Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Forrest Stuart gives us a new framework for understanding life in criminalized communities throughout America. The idea of and#147;community policingand#8221; and of stop-and-frisk and broken windows is just part of the picture, which includes people on both sides of the issue of keeping order in Skid Row communities. Stuartand#8217;s is a dramatic demonstration of how to understand the daily realities of Americaand#8217;s most truly disadvantaged, an understanding that requires a sharp focus on the pervasive role and impact of the police. Policingand#151;and#147;zero toleranceand#8221; models in particularand#151;is reshaping urban poverty and marginalization in 21st-century America. Stuart immersed himself for several years in the notorious and#147;homeless capital of America,and#8221; which is to say, Skid Row in Los Angeles. It has the largest concentration of standing police forces anywhere in the United States. On their side, the police practice what Stuart calls and#8221;therapeutic policingand#8221;and#151;a form of virtual social work that is designed to and#147;cureand#8221; the poor of individual pathologies. On the side of the homeless, Stuart finds a cunning set of techniques for evading police contact, which he dubs and#147;cop wisdomand#8221; and which the poor use for intensifying resistance to roustings by the police. The police are tasked with day-to-day management of the growing numbers of citizens falling through the holes in the threadbare social safety net. We see daily patrol practices and routines that amount to and#147;hyper-policingand#8221; in skid row districts. The continuous threat of punishment aims to steer homeless individuals away from self-destructive behaviors while providing incentives to drug recovery, employment, and life skills (in nearby meta-shelters). Minority upheavals now underway across America underscore the divide between cops and the urban poor (almost all of whom are black or Latino). Stuart joins Alice Goffman in revealing the underlying, and often tragic, dynamics.
Synopsis
In his first year working in Los Angeles's Skid Row, Forrest Stuart was stopped on the street by police fourteen times. Usually for doing little more than standing there.
Juliette, a woman he met during that time, has been stopped by police well over one hundred times, arrested upward of sixty times, and has given up more than a year of her life serving week-long jail sentences. Her most common crime? Simply sitting on the sidewalk--an arrestable offense in LA.
Why? What purpose did those arrests serve, for society or for Juliette? How did we reach a point where we've cut support for our poorest citizens, yet are spending ever more on policing and prisons? That's the complicated, maddening story that Stuart tells in Down, Out and Under Arrest, a close-up look at the hows and whys of policing poverty in the contemporary United States. What emerges from Stuart's years of fieldwork--not only with Skid Row residents, but with the police charged with managing them--is a tragedy built on mistakes and misplaced priorities more than on heroes and villains. He reveals a situation where a lot of people on both sides of this issue are genuinely trying to do the right thing, yet often come up short. Sometimes, in ways that do serious harm.
At a time when distrust between police and the residents of disadvantaged neighborhoods has never been higher, Stuart's book helps us see where we've gone wrong, and what steps we could take to begin to change the lives of our poorest citizens--and ultimately our society itself--for the better.