On The Run: Fugitive Life in an American City Read online

  The tough-on-crime era ushered in a profound change in how the United States manages ghettoized areas of its cities. For most of the twentieth century, the police ignored poor and segregated Black neighborhoods such as 6th Street. Between the 1930s and the 1980s, an era which saw the Great Migration, restrictive racial housing covenants, the Civil Rights Movement, growing unemployment, the erosion of social services, an expanding drug trade, and the departure of much of the Black middle class from the poor and segregated areas of major cities,3 reports from firsthand observers paint the police in segregated Black neighborhoods as uninterested, absent, and corrupt.4

  This began to change in the 1960s, when riots in major cities and a surge in violence and drug use spurred national concern about crime, particularly in urban areas. The number of police officers per capita increased dramatically in the second half of the twentieth century in cities nationwide.5 In Philadelphia between 1960 and 2000, the number of police officers increased by 69 percent, from 2.76 officers for every 1,000 citizens to 4.66 officers.6 The 1980s brought stronger drug laws and steeper sentences. In the 1990s, the tough-on-crime movement continued, with urban police departments across the nation adopting what became known as zero-tolerance policing, and then CompStat to track their progress.7

  For many decades, the Philadelphia police had turned a fairly blind eye to the prostitution, drug dealing, and gambling that went on in poor Black communities. But in the late 1980s, they and members of other urban police forces began to refuse bribes and payoffs. In fact, corruption seems to have been largely eliminated as a general practice, at least in the sense of people working at the lower levels of the drug trade paying the police to leave them in peace. Also during this period, large numbers of people were arrested for using or possessing drugs, and sent to jails and prisons.

  The crackdown on the drug economy in poor Black neighborhoods came at the same time that welfare reform cut the assistance that poor families received and the length of time they could receive it. As welfare support evaporated, the War on Drugs arrested those seeking work in the drug trade on a grand scale.

  By 2000, the US prison population swelled to five times what it had been in the early 1970s. An overwhelming majority of men going to prison are poor, and a disproportionate number are Black. Today, 30 percent of Black men without college educations have been to prison by their midthirties. One in four Black children born in 1990 had an imprisoned father by the time he or she turned fourteen.8

  Sociologist David Garland has termed this phenomenon mass imprisonment: a level of incarceration markedly above the historical and comparative norm, and concentrated among certain segments of the population such that it “ceases to be the incarceration of individual offenders and becomes the systematic imprisonment of whole groups.”9 Sociologist Loïc Wacquant and legal scholar Michelle Alexander have argued that current levels of targeted imprisonment represent a new chapter in American racial oppression.10

  Since the 1980s, the War on Crime and the War on Drugs have taken millions of Black young men out of school, work, and family life, sent them to jails and prisons, and returned them to society with felony convictions. Spending time in jail and prison means lower wages and gaps in employment. This time away comes during the critical years in which other young people are completing degrees and getting married. Laws in many states deny those with felony convictions the right to vote and the right to run for office, as well as access to many government jobs, public housing, and other benefits. Black people with criminal records are so discriminated against in the labor market that the jobs for which they are legally permitted to apply are quite difficult to obtain.11 These restrictions and disadvantages affect not only the men moving through the prison system but their families and communities. So many Black men have been imprisoned and returned home with felony convictions that the prison now plays a central role in the production of unequal groups in US society, setting back the gains in citizenship and socioeconomic position that Black people made during the Civil Rights Movement.12

  . . .

  6th Street is a wide commercial avenue, and the five residential blocks that connect to it from the south form an eponymous little neighborhood. In the 1950s and 1960s, the 6th Street neighborhood had been a middle-class Jewish area; by the early 1970s it was just opening up to Black residents.

  When I first came to the neighborhood in 2002, 93 percent of its residents were Black. Men and boys stood at its busiest intersection, offering bootleg CDs and DVDs, stolen goods, and food to drivers and passersby. The main commercial street included a bulletproofed Chinese takeout store that sold fried chicken wings, single cigarettes called loosies, condoms, baby food, and glassines for smoking crack. The street also included a check-cashing store, a hair salon, a payday loan store, a Crown Fried Chicken restaurant, and a pawnshop. On the next block, a Puerto Rican family ran a corner grocery. Roughly one-fourth of the neighborhood’s households received housing vouchers, and in all but two households, families received some type of government assistance.13

  6th Street is not the poorest or the most dangerous neighborhood in the large Black section of Philadelphia of which it is a part—far from it. In interviews with police officers, I discovered that it was hardly a top priority of theirs, nor did they consider the neighborhood particularly dangerous or crime ridden. Residents in adjacent neighborhoods spoke about 6th Street as quiet and peaceful—a neighborhood they would gladly move to if they ever had enough money.

  Still, 6th Street has not escaped three decades of punitive drug and crime policy. By 2002, police curfews had been established around the area for those under age eighteen, and police video cameras had been placed on major streets. In the first eighteen months that I spent in the neighborhood, at least once a day I watched the police stop pedestrians or people in cars, search them, run their names for warrants, ask them to come in for questioning, or make an arrest.14 In that same eighteen-month period, I watched the police break down doors, search houses, and question, arrest, or chase people through houses fifty-two times. Nine times, police helicopters circled overhead and beamed searchlights onto local streets. I noted blocks taped off and traffic redirected as police searched for evidence—or, in police language, secured a crime scene—seventeen times. Fourteen times during my first eighteen months of near daily observation, I watched the police punch, choke, kick, stomp on, or beat young men with their nightsticks.

  The problems of drugs and gun violence are real ones in the 6th Street community, and the police who come into the neighborhood are trying to solve them with the few powers that have been granted to them: the powers of intimidation and arrest. Their efforts do not seem to be stopping young men like Mike and Chuck from attempting to earn money selling drugs or from getting into violent conflicts; whether they are helping to reduce overall crime rates is beyond the scope of this study.

  Whatever their effect on crime, the sheer scope of policing and imprisonment in poor Black neighborhoods is transforming community life in ways that are deep and enduring, not only for the young men who are their targets but for their family members, partners, and neighbors.

  CLEAN AND DIRTY PEOPLE

  With decent, well-paying jobs in perennial short supply, Black communities have long been divided between those able to obtain respectable employment and those making their money doing dangerous, profaned work. In the 1890s, W. E. B. DuBois dubbed this latter group the submerged tenth.15 In the 1940s, Chicago sociologists St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton referred to these groups as the respectables and the shadies. Drawing on terms used frequently in the Black community, sociologist Elijah Anderson famously dubbed this distinction the divide between decent and street.16 Though the line between decent and street has been recognized and elaborated by academics, those divides first emerged as folk categories that residents of segregated Black neighborhoods used to draw distinctions among themselves.

  In the current era, where police circle overhead and the threat of prison weighs heavily o
n neighborhood residents, the long-standing social divides within the Black community have been exacerbated by the issue of legal standing.

  A central social fact about any person living in the community of 6th Street is his or her legal status; more specifically, whether the person is likely to attract police attention in the future: whether he can get through a police stop, or make it home from a court hearing, or pass a “piss test” during a probation meeting. Those who have no pending legal entanglements or who can successfully get through a police stop, a court hearing, or a probation meeting are known as clean. Those likely to be arrested should the authorities stop them, run their names, or search them are known as dirty.

  These designations are occasioned ones, brought to the fore when an encounter with the authorities is imminent or has just occurred. When friends and neighbors hear that a young man has been stopped, their first question is often “Is he dirty?” This question means: Does he have an open warrant? Any probation or parole sentence he’d be violating by running into the police? Is he carrying any drugs? In short: if he meets with the police, will he come home to his bed tonight, or will he be seized?

  Yet the designations of clean and dirty aren’t just in-the-moment estimations occasioned by contact with the criminal justice system. They also become more general labels that attach to individuals or locations over time. While some people are widely known to be in good standing with the law, others are generally assumed to be liable for arrest should the authorities stop them. These designations become significant even when a police stop isn’t imminent, because they’re linked to distinct kinds of behavior, attitudes, and capabilities. For instance, a clean person can rent a car or a hotel room, or show the ID required for entry into many buildings. A dirty person may be taken advantage of in various ways, as it’s assumed he won’t be able to notify the authorities.

  As men are largely the ones caught up in the criminal justice system, there exists in part a gendered divide—in many couples, the woman is clean, the man dirty. And the woman is not only free from legal entanglements—she likely works in the formal economy or receives government assistance, whereas the man makes his sporadic income in the streets, doing things for which he could be arrested. There is also an age divide—overwhelmingly, it is young people who are mired in legal entanglements, not older people. And third, there is a class divide, for it is most typically unemployed young men without high school diplomas who are dipping and dodging the police, who have probation sentences to complete and court cases to attend.

  Dirty people are likely more aware of their status than clean people are of theirs, much in the same way that Black people may think about race more often than white people do, or gay people may think about sexual orientation more often than straight people do. But clean people living in the 6th Street neighborhood and surrounding areas so often have relatives, friends, and neighbors who are looking over their shoulder that these categories remain somewhat salient no matter which side a person is on.17

  Residents of the neighborhood draw further distinctions between those likely to be taken into custody if the authorities do a general sweep, and those for whom the authorities are aggressively searching. The people the police are particularly interested in are said to be “hot.” Places can also be hot, as in a block with a lot of recent police activity or the funeral of a young man who was gunned down, where police are likely to be looking for people related to the case or with other open warrants. In these instances, it may be said that one should not enter the area or event, or associate with the individual, until it or he cools down.

  While the categories of clean/dirty and hot/cool focus on a person’s risk of arrest or a place’s likelihood to draw police attention, residents also draw distinctions among themselves according to how a person treats the legal entanglements of others. Those who continue to have dealings with a young man once he becomes wanted, who protect and aid him in his hiding and running, or who support him while locked up are known as riders—a term signaling courage and commitment. Those who turn on a man once the warrant has come in, or who fail to support a partner or family member once that person is sent to jail or prison, are said to be “not riding right.” Those who go a step further and provide the police with information about the whereabouts or actions of a legally precarious person are known as “snitches” or “rats.” Designations such as the clean person, the dirty person, the hot person, the snitch, and the rider have become basic social categories for young men and women in heavily policed Black neighborhoods.

  The first chapters of the book concern the dirty world: the young men spending their teens and early twenties running from the police, going in and out of jail, and attempting to complete probation and parole sentences. These chapters reflect my attempt to understand this world through the eyes of Mike and Chuck and their friends—young men living with the daily fear of capture and confinement. Because the reach of the penal system goes beyond the young men who are its main targets, later chapters take up the perspective of girlfriends and mothers caught between the police and the men in their lives; of young people who have found innovative ways to profit from the legal misfortunes of their neighbors; and finally of neighborhood residents who have managed to steer clear of the penal system and those enmeshed therein. The appendix recounts the research on which this work is based, along with some personal reflection about the practical and ethical dilemmas of a middle-class white young woman reporting on the experiences of poor Black young men and women.

  Together, the chapters make the case that historically high imprisonment rates and the intensive policing and surveillance that have accompanied them are transforming poor Black neighborhoods into communities of suspects and fugitives. A climate of fear and suspicion pervades everyday life, and many residents live with the daily concern that the authorities will seize them and take them away. A new social fabric is emerging under the threat of confinement: one woven in suspicion, distrust, and the paranoiac practices of secrecy, evasion, and unpredictability.

  Still, neighborhood residents are carving out a meaningful life for themselves betwixt and between the police stops and probation meetings. The scope of punishment and surveillance does not prevent them from constructing a moral world in which they can find dignity and honor; and the struggles of young men and women to negotiate work, family, romance, and friendship in this hyper-policed zone, under threat of confinement, constitute as much of the story as the late-night raids or full-body searches.

  ONE

  The 6th Street Boys and Their Legal Entanglements

  CHUCK AND TIM

  On quiet afternoons, Chuck would sometimes pass the time by teaching his twelve-year-old brother, Tim, how to run from the police. They’d sit side by side on the iron back-porch steps of their two-story home, facing the shared concrete alley that connects the small fenced-in backyards of their block to those of the houses on the next.

  “What you going to do when you hear the sirens?” Chuck asked.

  “I’m out,” his little brother replied.

  “Where you running to?”

  “Here.”

  “You can’t run here—they know you live here.”

  “I’ma hide in the back room in the basement.”

  “You think they ain’t tearing down that little door?”

  Tim shrugged.

  “You know Miss Toya?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You can go over there.”

  “But I don’t even know her like that.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Why I can’t go to Uncle Jean’s?”

  “’Cause they know that’s your uncle. You can’t go to nobody that’s connected to you.”

  Tim nodded his head, seeming happy to get his brother’s attention no matter what he was saying.

  Chuck was the eldest of three brothers. He shared a small, second-floor bedroom with Tim, seven years his junior, and Reggie, born right between them. Reggie had left for juvenile detention cente
rs by the time he turned eleven, so Tim didn’t know his middle brother very well. He looked up to Chuck almost like a father.

  When Tim was a baby, his dad had moved down to South Carolina and married a woman there; he did not keep in touch. Reggie’s father was worse: an in-the-way (no-account) man of no consequence or merit, in prison on long bids and then out for stints of drunken robberies. Reggie said he wouldn’t recognize him in the street. By contrast, Chuck’s father came around a lot during his early years, a fact that Chuck sometimes mentioned when trying to explain why he knew right from wrong and his younger brothers did not.

  The boys’ mother, Miss Linda, had been five years into a heavy crack habit when she became pregnant with Chuck, and continued using as the boys grew up. With welfare cuts the family had very little government assistance, and Miss Linda never could hold a job for more than a few months at a time. Her father’s post office pension paid the household bills, but he didn’t pay for food or clothes or school supplies. He said it was beyond what he could do, and not his responsibility anyway.

  At thirteen Chuck began working for a local dealer, which meant that he could buy food for himself and Tim instead of asking his mother for money she didn’t have. His access to crack also meant that he could better regulate his mother’s addiction. Now she came to him to get drugs, and mostly stopped prostituting herself and selling off their household possessions when she needed a hit. In high school Chuck got arrested a number of times, but the cases didn’t stick and he continued working for the dealer.

  By his sophomore year, Chuck’s legs were sticking out past the edge of the bunk bed he shared with Tim. He cleared out the unfinished basement and moved his mattress and clothing down there. The basement flooded and smelled like mildew and sometimes the rats bit him, but at least he had his own space.

  Tim was eight when Chuck moved out of their room, and he tried to put a brave face on it. When he couldn’t sleep, he padded down to the basement and crawled into bed with his brother.