The Jail. John Irwin
and massage parlors. In a sense, these zones are given over to the rabble, not because it is recognized that the rabble must have a place, but because there is nothing else that can be done with them. In these zones the police have a mandate to reduce the public deviance to an acceptable level, prevent disreputables from preying excessively on one another, and protect reputable persons who pass through or have business there. As one officer said: “We have girls going to work at the Telephone Company here. They have to walk through this area. We have to provide them with an area they can walk through.”42
Police officers will arrest disreputables in these zones for acting in ways that exceed the police officers’ conception of the zone’s behavioral limits. This conception is based on unstated, unwritten discretionary standards, which are part of the police officers’ working culture and are learned mostly on the job.* Many violations of these discretionary standards are, at most, very petty crimes, and sometimes they consist of nothing more than disobeying an officer’s commands or in some other way challenging his authority—and in these zones maintaining authority is an important issue with police. In this study my research assistant and I randomly selected 100 persons arrested for felonies in San Francisco and then interviewed them and reviewed their booking and court records. In twenty-five cases, the persons were engaged in very petty crimes (or no crime at all), but they behaved in ways that apparently exceeded the standards of the rabble zone. Here are a few examples of such behavior, taken from the interviews or from the booking reports of the arresting officer.
A young black male got into a fight with his sister in their home in one of the city’s ethnic ghettos. She called the police and told them that he had hit her with a stick. He claimed that he had not: “I have witnesses that say I didn’t touch her.” The police believed her version and arrested him.
A young white male described his arrest to me: “I was standing outside a door and the landlady called the police. I was bleeding. I had just been beat up. When they came, they searched me and found some pills. They were nice to me. Took me to get some stitches and then brought me to jail.”
In another example, the arresting officers described the arrest in their booking report:
While on patrol in the area [an ethnic ghetto] I observed E. to be walking from corner to corner with no apparent business. As I observed him further to walk [north bound] on Octavia from Hayes, I entered the radio car, at which time E. took a cigarette package out of his pocket, and threw it onto the stairs of [street number] Octavia, at which time two tablets fell out of the package. Further look at the package produced 24 more white tablets, possibly codeine No. 4. E. was taken into custody and booked.
In trying to keep the zone’s public deviant behavior within tolerable limits, police officers watch particular persons and particular types, such as petty hustlers. Three of the arrests in the felony sample were of persons that the police officers knew and defined as potential troublemakers. One of them said: “I was walking down the street through the Tenderloin with some friends. A cop pulls up and says, ‘you’re drunk.’ He grabbed me and we scuffled. I fell down. The cop accused me of trying to steal his gun. It was a set-up. They did the same thing to me a year ago. They’re just trying to get my probation revoked.”
Six arrests were of petty hustlers who sold drugs in San Francisco’s Tenderloin or the South of Market skid row. One member of this group said in an interview: “I was walking down Market Street talking to a friend. Two undercover cops thought I was talking to them [instead of his friend], trying to sell them some weed. They arrested me for possession for sale. It wasn’t weed; it was tobacco and herbs.”
Two arrests were of Cubans, a group the police see as troublemakers and criminals. In an interview, one Cuban explained (in Spanish) that he had been standing with a friend on the corner of Twentieth and Mission (in the heart of the Latino neighborhood) when the police pulled up to them. He said he did not know what they said because he cannot speak English. They arrested him and his friend for felony assault. (Two days later the charges were dismissed.)
In the rabble zones disreputables often prey on other disreputables, and police officers make arrests to protect the disreputable victims. This apparently was the case in eight of the arrests in our sample. As one man said in his interview: “Me and my ole lady were having an argument on the street. We had been drinking and walking around [in the Tenderloin]. She stepped out in the street and flagged down a police car and told them I had hit her and was trying to rape her.” (The charges were dropped three days later.)
Some neighborhoods in San Francisco are “contested zones,” areas that the rabble want to use and the police want to clean up. In these contested sections, police enforce stringent standards against the disreputables. Seven of the arrests made in contested zones were for behavior by disreputables that probably would have been tolerated in rabble zones. For example: “I was walking through the Haight [a zone that is rising out of its mid-1970s depths as a hippie skid row], and a police officer came up to me and asked if I could get him some drugs. I knew he was a cop. Then he wanted me to work for him, turn in people I knew who were dealing. I wouldn’t, so they busted me.” (The charges were dropped by “order of the court” when this man appeared at arraignment.)
Another example: “I was sitting on the steps at Walgreen’s on Polk Street [a contested neighborhood] drinking vodka. The police came up to me and told me to pour it out. Then they searched me and found some grass on me. It was less than an ounce. They arrested me for possession for sale.” (The charges were reduced in court to a misdemeanor and the man fined $100.)
When police see disreputables in respectable neighborhoods, they watch them closely and apply very strict standards. In our sample of 100, thirteen rabble types were arrested in respectable neighborhoods for committing acts that probably would have been ignored if they had occurred in rabble zones or if reputable people had committed them. One of the thirteen reported: “I was riding around with a friend and his car broke down. He got out to fix it, and across the street some guy ran away from an open car. We went over to look at it and were looking in the window when the cops pulled up. They arrested us for burglary.” (The charge was dismissed the next day.)
Raids
In addition to containing deviance within rabble zones and acceptable limits, police officers, particularly members of the vice squad, make raids into the zone to arrest particular individuals or types of disreputables. Raiding Tenderloin hotel rooms and apartments to capture persons involved in drugs is the most common form of raid in San Francisco. Nine of the felony arrests in our sample were apparently the result of raids. For example, one interviewee said: “We were in our room in a hotel on Eddy Street [in the Tenderloin] and the cops came busting in the door. They were undercover narcotics agents. They started hassling everyone. There were a lot of drugs in the room. They arrested everyone. They told me, ‘We’re sending you back to San Quentin.’”
Another common form of raid depends upon the use of “plants” to catch petty thieves on the street. A booking report read:
On Tuesday 11–17-81 at 13:15 hrs. Lieutenant B. strolled east on Market Street. Lt. B. feigned the appearance of an elderly pensioner, and in his right rear pants pocket was a tan envelope containing $2.00. Lt. B. stopped and looked eastward when R. approached Lt. B. and took the tan envelope out of the pocket. R. was arrested by Sergeant W. and transported to the Hall of Justice where he was booked on the above charge.
Sweeps
Occasionally the police set out to round up an entire category of rabble in order to clean up the streets in an area. For example, the Las Vegas police went after street prostitutes in March 1981. “Almost 300 prostitutes were arrested and taken to jail during the first 48 hours of a police crack-down on Las Vegas Strip prostitution, Assistant Sheriff Jere Vanek said yesterday. . . . ‘The street hookers are offensive, have no tact, no finesse, they get into fistfights over turf.’”43
In Miami in October 1982 the police swept the streets of derelicts before the arrival of a convention of travel agents. A newspaper reported:
Like an anxious hostess