Uncomfortable Kinship: An Ethnography of the Professional World of Gang Experts and Street Outreach Workers in South Los Angeles.

• Author: Gascon, Daniel

ABSTRACT

This study sheds light on the professional world of gang experts and street outreach workers and raises questions about the future of urban governance. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork primarily in one South Los Angeles neighborhood that I call Lakeside and interviews conducted between 2009 and 2010, my findings show that gang experts demonize street workers, shun professional contacts, and instead aggressively enforce them. Confrontational police encounters provoke resistance from street workers. The findings also highlight the limited opportunities for integrated governance. To conclude, I discuss the broader implications of these findings for public policy and qualitative research in gang-inhabited and heavily policed urban environments.

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The nation's largest and wealthiest cities are undergoing a new urban crisis and gangs are once again its folk devils. Mayors London Breed of San Francisco and Eric Adams of New York have each spoken publicly on the crises of gangs, drugs, crime, and violence in their cities. Adams, for instance, declared a state of emergency in response to increasing gun violence in New York after several notable shooting deaths (Rubinstein & Mays 2022) and Breed has called for improved public safety measures in the wake of numerous strong-arm robberies and increased public drug sales and consumption (Shanks 2023). Both leaders argued that gangs, which, according to police and city data, are most concentrated in black and brown neighborhoods, were the driving force behind recent increases in urban crime (Southall 2021, Valdez 2022). This is not the first time we have seen this process unfold. Stuart Hall et al.'s (2017) classic, Policing the Crisis, outlined how urban crises are moral campaigns wherein moral entrepreneurs like Adams and Breed label certain groups dangerous and demand expanded state enforcement powers to neutralize these public safety threats. The reactions of mayors and moral entrepreneurs, as Hall et al. (2017) would suggest, are most drastic after highly publicized incidents. Critical gang scholar David Brotherton (2015) shows how moral campaigns work against urban groups labeled as gangs. In these campaigns, police take on a prominent role, serving as both moral entrepreneurs and moral enforcers capable of constraining the lived experiences of labeled gang members who are most often poor, young, black, and migrant men. These figures are demonized in the moral campaigns.

Though Adams and Breed have both proposed multi-pronged urban governance programs, including a range of measures from public health to public safety, recent decisions have confronted legitimacy challenges. Adams, for instance, called for the reformation of NYPD's antigun violence unit, the so-called Neighborhood Safety Team, which his predecessor disbanded after observing a pattern of civil rights abuses (Fitzsimmons 6c Southall 2022). Breed approved refunding the SFPD and expanding its academy recruitment after previously diverting city funds away from police and toward black youth development programs (Mehta 2022). These policy decisions essentially reversed the course of progressive criminal justice reforms that city leaders installed after the 2020 George Floyd protests. Historically, as Vitale (2017) has shown, whenever moral entrepreneurs elevate the specter of gangs to crisis levels, the response is the development of a state punitive apparatus to surveil, track, and control threats to public safety. And in the case of these two cities, moral campaigns have indeed relied upon the expanded use of zero tolerance police tactics, which civil rights advocates have called regressive, discredited, and harmful to civilians of color (Fitzsimmons 6c Southall 2022, Mehta 2022). Both moral campaigns combined public safety with public health measures to assist with vagrancy, substance abuse, and mental illness, and they have both drawn criticism. In New York, for instance, Adams has endorsed Cure Violence programs, where the city employs former gang members as street outreach workers to connect young people in the communities most impacted by street violence with a host of intervention services (Rubinstein 6c Mays 2022). But almost immediately, this decision provoked questions over the criminal records, gang ties, and business dealings of outreach workers (Singh 2022). It appeared that their gang ties rendered them susceptible to the gang folk devil stigma.

This study sheds light on the professional world of gang experts and street outreach workers and raises questions about the future of gangs and urban governance. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork primarily in one South Los Angeles neighborhood that I call Lakeside and interviews conducted between 2009 and 2010, (1) describe the professional world of police and street workers. The findings show that gang experts demonize street workers, shun professional contacts, and instead aggressively enforce them. Confrontational police encounters provoke resistance from street workers. But the findings also highlight the limited opportunities for integrated governance. In the following pages, I will provide some historical context for the development of urban governance structures and discuss how the status contradiction and folk devil frameworks drive my analysis. Then I will outline my methods before discussing key findings and their broader implications for the qualitative study of heavily policed urban environments.

Gangs and the Urban Crisis

Gangs are the folk devils of the contemporary urban crisis in the United States. Brotherton (2015) argues that the image of the gang member in the public imagination is stigmatized; it is an accumulation of personal, social, and cultural pathologies. The gang member is demonized and placed at the center of the urban violence crisis to justify the expansion of the state's powers of surveillance and enforcement. Hall et al.'s (2017) classic study of the British urban crisis of the 1970s shows how the moral panics over social phenomena like muggings unfold by focusing on the societal reaction to the mugging phenomenon. Muggings, from this perspective, served as a measure of social order, and the figure of the mugger, the young black man, served as British society's scapegoat amid the urban violence crisis. Public reaction to the dominant image of the mugger produced an authoritarian backlash and politicians deployed the image of the mugger to stoke public fear and anxiety. Together these social forces constructed and constrained the ideological image of the mugger to mobilize state mechanisms. State policy debates then shifted toward the need to deploy so-called softer mechanisms of control, but instead the punitive apparatus grew. In the end, Hall et al. (2017) argued that by analyzing the mugger as a social phenomenon, he revealed that society's crisis was a crisis of hegemony.

Throughout the twentieth century the criminalization of urban gangs became an increasingly organized racial state project. Muhammad (2019) argues that the history of US urbanization in the north must be read against the larger backdrop of Jim Crow racism more commonly attributed to the south. Even in the so-called liberal and progressive north, urban governance policies resulted in the overrepresentation of blacks among those contacted by police and those subsequently arrested andjailed. White officials justified this overrepresentation with beliefs in the inherent inferiority and criminality of black people. Hinton and Cook (2021) argue that the seeds of the gang war as a project for the mass criminalization of young black men were sown later in the 1960s. It was not until Reagan, and especially under the Clinton administration, that the law enforcement arm of the government significantly expanded. Federal funding supported the creation of specialized paramilitary units, such as SWAT, and the integration of military equipment from armored cars to tear gas and lethal weaponry. Premised upon the principles of so-called problem-oriented policing, national policies shifted to disorder, drugs, and gang violence enforcement. Beyond policing, new punitive legal structures, such as anti-gang ordinances, began to take root in cities throughout the country.

Vitale (2017) argues that the typical police-gang interaction involves the officer attempting to control the encounter through aggressive, intimidating, and punitive means and that the interaction is undergirded by the presumption that perceived gang members are terrorists. Gangs are large, numerous, and concentrated in urban areas, most notably in Los Angeles. Police gang units emerged in the 1980s and 1990s and they mainly serve to gather intelligence and implement suppressive street tactics. Gang units tend to be isolated from other departmental units and gang unit officers have a distinct culture from that of other officers. Their mission, aims, and targets tend to be relatively undefined, leading to widespread civil and human rights abuses. LAPD is a prime example. Since the 1970s, the department has been involved in the creation of numerous specialized gang focused units that are responsible for the mass criminalization of a generation of the city's young black and brown men. Police gang unit actions are often susceptible to the pressures of politicians and public opinion. Gang unit officers over-attribute gang crime to young people in perceived gang inhabited communities. They impose structure, hierarchy, and leadership onto their understandings of street groups. Further, police justify their actions by the overrepresentation of young black and brown men in arrest rosters. But since the 1980s, gang criminalization has done little to arrest urban violence and has instead contributed to the long-term disenfranchisement of young people with criminal records and gang files (see also Duran 2009, Rios 2011).

The primary goal of this study is to describe the professional...