Cruel Survival: Policing and Punishing the Unhoused in the American City
Book in Progress (Under Contract with University of California Press)
Cruel Survival examines and rethinks the criminalization of homelessness in the progressive city. Over the past three decades scholars, activists, and journalists have drawn our attention to the ways cities have pursued campaigns of zero-tolerance policing: locking up low-level misdemeanor offenders and removing the homeless from public space, all while slashing welfare assistance. Yet what of progressive cities today? Observers across the political spectrum frequently claim that San Francisco and other progressive cities have reduced or even ended the criminalization of homelessness. San Francisco has decreased its jail population by over 70%, ended cash-bail, elected progressive DA’s, and expanded alternative sentencing programs. Liberals point to these facts to claim their cities do not punish the poor, while conservatives blame these policies for enabling urban disorder. In fact, they are both wrong: the criminalization of homelessness has increased. It’s just that the policing and punishment takes different forms.
About the Research
The book draws on research carried out between 2015-2020. At its foundation are two years of intensive participant observation that braids the standpoints of the unhoused and of those who manage them. One year was spent studying the state from below: I spent 229 nights embedded on the streets, in shelters, and in daily welfare hotels with those experiencing homelessness, and even more days accompanying people accessing services, courts, hospitals, and jobs or gathering resources through panhandling and recycling. Another year was devoted to studying the field of homeless management from within. From ground-level interactions on ride-alongs with police officers, public health workers on street outreach, and sanitation workers tasked with encampment cleanings, to the inner workings of city hall, where I briefly served as a research assistant to the director of the Mayor’s Office of Homelessness. Finally, the book offers perspectives against the state, as my organizing with advocates at the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness involved challenging and resisting city policies, officials, and employees. Across these viewpoints I witnessed nearly daily interactions between police and the unhoused through arrests, citations, and move-along orders on the streets as well as policy processes and political struggles over the policing of homelessness in the halls of power. In addition, the book draws on two original community-based survey and interview studies with homeless San Franciscans (n=350 and n=600), scrutiny of government documents and emails accessed through public records requests, and analysis of nearly four million 911 and 311 call records of “homeless concerns.”
Related Academic Articles
Complaint-Oriented Policing: Regulating Homelessness in Public Space. American Sociological Review. 2019.
Over the past 30 years, cities across the United States have adopted quality-of-life ordinances aimed at policing social marginality. Scholars have documented zero-tolerance policing and emerging tactics of therapeutic policing in these efforts, but little attention has been paid to 911 calls and forms of third-party policing in governing public space and the poor. Drawing on an analysis of 3.9 million 911 and 311 call records and participant observation alongside police officers, social workers, and homeless men and women residing on the streets of San Francisco, this article elaborates a model of “complaint-oriented policing” to explain additional causes and consequences of policing visible poverty. Situating the police within a broader bureaucratic field of poverty governance, I demonstrate how policing aimed at the poor can be initiated by callers, organizations, and government agencies, and how police officers manage these complaints in collaboration and conflict with health, welfare, and sanitation agencies. Expanding the conception of the criminalization of poverty, which is often centered on incarceration or arrest, the study reveals previously unforeseen consequences of move-along orders, citations, and threats that dispossess the poor of property, create barriers to services and jobs, and increase vulnerability to violence and crime.
"COMPLAINT-ORIENTED “SERVICES”: SHELTERS AS TOOLS FOR CRIMINALIZING HOMELESSNESS." THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF POLITICAL AND SOCIAL SCIENCE 693.1: 264-283.
This article argues that the expansion of shelter and welfare provisions for the homeless can lead to increased criminalization of homeless people in public spaces. First, I document how repression of people experiencing homelessness by the police in San Francisco neighborhoods increased immediately after the opening of new shelters. Second, I reveal how shelter beds are used as a privileged tool of the police to arrest, cite, and confiscate property of the unhoused, albeit in the guise of sanitary and public health initiatives. I conclude by considering how shelters increasingly function as complaint-oriented “services,” aimed at addressing the interests of residents, businesses, and politicians, rather than the needs of those unhoused.
“PERVASIVE PENALITY: HOW THE CRIMINALIZATION OF HOMELESSNESS PERPETUATES POVERTY.” SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 2019. WITH DILARA YARBROUGH AND LISA MARIE ALATORRE.
A growing literature is looking beyond incarceration to understand the extent to which the criminal justice system perpetuates poverty and inequality. This paper examines how anti-homeless laws, the most prominent and rapidly growing subset of quality of life laws in US cities today, produces various forms of police interactions that fall short of arrest, yet have wide-ranging impacts on the urban poor. Because such interactions are largely untracked by the state, and in turn under-scrutinized by scholars, our study provides one of the first assessments of the effects of quality-of-life policing on marginalized groups drawing on a citywide survey of those who have recently experienced homelessness along with 43-in-depth interviews. Our analysis elaborates the mechanisms through which consistent punitive interactions, including move-along orders, citations and destruction of property systematically limit homeless people’s access to services, housing, and jobs, while damaging their health, safety, and well-being. Our findings also suggest that anti-homeless laws and enforcement fail to deliver on their promise of reducing urban disorder, instead creating a spatial churn in which homeless people circulate between neighborhoods and police jurisdictions rather than leaving public space. We argue that these laws and their enforcement, which affected the majority of study participants, constitute a larger process of pervasive penality - consistent punitive interactions with state officials that most often do not result in arrest, but nonetheless exact widespread and deep material and psychological harm. This process not only reproduces homelessness, but also deepens racial, gender, and health inequalities among the urban poor.
“FIGHTING ANTI-HOMELESS LAWS THROUGH PARTICIPATORY ACTION RESEARCH: REFLECTIONS FROM THE SAN FRANCISCO COALITION ON HOMELESSNESS’ CRIMINALIZATION STUDY." 2020. WITH LISA MARIE ALATORRE, JENNIFER FRIEDENBACH, BILAL ALI, TJ JOHNSTON, AND DILARA YARBROUGH. IN S. GREENBAUM AND P. ZINN (EDS), COLLABORATING FOR CHANGE: A PARTICIPATORY ACTION RESEARCH CASEBOOK. NEW BRUNSWICK: RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS.
Formed in 1987, the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness has been organizing against the criminalization of poverty for over 20 years. In collaboration with sociologists, we conducted a PAR study about the effects of the criminalization of homelessness in San Francisco. This chapter discusses 1) how our participatory research process enhanced the quality of data and worked as a vehicle for organizing 2) how our project impacted the organization, city, and narrative on the criminalization of homelessness and 3) how we confronted assumptions about expertise as we worked to establish homeless people as leaders and experts in the local policy arena. Our successes, struggles, and process will be useful to other researchers and organizers designing and implementing projects that establish the expertise and leadership of directly affected communities.
Public-Private Parasites: How Business Improvement Districts Criminalize Homelessness. In Progress. with jeff garnand.
Over the past three decades, Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) have proliferated across North America and more recently abroad. Over this same period time local anti-homeless laws have expanded making it illegal to sit, rest, or ask for money in public spaces. While recent studies have explained how these public-private partnerships engage in advocacy to pass such anti-homeless laws, we know little about how these organizations enforce such laws once they are in place and the impacts they have on the unhoused. Drawing on an analysis of 3.9 million of 311 and 911 call records, administrative data, and interviews with BID and city officials we elaborate how BIDs criminalize homelessness in the city of San Francisco. We argue that BIDs, which are private entities, use their publicly granted powers at the expense of their host, to draw increased policing, sanitation, and even social service resources from the city, displace homelessness into surrounding neighborhoods, all while advocating for costly policies that criminalize poverty and restrict public space across the entire municipality.
Therapeutic Penal Populism: Policing Poverty in the Progressive City
Despite the growing wave of criminal justice reform and the resurgence of progressive politics in several major US cities, punitive policies against the poor such as anti-homeless laws and quality-of-life policing initiatives persist and expand. How can we explain this persistent punitiveness in the progressive city? This article explains how discourses and practices of welfare and medical provision for the extremely poor are used by politicians and policymakers to legitimate and enact increased policing of the city’s unhoused. In contrast to the portrayal of a “punitive turn” marked by the downgrading of the welfare state and upgrading of the penal state, the first part of the paper draws on archival records (1983 – 2008) to document how new anti-homeless laws and policing initiatives in San Francisco have been paired with the expansion of homeless services. The second part of the paper analyzes the city’s recent passage of an anti-camping ban as a ballot measure. Drawing on observations of policy-makers and stakeholders conducted while working in the Mayor’s office of homelessness when the measure sparked battles between city supervisors, as an organizer with the city’s homeless advocacy group fighting the measure, and observations at homeowner, business, and community associations meetings, I show how discourses of housing, shelter, and medical treatment were mobilized to support the ban. Building on Durkheim’s conception of punishment as an emotive and communicative device and the criminological theory of “penal populism” that describes how electoral advantage of policy takes precedence over penal effectiveness, feeding off of “tough on crime” emotional reactions, this article develops the concept of therapeutic penal populism. I argue that punitive policies against the poor continue to be driven by a symbolic politics for electoral advantage, but increasingly require the rhetorical and policy accoutrements of therapy to make them palatable to a liberal citizenry. Unfortunately, as the subsequent articles reveal, the welfare, medical, and social provisions with which these penal policies are paired are wholly inadequate and result in increased criminalization, punishment, and deprivation of the unhoused.