This dissertation engages a fundamental concern for sociologists, criminologists, and scholars of urban poverty: how authorities attempt to better control marginal social groups, and how those populations counteract and even resist these efforts. Drawing on five years of ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and archival research, the dissertation analyzes daily life on the streets of Los Angeles' Skid Row district, a neighborhood widely-regarded as the "homeless capital of America," distinguished as containing what is arguably the largest concentration of standing police forces found anywhere in the country, if not the world. Tracing the historical trajectory of neighborhood development into current-day, street-level interactions between police officers and Skid Row's impoverished and homeless inhabitants, I argue that a new model of social control has emerged, tightly wedding rehabilitative and punitive interventions - what I term "therapeutic policing." Examining inhabitants' everyday experiences of Skid Row in the shadow of policing, the text further examines a range of strategies - from quiet subversion to overt opposition - by which those in the neighborhood attempt to resist the mandates of therapeutic policing. Throughout the analysis, I demonstrate that the increasing omnipresence of surveillance, detainments, and arrests in Skid Row, and other marginalized and stigmatized urban neighborhoods, is fundamentally reshaping the manner in which residents come to understand themselves, their peers, and their communities.

What logics underlie the call to “defund the police,” and how do those logics matter in policy debate? In the wake of widespread protests after the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and other victims of police violence during the summer of 2020, the Black Lives Matter movement’s call to “defund the police” captured the national imagination. Several municipal governments promised to cut funding and contracts for their respective police departments, with mixed results. Because we expect police defunding and reinvestment to remain a central movement demand, this Article explores the demand’s discursive and normative terrain. It does so by describing and critically engaging three logics of criminal system alternatives that we have observed in activists’ demands and organizing efforts. Specifically, we theorize investments in social welfare, safety production, and racial reparation as deeply connected but distinct logics that might guide decisions about where and how money should be spent as part of defund initiatives, and we discuss some implications of each for transformational change within and beyond policing.