Introduction

Darryl Watkins is a balding black man in his midfifties. His slight

limp and callused hands tell of a life of manual labor. A veteran of
the first Gulf war, Darryl suffers from partial hearing loss and re-
curring symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). For the
three years before we met, Darryl had held a part-time, off-the-books
job stocking shelves and mopping the floors of a small convenience
store in South Central Los Angeles. To make ends meet, he combined
the $150 in cash he took home each week with his monthly General
Relief check of $221. This meager income allowed Darryl to rent a
small studio apartment a few blocks from the store. One day, without
warning, Darryl’s life took a turn for the worse. His employer sold the
shop and let Darryl go. Without consistent income, Darryl was soon
evicted from his apartment. As part of his search for a new place to
live, he made the two-hour bus ride to the Veterans Affairs benefits
office to ask for assistance. The VA could offer no immediate help.
Instead, they handed Darryl a list of cheap single-room-occupancy
(SRO) hotels located across town, in Los Angeles’s Skid Row district.
Known locally as “the Nickel,” Skid Row is a fifty-block neighbor-
hood on the eastern flank of the city’s rapidly redeveloping down-
town. Despite their geographic proximity, the two areas are worlds
apart. Mere blocks from LA’s iconic city hall, revitalized central
business district, and hippest new coffee shops sits one of the rawest
expressions of structural violence and urban marginality found any-
where in America. Described by historian Mike Davis as “the inner
circle of Dante’s inferno,” the Nickel is home to some thirteen thou-

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sand residents living in extreme poverty.1 Over the last three decades,
the neighborhood has become a community of last resort for those hit
hardest by deindustrialization and welfare cutbacks. As job opportu-
nities and social supports continue to dry up, denizens from across
the United States are migrating to LA’s Skid Row in search of emer-
gency resources and low-cost housing. The population is overwhelm-
ingly made up of black, undereducated, working-age men, many of
whom have problems associated with physical disabilities, mental
illness, and addiction.2 With one-third of Skid Row’s residents living
on the streets, in shelters, or in temporary housing, the neighborhood
is widely considered the homeless capital of America.
Despite having lived in Los Angeles most of his life, Darryl had
never set foot in Skid Row until the VA suggested he live there. Still,
he was well aware of its reputation as a place of exile. “It hit me like
a ton of bricks,” he recalled of learning about his “housing options.”
“I got a big ol’ knot in my stomach as soon as the lady on the desk said
those two words: Skid Row. I guess that’s when it finally sunk in. I was
finally at the end of the road. Rock bottom.”
Having exhausted all other options, Darryl reluctantly slung his
duffel bag on his back and boarded a bus for Skid Row, where he used
his remaining savings to rent a room in an SRO hotel. Despite the
spartan accommodations, with their faint odor and shared toilet, he
forced himself to hold on to hope. To make his rent, he joined the fleet
of residents who spend their days scavenging nearby alleys, pushing
rickety shopping carts in search of cardboard boxes, aluminum cans,
small electronics, and anything else that can be converted into cash.
When the hauls were good, Darryl was able to afford his room. When
times were lean, he resorted to sleeping on the streets or in a shelter.
Darryl and I met shortly after his arrival. We bonded over a heated
game of dominoes in one of Skid Row’s small parks. Like Darryl, I
was a relative newcomer to the neighborhood. Yet our paths to this
place could not have been more different. At the time, I was a gradu-
ate student at UCLA interested in writing a book on the daily survival
strategies of those relegated to the very bottom of the social hierar-

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chy. Darryl was one of a number of Skid Row residents who graciously
invited me into their lives, and I began trekking out with him most
mornings to help him dumpster dive. It was difficult and dirty work,
and Darryl seemed happy to have a curious and unpaid “apprentice”
to hold open dumpster lids and help him haggle for better prices at
the recycling center.
I was consistently impressed by Darryl’s optimism in the face of
such stark conditions. He greeted me in the mornings with a wide,
gap-toothed smile and kept me laughing with stories about child-
hood sweethearts and boot-camp follies. Sometimes, however, after
several hours sweating in the LA sun, his tone grew darker. “If you
think about it,” he complained once as we struggled to control his
cumbersome cart, “I really shouldn’t have to be doing any of this at
all. I was there when America needed me. I had faith in my country,
in my government. But where are they now, now that I need some
help? I tried everywhere. DMH [Department of Mental Health], DPSS
[Department of Public Social Services], the housing office, the VA. But
it’s the same broken record everywhere I go: ‘We can’t do anything
for you, Mr. Watkins.’ It’s like they just used me up and left me out in
the cold.”
Darryl’s words rang in my head for some time. Yet he was far from
alone in this sentiment. From my first days in the neighborhood, I con-
sistently heard newcomers tell me that they had “paid their dues”—
whether by serving in the military, paying taxes, working diligently,
or simply “keeping their nose clean” in impoverished, often violent
conditions—only to be abandoned by the state in their most desper-
ate moment. They quickly learned, however, that the abandonment
was not complete. Rather, state intervention had been reorganized
and reinserted in the form of aggressive policing. On the streets of
the Nickel, the Los Angeles Police Department was intent on solving
residents’ problems and bringing them back into the fold, whether
residents wanted this help or not.
For Darryl, this lesson came within weeks of his arrival. On an
otherwise unremarkable morning, he sat alone on a curb next to

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his overflowing cart, resting his feet after a particularly tiring haul.
Without warning, two LAPD squad cars slammed to a halt only feet
away. The officers were on top of him before Darryl had time to re-
act. They pushed him against a nearby wall and slapped handcuffs
on his wrists. After searching him and running his name through a
warrant database, they arrested him for sitting on the sidewalk—a
misdemeanor and an arrestable offense in Los Angeles. But for Dar-
ryl, the suddenness of the arrest was quickly overshadowed by the
curious nature of the booking process. At the station, the officers gave
him an unexpected ultimatum: they would drop the charges if he en-
rolled in a twenty-one-day residential rehabilitation program. Dar-
ryl accepted the offer. Twenty minutes later, a caseworker escorted
him and five other arrestees out of the station and two blocks east to
the Union Rescue Mission (URM)—the largest shelter and nonprofit
service provider in the United States. Once inside, Darryl began his
mandatory participation in the URM’s flagship employment training
and Bible study classes.
I ran into Darryl the following week in the park. He recounted
his arrest and explained that he had absconded from the program
after only four days. Conditions inside the facility—particularly the
mandatory lights-out and early bedtime—seemed to amplify his
PTSD. Instead of sleeping, he told me, he spent those few evenings
wrestling with insomnia and panic attacks. The facility allowed him
to leave during daylight hours but required him to report back ev-
ery four hours, for classes or simply to account for his whereabouts.
This schedule made it virtually impossible to return to recycling, his
usual means of generating income. The program also mandated that
Darryl attend drug counseling and submit to random drug tests. The
final straw came when the organization asked him to hand over his
monthly General Relief check, insisting that doing so would teach
him the merits of saving.
While Darryl was able to cut ties with the program quickly, avoid-
ing contact with police proved far more difficult. Less than a week
later, officers detained, handcuffed, and searched him and several

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 inTrodUCTion 5

other men as they stood in line for free sandwiches being distributed
by an out-of-town church group. “The cops wouldn’t let us get our
food,” he told me the next morning. “They said that instead of stand-
ing around waiting for handouts, we needed to be spending our time
looking for jobs.” Darryl pleaded with the officers, insisting that he
had been unsuccessful in landing decent-paying work after his re-
cent layoff. The officers responded by issuing him a littering ticket
(for flicking his cigarette ash into the breeze). They instructed him to
take it to the URM, where four hours of job counseling would elim-
inate the $174 fine. “They acted like they were doing me a favor,” he
said with frustration. But Darryl was determined not to return to the
URM, even for four hours. Over time, the unpaid fine increased to
over $500, his driver’s license was suspended, and a warrant was is-
sued for his arrest.
Several weeks later, officers detained Darryl again for sitting on
the sidewalk near the URM. Instead of arresting him, these officers
presented him with the now familiar ultimatum right there on the
spot: they would take Darryl to jail unless he walked back into the
facility and enrolled in one of its rehabilitation programs. Once more,
Darryl opted for the latter choice. The officers watched closely as he
made his way inside. Resolved not to reenter the program, he sat in
the lobby for several hours, leaving only when he felt confident that
the officers’ shift had ended. So began a recurring cycle. Over the next
four months, the police stopped Darryl three more times, resulting
in an additional citation, a second arrest, a three-week jail sentence,
and another mandated stay in a rehabilitation program. I kept up with
Darryl throughout this period. His optimism and magnetic personal-
ity had begun to dull as his deepening entanglements with the crim-
inal justice system made it harder for him to get back on his feet, let
alone scrape up enough money to support himself.

Police encounters like Darryl’s have become a daily, if not hourly, oc-
currence in Skid Row. In September 2006, just before Darryl and I

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 6 inTrodUCTion

arrived in the area, the LAPD had launched the Safer Cities Initiative
(SCI), one of the most intense policing campaigns ever seen. At an
annual price tag of six million dollars, SCI saturated the neighbor-
hood’s 0.85 square miles with eighty additional officers, making LA’s
Skid Row home to arguably the densest concentration of standing
police forces anywhere in the United States.3 Adhering to the “zero
tolerance” model of law enforcement, officers made nine thousand
arrests and issued twelve thousand citations in the initiative’s first
year alone.
Over the course of five years, I spent time with hundreds of Skid
Row residents for whom the police were a constant concern. I wit-
nessed and heard about repeated detainments, interrogations, cita-
tions, arrests, and incarceration at the hands of the LAPD. I quickly
realized that understanding the daily realities of America’s most
disadvantaged—the dilemmas that complicate securing an income,
obtaining housing, or merely acquiring a meal—requires that we
consider the pervasive role and impact of the police. Down, Out, and
Under Arrest is the result. This book builds outward from thousands
of police interactions and experiences like Darryl’s to show how po-
licing is reshaping urban poverty and marginality in the twenty-first
century.
This book makes two central assertions. The first is that zero-
tolerance policing campaigns like the Safer Cities Initiative represent
a profound shift in contemporary poverty governance. As federal,
state, and local governments continue to purge welfare rolls, elim-
inate housing programs, and privatize service provision, the police
are increasingly tasked with day-to-day management of the growing
number of citizens falling through the holes in the threadbare social
safety net. Contrary to many of our assumptions about policing, these
interventions are not simply intended to lock up the poor and throw
away the key. Rather, they reflect what I term therapeutic policing—a
paternalistic brand of spatial, behavioral, and moral discipline de-
signed to “cure” those at the bottom of the social hierarchy of the indi-
vidual pathologies deemed responsible for their abject circumstances.

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The second major contention is that this interventionist mode of

social control has reshaped the cultural contexts of poor neighbor-
hoods. In their efforts to cope with omnipresent regulation and sur-
veillance, residents develop a shared cognitive framework—what I
call cop wisdom—that becomes a guide for processing information,
perceiving available options, and making moral sense of experiences,
even when police officers are not (yet) physically present. Cop wis-
dom also provides the foundation for residents’ efforts to evade, de-
flect, and otherwise contest unwanted police contact. Through this
process, policing has become intimately woven into the social fabric
of everyday life, restructuring how those relegated to the bottom of
the social order come to understand their peers, their communities,
and themselves.
Taken together, these developments reflect a dramatic transfor-
mation in relations between the state and the urban poor. Through-
out the latter half of the twentieth century, our most impoverished
communities faced an era of “malign neglect” on the part of a state
that was unwilling to provide adequate economic, social, and physical
protections.4 While the down-and-out have received neither respite
from market insecurities nor meaningful increases in financial sup-
port, they confront a new set of challenges to mere survival. The ma-
lign neglect of the past is increasingly supplanted by an era of “malign
attention.” A reorganized, interventionist state reaches even deeper
into the lives of the urban poor to exert strict control over their most
mundane and commonplace behaviors.

Policing the Poor

Poverty governance—the supervision, regulation, and integration of

impoverished populations into civil society and the market—is a pe-
rennial state concern. Generations of social thinkers, from Karl Marx
to Michel Foucault, have called attention to the fact that the police,
the courts, and prison constitute a primary means by which the state
accomplishes this task. Criminal justice policies operate in tandem

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