Event

Abstract: Over the last four decades, the United States has witnessed a dramatic expansion of all facets of its criminal justice system. This project considers the sociological impacts of hyper-criminalization on the daily experiences, social interactions, and cultural contexts of impoverished urban communities. Drawing on five years of ethnographic fieldwork in Los Angeles’ Skid Row – the site of one of the most aggressive “zero-tolerance” policing campaigns to date – I examine how Skid Row residents develop and deploy a particular cultural frame – what I term “cop wisdom” – by which they render seemingly-random police activity more legible, predictable, and manipulable. Armed with this interpretive schema, “copwise” residents develop creative and circumspect strategies for evading, deflecting, and subverting punitive criminal justice interventions. For better or worse, cop wisdom and its resulting behaviors have 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.