedly show, law enforcement in prime space regulates, and thus constructs homeless people as a dehumanised ‘Other’. Viewed merely as blemishes on an otherwise attractive landscape

homeless people are not ascribed the status of moral beings or legal subjects; they are unsightly trash to be removed, objects with limited aesthetic value (Walby and Lippert, 2012, p. 1029).

The causes and compounding factors that underlie homelessness thus become irrelevant, so long as this ‘disorder’ is eliminated from view.

If policing serves to objectify and dehumanise homeless people in prime space, the analysis suggests that policing rehumanises this population in marginal space. Reflecting and reinforcing a neoliberal ideology (Herbert and Brown, 2006), Skid Row policing practices re-imagine homeless people as moral beings that, beyond their poor choices, behaviours and lifestyles, are essentially “‘like us’: no different from other rational actors” (Crawford, 2003, p. 484). Social and economic marginalisation is thus reframed in cost–benefit terms: homeless people have weighed out the potential risks, gains and costs of entering rehabilitative services and programmes necessary for re-entering society, but have chosen to remain homeless because they perceive its benefits to outweigh possible losses. As a result, the underlying cause of homelessness—individuals’ shelter resistance—along with the factors that compound it—a growing comfort outside of shelters, ongoing drug consumption, and non-compulsory receipt of vital resources—become centrally relevant within this context. It is these factors, and not the unsightliness of homeless bodies, that are the express target of discretionary law enforcement in Skid Row. By manipulating behavioural incentives, these policing practices aim to ‘reprogramme’ homeless individuals to make the ‘right’ choice and, through collaboration with the mega shelters, transform them into sober, self-governing and responsible citizens. In the process, this approach significantly widens the net of state surveillance and coercion as police officers target an expanding range of behaviour and people believed to impede correct choices. Backed by prominent homeless service organisations, violations of due process and probable cause have become reframed as necessary means to rehabilitative ends.

Far from unique to Los Angeles, the systematic relocation and concentration of homeless people into Skid-Row-type areas reflects an international trend (von Mahs, 2013). It seems reasonable, then, to assume that municipalities are increasingly turning to recovery management to govern such spaces. The comparison between prime and marginal space regarding their relative levels of policing (for example, Figure 1) suggests that, as redeveloping prime areas are adequately ‘secured’ against contamination by homeless people, recovery management may supplant exclusion as a predominant model of homeless regulation.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I thank Stefan Timmermans for reading early versions of this paper. I am also grateful to the editors of Urban Studies and the anonymous reviewers for providing insightful comments and suggestions. Anjanette Chan Tack provided assistance on .

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

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