REGGIE: And you on parole! You done got home like a day ago! Why the fuck you calling the law for? You lucky they ain’t just grab [arrest] both of you.
FRIEND: Put it this way: they ain’t come grab you like you ain’t violate shit, they ain’t find no other jawns [warrants] in the computer. Dude ain’t pop no fly shit [accused Mike of some crime in an attempt to reduce his own charges], but simple fact is you filed a statement, you know what I’m saying, gave them niggas your government [real name]. Now they got your mom’s address in the file as your last known [address]. The next time they come looking for you, they not just going to your uncle’s, they definitely going to be through there [his mother’s house].
In this case, their counsel proved correct. Mike returned to the halfway house a few days later and discovered that the guards there were conducting alcohol tests. He left before they could test him, assuming he would test positive and spend another year upstate for the violation. He planned to live on the run for some time, but three days later the police found him at his mother’s house and took him into custody. We had been playing video games, and he had gone across the street to change his clothes at the Laundromat. Two unmarked cars pulled up, and three officers got out and started chasing him. He ran for two blocks before they threw him down on the pavement. Later, he mentioned that their knowledge of his mother’s new address must have come from the time he reported the robbery, and he bemoaned his thoughtlessness in calling them.
Young men also learn to see the courts as dangerous. A year after Chuck came home from the assault case, he enrolled in a job training program for young men who have not completed high school, hoping to earn his high school diploma and gain a certificate in construction. He proudly graduated at twenty-two and found a job apprenticing on a construction crew. Around this time he had been arguing with his baby-mom, and she stopped allowing him to see their two daughters, ages one and a half and six months. After considerable hesitation, Chuck took her to family court to file for partial custody. He said it tore at him to let a white man into his family affairs, but what could he do? He needed to see his kids. At the time, Chuck was also sending thirty-five dollars per month to the city toward payment on tickets he had received for driving without a license or registration; he hoped to get into good standing and become qualified to apply for a driver’s license. The judge said that if Chuck did not meet his payments on time every month, he would issue a bench warrant for his arrest.4 Then Chuck could work off the traffic tickets he owed in county jail (fines and fees can be deducted for every day spent in custody).
Five months into his case for partial custody in family court, Chuck lost his construction job and stopped making the payments to the city for the traffic tickets. He said he wasn’t sure if he had actually been issued a warrant, and unsuccessfully attempted to discover this. He went to court for the child custody case anyway the next month, and when his baby-mom mentioned that he was a drug dealer and unfit to get partial custody of their children, the judge immediately ran his name in the database to see if any warrants came up. They did not. As we walked out of the courthouse, Chuck said to me and to his mother:
I wanted to run [when the clerk ran his name], but it was no way I was getting out of there—it was too many cops and guards. But my shit came back clean, so I guess if they’re going to give me a warrant for the tickets, they ain’t get around to it yet.
The judge ruled in Chuck’s favor and granted him visitation on Sundays at a court-supervised day-care site. These visits, Chuck said, made him anxious: “Every time I walk in the door I wonder, like, is it today? Are they going to come grab me, like, right out of the day care? I can just see [my daughter’s] face, like, ‘Daddy, where you going?’”
After a month, the conditions of his custody allowed Chuck to go to his baby-mom’s house on the weekends to pick up his daughters. He appeared thrilled with these visits, because he could see his children without having to interact with the courts and risk any warrant that might come up.
. . .
If, in the past, residents of poor Black communities could not turn to the police to protect themselves or settle disputes because the police were so often absent and uninterested, now it seems that residents face an additional barrier: they cannot turn to the police because their legal entanglements prevent them from doing so. The police are everywhere, but as guarantors of public safety, they are still out of reach.
The hesitancy of legally precarious men to turn to the authorities has some important implications. First, steering clear of the police and the courts means that young men tend not to use the ordinary resources of the law to protect themselves from crimes committed against them.5 While those on probation or parole may make tentative use of these resources (and sometimes regret it later, when the police arrest them using new information they provided), men with warrants typically stay away. During my first year and a half on 6th Street, I noted twenty-four instances of men contacting the police when they were injured, robbed, or threatened. These men were either in good standing with the courts or had no pending legal constraints. I did not observe any person with a warrant call the police or voluntarily make use of the courts during the six years of the study. Indeed, these young men seemed to view the authorities only as a threat to their safety.
Ned, age forty-three, and his longtime girlfriend Jean, age forty-six, lived on Mike’s block. Jean smoked crack pretty heavily, although Chuck noted that she could handle her drugs, meaning she was able to maintain both a household and her addiction. Ned was unemployed and for extra money occasionally hosted dollar parties—house parties with a dollar entrance fee offering drinks, food, and games for a dollar each. He also engaged in petty fraud, such as intercepting checks in the mail and stealing credit cards. The couple’s primary income came from taking in foster children. When Ned and Jean discovered they might be kicked out of their house because they owed property taxes to the city, Jean called Reggie’s cousin, telling him to come to the house because she had some gossip concerning his longtime love interest. When he arrived, a man in a hoodie robbed him at gunpoint. Reggie later remarked that his cousin should have known better than to go to Ned and Jean’s house: as the only man on the block with a warrant out for his arrest at the time, he was an easy target for a couple under financial strain.
If young men known to have a warrant become the target of those looking for someone to exploit or even to rob, they may resort to violence themselves, for protection or for revenge.
One winter morning, Chuck, Mike, and I were at a diner having breakfast to celebrate that the authorities hadn’t taken Mike into custody after his court appearance earlier that day. Chuck’s mother called to tell him that his car had been firebombed outside her house, and that firefighters were putting out the blaze. According to Chuck, the man who set fire to his car had given him drugs to sell on credit, under the arrangement that Chuck would pay him once he sold the drugs. Chuck hadn’t been able to pay, however, because the police had taken the money from his pockets when they searched him earlier that week. This was the first car that Chuck had ever purchased legally, a 1994 Bonneville he had bought the week before for four hundred dollars from a used-car lot in Northeast Philadelphia. He didn’t speak for the rest of the meal. Then, as we walked to Mike’s car, he said:
This shit is nutty, man. What the fuck I’m supposed to do, go to the cops? “Um, excuse me, officer, I think boy done blown up my whip [car].” He going to run my name and shit, now he see I got a warrant on me; next thing you know, my Black ass locked the fuck up, you feel me? I’m locked up because a nigga firebombed my whip. What the fuck, I’m supposed to let niggas take advantage?
Chuck and Mike discussed whether Chuck should take matters into his own hands or do nothing. Doing nothing had the benefit of not placing him in more legal trouble, but as they both noted, doing nothing set them up to be taken advantage of by people who understood them to be “sweet.”
A few days later, Chuck drove over to 8th S
treet with Mike and another friend and shot off a few rounds at the home of the man who he believed was responsible for blowing up his car. Although no one was injured, a neighbor reported the incident, and the police put out a body warrant for Chuck’s arrest for attempted murder.
Hesitant to go to the police or to make use of the courts, young men around 6th Street are vulnerable to theft or violence by those who know they won’t press charges. With the police out of reach, they sometimes resort to more violence as a strategy to settle disputes or defend themselves.6
THE NET OF ENTRAPMENT
It isn’t difficult to imagine that a young man worried that the police will take him into custody learns to avoid both the cops and the courts. But young men around 6th Street learn to fear far more than just the legal authorities. The reach of the police extends outward like a net around them—to public places in the city, to the activities they usually involve themselves in, and to the neighborhood spots where they can usually be found.
Three hospitals serve the mixed-income Black section of the city within which 6th Street is located. Police officers crowd into their waiting rooms and hallways, especially in the evenings and on the weekends. Squad cars and paddy wagons park outside the hospital, officers in uniform or in plain clothes stand near the ambulances, and more officers walk around or wait in the ER. Some police come to the hospitals to investigate shootings and to question the witnesses who arrive there; others come because the men they have beaten while arresting them require medical care before they can be taken to the precinct or the county jail. Sitting in the ER waiting room, I often watched police officers walk Black young men out the glass double doors in handcuffs.
According to the officers I interviewed, it is standard practice in the hospitals serving the Black community for police to run the names of visitors or patients while they are waiting around, and to take into custody those with warrants, or those whose injuries or presence there constitutes grounds for a new arrest or a violation of probation or parole.
Alex experienced this firsthand when he was twenty-two years old and his girlfriend, Donna, was pregnant with their first child. He accompanied her to the hospital for the birth and stayed with her during fourteen long hours of labor. I got there a few hours after the baby was born, in time to see two police officers come into Donna’s room to place Alex in handcuffs. As he stood with his hands behind him, Donna screamed and cried, and as they walked him away, she got out of the bed and grabbed hold of him, moaning, “Please don’t take him away. Please, I’ll take him down there myself tomorrow, I swear—just let him stay with me tonight.” The officers told me they had come to the hospital with a shooting victim who was in custody, and as was their custom, they ran the names of the men on the visitors’ list. Alex came up as having a warrant out for a parole violation, so they arrested him along with two other men on the delivery room floor.
I asked Alex’s partner about the warrant, and she reminded me that the offense dated from Christmas, when the police had stopped Alex as he pulled up to a gas station. Since his driver’s license had been revoked, driving constituted a violation of his parole.
After the police took Alex into custody at the maternity ward, it became increasingly clear to his friends on 6th Street that the hospital was a place to be avoided at all costs. Soon after Chuck turned twenty-one, his twenty-two-year-old girlfriend was due with their second child. Chuck told her that he would be at the hospital, even though he had a detainer out for a probation violation for breaking curfew. He stayed with her up until the point that she was getting in her aunt’s car to go to the hospital. Then at the final moment, he said she should go ahead without him, and that he would come soon.
Later, Chuck sat with me on the steps and discussed the situation. “I told her I was on my way,” he said. “She mad as shit I ain’t there. I can hear her right now. She going to be like, “You broke your promise.” I’m not trying to go out like Alex [get arrested], though. You feel me?”
As we spoke, his girlfriend called his cell phone repeatedly, and he would mute the sound after one ring and stare at her picture as it came up on the screen.
Just as a man worried the police will pick him up avoids the hospital when his child is born and refuses to seek formal medical care when he is badly beaten, so he won’t visit his friends and relatives in prison or jail. Some prisons make it a general practice to run the names of visitors; others employ random canine searches of visitors’ cars, and run the plates and names from the parking lot.
Funerals also become risky for men worried that the police may take them. Each of the nine funerals I attended for young men who had been killed in the 6th Street neighborhood featured police officers stationed outside with a tripod camera to film the mourners as they filed in. More officers stood across the street and parked on the adjacent blocks. When I asked an officer of the Warrant Unit about funerals, he replied that they were a great place to round up people for arrest. “But we try to stay a block or two away, so we don’t get our picture in the paper.”
Like hospitals and funerals, places of employment become dangerous for people with a warrant. Soon after Mike got released on parole to a halfway house, he found a job through an old friend who managed a Taco Bell. After two weeks, Mike, twenty-four at the time, refused to return to the house in time for curfew, saying he couldn’t spend another night cooped up with a bunch of men like he was still in jail. He slept at his girlfriend’s house, and in the morning found that he had been issued a violation and would likely be sent back to prison, pending the judge’s decision. Mike said he wasn’t going back, and they were going to have to catch him. Two parole officers arrested him the next day as he was leaving the Taco Bell, where he had gone to pick up his paycheck. He spent a year back upstate for this violation.
When Mike got booked at the Taco Bell, Chuck chewed him out thoroughly. Didn’t he remember the time Chuck got taken?
Chuck started working at the local McDonald’s when he was nineteen. Later that year he caught a probation violation for driving a car, his driving privileges having been revoked as part of his probation sentence. Though he had a warrant, Chuck kept working, saying that if the police came he would simply run out the back door.
A couple of weeks later, a former employee got into a fight with three other workers, and the police shut the McDonald’s down while they questioned witnesses and looked for the women involved. When the fight began, Chuck had been in the storeroom, talking on the phone to his girlfriend. He came out, he said, and saw six police officers staring at him. At this point he phoned me to come pick up his house keys, fairly certain he would be taken into custody. When I got there, it was too late—Chuck was leaving in the back of a squad car.
A man worried that the police are hunting him—or at least may take him into custody should they come upon him—also comes to see friends, neighbors, and even family members as dangerous. First, he must avoid people who are “hot.” After Reggie robbed a convenience store and the security camera footage appeared on the nightly news, the cops came looking for him with much more determination than when he only had a warrant out for a probation violation. He became so hot that other men on the block didn’t want to be seen with him, worried that he’d bring heat on them. Mike gave me this advice:
I’ll only tell you this one time, A. Do not be around Reggie. He’s hot right now, he’s on the run. Don’t get caught up in it. They’re going to come for that nigga, and I don’t want you nowhere around there. Don’t let him get in your car, don’t even talk on the phone. If he calls you, bang on [hang up on] that nigga. They probably tracing the calls, and you could fuck around and catch a ya’mean [be arrested on conspiracy charges, for harboring a fugitive, etc.] or something. Don’t come through the block, don’t even wave at the dude. I already told that nigga don’t call your phone no more, but just in case.
Young men’s distrust extends beyond those who are particular targets of the police. Cops may exert significant pressure on a man�
��s relatives or partner to provide information about him. Out of frustration and anger at his failures as a father, spouse, brother, or son, his partner or family members may freely call the police on him, taking advantage of his wanted status to get back at him or punish him.
Whether a man’s friends, relatives, or girlfriend bring him to the attention of the authorities because the police pressure them to do so or because they leverage his wanted status to control or punish him, he comes to regard those closest to him as potential informants. Like going to the hospital or calling the police, spending time with friends, family, or romantic partners places men at risk.
CULTIVATING AN UNPREDICTABLE ROUTINE
Mike, Chuck, and their friends came to see danger and risk in the routine doings of everyday life. They learned to fear the police, and to regard the courts, the hospitals, their workplaces, their residences, and even their own family members as potential paths to confinement. To limit the risks that mundane places, relations, and people posed, they learned to practice concerted avoidance: to run and hide from the police, steer clear of hospitals, skip work, and hang back from their families and close friends.
Another strategy that young men on 6th Street adopt is to cultivate a secretive and unpredictable routine. I first noticed this strategy when Ronny shot himself in the leg when he was fifteen. Six police officers were occupying the ER lobby when he arrived; two of them quickly handcuffed the young man who had brought him in.
Ronny’s grandmother, aunt, cousin, and sister sat in the lobby and waited for news. Some of the young men from 6th Street who had warrants at the time didn’t show up at all, explaining to others that they couldn’t take the chance, even though they “loved that lil’ nigga” and wanted to be there. The men who did come, including Mike, stayed outside the hospital, hovering at the edge of the parking lot. They discussed which local police officers were inside, and what their chances were of going in to see Ronny without being spotted. One of Ronny’s friends waited for a few minutes some yards away from the emergency room doors, heard the status report, and left. He returned periodically throughout the night, motioning through the doors for someone in the waiting room to come out and give him an update. Mike asked me to stay and keep in touch with him via cell phone:
On The Run: Fugitive Life in an American City Page 5
