Disorderly community partners and broken windows policing

Abstract

How do residents in community groups define deviance, community, and their relationship to local government? Relying upon approximately two years of multi-method ethnography, I argue that despite law enforcement attempts at dissuasion, community group members utilize the broken windows theory to portray street vending as a harbinger of crime. Residents request police action and demand government services based on the self-adopted identities of victim and consumer-citizen. The police, in turn, enact a model of community policing in which the public is restricted to a supportive role as informants and guarantors of quality-of-life issues. Both sides of the partnership deploy broken windows arguments in conflicting visions about the disorderly other.

Keywords

broken windows community policing race urban ethnography

With the fall of the detached professional style of policing prevalent in the 1970s, new models of law enforcement have emerged in American cities to address formal and informal social control. Two prominent models, broken windows policing and community policing, entail distinct roles for community members and law enforcement. Community policing involves cooperation between police and residents in the development of crime prevention strategies. Broken windows policing places emphasis on order maintenance by officers with community members in a supporting role. Despite the traditional theoretical differences in the two paradigms, in practice many urban police forces implement both simultaneously (DeMichele and Kraska, 2001). Some researchers view community policing programs as a potential challenge to the hard line antidemocratic nature of the broken windows model (Herbert, 2001; Trojanowicz and Bucqueroux, 1990). Critical scholars, however, argue that community policing is a top-down rather than collaborative endeavor in which the police use community groups for their own purposes (Crawford, 1997; Garland, 2001).

Even these critical scholars have dedicated less attention to how community groups use partnerships for their own ends. I have conducted a sustained ethnographic examination of a community–police partnership, with particular attention to neighborhood resident participation. I focused on the civilian side of partnerships because arguments about the democratizing or anti-democratic leanings of policing models hinge on community participation. An exclusive focus on police agency can portray law enforcement as all powerful. But ‘the community’ is not always a well-intentioned yet powerless, reactive entity in the face of police authority. Looking at the interaction between the community and the police from the perspective of community groups could reveal how certain sets of citizens become authorized to speak over others. A view from the perspectives of community group members also has the potential to reveal the myriad forms of subtle power wielded by citizens as they interact with police.

I demonstrate how community group members have taken broken windows ideology and used it for their own ends in attempts to oppose street vending in their area. I found that despite official attempts to diminish the expectations of community group members, residents in community groups utilized the broken windows theory to portray vending as a harbinger of crime. I built upon the work of Duggan (2003) and Simon (2007) to explore the ways community group members used consumer citizen and victim identities to relate to government in the era of broken windows and community policing. Community group members approached partnerships as if community policing and broken windows enforcement were seamlessly compatible. The few individual community group members that had extensive resources at their disposal applied pressure to authorities to extract an enforcement response. Less well-positioned community group members opportunistically took direct action against vendors, overstepping their partnership role in the eyes of authorities.

Ultimately, each side of the community partnership molded the policing models for self-serving ends. Harcourt (2001) examined the use of broken windows arguments among policy-makers and police. I have used his concept of ‘harm arguments’ to expand research on the use of broken windows logic into community groups. Drawing upon the community policing literature (Crawford, 1997; Garland, 2001; Herbert, 2001; Lyons, 1999), I added an analysis of how broken windows provided a lens through which tensions in a community partnership played out in a racially and socioeconomically diverse area.

The ‘community’ in community partnerships

Throughout the early and mid-20th century, police in American cities strived to keep their distance from the neighborhoods they policed (Garland, 2001). Detachment was not only intended as an antidote to rampant corruption but also as a way to shield departments from public scrutiny. Professionalization gave the appearance that policing could be scientifically efficient and apolitical (Lyons, 1999). However, social unrest, high profile cases of police brutality and consistently high crime rates are a few factors that sparked misgivings about professionalized policing in the 1970s.

Police departments across the country have turned to community policing measures in the realization that informal social control exercised through everyday relationships and institutions is more effective than legal sanctions (Garland, 2001). When I use the term ‘community partnerships’ I refer to programs that bring the police, organized residents and, at times, other relevant government agencies together to develop problem solving projects as a fear reduction and crime prevention strategy. There are several directions community partnerships can take and a variety of tensions and contradictory elements that can arise in the implementation of community policing. These tensions and contradictions warrant attention because they speak to struggles over what constitutes the legitimate voice of the community. Partnerships are the vehicle through which law enforcement ‘empowers’ residents to ‘take back’ their neighborhoods from criminals. Herbert (2001) and Trojanowicz and Bucqueroux (1990) see community partnerships as a possible avenue for infusing a democratic process into crime reduction strategies if citizens are equal partners with officers. These scholars view an ideal partnership as one in which officers, city employees, and community group members develop programs and decide the direction of resources together.

However, Crawford (1997) and Garland (2001) note that more often community partnerships are an opportunity for police to manage the public’s expectations for enforcement. Through ‘responsibilization strategies’ authorities claim that the primary reason for crime is the community’s failure to prevent it (Crawford, 1997: 266). Thus, officials contradictorily reassure the public through a litany of ‘tough on crime’ talk while simultaneously redirecting accountability for crime rates. Here, a community partnership is part public relations ploy and a forum for police to appease residents as well as co-opt, disarm, and preempt resistance and discontent. Despite residents’ hope that community partnerships will deliver individualized attention and resources from police, they often bring the opposite result. Crawford (1997: 166) argues, ‘in the “double-speak” of criminal justice rhetoric, the notion of “community ownership” frequently translates into “the community must mobilize its own resources”’. Consequently, select people with financial and political resources, such as private business owners, reappear in the leadership positions of community partnerships (Crawford, 1997). In this type of community partnership, police develop their own agenda and then ‘tap community partnerships only insofar as they are a resource for the police department, reversing the power flow from empowering communities to empowering the police’ (Lyons, 1999: 36).

Nevertheless, appointing civilians who possess power, wealth, or influence could bring tension to a partnership, as they also can leverage their resources to persuade police to respond to their needs. Powerful and wealthy civilians can use their resources to support police. However, they may also be able to forcefully challenge claims of responsibility and blame made by officials.

Law enforcement officials intentionally shape the composition of community partnerships as well. In a study of community partnership programs initiated by the New York Police Department (NYPD) under William Bratton in the 1990s, Chesluk (2004) argues that officials in community partnerships do not simply find the community. Rather, ‘the police determine in part the nature of the ‘‘community’’ and how they will speak’ by enlisting well-organized groups of citizens to combat ‘undesirables’ (Chesluk, 2004: 256–7). Police pick specific groups and deem them to be ‘the community’.

Regardless of the dynamic a community partnership develops, Crawford argues that community groups have moral overtones of exclusion. Community-based crime prevention programs necessitate that ‘we’, the law-abiding citizens, identify and take action against criminal outsiders. Crawford (1997: 169) explains, ‘Exclusion is not so much an unfortunate by-product of the practice of community-based crime prevention initiatives but an essential element of its operation.’ But we still do not know how, in practice, the ‘community’ uses the rhetoric of community partnerships and broken windows policing to create specific community boundaries and garner state resources.

Broken windows

Unlike community policing, broken windows (also called order maintenance or zero tolerance policing) implies a more passive role for residents who are viewed as being unable to battle disorder in their neighborhoods (Herbert, 2001). Proponents of the broken windows theory argue that the accumulation of small acts of ‘disorder’ creates an environment conducive to serious crimes like robbery or assault. Disorder causes a general feeling of fear to which law-abiders react by fleeing into their homes or to more orderly gated estates. Conversely, the ‘wrong’ kinds of people are supposedly attracted to disorderly areas because they are seen as easy places to commit crimes. The concept of disorder is necessarily vague and indefinitely expansive so as to allow for ample police discretion. A few signs of so-called physical and social disorder are litter, graffiti, truants, loiterers, people who are homeless, and street vendors (Parenti, 2001). Preventative policing grants the police discretion to target signs of disorder in order to prevent the escalation to violent crime (Bratton and Malinowski, 2008; Wilson and Kelling, 1982). Despite official race neutrality in the language of the broken windows theory, definitions of disorder are laced with implications about race, class, and public space (Roberts, 1999; Stewart, 1998). The practice of broken windows policing relies upon a racial ideology that connects the dark/foreign other to unpredictable chaos and criminality. The ‘disorderly’ people targeted by police are overwhelmingly lower-class, black, Latino, and using public space.

Harcourt (2001: 194) argues that the disorder-crime nexus hinges upon ‘harm arguments’ that flourish in political and legal debates. Those who deploy harm arguments contend that certain actions are harmful rather than simply annoying, morally offensive, or aesthetically objectionable. Harcourt takes loitering as one example. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s anti-loitering ordinances prohibited public idleness insofar as it posed a nuisance to others. With the rise of the broken windows theory, policy-makers and law enforcement justify similar ordinances by arguing that loitering is a broken window that attracts crime, such as gang activity (Harcourt, 2001). Loiterers, homeless people, unattended youth, and so on, are deemed responsible for the potential neighborhood spiral into crime and urban decay. Thus, loitering is transformed from an inconvenience to disorderly and harmful behavior that justifies police intervention.

Researchers have extensively debated the theoretical and empirical merit of the disorder-crime continuum (Harcourt, 2001; Sampson and Raudenbush, 2004; Xu et al., 2005) and the effects of order maintenance policing on public life, informal economies, arrests patterns, and fear of crime (Duneier, 2001; Hinkle and Weisburd, 2008; Jang et al., 2008; Parenti, 2001; Stewart, 1998). Trojanowicz and Bucqueroux (1990) contend that order maintenance policing can effectively reduce fear of crime. Hinkle and Weisburd (2008), however, find that the visible police intervention launched to ‘restore order’ can decrease general feelings of safety. Davis (2002: 8) and Crawford (1997: 271) maintain that rather than increasing feelings of safety, the constant monitoring of disorder and danger ‘paradoxically generate[s] radical insecurity’ so as to ‘institutionalize anxiety’ in middle-class urban residents. Residents in turn demand greater responsiveness from both public and private agents of security. However, just because authorities have the discretion to act on something does not mean they will. It is the difference between what broken windows allows police to do and what it would obligate that the police do. Order maintenance means that ‘broad criminal laws [ … ] allow the police to take people off the streets because they look suspicious’ (Harcourt, 2001: 128). The police have broad discretion to remove people deemed undesirable. Whether and how they respond to disorder is contingent on multiple extralegal factors.

Despite distinct roles for residents and officers as an ideal type, community policing programs can be made compatible with the broken windows theory through an emphasis on informal social control, moral binaries and the construction of an exclusive community (DeMichele and Kraska, 2001; Herbert, 2001). Under a circular logic, the degeneration of community is both the cause and the result of crime (Crawford, 1997). Crime and disorder cause law-abiding people to retreat into their homes in fear. The lack of interaction breeds yet more fear, causing people to become further detached. Thus, strengthening community is both a means and an end (Sasson, 1995). However, compared to the ideal of community policing, residents are more limited in their actions under the broken windows policing model. Properly behaved residents are to upkeep their property, observe disorderly others, and alert officers to signs of disorder. Fear is reduced, order restored, and community is built through the formal and informal social control of an ‘other’.

The neighborhood

To study how community groups defined disorder, danger, community, and their relationship to government I conducted participant observation in the mid-city Los Angeles neighborhood of La Cienega Heights (LACH) for nearly two years, spanning from the summer of 2007 to the spring of 2009. La Cienega Heights is often characterized as a ‘pocket of poverty’ in the generally more affluent West Los Angeles jurisdiction. The neighborhood consists primarily of two- and three-storey apartments built in the 1960s, punctuated occasionally by a single-family home built in the 1920s. According to the 2000 Census, 86 percent of the housing units were renter-occupied (US Bureau of the Census, 2000a). The census tract was 28 percent white, 33 percent black or African-American, three percent Asian, and 32 percent Hispanic or Latino (US Bureau of the Census, 2000b). Forty percent of residents were foreign born, the overwhelming majority of which were from Latin America, especially Mexico (US Bureau of the Census, 2000c). The median household income was $28,180. Thirty-two percent of families were below poverty level (US Bureau of the Census, 2000d). The census tract for La Cienega Heights also includes six blocks from the neighborhood to the north.

In comparison, in the census tract to the north, 70 percent of the housing units were renter-occupied according to the 2000 census (US Bureau of the Census, 2000e). Residents were 70 percent white, 11 percent black or African-American, six and one-half percent Asian, and 10 percent Hispanic or Latino (US Bureau of the Census, 2000f). The median household income was $45,641 with nine percent of families below poverty level (US Bureau of the Census, 2000g). It appears that the area to the north included more owner-occupied units and more whites than La Cienega Heights. Furthermore, the inhabitants in the renter-occupied units to the north had on average higher incomes than those in the La Cienega Heights census tract.

The tract to the immediate west had a drastically different make-up than La Cienega Heights, with 95 percent owner-occupied units, a medium household income of $114,097, and only two percent of families below poverty level (US Bureau of the Census, 2000h, 2000i). The area to the west was 90 percent white, five percent Asian, and three and one-half percent Hispanic or Latino (US Bureau of the Census, 2000j). The neighborhoods surrounding La Cienega Heights also had a significant Jewish population.

In the 2005–2009 American Community Survey, the La Cienega Heights census tract had about the same amount of renter-occupied units but fewer families below poverty level than in the 2000 Census (US Bureau of the Census, 2009a). The white population remained stable. The black population decreased to 19 percent while the Latino/Hispanic population increased steeply to 51 percent (US Bureau of the Census, 2009b). The area to the north still consisted of higher-rent apartments and the racial make-up was about the same as in 2000 (US Bureau of the Census, 2009c, 2009d). The tract to the immediate west remained overwhelmingly white and owner-occupied (US Bureau of the Census, 2009e, 2009f).

During the research I lived in the 18-square-block La Cienega Heights neighborhood and attended 38 regular monthly community meetings and emergency town halls held by community groups that participated in crime prevention partnerships. I also attended two LAPD West Division COMPSTAT meetings during the research period. I followed community group members throughout their efforts to set up a neighborhood watch system in La Cienega Heights. I had regular informal conversations and interaction outside of meetings with the members of all of the groups. I took shorthand notes on flyers that were handed out during the meetings or in small notebooks. Immediately after the meetings I wrote extended field notes on my computer. The data resulted in 250 pages of single-spaced field notes, which I open-coded. In addition to numerous field interviews, I also conducted in-depth interviews with eight particularly active community group members, three prosecutors from the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office, six WLAPD (West Los Angeles Police Department) officers assigned to the area, and the Field Deputy from the area’s City Council District Office. Interviews were digitally recorded and transcribed. The interviews were conducted in people’s homes, offices, with officers on their beats, and at restaurants. Each interview lasted between one to two hours. I analyzed approximately 60 documents that included petitions, letters between community groups and authorities, email communication over public listservs, and plans of action for task forces drafted by community groups and authorities.

I chose La Cienega Heights as the field site in which to explore the research questions for two primary reasons. First, there is very little firsthand qualitative work on broken windows, particularly outside of New York City where former Police Commissioner William Bratton instituted the policing method (Jang, 2009). The increasing popularity of the broken windows theory amongst the LAPD after Bratton’s tenure as police chief makes Los Angeles an important field site. The only other fieldwork I am aware of that has been done in Los Angeles examined LAPD officers, but not community partners, in a low-income community of color (Wagers, 2008). I chose La Cienega Heights and the surrounding areas because it offered an opportunity to examine the struggles that occur when defining disorder, neighborhood boundaries, and ‘the community’ amongst elite citizens that have more power to challenge police. Community group members were not representative of neighborhood residents. Their high levels of formal community involvement made them unique. It is precisely this uniqueness and unrepresentativeness, however, which interested me. Community groups had plans to shape the neighborhood in specific ways. They reached out to leaders in local government, the police, the City Attorney’s Office, and business interests to control access to the neighborhood, resource distribution, the appearance of the area, and the behavior of residents.

Noticeably absent from my observations and interviews are the majority of residents that neither participated in community groups nor held positions of institutional power, including vendors and nearly all of my neighbors. The decision not to make these relationships the basis for systematic study was informed by my research goals and ethics. I feel uncomfortable with the voyeuristic gaze of the traditional ethnographic method. Much urban ethnography is concerned with using low-income people of color as research objects to be alternately feared and pitied by highly educated consumers of ethnographic texts (Kelley, 1998). I have no interest in adding myself to the many sets of ever-present eyes that watch and try to offer explanations for people labeled ‘deviant’. Several privileges, including a light skin tone, an advanced education, and the legitimacy of association with a research institution, provided me with access to the arenas of the watchers and planners.

Second, for nearly four decades, the police, the City Attorney’s Office, business owners, and homeowners associations in bordering neighborhoods have tried to alter La Cienega Heights. The neighborhood served as a site of experimentation in which policies and protocols were developed and perfected before they spread to the rest of the city and, at times, the rest of the country. For example, in 1987 La City’s first gang injunction was implemented in La Cienega Heights (at the time called Cadillac-Corning). In 1997 La Cienega Heights became one of Los Angeles’ first sites to experiment with the SARA (Scanning, Analysis, Response, and Assessment) model. The SARA model is a problem-solving policing method in which officers collaborate with neighborhood prosecutors, landlords and community groups to fight crime, blight, and ‘quality of life’ offenses. The SARA method is now widely used by police departments nationally.

In comparison to much of Los Angeles, La Cienega Heights was a relatively safe neighborhood. Most years there were no homicides in the neighborhood. However, in comparison to the rest of the West Los Angeles Division, the area was considered a ‘problem’ neighborhood that monopolized the resources of the WLAPD. Although the efforts to ‘clean up’ the neighborhood had some impact and caused chaos in the lives of La Cienega Heights residents, police and community partners did not see any long-term ‘success’. Police and long-term residents in the surrounding neighborhoods complained that they had been dealing with the same problems for 40 years. I wanted to understand how a small group of people were able to acquire, or alternately, not able to acquire, the power to influence policies and enforcement, as well as how their actions were informed by the ways they thought about those they sought to control or force out. My case study is a concrete attempt to meld community partnerships with broken windows policing. My purpose is neither to argue that a certain type of partnership is good or bad nor to pin down ‘disorder’. Duneier (2001: 289, 315) recommends that the ambiguity of broken windows should be addressed with efforts to ‘define disorder with greater accuracy’ through the ‘systematic study’ of the people who may increase or decrease safety. However, I do not believe that sociological knowledge production is somehow a more just or competent method for determining hierarchies of what and who is (un)safe or (in)decent or (un)civil. Reshuffling the disorder–crime continuum does not confront the fact that the framework of broken windows gives a few the discretion to draw ‘the line between order and disorder in the first place’ (Harcourt, 2001: 130). Similarly, attempting to determine the relative merit of partnerships misses the much larger question of how community partnerships saturated with broken windows ideology structure struggle to define community and safety, identify disorder, and control neighborhood space through the management of people and property.

Vendors as the broken window: Community groups and harm arguments

We are a community seeking to revitalize its livability and image. We have truly bought into Chief Bratton’s broken windows credo and believe that a neighborhood that looks neglected invites crime and deviant behavior. (La Cienega Heights [LACH] Community Group in a document addressed to the West Los Angeles Police Department [WLAPD] Captain, June 2005)¹

Residents of La Cienega Heights who attended community meetings in the spring of 2008 had recent violence on their minds. During ten days in late March and early April, three shootings, one resulting in a fatality, occurred in the area. It was rumored that the shootings were gang related. Frustrated, anxious people filled the cafeterias of the local schools after work to demand answers. How could they let this happen again? What were they planning to do to protect ‘law-abiding’ residents? The WLAPD captain and other uniformed officers sat in a panel at the front of the room with the neighborhood prosecutor from the City Attorney’s Office and a detective in a charcoal grey suit. They repeatedly assured everyone that they were making progress on the case. The criminals would be arrested and punished. Resources were going to be poured into the neighborhood.

There was one surprising topic that popped up in all of the open question sections at the end of each meeting. Laura,² a member of the LACH Community Group, asked the newly-assigned senior lead officer, Angela, what the WLAPD planned to do about the persistence of illegal vendors:

Laura: Summer is coming, during which the neighborhood will be invaded by vendors. It doesn’t frame the neighborhood well.

Angela: I just shooed away some vendors by the Bank of America. Dealing with the vendors is like mowing the lawn. If you don’t stay on top of it, they grow back thicker. But they are not a very high priority. Burglaries are picking up and all crime picks up in the summer, including gang activity.

Laura: They may not just be selling wares. They observe, they tip off. It’s the broken windows theory.

Angela: It is very much a blight on society. It is very much a broken windows problem. If you can send me the information on where they are and when – times are very important – I can forward the information onto patrol for them to take care of.

Laura’s statement exemplifies how community groups considered vendors to be outside elements that assaulted the community. This instance is just one of many examples in which residents in community groups demonstrated an awareness of the broken windows theory of crime, however misconstrued, that the LAPD formally espoused. The LACH Community Group adopted the paradigm of broken windows. It shaped their work and their interaction with local government services. Residents essentially reversed broken windows logic. Rather than identifying vending as a cause of disorder that could lead to murder, their focus on vending was sparked by a murder. The leap from murder to vendors was mediated by fuzzy concepts like ‘blight’ that were used with such frequency they came to encompass an increasingly broad range of people, activities, and spaces. Laura’s interaction with Angela also highlights the tension between the LAPD’s broken windows ideology, the daily practice of police work, and the department’s attempt to institute community policing.

Vending took a variety of forms in the neighborhood. After more than a year and a half, I barely noticed the horn that announced the arrival of the Latino produce vendor in front of my house anywhere from two to five times a day. The tune to the first couple lines of ‘La Cucaracha’ blared through the static of a loudspeaker attached to the top of the white truck. The broken horn could not play the full first two lines of the song though. Instead, the music spiked, dipped, and broke up before trailing off limply: La cucaracha, la cuca-racha, ya no-qiuer-es cam-i-nar … Another older Latino vendor parked his produce truck at the same spot every day, remaining stationary to sell products. Two ice cream trucks played lullabies as they lumbered up and down the neighborhood’s narrow streets. Additionally, a young Latino man with small bells dangling from the handle of a push cart sold ice cream and pork rinds throughout the day. Around sunset a middle-aged Latina pushing a cart shouted out her product, ‘taaaamaaaales!’ During the spring and summer a man set up a fruit stand at a busy four-way-stop.

How did residents in the LACH Community Group link vending to crime? In hopes of eradicating vending from the neighborhood, they attacked the practice from a number of angles. At first, they complained that vendors were an annoyance. The LACH Community Group initially argued that their quality of life was being affected through small but compounding infractions. They alleged that noise pollution from vendors’ horns and bells, congregation of crowds around the trucks, and litter created a feeling of disorder that made them generally fearful as well as lowered property values. In response, police argued that quality of life offences are extremely difficult to catch in the act. For example, to cite a vendor for noise pollution the police would have to monitor vendors and measure the decibels of their horns. After they failed to extract an enforcement response, they turned to harm arguments that more forcefully associated vendors with danger. For example, community group members claimed that the graffiti on vending trucks constituted a visual blight that attracted violent crime. Furthermore, the LACH Community Group complained that the vendors constituted a health risk to the community. They demanded coordination between the WLAPD and the Los Angeles County Health Department to shut down the carts and confiscate their goods for selling food in sub-grade conditions. Again, police responded that they did not have the personnel to launch a coordinated operation. The LACH Community Group also complained that the undocumented immigration status of many vendors indicated that they were not taxed or properly licensed. Community group members argued that vendors further undercut taxed and licensed businesses when they pulled customers away. Officers claimed that they would target illegal vendors if businesses filed complaints. On the contrary, several businesses actually protected vendors by renting out space to them.

Finally, community group members’ requests became structured around increasingly explicit connections between vendors and danger through claims that vendors were themselves perpetrators of criminal activities. At the end of 2008, LACH Community Group members began telling authorities they had reason to believe that one of the vendors had started to sell marijuana and other drugs as well as food. One recurring story involved an ice cream man who was caught a few years previously selling toy guns near the elementary school. At times, people said he was also selling pellet guns, fireworks, or cigarettes. More important than the details of the story was the function of the narrative. It was a documented example that community group members could use as leverage against those who were unconvinced by their harm arguments. The story explicitly connected the vendor with the predation of children as justification for the aggressive eradication of all vendors. Either you were invested in the anti-vending crusade or you sided with violent gang members, child predators, and drug dealers.

Community groups marshaled broken windows arguments to prompt action from various local government agents. Community groups began with complaints that vendors brought disorder into the physical environment and that police should have addressed annoyances that affected their quality of life. They then sought other local government agencies to regulate and enforce various violations. Eventually, they returned to appeals to law enforcement, but this time through the lens of social disorder and the explicit connection of vendors to criminal behavior. Community group members increasingly linked vendors to active predation because appeals through broken windows logic did not convince authorities. A deconstruction of harm arguments highlights the ambiguity involved in locating vendors on the disorder-crime continuum. A lot of work goes into the separation of disorderly deviants and orderly law-abiders. Daily life defies clean categorization. There is not just one form of disorder. Accordingly, part of defining disorder is deciding who is supposed to restore order.

Ironically, the ever-expanding scope of harm arguments complicated an official law enforcement response because different harm arguments implied the jurisdiction of very different agencies. There was no one institution to address vending. Despite all of the institutional representatives that met in community partnerships, the process to report vendors was unclear. At times vending violated health codes. In some situations, vending qualified as an illegal activity. Community group members felt they held up their half of community policing. They became frustrated when authorities responded to the ambiguity with inaction.

Not every broken window is repaired: The police resist community demands

Community group members believed that, as an institution that spread the broken windows gospel, the LAPD should have targeted illegal vending. A senior lead officer and neighborhood prosecutor were assigned to the area specifically for the purpose of addressing local ‘quality of life’ concerns on a long-term basis. In community meetings and in the press, LAPD officers constantly talked about their belief in broken windows. For example, at a community meeting an LAPD officer talked about the importance of quickly addressing disorder:

When we see graffiti, we try to get it removed as soon as possible because the broken windows theory that we follow says that if we clean it off quickly people will be less tempted to put more graffiti on top of it. Our goal is for the gang to see that they cannot thrive here and move on to another area.

The mediation of enforcement through reporting technology exemplified the push and pull between police and community groups over their relative power in partnerships. The COMPSTAT system (short for ‘Computerized Statistics’) structured officer deployment and accountability in the broken windows model of policing (Bratton and Malinowski, 2008; Parenti, 2001). COMPSTAT mapped up-to-date crime trends with higher crime areas getting more police. Commissioners and chiefs ranked LAPD divisions at monthly COMPSTAT meetings according to the percentage that captains brought down crime in their reporting districts.

Police often advised residents to report vendors. Community group members were told that the more they could document disorder, the more resources would be distributed to the area. It was a recurring tactic of appeasement that officers could fall back on when other responses proved insufficient.

Community group members were conscious of the COMPSTAT system and the broken windows theory. They actively tried to make their areas look in dire need of police resources. According to one community group member:

People need to report everything. They see a lot but they don’t report it because they think nothing will happen. But when people make reports, it goes into COMPSTAT, and COMPSTAT determines officer deployment. So when no one reports, and officers look to COMPSTAT to decide where to send officers, they look at the map, and say, ‘well, you live in a country club, there’s no crime there’.

But the process was not so straightforward. Although the point of broken windows is to focus on minor, not even technically illegal, offenses as a preventative measure, the daily reality of police work often necessitated deviation from this model. Vending was a low priority compared to robberies or assaults. Thus, a dedicated response was unlikely even if residents reported vendors consistently. From the perspective of the police, community group members overstepped their role. Police, not residents, decided enforcement.

The broken windows model granted officers broad discretion. An officer did not target every disorderly behavior. Rather, broken windows logic meant they could rely on a litany of charges of disorder to justify targeting the person or group at hand. For example, in a study of the LAPD Herbert (1997) discovered that police were reluctant to arrest street vendors as long as they did not challenge the police for territorial control. Nonetheless, police could not always brush off community groups based on the privilege of discretion. They still had to give at least a nod to the guidelines of community policing. Officers also justified their non-enforcement of vending ordinances by contesting community group members’ definition of insiders and outsiders. For example, after years of unsuccessful demands for the citation and arrest of vendors, the LACH Community Group called for the assignment of a new senior lead officer. The senior lead officer under fire responded to the anger of LACH Community Group members in a letter:

This is also a social problem that politicians and government has been trying to solve for years. As a side note when other officers and myself attempt to cite these individuals we have been yelled at and ridiculed by citizens who claim that we are harassing and racial profiling these vendors. There is support for these vendors by people who say that this is a victimless crime and who claim that these vendors are merely serving a community who wants, needs and welcomes their services.³

The senior lead officer pointed out that a sizable proportion of residents who were not involved in community groups showed approval of vendors by keeping them in business. When police enlisted residents in community partnerships they opened up a floodgate for which they were not prepared. Because ‘every moment of discomfort can be read as a potential broken window and therefore the first step on the road to chaos’, residents bombarded police officers with a myriad of complaints (Chesluk, 2004: 255). Like the officers in Lyons’s (1999) study of a community partnership in Seattle, officers did not automatically imbue more educated, wealthy and active community members with the authority to represent the community. Officers constructed a broader definition of community, at least momentarily, when community groups overstepped their role. Officers were flexible in their loyalty to broken windows logic depending upon the practical situations they faced. Nonetheless, the self-appointed community was determined to not be so easily dismissed.

Community groups take action: Empowerment as victims and consumers

In the summer of 2008 a white homeowner expressed his frustration with the persistence of illegal vending on his block:

I do not care if the renters in the owner neglected apartments want the vendors here, many of which are illegal aliens and are leaching off of the welfare system or taking advantage of Section Eight. I have already witnessed a surge in foot vendors this summer alone, some of which in broken English have told me they just got here from El Salvador. What's the chance they are here legally, operating a legal business? How is it that renters and illegal vendors have more rights in this neighborhood than the law abiding, hard working tax-paying home-owning citizens?

His statement is a common example of the way homeowners in the community groups talked about vendors and the patrons of vendors. The group that they considered to have a legitimate voice in the neighborhood was quite narrow.

In their calls for action from authorities, the members of community groups revealed how they imagined themselves in relationship to other residents as well as to local government. To these ends, residents in community groups blended the frames of consumerism and victimization. They viewed local government not as a general public service, but as an entity that must respond to an exclusive group of investors. The most obvious ground for entitlement was through the payment of property taxes. Community group members also made less concrete claims to entitlement. Because of their status as deserving urban citizenry (white or honorary white, ‘productive’, not poor) they saw themselves and their property as constantly victimized by bad people. Community partnerships provided an avenue for residents to voice their demands and ideas about community within broken windows logic.

The security of self, property, and lifestyle was demanded as an entitlement of inclusion in the good, deserving community. Duggan (2003) argues that homeowners create exclusion through identification with the place in which they pay property taxes. Under the ‘consumer citizenship’ model of government, they claim to be entitled to local government services in return for their investment (Duggan, 2003: 38). The claim to exclusive services is far from purely economic. Rather, the localities to which homeowners identify are racial. High taxes are linked to ‘the high cost of welfare for poor, minority, urban residents – the same communities blamed for crime’ (Simon, 2007: 109). Community group members’ claims for entitlement were saturated with racially coded implications about who is and who is not deserving of support from the state. ‘Illegal aliens’, ‘broken English’, ‘just got here from El Salvador’, ‘leaching off of the welfare system or taking advantage of Section Eight’ signal that the people being talked about were poor, black or brown, undeserving, and criminal. The victim is someone who pays while others are free-riders.

Besides envisioning themselves as deserving of services because of taxes or long-term neighborhood involvement, residents in partnerships appealed to crime victimization. Scholars have noted that a victimization frame is often strategically successful in gaining legal footing (Garland, 2001; Harcourt, 2001; Simon, 2007). Simon (2007: 89–90) argues that with the 1968 Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act the crime victim arose as an ‘idealized subject’. Legislation centered on the imagined interests of the victim. The exaltation of the victim as model citizen created incentives for people to embrace the identity. Therefore, ‘people deploy the category of crime to legitimate interventions that have other motivations’ (Simon, 2007: 4). The process of defining dangerous others entailed the simultaneous definition of the self as potential victim.

Although community groups were dominated by property owners, the few renters in the groups also claimed to be ‘invested’ in the neighborhood and entitled to services and a police response. In a regression of marginalization, long-time renters distanced themselves from people they considered unworthy and criminal, such as new renters or undocumented immigrants. For example, one of the few renters active in the LACH Community Group, a middle-aged black woman, referred to ‘working renters’ as the apartment dwellers deserving of a place in the community: ‘What I mean when I say working renters is that these were not transient renters. Many had been in the neighborhood for 20 years.’ Renters leveraged the time or energy they invested and their status as good people to elicit a response from police, local government, and city prosecutors. Community group members believed that they got nothing back for all their hard work and material investment, not even extensive special treatment from local bureaucracies. Meanwhile, undeserving and lazy others lived charmed lives blessed with protection by the state.

Empowerment through politicking

Whereas most of the members of the LACH Community Group had little sway with police and neighborhood prosecutors, members of the Community-Police Advisory Board (C-PAB) often maintained daily communication with the WLAPD Captain and negotiated their concerns with him or her directly. C-PAB members were mainly white homeowners from affluent Westside neighborhoods.

David, a white business owner on the board of C-PAB, was active in his Neighborhood Council and a member of the Chamber of Commerce. David had little tolerance for residents who insisted that police were the answer to community problems. He told me that the community had to be empowered to solve its own problems, ‘We have a responsibility to take matters into our own hands. We can’t wait for the cops or the city to solve this. It is a matter of personal responsibility.’ At a neighborhood watch meeting for La Cienega Heights, David explained how his neighborhood association successfully solicited city services:

City government is like a big tree. And I can be an arborist but you guys have to learn how to work the system. My suggestion is that if you want something to get done submit a request in writing, email is fine, to your city council person. And report it to your neighborhood council. The neighborhood council advises the city council on quality of life issues. And don’t forget about it. Keep calling and checking up on it [ … ] you have to know who to go to but also how to talk to them.

The WLAPD captain confirmed the soundness of David’s advice, ‘David is right about persistence. If someone calls me once, obviously I look at it. But if someone calls me 15 times, guess what? The person who calls me once is going on the backburner.’

David played a central role in a lawsuit which blocked the ‘Pico-Olympic Traffic Initiative’ proposed by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and then City Councilmember Jack Weiss. The purpose of the initiative was to alleviate a portion of Los Angeles’ notorious traffic problems by changing the parallel Pico Boulevard and Olympic Boulevard into one way streets during rush hours. The neighborhood councils along Pico felt they were left out of the decision process when the initiative was crafted. Furthermore, businesses were convinced they would lose revenue from the parking restrictions that would accompany the change in traffic signals. With donations from Westside homeowners, David and the Chamber of Commerce hired a lawyer and successfully defeated the initiative.

David used leverage he gained from the Pico-Olympic Traffic Initiative lawsuit to facilitate anti-vending enforcement. At a public safety meeting the WLAPD captain, with David at his side, explained to a crowd of angry residents why it is not practically feasible for the police to confiscate vendors’ goods.

Captain: We don’t have space for confiscated goods. That would require a warehouse and the problem is that property in West LA is expensive. The pushcarts are technically evidence in a crime. But we are working on –

David (cutting in): C-PAB is currently working on getting space. Along Pico there are some owners of public storage places who are very grateful to us for stopping the Pico-Olympic traffic initiative.

The purpose of C-PAB was to provide a liaison between the community and the police. C-PAB members were supposed to represent the concerns of the community. Alternately, C-PAB members assisted the LAPD in community policing efforts such as Neighborhood Watch. Police-appointed liaisons in community–police partnerships structured community expectations of police (Chesluk, 2004). Thus, the groups legitimated LAPD actions as backed by popular support and a democratic process. In a way, David was trying to help the WLAPD Captain by providing him with resources to which he would not otherwise have access and appease demanding residents.

Although the police had state authority, some community group members were much wealthier and, in many ways, more politically connected than the police captains with whom they partnered. David’s unique position also brought subtle tension to police power. The sincerity of the captain’s desire to address vending was checked when community group members viably offered solutions. Interestingly, however, such power differentials may backfire. During the course of this research, David was ousted from C-PAB. The newly appointed Police Captain made use of her right to remove any C-PAB member. When other C-PAB members demanded transparency over the circumstances of David’s removal, she would only comment that they had a ‘difference of opinion’. She replaced David with a ‘more respectful’ soft-spoken white man in his 60s from Bel-Air. At least in the arena of C-PAB, it appears the police held onto ultimate authority. Most community group members, however, did not have the resources to battle the WLAPD Captain. They had a more immediate and direct method to confront vending.

Empowerment through vigilantism

The Neighborhood Prosecutor explained in an interview why she believed that vending was such a salient issue for community group members:

People don’t like strangers in their neighborhood. So it’s perceived that if you have this person sitting there selling fruit, somehow these people are doing something else – some other illegal activity.

Community group members insisted that vendors had no place in the neighborhood. But the vendors were not strangers in the sense that they were unfamiliar to residents. There was a general consistency day after day in the people who drove the produce trucks, sold ice cream from push carts, and set up fruit stands at busy corners. Patrons developed amicable acquaintanceships with the vendors they regularly bought from. The police also knew the vendors who frequented the neighborhood.

Community group members who opposed vending recognized particular vendors. One LACH Community Group member burst out of his house to yell at a vendor he claimed was ‘arrogant’ for repeatedly ignoring requests to stop honking his horn. In another instance, a member of the group was arrested after a vendor called the police to report harassment. LACH Community Group members harbored vehement anger at the vendors they believed filed false battery claims against them. When community group members could not elicit a response from authorities, they took enforcement into their own hands. A LACH Community Group member started a 2008 letter with the line ‘word from the front’, as if to imply the existence of a war between some residents and vendors. He continued: ‘If something dramatic is not done soon with regard to shutting down these vendors, escalation of confrontation is inevitable.’⁴ Community group members positioned themselves as under siege from a litany of undeserving, criminal people and from the very institutions that were supposed to protect them. They simultaneously defined community narrowly while employing populist language to justify taking action into their own hands.

In order to get a response from the authorities, residents tracked vendors, called the police, and refused to leave until the police agreed to meet their demands for a citation or arrest. Another LACH Community Group member advanced a sort of ultimatum to the neighborhood prosecutor, ‘If this area is not policed, we will have to do it ourselves, at great personal risk.’ She admitted to me that she personally struggled with the turn the community group took: ‘We have had to do citizens arrests. We have had to follow people we saw breaking into houses or doing graffiti and hold them until the police get there. At what point does it turn into vigilantism? We don’t want to do that.’ There was uncertainty and unease in all parts of the partnership as to when the ‘informal regulation of criminal deviance’ slipped from neighborly vigilance into uncontrollable vigilantism (Johnston, 1996: 220). What are the police to do when the residents who are supposed to restore order become themselves disorderly? For the core members of community partnership groups, crime prevention became all-encompassing. They maintained constant communication with police, city prosecutors, and government officials, checked COMPSTAT crime maps daily, and discussed any signs of possible danger with each other via call chains. Look for deviance through a broken window and you will see it, sometimes driving a produce truck.

The disorder of upstanding citizens

Community and broken windows policing presume very different legitimate roles for community members. Yet both policing approaches are not incompatible and may be used to the advantage of community members. This study showed that once a community buys into the premise of broken windows they may relinquish their presumed passive role and try to hold the police accountable to the causal link between disorder and crime. Community group members turned the tables, demanding protective services in the name of looming disorder. How much did community group members, a small but vocal portion of the neighborhood population, actually associate vendors with crime and danger? Community group members themselves may not even have been certain as to why they felt as they did about vendors. It is difficult to disentangle true motivations from instrumental tactics. It is evident, however, that community group members used harm arguments selectively and strategically to prompt a desired response from authorities. When their harm arguments were rejected, community group members turned to making more direct connections between vending and danger, for example, through claims that vendors dealt drugs and burglarized homes.

Community group members explicitly stated that they were using the broken windows framework and they expected the police to do the same. For years, community groups were told by police that it was important to follow the broken windows model by erasing graffiti immediately, fixing broken street lights, and up-keeping their lawns and houses. Residents, however, turned expectations back on the police. They were comfortable engaging with academic theories. They understood how COMPSTAT and officer deployment worked enough to actively manipulate police technology. Using the broken windows framework heightened the level of attention residents expected from police and other local government agencies. The community’s warm embrace of broken windows surveillance put the police in the awkward position of having to qualify the causal links between street vending and serious crime. A policy that was supposed to give law enforcement discretion to single out disorder was used to encourage them to spend scarce resources. It was community group members that sought preventative action on the assumption, however tenuous, that the worst situation would materialize. In taking a risk management framework, community groups overestimated the likelihood of danger, especially in a neighborhood where murders and violent crime were relatively rare. Although the stated intent of community partnership programs was to reduce fear, the broken windows theory allowed community group members to argue that potential danger was everywhere.

Battles over vending in the racially and socioeconomically mixed area highlight that, contrary to the claims of broken windows advocates, what constitutes disorder is far from obvious. Constructing order produces the problem of disorder. Moreover, what is order in one context becomes disorderly in another context (Berg and Timmermans, 2000). Here, harnessing the broken windows argument in the framework of community policing gave community groups leverage to define street vending as disorder. Community groups became quite chaotic in their own way as they scrambled from one line of logic to another. In the end, community group members never got the dedicated systematic enforcement they wanted. The tentacles of formal and informal social control functioned unevenly and uneasily. It involved a variety of actors who often worked at cross-purposes.

Community group members saw broken windows logic as offering a promised land of order that was worth almost any cost. But their frantic need to tame disorder haphazardly affected the daily lives of vendors and other groups they criminalized. Moreover, there was a lifelessness that permeated the spaces where there loomed fear of anything that winked openly of the uncomfortable or of indecency or wild beauty. In many cities unsanctioned art is attacked as criminal graffiti (Ferrell, 1995). Skateboarding is categorized as a public nuisance (Hayward, 2004). The community group was like many urban entities that continue to arrange and regulate public space in their own binary vision such that any complexity is erased. Street vendors selling food were feared as door-to-door deliverymen of chaos and crime. The ordering obsession suffocated any traces of creativity and excitement. The ‘utopia’ of controlled space, the numbing need for ‘civility’ and blank walls, is no place to end up.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Stefan Timmermans for his tireless guidance and Dwight Davis for his methodological assistance.

Notes

Ana Muniz is currently a PhD student at the University of California, Los Angeles, Department of Sociology.

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