On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City (33 page)

THE POLICE AND THE COMMUNITY

Here it might be worthwhile to comment on just how complex the relationship actually
is between members of the 6th Street community and the criminal justice personnel
who operate in that neighborhood (or remove people from it). On some level the police
are seen as a white, anonymous occupying force that swoops into the area to round
up whichever young men are unlucky enough to cross their path. Fear and hatred of
the police are palpable, and it’s not uncommon for people’s anger and resentment to
boil over during police stops. But many residents also count a few police officers
as neighbors and relatives. These personal connections to the police force make it
harder to see all officers as outside invaders, though some cops who live in the community
are reviled just as much as the ones who do not, if not more so.

Another contradiction lies in the fact that young men getting chased by the police
may at the same time be romantically involved with female members of the force. Women
in the Black community are significantly better educated and better employed than
their male counterparts, and a good share of them work in criminal justice. This means
that a number of romantic partnerships cross the line between police and criminals.
Such ties are only multiplied by the intimate association in which young men like
Mike and Chuck so often find themselves with female halfway house operators, prison
guards, and probation workers. Another surprising fact here is that young men sitting
in jail or prison urge the women coming to visit them to apply for jobs in
law enforcement. Mike and Chuck and their friends understood better than most that
criminal justice is one of the few robust branches of the economy, and a field in
which those who do not have legal issues of their own would be smart to enter.

Similarly, the moral view of snitching is quite fluid. A generalized norm against
informing certainly exists, but people call the police on one another every day. What
is even more interesting is that many people who blatantly call police on others in
the neighborhood are not judged for it; this action is expected of them, and understood
as part of their character as upstanding, clean people.

THE FUGITIVE GHETTO IN HISTORICAL AND COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE

What sense might we make of the heavily policed community of 6th Street, and of the
millions of Black young men going in and out of jails and prisons today? Sociologist
Loïc Wacquant and Civil Rights advocate Michelle Alexander have drawn strong parallels
between the current levels of targeted imprisonment and earlier systems of racial
oppression such as slavery and Jim Crow, both of which denied Black people basic rights
such as voting, running for office, and free movement.
¹

Accompanying slavery and Jim Crow were policies that granted a fugitive status to
large numbers of Black men and women—during slavery through the fugitive slave laws,
and during the Jim Crow era through the vagrancy statutes that suppressed large numbers
of Black people moving to the North during the first and second Great Migrations.
²
The vagrancy statutes held that men could be arrested for being unemployed and unhoused,
as well as for drinking, loitering, disorderly conduct, or associating with known
criminals.

Though vagrancy statutes had existed in the United States since the colonial era,
widespread efforts to round up men on vagrancy charges occurred after the fugitive
slave laws were struck down, as Black people migrated to Northern cities after emancipation.
In turn, these statutes were stricken from the books in the 1960s and 1970s, just
as the laws and practices of the tough-on-crime era began to take effect.
³

From this history it would seem that large numbers of Black people in the United States
have been assigned not only a diminished form
of citizenship but a fugitive status through slavery, sharecropping, the Northern
migration, and now through the systems of policing and penal supervision accompanying
the War on Crime. In this sense, what I have described here represents only the latest
chapter in a long history of Black exclusion and civic diminishment in the United
States.

Yet it would be incorrect to conclude that the history of US race relations has been
one of unrelenting domination. Instead, there have been gains and reversals, and the
quality of African American citizenship has expanded significantly in recent decades.
An important difference between current levels of policing and imprisonment and earlier
periods of racial oppression is that heavy policing and high levels of imprisonment
are restricted largely to
poor
Black men and their communities, as well as to many poor white and Latino men. Educated
Black men and their families are not enveloped in intensive penal supervision: they
may on occasion be subject to public police harassment and mistreatment, but they
are not spending their twenties sitting in jail, or living on parole or with warrants
out for their arrest.

.   .   .

If the current treatment of poor Black people in US cities bears at least some similarity
to earlier periods of racial oppression in the United States, it might also remind
readers of the experience of other groups whose ethnicity, religion, caste, or sexual
orientation has in various moments placed them on the social and economic margins.
Tools of state oppression may vary, but the experience of persecuted groups throughout
history—from the Jews in Europe to undocumented immigrants in the United States to
people anywhere living under a repressive, authoritarian, or totalitarian regime—shows
astonishing threads of commonality across time and space.

At the level of lived experience, these cases all involve the denial of basic rights
to large groups, and the risk of some extreme sanction—confinement, expulsion, deportation,
torture, or death—becoming a real possibility facing many people. The combination
of restricted rights and threatened extreme sanction criminalizes everyday life as
people work to circumvent their restrictions and avoid the authorities. We frequently
see curfews as well as identity checks and searches being established, and the practices
of evasion, hiding, and secrecy becoming
techniques for daily living. A black market in false documents and prohibited goods
flourishes. We also see the pernicious issue of informants, both through the police’s
efforts to cultivate them and through people turning each other in for their own gain.
The authorities not only cultivate professional informants but routinely pit close
friends, neighbors, and family members against each other, asking people to choose
between their own freedom and the security of those they hold dear. Residents experience
frequent acts of state violence in the streets—people getting beaten, strangled, kicked,
or even shot in public view, for example—and see that the authorities are fairly useless
for protection or mediation, despite their omnipresence. Diminished rights and the
looming threat of extreme sanction are felt at the level of the community’s social
fabric—for example, the taking on of legal risk is understood as a gesture of sacrifice
and personal attachment—and legal restrictions and diminishments become key social
distinctions, particularly the divides between those more or less safe from the authorities.

To be sure, these cases involve as many differences as similarities. In many instances,
those seized by the authorities didn’t circulate back into the general population;
once they were gone, they didn’t return. The fear of torture and death isn’t the same
as the fear of prison or deportation. But these cases share enough so that a deep
knowledge of one may teach us something about the experience of people living in others.
Certainly, the contemporary US ghetto can take its place among them.

Taken in these terms, we might understand the US ghetto as one of the last repressive
regimes of the age: one that operates within our liberal democracy, yet unbeknownst
to many living only a few blocks away. In a nation that has officially rid itself
of a racial caste system, and has elected and reelected a Black president, we are
simultaneously deploying a large number of criminal justice personnel at great taxpayer
cost to visit an intensely punitive regime upon poor Black men and women living in
our cities’ segregated neighborhoods.

EPILOGUE

Leaving 6th Street

Some say you should stop a research project when you stop learning new things. I’m
not sure it usually goes that way. At any rate, I never got to a point of “saturation”;
never felt that I’d understood enough and it was time to leave and write up my findings.

In the end, I left when my funding ran out, and I had to write a dissertation and
get a job. By then it didn’t feel like I was leaving the 6th Street Boys as much as
the 6th Street Boys had left me—or rather, that the group as we had known it had ceased
to exist. By 2008 Chuck was gone, along with two other members we’d also lost to shootings.
Steve committed suicide the following year, a tragedy that some attributed to his
growing addiction to PCP, and others to his inability to keep going without Chuck.
Mike went to federal prison, and when he came home in 2011, he moved to another neighborhood
and got a job washing cars. Chuck’s middle brother, Reggie, and his youngest brother,
Tim, were in prison upstate on long bids. Anthony served a three- to five-year sentence
in state prison and was shot to death by the police shortly after his return to 6th
Street in 2013. According to neighbors, the police had been working undercover, and
when they ran up on Anthony in the alleyway he shot at them, thinking they were 4th
Street Boys. Alex has long since moved off the block and out of the area.

I continue to see Aisha and some of her family when I return to Philadelphia, and
also visit Alex and Mike, who now hold regular jobs and live with their children and
partners. I stay in touch with Reggie and Tim by letter and through phone calls, as
well as by the occasional trip
upstate when I’m in the area. Reggie and Tim have been bored enough by their incarceration
to ask how the book was coming along, so sometimes we talk about that. But more than
that, I believe we remain tied to one another by times past, and by the memory of
the men who are no longer with us.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For a decade of generosity and friendship, I thank Miss Deena and her grandchildren,
Aisha and Ray; Miss Regina and her son Mike; and Ronny, Anthony, Steve, Josh, and
the Taylor family: Mr. George, Miss Linda, and her sons, Chuck, Reggie, and Tim. Over
many years, Mike, Chuck, and Reggie provided substantial research assistance and feedback
on the writing; Reggie gave his from a prison cell.

My parents, William Labov and Gillian Sankoff, provided crucial comments on drafts
of the work, every step of the way to the final manuscript. Their unwavering support,
as well as that of my sister, Rebecca Labov, and the entire DelGuercio family, made
the book possible.

At Penn, Elijah Anderson supervised the undergraduate thesis I wrote about the struggles
of the 6th Street Boys. I hope these pages make evident just how much his ideas continue
to inspire me. David Grazian, Charles Bosk, Randall Collins, and Michael Katz also
gave freely of their time and assistance, joining with Elijah to provide a vibrant
intellectual community for a young person to conduct urban ethnography. Many of these
early mentors continued to lend their advice and support long after I left Penn, and
I am in their debt.

At Princeton, Mitch Duneier devoted himself to my sociological education with more
care and attention than any graduate student deserves. Ethnography is a tradition
passed down from teacher to student in a set of sensibilities and practices conveyed
in off moments and parenthetical conversations. Over many years, Mitch instilled these
ethnographic ways of being, transmitting the ideas of his teachers as well
as his own. One lesson he stressed above the others: the importance of investigating
the social world while treating people with respect. His contributions to the research
and writing of this book are more than I can express here; he is a teacher in the
highest sense of the word.

Viviana Zelizer, Paul DiMaggio, Devah Pager, and Cornel West joined Mitch to form
a dissertation committee second to none. Marvin Bressler, Bruce Western, Martin Ruef,
Patricia Fernandez-Kelly, and Sara McClanahan also gave generously of their time and
advice. The doors of these Princeton faculty members were always open to me, and to
them I owe this book’s core arguments.

Part of this work had its origins in a paper published in the
American Sociological Review
. Editor Vincent Roscigno, coeditor Randy Hodson, and reviewers Steven Lopez, Philip
Kasinitz, Jack Katz, and Patricia Adler gave me crucial feedback (and graciously disclosed
their names to me after the article was accepted).

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Scholars in Health Policy Program and the University
of Michigan provided the time and resources I needed to revise the dissertation. In
Ann Arbor, a terrific group of fellow postdocs pored over chapter drafts: Trevon Logan,
Edward Walker, Greggor Mattson, Sarah Quinn, Brendan Nyhan, Graeme Boushey, Seth Freedman,
Jamila Michner, and Christopher Bail.

At UCLA, a community of scholars dedicated to the study of social interaction and
urban life lent office space and encouragement to a part-time visitor. For their support
and advice, I am particularly indebted to Jack Katz, Robert Emerson, Stefan Timmermans,
and Brandon Berry.

At the University of Wisconsin, Erik Olin Wright, Mara Loveman, Joan Fujimura, Doug
Maynard, John Delamater, Pamela Oliver, Monica White, and Mustafa Emirbayer offered
generous comments. I am deeply in their debt. Students in the undergraduate seminar
“The Ghetto” gave sound advice on early drafts. I thank Mitch Duneier for inviting
me to co-teach the course with him while I was a graduate student, as well as our
students in Princeton, Rome, and Krakow, and then in Madison. I also thank the students
in the ethnography seminar at Madison, the participants in the CUNY Graduate Center
Methods Workshop, the Harvard Justice and Inequality Working Group, and the UCLA Ethnog
raphy Working Group for their close readings and helpful advice on chapter drafts.