Although sweeps generally produce misdemeanor arrests, three of the persons in our sample arrested for felonies were apparently caught in sweeps. One of them said: “I was in a parking lot on Mission Street and the police came in with a paddy wagon. They were picking up lowriders. They got me for being high on drugs and for possession of stolen property.” (The charges were dropped three days later.)
Helping rabble
Some arrests of disreputables are intended as a form of aid. Police officers are among the few—and are sometimes the only—social agents available to the rabble. As Jacqueline Wiseman has written: “The peace-keeping on the Row can be said to be at least secondarily for the benefit of residents, but more in the manner of the parent who disciplines a child for his own good. Most police consider a drunk arrest to be somewhat benevolent.”45 Arrests of this sort are invariably made on misdemeanor charges. In our sample, some of the misdemeanor drunk arrests may have been “for the benefit of the resident,” but none of the felony arrests appeared to be for the purpose of extending aid.
Fighting property crime by rabble
One of the most troublesome activities of the rabble class, which the police make a constant effort to stop, is its persistent assault on the private property of respectable citizens. Fifteen of our 100 felony arrests were of disreputables for stealing property from reputable people or businesses. Here are two examples from police reports:
Received a call via radio re: an 852 in progress [theft from auto] in the 2800 block of Jackson Street [a highly respectable neighborhood]. As we drove in front of [street number] Jackson, Officer Q. and I observed the above boosted vehicle parked inside the garage area of [street number] Jackson. The door to this garage was open partially and we were able to see the garage area. We saw M. in the front seat area, and suspect no. 2 standing next to the right-side open door of the boosted vehicle. Custody of M. was turned over to 3F30 day watch.
Victim/reportee L. told me that while he was standing outside of Studio West dance hall, he engaged in a conversation with suspect no. 1. Suspect no. 1 informed him that a friend of his, suspect no. 3, a white female, was without a date and asked him if he’d accompany them and be her escort. Suspect no. 1 opened the passenger door, where L. sat. L. looked up at him and saw what he described as a .38 revolver pistol in the suspect’s hand pointing at him. The suspect then said, “Give me your money.” L. complied; fearing for his life. L. handed suspect no. 1 his wallet. Suspect no. 1 then told L. to leave the keys to his vehicle and get out. As L. hesitated at this command, suspect no. 1 kicked him in the face.
Finally, nine of the felony arrests in our sample seem unrelated to managing the rabble. The behavior in question—which ranged from first-degree murder to possession of cocaine discovered during a drunk-driving arrest—would probably have provoked arrest regardless of who had committed it.
Conclusions
By arguing that arrest procedures and the jail are used mainly to manage the rabble, I do not mean to imply that crime is not an issue. As the foregoing partial review and classification of the 100 felony arrests suggests, the majority of those arrested were in fact guilty of some crime. Rather, I would like to emphasize that the culpability of those persons had what Egon Bittner has called “restricted relevance.”46 That is, they violated standards that are enforced with a great deal of discretion by the police and mainly in order to manage the rabble rather than to enforce the law.
Some of the more serious crimes, such as robbery and assault by one disreputable on another, usually come to the attention of the police because of the social setting and the status of the disreputables. Disreputables commit their crimes in a much more obvious fashion than reputable people, and the police, in performing their rabble management function, are keeping their eye on them and expecting them to commit crimes. Police do overlook a lot of criminal conduct by disreputables. However, disreputables commit an enormous amount of petty crime out in the open, and the police see a great deal of it.
Likewise, when disreputables are arrested for violating the private property rights of respectable citizens, it is because the police are at least as interested in managing the rabble as in enforcing the law. It is not simply the fact of theft that provokes arrest; it is who commits the theft and what type of theft it is. Our society—like its predecessors, chiefly England—has been quicker to criminalize covetous property accumulation by the rabble than by other classes. The police are always on the lookout for purse-snatching, theft from cars, and shoplifting, but they almost never patrol used-car lots or automobile repair shops to catch salesmen or repairmen breaking the law, and they never raid corporate board rooms to catch executives fixing prices. The difference between these crimes is not seriousness or prevalence; it is offensiveness, which is determined by social status and context.
*Caleb Foote, who studied the abuses of vagrancy statutes, interprets these laws:
The anti-migratory policy behind vagrancy legislation began as an essential complement of the wage stabilization legislation which accompanied the breakup of feudalism and the depopulation caused by the Black Death. By the Statutes of Labourers in 1349–1351, every able-bodied person without other means of support was required to work for wages fixed at the level preceding the Black Death; it was unlawful to accept more, or to refuse an offer to work, or to flee from one county to another to avoid offers of work or to seek higher wages, or to give alms to able-bodied beggars who refused to work. (Foote, “Vagrancy Type Law and Its Administration,” p. 615)
*Though the limits vary from time to time and officer to officer, in a particular period officers tend to agree on them. For a discussion of the working knowledge of police officers, see Egon Bittner, “The Police on Skid-Row: A Study of Peace Keeping.”
2
Who Is Arrested?
THE VAST MAJORITY of the persons who are arrested, booked, and held in jail are not charged with serious crimes. They are charged with petty ones or with behavior that is no crime at all. And the jail, unlike the prison, has little to do with serious crime. Its primary purpose is to receive and hold persons because they are “offensive.” These conclusions are based on an analysis of two samples of a jail’s intake population: 100 felony arrests and 100 misdemeanor arrests randomly selected over a one-year period from the booking record of the San Francisco City and County jails. My research assistant and I were not able to interview the persons in the misdemeanor sample because so many of them were released within a few hours of arrest. But we were able to interview all persons in the felony sample within twenty-four hours of their arrest. We questioned them about their social backgrounds, their recent activities, and the circumstances of their arrest, including the nature of the behavior that led to it. In most cases the accounts of events that led to their arrest were patently valid. (Either they openly admitted the truth of the charges, or they denied them and their accounts were validated by immediate dismissals.) But whenever we had any reason to doubt the truth of an account, we sought verification in the court records, the booking reports, and the state’s crime records.
Table 1 Distribution of Charges in the Felony Sample (100 arrests)
Crime Seriousness
The distribution of charges in the felony and misdemeanor samples are shown in Tables 1 and 2. (In cases involving multiple charges only the most serious charge is listed.) The misdemeanor charges, of course, were by definition made for crimes that were not considered serious. On the other hand, many of the felony charges pointed to crimes that would be committed only by persons who fit the popular and official conceptions