Sociology Department Seminar: Down Out and Under Arrest: How Policing Shapes Everyday Life in Urban Poor Communities

Forrest Stuart, Associate Professor of Sociology, Stanford University, will present his work “Down Out and Under Arrest: How Policing Shapes Everyday Life in Urban Poor Communities.” Since the 1990s, American cities have embraced hyper-aggressive policing policies. Drawing on over 7 years of in-depth, ethnographic fieldwork alongside police and residents in Los Angeles’s Skid Row and on Chicago’s South Side, Dr. Forrest Stuart analyzes how the omnipresent threat of harmful police contact reshapes the cultural contexts and patterned behaviors in criminalized neighborhoods. In the hope of reducing such police contact, residents adopt a particular cognitive schema—which he refers to as “cop wisdom”—that transforms the way residents understand and interact with physical environments, peers, and strangers. He traces how cop wisdom leads to new and potentially troubling forms of behavior and social interaction.

NIS