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CHAPTER 1
Labeling the Urban Poor as Criminals
Every morning on my drive to work, I confront a towering, illuminated billboard with large, rotating photos of criminals. Mostly men wanted for murder, attempted murder, and armed robbery, the individuals in the photos look angry. No well-groomed bankers or professionals among them, they project an ominous roughness. A line of print stretching across the bottom of the billboard provides the authorities' telephone number and asks motorists to call if they know where the criminals are hiding.
Like everyone else in my comfortable middle-class part of town, I have absolutely no idea where the pictured men are, and it is not even clear if the men have perpetrated their heinous acts locally. Nevertheless, the billboard effectively labels these men as criminals. Popular with scholars in the 1960s and 1970s, "criminal labeling theory" insists that there be a "process of social definition" before a person can be deemed a criminal. The identification of criminals, in other words, requires some sort of gesture or statement from certain people or institutions and a reaction to the gesture or statement. The giant billboard labels supposed perpetrators, and, along with others passing through the intersection, I notice the billboard and am chilled by a sense that criminals are among us.
Being labeled a criminal is highly consequential because it both denigrates and restricts, and police departments, district attorneys' offices, criminal courts, and prisons are more important in criminal labeling than the largest of billboards. These legal institutions continually and sometimes eagerly characterize and identify criminals. The institutions' labeling can come in many ways, ranging from something as simple as pushing down an arrested person's head as he or she enters the back seat of a squad car all the way to a formal conviction and sentencing in a court of law. The legal institutions often act in combination and in sequence, and as criminals pass through the system, their criminal labels grow larger, darker, and more indelible.
Men and women who are unemployed or marginally employed are more likely to be labeled as criminals than are other members of society. The process is not a tightly coordinated conspiracy, but police officers, prosecutors, and jailers repeatedly apply rules of one sort or another and in the process deem individual impoverished city dwellers to be criminals. While in many cases those labeled have committed the criminal acts that are alleged, the criminal justice system too unthinkingly and too hastily attaches criminal labels to the urban poor.
In the end, this labeling during arrests, in the courthouses, and through imprisonment affects more than individual suspects, defendants, and inmates. Criminal labeling by the law and legal institutions contributes mightily to a broader sociocultural process of criminalization, one that sometimes implies all of the urban poor are criminal. Those angry and menacing young men who stare down at me from the giant illuminated billboard do so not only as individuals but also as representatives of a whole sector of the American population. The criminalization of the urban poor is a forceful first step in their oppression.
Arrest
The labeling of the urban poor as criminals does not begin with formal convictions in a court of law but rather with arrests on the streets of town. When the police arrest a poor person — usually a youth or young adult — consequences abound. The arrested person loses touch with school or work, assuming either has a place in his or her life. Many friends, neighbors, and relatives conclude the arrested person had "gone bad" or turned toward crime, and complete restoration of lost trust and respect is almost impossible. While in custody, the arrested person interacts with others who may have more fully accepted identities as criminals and are prepared to influence arrested neophytes. One arrest sets the stage for subsequent arrests, and it is not an exaggeration to say that being arrested can change the tenor and direction of one's life.
Where are the arrests most likely to occur? The answer is hardly surprising: Arrests are most likely where crime and criminal victimization are the most common. Study after study shows this locale to be the poor neighborhoods of our inner cities. The indefatigable William Julius Wilson, whose characterization of the urban poor as an "underclass" was mentioned in the introduction, has attempted to explain this phenomenon. In an article written with fellow sociologist Robert J. Sampson, Wilson observed that "macrosocial patterns of residential inequality give rise to social isolation and the ecological concentration of the truly disadvantaged, which in turn leads to structural barriers and cultural adaptation that undermine social organization and hence control of crime." Wilson and Sampson remind us, to put it more directly, to bear in mind the concentrated poverty and lack of social coherence in the communities in which crime and criminal victimization are most prevalent. We should not be surprised, Wilson and Sampson tell us, that a great deal of criminal conduct occurs in poor urban neighborhoods. As these neighborhoods took on their modern form in the 1970s and 1980s, they experienced dramatic increases in arrests per capita. The arrest rates then remained at high levels through the remainder of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century.
But concentrated poverty and deteriorating social capital do not fully explain the high arrest rates in poor inner-city neighborhoods. The controversial mindsets, expectations, and tactics of the police are also important factors. These features of policing push what are already high arrest rates even higher.
Facing criticism for their attitudes and actions, police departments have in fact greatly increased public-relations appearances and also the production of pamphlets and videos about their role as friendly helpers of the public. Then, too, so-called community policing has become all the rage. In community policing, police cordially patrol on foot, decentralize their departments, and most generally attempt to coordinate police work with the preferences of neighborhood residents and community organizations. Community policing stresses cooperation and partnership, and who, after all, wants to oppose anything with the word "community" in its name?
In reality, though, many police are not truly prepared to relinquish the power to community leaders or even to pay attention to what the leaders have to say. Stated simply, police prefer to root out crime and apprehend lawbreakers on their own. Individual police might have a passion for stamping out specific varieties of wrongdoing as indicated by the law, but more commonly police are enamored with enforceable laws whatever they might be. They think laws are to be followed, and they want to enforce them and crack down on those who break them. In their private heart-of-hearts, most police take their role to literally be "law enforcement."
The police are likely to be especially sanguine about law enforcement in poor urban communities. In particular, police are prone to perceiving poor urban neighborhoods as "offensible space." When a policeman observes the boarded-up storefronts and broken windows, he or she is likely to think of crime and violence. When a policeman contemplates the bulletproof shields in front of cash registers in corner stores, or the curving, metallic graffiti on the buses and trains, he or she might assume that criminals lurk and abound. Police come to the inner city thinking it is crime-laden, see visual cues, and take their expectations to be confirmed.
Beyond their general expectations and the visual cues, many police react to the behavior and characteristics of actual people they encounter in the inner city. Some police might see men wearing low-slung pants or sporting neck tattoos as likely to have criminal tendencies and inclinations. More crudely, some policemen might consider African Americans and Latinos as especially strong candidates for arrest. Certain people might strike police as a "good collar" — that is, an arrest that can stick and lead ultimately to a conviction.
In 2013, this type of thinking struck Judge Shira A. Scheindlin as an unconstitutional variety of racial profiling. Her 140-page opinion for the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York reviewed data for four million police stops and the purported efforts of New York City police to stop and frisk the right people at the right times in the right locations. In Scheindlin's mind, the notion of "the right people" was especially disconcerting in that it targeted members of groups heavily represented in the New York Police Department's crime-suspect data and thereby resulted in the disproportionate stopping and frisking of African Americans and Latinos. A person's race, like a person's height and weight, could be a permissible consideration in the descriptions of a specific suspect. But the practices of New York City's police did not relate to specific suspects and had to cease because it was impermissible to subject members of a racially defined group to heightened law enforcement simply because of their group affiliation. As Scheindlin put it, "The Equal Protection Clause does not permit race-based suspicion."
Scheindlin's 2013 decision outraged Michael Bloomberg and Raymond Kelly, the mayor and police commissioner respectively, and New York City legal officials successfully petitioned for a stay of Scheindlin's order. "Stop-and-frisk" policies then became one of the most pointed issues in the immediately subsequent mayoral election. After Bill de Blasio was victorious in that election, he settled the case by agreeing to the reforms Judge Scheindlin had ordered in the first place. In the present, the police department is ambitiously revising its policies, training, supervision, and discipline regarding "stop-and- frisk." In addition, an appointed official now monitors police practices, and in one pilot program, officers have to wear tiny video cameras that record what is said and done while officers are on patrol. The video camera idea has caught the eye of other communities and police departments and may eventually take hold in many cities. Overall, Judge Scheindlin estimated when she retired in 2016 that her orders had led street stops in New York City to drop from 685,000 in 2011 to only 24,000 in 2015.
One reason New York City police officials and unions were so upset with Judge Scheindlin's ruling is that a reliance on the notion of "offensible space" and a sense of who might be a "good collar" were truly central in police department operations. Police departments in New York City and elsewhere want to convince the public they are doing their job and doing it well. This may or may not involve meetings behind closed doors to discuss how to pump up arrest figures, but police departments serve their own interests by arresting frequently and efficiently. Hence, in the words of one prominent criminologist, "The large population of poor black males is the perfect bureaucratic solution. ... In a class society, the powerless, the poor, and those who fit the public stereotype of 'the criminal' are the human resources needed by law enforcement agencies to maximize rewards and minimize strains."
Contributing even further to the problem is what criminologists call the "asymmetrical status norm" in police work. As middle- and upper-class drivers stopped for a traffic offense know or quickly come to know, many police expect to receive more respect and deference than they are prepared to give. They expect to be addressed formally and approached politely. This is not the time for banter or, Heaven forbid, wisecracks. "A good deal of law enforcement is devoted not to the actual enforcement of rules, but to coercing respect from the people with whom the enforcer deals. This means that one may be labeled a criminal not because he has actually broken a rule, but because he has shown disrespect to the enforcer of the rule." According to one older study, failure to show respect for a policeman is the most certain way to get arrested by that policeman. Furthermore, police are often older than the people they have stopped or are questioning, and police are more likely to be white than are the people they encounter. Age and a sense of racial superiority can add to the asymmetrical expectations.
Within the "offensible space" of a center city populated by the urban poor, the asymmetrical expectations of the police are frequently unmet in encounters with poor people, especially teenagers and young adults. The police perceive young people wearing the badges of poverty to be rude and disrespectful. Police are unwilling to "take any shit" from these "wise-ass punks." Police almost instinctively feel the need to take firm control when dealing with the urban poor, and the resulting encounters are more fractious and menacing than one might expect. Given the tension, arrests become even more likely.
What's more, the law related to how and why police might arrest has evolved in ways that allow and almost invite the police to arrest. In his prize-winning book No Equal Justice, Georgetown University law professor David Cole has systematically set out an argument for how arrest law supports the police's proclivity for arresting the urban poor. While the police cannot simply search a person because they want to, the Supreme Court of the United States has ruled that suspects can "voluntarily" consent to searches. Police can and do exploit the consent-search rules for intimidated and poorly educated suspects, and when searches yield guns, illegal drugs, or stolen property, the police arrest.
Stop-and-frisk rules also allow a policeman who wants to arrest an inner-city resident to do so. Theoretically, the police cannot stop and frisk a suspect unless they have "reasonable suspicion" of wrongdoing, but a substantial body of laws and court rulings allows policemen to stop a person if they observe a suspect in a high-crime area or if the suspect is engaging in suspicious, evasive behavior. This standard creates a special vulnerability for the urban poor. For starters, and recalling where most crime is perpetrated, the urban poor for the most part live in what would classify as a "high-crime area." Then, too, the urban poor frequently have reason to avoid the police even if they have done nothing criminal. The urban poor, after all, are aware of patterns of harassment, tasing, rough treatment, and even shooting by police, and often head the other way whenever the police appear on their personal radar screens. This avoidance, though, might register as evasive and suspicious and thereby provide a legally justified opportunity to stop and frisk. To make a potentially longer story short, stop-and-frisks "are applied disproportionately to the poor, to African Americans and to Hispanic Americans." If frisking turns up a weapon, contraband, or both, the police can arrest, and no legal issues present themselves.
Police can also arrest individuals in motor vehicles using what are sometimes called "pretext stops." Police can almost always follow a car long enough to observe a rolling stop or failure to change a lane properly. Equipment problems also provide a pretext to stop a motor vehicle, and some police admit off the record that if all of a car's equipment is working, it is still easy to stop a car and break out the left rear taillight on the slow, ominous stroll to the driver's window. Then, too, the possibility always exists that fuzzy dice, medallions, or even pacifiers will be hanging from the rearview mirror — a virtual requirement on older cars driven by younger men of modest means, and technically an equipment violation in most jurisdictions. Given a purported traffic or equipment violation, a policeman can look inside the vehicle. If he or she spots weapons, drugs, open liquor bottles, or stolen property, he or she can arrest.
The media have reported frequently on the "driving while black" problem. As noted, African Americans are suspicious in some law- enforcement eyes simply because of their race. Sometimes police stop African American drivers not because of motor vehicle violations but rather because they are African Americans. Heated arguments might ensue, as might arrests, for what is really a matter of belonging to a subordinate race. In fairness to the media, the news stories have for the most part been critical of this phenomenon. However, the media have not satisfactorily noted that when a traffic stop occurs because somebody is African American, the traffic stop may be a pretext for looking for something else in order to make an arrest. The traffic stop, in other words, is often a means to a more consequential end.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Containment And Condemnation"
by .
Copyright © 2019 David Ray Papke.
Excerpted by permission of Michigan State University Press.
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