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Policing the Anticommunity: Race, 1 Deterritorialization, and Labor Market 2 Reorganization in South Los Angeles

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Policing the Anticommunity: Race, 1 Deterritorialization, and Labor Market 2 Reorganization in South Los Angeles J_ID: LASR Customer A_ID: LASR12168 Cadmus Art: LASR12168 Ed. Ref. No.: LSR.02866.R2 Date: 5-September-15 Stag 1 Policing the Anticommunity: Race, 1 Deterritorialization, and Labor Market 2 Reorganization in South Los Angeles 3 AQ4 Aaron Roussell 4 5 Recent decades have seen the rise of both community partnerships and the 6 carceral state. Community policing in Los Angeles arose after the 1992 upris- 7 ings and was built on two conceptual building blocks—the territorial impera- 8 tive and community partnership—which remain central more than 20 years 9 later. At the same time, LA has undergone a significant black-to-Latino demo- 10 graphic shift linked with its restructured economy. This article discusses these 11 changes using archival analysis and 5 years of participant observation in one 12 South LA precinct. Police help to reshape the demography of South LA in 13 ways conducive to post-Fordist economic shifts. The “community” concept 14 appropriated by urban governance initiatives is composed against the 15 unwanted “anticommunity,” which serves to heighten territorial control over 16 black and Latino residents. Rather than encourage community cogovernance 17 over the institution of policing, community rhetoric facilitates racial prefer- 18 ence in neighborhood transition under the auspices of an increasingly bifur- 19 cated labor market. 20 21 The rise of community partnerships in urban governance has 22 increasingly dominated the discussion on crime, law, social serv- 23 ices, and institutional initiatives (Brown 2010; Herbert and 24 Brown 2006; Hughes and Edwards 2002; Myers and Goddard 25 2013; Rose 1996). A parallel trend, referred to by such phrases 26 as the carceral state, the prison nation, and the new social con- 27 trol, has seen the rise of mass incarceration, as well as the 28 increased regulation and surveillance of public space and black 29 and brown populations (Beckett and Herbert 2009; Foucault 30 1995; Gelman, Fagan, and Kiss 2007; Richie 2012; Stuart 2011). 31 Implicated in both of these currents has been the adoption of 32 I would like to thank the residents and officers of South Division for their candidness, time, and patience with this research. Additional appreciation to Luis D. Gascon for our ongoing collaboration and Cheryl Maxson for providing data. Finally, many thanks to Terressa Benz, Kristin Haltinner, Raoul Lievanos, Mona Lynch, Jodie Nicotra, Marisa Omori, and Monica Williams for their helpful comments on various drafts of this manu- script, as well as my long-suffering reviewers and editors who helped refine and improve these arguments. I am very grateful. Please direct all correspondence to Aaron Roussell, Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology, 722 Johnson Tower, Washington State University, Pullman, WA 99164- 4872; e-mail: [email protected]. Law & Society Review, Volume 49, Number 4 (2015) VC 2015 Law and Society Association. All rights reserved. ID: rajae Time: 21:13 I Path: W:/JW-LASR150031 J_ID: LASR Customer A_ID: LASR12168 Cadmus Art: LASR12168 Ed. Ref. No.: LSR.02866.R2 Date: 5-September-15 Stag AQ1 2 Policing the Anticommunity community policing by nearly every major urban police force in 33 the country (Johnson and Roth 2003), a tactical and philosophi- 34 cal shift which purports to reconnect urban populations with 35 those agents the state has assigned to protect citizens and main- 36 tain order. Focusing on the shifting demographic and economic 37 terrain of Los Angeles, this article describes ways in which com- 38 munity policing helps remake urban neighborhoods. The com- 39 munity in community policing, rather than reflecting organic 40 notions of residents, conforms to police notions of territorial 41 control. 42 The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) began imple- 43 menting community policing in 1992, in tandem with the 44 national push for such initiatives. This effort was not a spontane- 45 ous desire to engage more closely with LA residents, but rather a 46 political response to the 1991 police beating of motorist Rodney 47 King and the 1992 uprisings that followed the acquittal of his 48 assailants by a white jury in Ventura County. Residents, particu- 49 larly in majority black and Latino South LA where the uprisings 50 began, exerted collective pressure to combat police racism and 51 brutality (Costa Vargas 2006; Davis 1993a; Loyd 2012). The inde- 52 pendent Christopher Commission Report generated in the 53 interim recommended community policing as one way to make 54 police “accountable to all segments of the community” and create 55 a more “positive relationship” with the community (1991: 105– 56 106). The LAPD’s resulting community policing approach 57 remains the official response to calls for police accountability in 58 LA. 59 Although the popular image of South Los Angeles is that of 60 an African-American ghetto—a “spatially segregated and contigu- 61 ous Black community” (Patillo 2003: 1046)—black residence 62 began to decline in the early 1980s from a height of about 85 63 percent. By 2007, South LA was over half Latino and nearly one- 64 third immigrant, a number which certainly undercounts the 65 undocumented population (Hipp et al. 2010). Families with 66 means of all ethnoracial groups have left South LA for the LA 67 Harbor, Long Beach, and the suburbs (Davis 1993b; Soja 2014). 68 As Costa Vargas (2006) suggests, South LA “is quickly becoming 69 the exclusive home of the brown and black California version of 70 the lumpenproletariat, and as such has become the site for an 71 unprecedented volume of imprisonment and deaths” (28)—a 72 broad statement supported by other LA researchers (Davis 2006; 73 Stuart 2011; Valle and Torres 2000). Linking demographic transi- 74 tion to urban governance, he suggests that up to 14 percent of 75 black outmigration from LA in the 1980s and 1990s was due 76 solely to the forced migration of incarceration. 77 ID: rajae Time: 21:13 I Path: W:/JW-LASR150031 J_ID: LASR Customer A_ID: LASR12168 Cadmus Art: LASR12168 Ed. Ref. No.: LSR.02866.R2 Date: 5-September-15 Stag Roussell 3 These demographic shifts are also linked to the vast urban 78 restructuring that LA has undergone since the 1970s (Soja 79 2014; Soja, Morales, and Wolff 1983). The rise of LA’s bifur- 80 cated service and information economy in place of its postwar 81 manufacturing dominance has provided the area with limited 82 job growth, swelling the Latino population of South LA by pull- 83 ing immigrants from Mexico and Central America (Ibarra and 84 Carlos 2015; Valle and Torres 2000). Such a post-Fordist 85 arrangement allows for both investment in high status, high 86 income technology and entertainment industries on the one 87 hand and a supportive economy of workers carrying out low- 88 status, labor-intensive tasks on the other. By the end of the 89 1990s, LA remained the largest industrial city in the United 90 States, but its “industries [were] based on nonunionized low- 91 wage workers ... drawn increasingly from the ranks of immi- 92 grants, legal and undocumented” (Valle and Torres 2000: 4). 93 Many service employers, such as hotels and cleaning services, 94 explicitly prefer immigrant and undocumented Latinos over 95 native-born black citizens. One ostensible reason for this is their 96 “soft skills”: Zamudio and Lichter (2008) argue that this is code 97 for tractable immigrant labor, as undocumented migrants can be 98 paid substandard wages, collect no benefits or worker’s compen- 99 sation, and are unlikely to sue over workplace violations. Yet the 100 preference against black labor has long been a historical trend 101 in LA (Sides 2003). As Marcelli, Pastor, and Jossart (1999) 102 remind us, this economic arrangement also swells the ranks of 103 the informal economy of both visible and invisible, citizen and 104 noncitizen labor, including day labor, prostitution, street food 105 vending, and drug selling. Meanwhile, the homeless population 106 has expanded significantly in LA’s “skid row,” about three- 107 fourths of whom are black, particularly since the 2008 housing 108 market crash (Stuart 2011). 109 To expand on the relationship between the turn to community 110 on the one hand and the growing prison nation on the other, this 111 article situates both trends within a framework that emphasizes the 112 responsivity of each to the racial/capitalist state. It contributes to a 113 developing, place-based literature that considers together political 114 economy, law enforcement, and the racialized social forces that 115 shape urban space. For example, Lynch and her colleagues (2013) 116 identified economic and political pressures from gentrification and 117 tourism as driving differential drug law enforcement in San Fran- 118 cisco. These policies subjected black residents in different neigh- 119 borhoods to coercive containment or expulsion depending on the 120 political/economic development goals for each neighborhood. In 121 LA, Stuart (2011) finds that special law enforcement task forces 122 sweep homeless populations in “Skid Row” into subpoverty 123 ID: rajae Time: 21:13 I Path: W:/JW-LASR150031 J_ID: LASR Customer A_ID: LASR12168 Cadmus Art: LASR12168 Ed. Ref. No.: LSR.02866.R2 Date: 5-September-15 Stag AQ1 4 Policing the Anticommunity positions using initiatives underwritten by businesses that profit 124 from this labor. He discusses in other work the rehabilitation- 125 oriented policing of the homeless in Skid Row compared to their 126 expulsion from “prime” commodified urban spaces (Stuart 2014). 127 These authors explicitly connect patterns of racialized law enforce- 128 ment to neoliberal economic policy, yet such logics are not simply 129 economic, using cultural understandings of racial inferiority to 130 enable policies that would not pass muster if the affected popula- 131 tions were middle-class whites (Alexander 2010; Katznelson 2006).
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