The disordered state of zero-tolerance urban policing is the subject of Down, Out, and Under Arrest, the first book by University of Chicago sociologist Forrest Stuart. He is mixed race (black and Mexican) and grew up in impoverished San Bernardino, Calif. He spent five years doing a field study in the Skid Row neighborhood of Los Angeles, known as the homeless capital of the United States. Its residents are mostly black, unemployed, undereducated, disabled and addicted, and it has more police officers per capita than any other LAPD division.
In the 1990s, Los Angeles helped build three "mega-shelters" in Skid Row. These refuges emphasized rehabilitation over providing temporary food and shelter, and collaborated with the police to get people into their facilities. This altered how police officers viewed their work, which "led to a perverse development: the officers most committed to rehabilitation and reintegration... often acted the most punitively toward residents...." Stuart found that this approach burdens the poor with steep fines and jail time for minor infractions.
He recommends that the U.S. undo policies that treat the poor as undeserving, incompetent and immoral. Therapeutic policing should be replaced by programs that provide basic housing and voluntary access to services, and reduce the harms of self-destructive behaviors rather than trying to eliminate them--approaches that have been proven to succeed. This is a serious academic book, but it is also intimate and multifaceted, adding new insights and much-needed complexity to the current debates on policing in the poorest urban areas of the U.S. --Sara Catterall