872671
research-article2019

ASRXXX10.1177/0003122419872671American Sociological ReviewHerring

Complaint-Oriented Policing:
Regulating Homelessness in
Public Space

American Sociological Review
﻿1­–32© American Sociological
Association 2019
DOI:
10.1177/0003122419872671
https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122419872671
journals.sagepub.com/home/asr

Chris Herringa

Abstract
Over the past 30 years, cities across the United States have adopted quality-of-life ordinances
aimed at policing social marginality. Scholars have documented zero-tolerance policing andemerging tactics of therapeutic policing in these efforts, but little attention has been paid to
911 calls and forms of third-party policing in governing public space and the poor. Drawing
on an analysis of 3.9 million 911 and 311 call records and participant observation alongsidepolice officers, social workers, and homeless men and women residing on the streets of
San Francisco, this article elaborates a model of “complaint-oriented policing” to explain
additional causes and consequences of policing visible poverty. Situating the police within abroader bureaucratic field of poverty governance, I demonstrate how policing aimed at the poor
can be initiated by callers, organizations, and government agencies, and how police officers
manage these complaints in collaboration and conflict with health, welfare, and sanitation
agencies. Expanding the conception of the criminalization of poverty, which is often centeredon incarceration or arrest, the study reveals previously unforeseen consequences of movealong orders, citations, and threats that dispossess the poor of property, create barriers toservices and jobs, and increase vulnerability to violence and crime.

Keywords
policing, homelessness, poverty governance, urban sociology, social control

It’s 6am and officers Rodriguez and Sharkey are beginning their morning shift fromSan Francisco’s Mission Police Station.
“Alright, let’s see where we’re off to thismorning,” Rodriguez says, switching on thepatrol car’s dashboard. The screen wedged
between the passenger and driver’s seatlights up a list of 36 calls listing the time, anumeric code delineating the type of call,and a street address. “Hey, not so bad! It’s
still early though.” Of the calls on thescreen, twenty-one are coded 915, or what is
officially called “homeless complaints.” If
the 911 dispatcher receiving the call concludes that the reported violation covers oneof the city’s 24 anti-homeless laws and does
not involve a more serious crime, or a nuisance violation involving a housed person,

they dispatch the call as a homelesscomplaint.
Officers Rodriguez and Sharkey respond tothe calls in the order received. Driving to thefirst call, a mere five minutes from the station, we pass eleven tents and several morebodies laid out on cardboard, piles of blankets, and the hard-damp concrete, all violating the exact same ordinance we’re chasing
after, “illegal lodging.” We pull up to aa

University of California-Berkeley

Corresponding Author:
Chris Herring, University of California-Berkeley,
410 Barrows Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720
Email: Christoph.herring@berkeley.edu

2		single tent, tied between two large pillars of
the 101 highway overpass across from a
24-hour Fitness club. “They always call”
referring to the club, “And of course he’s
back!” Rodriguez explains, “There was a
big sweep last week on the other side of thethoroughfare by Southern,” referring to theeviction of an encampment carried out by
the adjacent police precinct from where thisperson had migrated.
Rodriguez parks the car, both get out, andSharkey takes out his baton to tap on thetent pole as if knocking on a door. TAP TAPTAP TAP TAP, “Good Morning. SFPD. Can
you pop your head out for a minute?” The
fly unzips and a tired face emerges, unfazed.
“Hi good morning sir, how are you doing?”
Sharkey asks. “Good, thanks,” the mancalmly replies. Sharkey continues, “So I
guess someone called this morning andcomplained about lodging here. So, I guess
you set up here last night?” The man nods.
“You know business is getting started andwould be great if you could just you know
move-along, otherwise they’re going to justcall again, and we’re gonna have to
respond.” Without resistance or attitude theman replies, “Yeah ok, I’ll get moving.”
Rodriguez and Sharkey return to the car,clear the run, and drive on to their next call.
Already two more homeless complaints
have hit the dashboard since arriving at thisone. Over the next three hours, the two officers clear ten homeless complaint calls,
three of which they simply drove by as the
person had moved on by the time we
responded. Except for one, a man who
refused to move-on and took a citation forblocking a sidewalk, the others followed thesame course as the first; the officers
explained someone had called to complain
and the person residing on the sidewalk,vacant lot, or park agreed to move-along.
As we pulled back into the station for lunch,
I ask the officers how they thought themorning went. Sharkey admitted, “Lookwe’re not really solving anybody’s problem.
This is a big game of whack-a-mole. I’ll
clear one run, get a person to move, but by
doing that I’m just creating another call,right? If we arrested a guy, we’d never clear

American Sociological Review 00(0)these calls, and when we cite them, they
won’t be able to pay and they’ll just be outhere longer and less willing to cooperate.”
Rodriguez, grasping for some sense ofredemption. “Look, I get it if you’re paying
two million dollars for a house and how
much are you paying for property taxes, andthen you have to walk past this guy that’s
taking a crap right in front of your house, or
you’re walking with your kid and you see
someone shooting up in the middle of thestreet or peeing or knocked out, like you
don’t want your kid seeing that. So we get
why people call, because it’s a quality-oflife issue for them. . . . But then our end, it’s
like where are they supposed to go? The
shelters are full. What are we supposed to
do with them?” (fieldnote, May 2016)

Over the past 30 years, police forces acrossthe United States have adopted forms of qualityof-life policing as a renewed commitment toaddressing order maintenance as a policing
priority and an instrumental crime-control
strategy (Harcourt 2009; Kelling and Coles
1997; Kohler-Hausmann 2018). Central tothese efforts have been the passage of local
ordinances aimed at curbing visible poverty,“anti-social behavior,” and homelessness(Beckett and Herbert 2009; Vitale 2008).
These laws are currently spreading at an
unprecedented rate in the United States(NLCHP 2017) and increasingly across theglobe (Fernandez Evangelista 2013). The
National Law Center on Homelessness andPoverty (NLCHP 2017) found that over halfof the 187 U.S. cities in its study banned
camping, sitting, and lying in public, and over
two-thirds had bans on loitering and begging
in particular places. Between 2006 and 2016,bans on sitting and lying increased by 52 percent, citywide camping bans by 69 percent,prohibitions on loitering and loafing citywide
by 88 percent, and bans on living in vehicles
rose 143 percent, the fastest increases of suchordinances in U.S. history. Recent statewide
studies by legal scholars show that most cities
have multiple ordinances on the books(Adcock et al. 2016; Frankel, Katovich, andVedvig 2016; Marek and Sawicki 2017; Olson,
MacDonald, and Rankin 2015). For instance,Herring

California cities have an average of nine antihomeless laws—Los Angeles and San Francisco have 21 and 24, respectively (Fisher
et al. 2015). Each law taken on its own may
seem limited in its strictures on targetedbehaviors, but collectively, they effectively
criminalize homelessness and in doing so create an impossible situation for policing.
Legal scholars have tracked the spread ofthese laws, but we know little about their onthe-ground implementation and effects. The
existing scholarship presents two generalcharacterizations of policing marginality(Herbert, Beckett, and Stuart 2017): “aggressive patrol,” which leverages citations andarrests to curb low-level criminality and isguided by quotas or directives from police
command (Beckett and Herbert 2009; Mitchell
1997; Moskos 2008), and “therapeutic policing” (Stuart 2016), which combines the stickof legal punishment with the carrot of rehabilitative services. In therapeutic policing,
officers utilize discretionary enforcement tocompel wayward citizens toward self-reform(see also Johnsen and Fitzpatrick 2010). Missing from these accounts, however, is an assessment of the role of complaints through 911,
the primary trigger for police response in U.S.
cities, and other means of third-party policing(Desmond and Valdez 2012; Garland 2001).
As illustrated in the opening vignette, complaints that result in dispatches create a unique
set of dilemmas, dynamics, and outcomes
between the police and the policed, as well as
between residents and business owners callingfor policing. Third-party policing is of growing importance; in San Francisco, for example, the unsheltered homeless population grewless than 1 percent between 2013 and 2017
(Applied Survey Research 2017), yet 911
police dispatches for “homeless concerns”
increased by 72 percent over the same period.
Although police command and officer discretion remain key aspects of policing marginality, this article addresses the empirical gaps byelaborating an additional approach I callcomplaint-oriented policing.
I evaluate the sources, enforcement, andeffects of complaint-oriented policing in three3

steps. Through an analysis of nearly four million 911 and 311 records and a variety of ethnographic observations, I first argue that “homelesscrises” are produced not only by increased
homelessness but also by a crisis of complaints.
Rather than finding a command-control systemof orders and quotas or an enforcement primarily driven by officer discretion, I identify various ways the policing of poverty is a product ofthird-party complaints. Next, I explain how
police officers resolve these complaints in conflict and collaboration with a host of otherstreet-level bureaucrats through a process ofburden shuffling (Seim 2017). Rather than locking up petty criminals (aggressive patrol) or
pushing people into services (therapeutic policing), officers resolve complaints by displacing
them spatially, temporally, or bureaucratically—
forcing homeless people into new spaces orreclassifying the “homeless problem” as an
issue for another agency or institution. Finally, I
consider the impact of these policing practices
on the survival and subjectivities of homelessindividuals. I illustrate how frequent and continual policing through move-along orders andcitations amounts to a pervasive penality thatdeepens poverty and suffering, as well as how
homeless campers resist and adapt to this formof policing to secure their survival. Building on
work that reveals how the ubiquitous policing of
marginal groups has detrimental effects beyond
incarceration (Desmond and Valdez 2012; Goffman 2014; Rios 2011), I uncover novel mechanisms through which the marginalized arefurther criminalized on account of their housing
and shelter status. Through police interactions
that fall short of arrest, move-along orders andcitations collectively work to dispossess thepoor of their property; create barriers to accessing services, housing, and jobs; and increase
vulnerability to violence and crime by stressing
the already tenuous social ties between individuals residing in public space.

Policing Extreme
Poverty In The City
Two general accounts currently exist in thescholarship on policing social marginality

4		(see Herbert et al. 2017).1 A number of scholars have characterized quality-of-life ordinances and their associated policing as
cornerstones of the carceral city (Davis 2006)
and urban revanchism (Smith 1996), whichaims to purify the streets and sidewalks ofvisible poverty for businesses, tourists, andwealthier residents under the banner ofreclaiming public space for bourgeois consumption (Mitchell 1997). Absent a welfare
response, cities have adopted a policing
approach of “aggressive patrol” to hide thesocial problem of homelessness through banishment (Beckett and Herbert 2009). Underlying this policing philosophy are variants ofbroken windows policing (Kelling and Wilson
1982), packaged as “order maintenance,”“quality-of-life policing,” “zero tolerance,” or“stop and frisk.” These methods are grounded
in a faith in deterrence to curb low-level criminality or as aesthetic interventions designed tosignal order and police presence to criminals.
Most often, these initiatives are depicted as
top-down, command-and-control policing“campaigns,” engineered and directed bypolice chiefs seeking arrest and citation quotas, most famously by Police Chief William
Bratton under the command of then-Mayor
Rudolph Giuliani in New York City during theearly 1990s (see Harcourt 2009; Vitale 2008;
Wacquant 1999). For a range of scholars, therecent intensification of anti-homeless laws
reflects a “punitive turn” (Garland 2001; Wacquant 2009) in the criminal justice system,
under which any previously-existing impulses
to rehabilitate and reintegrate criminals has
been supplanted by more aggressive and intolerant aims of exclusion.
More recently, a critique of the assumptionthat policing poverty is uniformly hostile, punitive, and exclusionary has emerged (see DeVerteuil, May, and von Mahs 2009). In his
ethnography of policing LA’s Skid Row, Stuart(2016) presents an alternative policing approach
toward these ordinances, which he terms “therapeutic policing.” Rather than rote retribution,strong-armed rehabilitation through coercive
benevolence was the underlying philosophy ofpolicing in Skid Row. In contrast to commandcontrol directives, officers use discretionary

American Sociological Review 00(0)enforcement through the threat of arrest andcitation to try to compel individuals to avail
themselves of various social services that might
alleviate their poverty or reduce their dependence on controlled substances (see also Johnsen
and Fitzpatrick 2010). According to this set ofscholars, policing is not solely in service ofbusiness elites, tourists, and residents, butrather aims at “fixing” the down and out themselves. This model of therapeutic policing fits
into a broader set of studies within the poverty
governance literature that challenges, or at least
complicates, the one-sided rise of a new punitiveness. This includes studies that have drawn
attention to the growth of shelters, targetedsocial services, and housing for the homelessover this same period of increased policing(Cloke, May, and Johnsen 2010; DeVerteuil
2006; von Mahs 2013), as well as research thatanalyzes how welfare institutions are becoming
increasingly punitive and punitive institutions
are increasingly filtering welfare services (e.g.,
Comfort 2007; Garland 2001; Soss, Fording,and Schram 2011).
However, the police interaction describedin the opening vignette problematizes descriptions of both aggressive and therapeutic policing, the key elements of which I outline in
Figure 1. For one, the immediate source of
the interaction was not an order from SFPD
commanders, as often depicted in accounts ofaggressive patrol, nor did it hinge on officers’
discretion, as would be the case in therapeuticpolicing. Second, the sanction of a movealong order did not result in a formal citation
or repeated arrests, which one might expect
under aggressive patrol, nor was there eventhe slightest pretense of an outcome thatwould lead to services or some protection forthe homeless camper, as in therapeutic policing. Finally, the role of the officer deviatedwidely from that of “rabble managers” containing the riff-raff, pushing people into andout of jail, and mitigating violence between
homeless people (Bittner 1967; Irwin 1985),
or that of “recovery managers” (Stuart 2016),
shepherding homeless people into rehabilitative programs to ameliorate individual pathologies. Instead, the modal policing process in
my observations of hundreds of interactions

Herring

5

Figure 1. Policing Social Marginality: Contrasting Approaches
Note: Adapted from Herbert, Beckett, and Stuart 2017.

between officers and homeless individuals (1)was initiated by complaints outside the police
force, (2) relied on punitive interactions thatmost often fell short of arrest and did not
involve services, and (3) was aimed at neutralizing the complaint through incapacitationand invisibilization.
During my fieldwork, I certainly witnessed
brutal instances of assertive punishment, as
well as acts of coercive benevolence by officers toward the unhoused, that reflected
approaches of aggressive patrol and therapeutic policing. However, neither paradigm captures the far more common logics andpractices of policing homelessness that I callcomplaint-oriented policing. Call-driven
reactive policing has been discussed in thepolicing literature since the 1970s, but little
sociological research exists on its role inquality-of-life policing, which is typicallyportrayed as a proactive method concerning
how officers manage the everyday onslaughtof calls, and the effect of this policing on themost marginalized.
This article traces the sources, enforcement, and impact of complaint-oriented policing, and in the process draws on andcontributes to three broader sets of literatureson urbanization, poverty governance, andcriminalization. First, my analysis of the drivers of complaint-oriented policing builds on
debates of urban change and urban government as it relates to policing. Emerging froma series of case studies of New York City
(Laniyonu 2018; Vitale 2008), Seattle (Gibson
2004), and Los Angeles (Davis 2006), andexplicitly articulated as a hypothesis by Sharp(2014), the postindustrial policing hypothesis
argues that intensified policing stems fromprocesses of gentrification. Understudied andundertheorized in this literature is the role of
911 and 311 calls, as well as organizations
such as resident associations and Business
Improvement Districts that engage in thirdparty policing. According to Garland(2001:170), third-party policing, composed of“a third governmental sector . . . positioned
between the state and civil society, connecting
the criminal justice agencies with activities ofcitizens, communities and corporations,” represents “the most significant development of
the crime control field” and yet has been
largely unstudied by sociologists (see Desmond and Valdez 2012). I present one of thefirst empirical analyses of large-scale 311 and911 administrative records, as recently called6		

for by O’Brien, Sampson, and Winship(2015).
I do not analyze the direct role of gentrification or attempt to adjudicate between theunderlying causes of complaint-oriented
policing; rather, I identify the structural andorganizational pressures placed on the police
to manage marginality that extend beyond thefield of criminal justice and how they manifest in police interactions. Following others
who analyze policing as a public institution
responding to community-based actors (Huey2007; Vitale 2008), I place police within the
dynamics of urban change and the broader
field of urban governance to demonstrate howchanges in business and resident organizations, other city agencies, new technologies
such as 311, and political struggles all ratchet
up the policing of social marginality, whilehomelessness and policing protocols remain
relatively constant.
Second, my analysis of the enforcement ofcomplaint-oriented policing builds on thescholarship of street-level bureaucracy inpoverty governance. Drawing from observations and interviews with a wide-range offront-line public workers, including school
teachers, social workers, and police officers,
Lipsky (1980) found that the ultimate
dilemma shared by all was an inability toperform their jobs to the highest standard due
to chronic scarcities of time, information, andother resources. Lipsky and other street-levelbureaucracy scholars (Brodkin 2012; Dubois
2016; Prottas 1979; Watkins-Hayes 2009)
reveal how front-line workers not only experience frustration when faced with this scarcity, but they “make policy” in trying to makedo. Although most of this literature focuseson how street-level bureaucrats “make policy” in vertical relations with authority fromabove and a mostly indigent clientele frombelow, more recent scholarship points to how
bureaucrats also relate laterally and are bothstrained and relieved by the actions and assetsof other city agencies (Comfort et al. 2015;
Hupe and Hill 2007; Lara-Millán 2014; Seim
2017). In his study of labor relations in theambulance, Seim (2017:452) sketches a

American Sociological Review 00(0)process of “burden shuffling” to describe how
ambulance medics and police officers “unload
undesirable work” (very often homeless clients) onto each other. Expanding the analytic
lens beyond the question of labor and work
avoidance, I identify additional mechanismsof spatial, temporal, and bureaucratic burden
shuffling utilized by officers and other frontline workers to reclassify and redistribute
poverty in the face of complaints. I also identify additional motives of burden shuffling
beyond reducing a worker’s caseload, including managerialist goals of improving agency
performance metrics and political goals in
shaping public perceptions of the state’s treatment of homelessness.
Finally, I consider the impact of complaintoriented policing on the survival and subjectivities of homeless individuals. Since the explosionof mass incarceration at the century’s turn,scholars have increasingly traced the penal
state’s tentacles, which grip the poor beyond
the prison walls to the sub-felony floors of thecourts (Kohler-Hausmann 2018), debilitating
monetary sanctions (Harris 2016; O’Malley2009), and the ubiquitous policing of poor
neighborhoods (Goffman 2014; Rios 2011;
Stuart 2016). This article adds yet another set ofmechanisms of criminalization to those foundin previous studies that particularly affect theunhoused, namely move-along orders anddestruction of personal property. These mechanisms comprise a pervasive penality (Herring,
Yarbrough, and Alatorre 2019), that is, a punitive process of police interactions that fall shortof arrest and are pervasive in both their frequency and lingering impact.
Although the outcome depicted in the
opening vignette of a homeless man amiably
agreeing to move-along without ticket orarrest may seem banal or even non-punitive, I
will show that such moments are part of amuch crueler punitive process. Citations seen
as nominal to most are nearly impossible forthe unhoused to pay, resulting in debt andbench warrants that create significant barriers
to exiting homelessness. Property confiscation by sanitation crews deprives people ofmedical and economic means of survival, andHerring

the mere fear of having one’s property confiscated prevents people from receiving medical
services or holding a job. The constant churning of move-along orders provoke conflictamong individuals trying to survive in limited
public spaces. Even though each quality-oflife ordinance, move-along order, and citation
alone may seem inconsequential, collectively,
the process of pervasive penality produces asequence of criminal justice contact that ismore powerful than the sum of its parts. This
process also diminishes citizenship by cultivating a distrust not only of the police, but ofvarious state institutions of poverty management and the public at large. Even without
overtly taking the punitive actions of arrestand incarceration, in what may appear a morecompassionate approach to the problem, thefailure to deal with root causes of homelessness leads city officials to develop short-term
solutions that exacerbate the problems facedby the unhoused and fail to stop the seemingly endless flow of complaints.

Case and Setting
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, an unevenrecovery from a deep recession marked bymassive deindustrialization, the steady erosion of union rights and benefits, catastrophic
decreases in affordable housing, the defunding of public housing, and the deinstitutionalization of mental institutions all combined to
produce a wave of new homelessness (Wolch
and Dear 1993). In contrast to earlier forms ofhomelessness, “advanced homelessness”(Marcuse 1988) was no longer a temporary ortransitional phenomenon, but a robust featureof the metropolis that spanned booms andbusts. The racial composition of the homelessalso changed drastically: minority groupmembers were a minority of the homeless inthe early 1970s, but today they are overrepresented in homeless populations in U.S. cities. Mass incarceration, increasing consumer
and homeowner debt, rising housing costs inmajor cities, welfare reform, and the continual defunding of public housing and mental
health services have increased the housing

7

insecurity of America’s poor, furthered racialdisparities, and increasingly affected families
and those with jobs (HUD 2017).
In response to the growth and persistenceof homelessness, federal and county governments responded in two ways. Homeless services have grown nearly constantly over the
past 30 years, despite the receding welfare
state that feeds the homeless condition itself.
Between 1984 and 1988, more than 3,500
new homeless shelters opened throughout thenation (Jencks 1995:15). Since then, the number of shelter beds in the United States
increased to more than 198,000, approximately 320,000 supportive housing units specifically for the homeless have been built, andthe HUD budget dedicated to homelessness
has grown from $173 million in 1987 to over
$2 billion today (HUD 2017). At the sametime, the criminalization of homelessness
intensified in nearly every city and county
across the country (NLCHP 2017).
San Francisco is a strategic research site
(Merton 1987) to study the regulation ofhomelessness, as it has long been a leader inboth the provision of care and punishment
toward the unhoused. San Francisco pioneered the “housing first” approach to homelessness in the early 1990s, and today it has
more supportive housing units for formerly
homeless individuals and has invested moremoney into homeless services per capita thanany other major U.S. city. In the past decadealone, the city has invested over $1.5 billion,
built or leased 2,700 units of long-term supportive housing, and created more than 500
new shelter beds (BACEI 2019). Yet at thesame time, in the early 1990s, San Francisco’s “Matrix” program was one of the firstzero-tolerance policing campaigns aimed athomelessness (Gowan 2010). Today, the city
has more anti-homeless ordinances on its
book than any other California and possibly
U.S. city (Fisher et al. 2015). As I will discuss, I found evidence of both how the expansion of welfare institutions increased thepolicing of homelessness and the various
ways this policing undermined the access andefficacy of welfare provisions to the unhoused.

8		

San Francisco provides a case study of how
progressive cities that have pioneered bothbold investments in homeless services andcriminal justice reform policies—including
the elimination of cash bail, financial justicereform of court fees and drivers licenses, closure of juvenile detention facilities, and other
innovations—continue to regulate social marginality through policing and criminal justice,albeit through the supposedly less punitive
tools of incarceration and arrest.

Fieldwork
This article draws from a larger ethnographic
project that investigated the field of homelessmanagement in San Francisco between 2014
and 2017. This project included a year ofobservations on ride-alongs with police officers, public health workers on street outreach,and sanitation workers on encampment cleanings; sitting in office hours with shelter social
workers; and working in city hall as theresearch assistant to the director of the Mayor’s
Office of Homelessness. I also draw on observations of community associations, including
three years working as a key organizer in thecity’s homeless advocacy group, the Coalition on Homelessness, and participating in
more than 100 public forums, such as community police meetings, homeowner andmerchant association meetings, and hearingsat city hall. I draw especially from my observations of hundreds of interactions between
police officers and homeless individuals inpublic spaces, my 23 ride-alongs with officers
from the San Francisco Police Department’s
Homeless Outreach Unit, 11 public community police meetings, eight city hearings
focused on policing homelessness, and private meetings between activists, police commanders, and policy officials.
I pair these observations from above withan enactive ethnography from below (Wacquant 2015). Over the course of another year,
I spent nine full months immersed living on
the streets, in the shelters, and daily/weekly“welfare hotels” alongside individuals experiencing homelessness.2 This entailed spending

American Sociological Review 00(0)57 nights sleeping out on sidewalks, in parks,
and beneath underpasses; 96 nights among
hundreds of other men in shelters; and 76
nights in daily or weekly hotels with the marginally housed or more often people just taking a break from the street. I spent most days
that year alongside a variety of homeless men
and women, acquiring the means of survival
through charity, informal work, begging, andthe illicit economy, and interacting with thelocal welfare and justice systems that accompany access to shelter, meals, benefits, jails,
and courts. On a weekly basis, and often
daily, I would witness interactions between
police and unhoused people, primarily on thestreets, but also in the shelters and housing
programs. I witnessed arrests, citations, andmove-along orders. While residing on thestreets, I was personally given move-alongorders dozens of time and threatened withcitation and arrest.
During observations I took notes on asmart phone. When passively observing, as
was often the case on my outings with streetlevel bureaucrats, I could sometimes transcribe in real-time entire conversations andactions. When enactively observing withhomeless participants, I would take shortnotes on breaks, record voice memos every
few hours, and when possible and given consent, audio record conversation and action to
avoid disrupting the flow of activity and conversation. At the end of each day or week, I
would elaborate these into narrative notes.
The multi-sided ethnography created aseries of tensions across these positions, particularly between the police and the policed. I
had not counted on or even sought permission
to ride-along with officers. However, after
presenting findings of a report documenting
the effects of criminalization on San Francisco’s homeless to the city’s Local HomelessCoordinating Board, the lieutenant of SFPD’s
homeless outreach unit approached me andsaid: “I really wish you’d come out and see theproblem from our perspective. I agree, we
can’t arrest our way out of this issue. Thisshould not be a policing issue. This is a social
services issue.” I discussed the proposal with

Herring

members of the Coalition on Homelessness
and with people I had spent time with on thestreet. Most thought I should see the SFPD atwork from “the inside,” although many predicted I would just be given a tempered viewof police on their best behavior biased “toplease the ethnographer” (Rios 2011:7). To an
extent this was certainly true. Although I witnessed citations and destruction of people’s
property during my ride-alongs, I never once
witnessed an arrest nor any physically aggressive behavior by police. However, because I
had already completed the enactive ethnography living alongside individuals on the streets,
where I witnessed constant policing firsthandwhen officers were unaware of my role as a
researcher, they all knew I had already seen
the reality of policing homelessness.3
What I mainly gained from these ridealongs was a clearer understanding of thesources of enforcement related to homelessness and how officers understood their work.
It also allowed me to discuss with officers
critiques I had heard for years from theunhoused and advocates about the policing of
homelessness. This follows Duneier’s (2011)
call for “ethnographic trials” through “inconvenient sampling,” where ethnographers
broaden their observations by including thepeople and perspectives that are least convenient for the impressions developed in theinitial phases of fieldwork, in the same way aprosecutor might call potentially hostile witnesses to the stand.
As I began to see how complaints were
driving the policing in my qualitative fieldwork, I realized many questions that surfaced—How frequently are calls dispatched
for homeless complaints? Are these calls
increasing or decreasing? Where are theyoccurring?—could only be addressed by analyzing quantitative data. After finding no readily available data, I filed a public records act
request with the San Francisco Department ofEmergency Management (DEM 2018), which
provided the date, address, and disposition ofhomeless-related dispatches. This article
draws on analysis of 605,481 911 call records

9

and 3.3 million 311 records regarding “homeless concerns.”4 The 911 data include all calls
made between 2011 and 2018 that were dispatched to officers as a “homeless concern,”
an official SFPD radio code that “is basicallyfor when anyone reports a homeless person
and there’s no other real crime a dispatcher
can select” as one officer described it to me.5
The data also include calls for aggressive panhandling, sit-lie, and trespassing violations,which are also classified by officials as “homeless related” but have distinct radio codesfrom the more general “homeless concern”
code that includes violations such as camping,obstructing a sidewalk, or loitering. A minority of individuals experiencing homelessness
do commit a range of crimes, demonstrate
psychosis, and create more serious problems
for the city, but I exclude these instances frommy quantitative analysis and ethnographic
observations, which are exclusively concernedwith the quality-of-life nuisance violations
listed above.
I also analyzed data from the city’s 311
system, the city’s primary customer service
center, where people report anything fromcurbside cleanup, potholes, or graffiti removal
to a host of “homeless concerns.” I accessedthe 311 data through the city’s public data
portal and included all calls of “homelessconcerns” and “homeless encampments”
from 2011 to 2018. The final section of thearticle integrates findings from a communitybased study I co-directed with Dilara Yarbrough and Lisa Marie Alatorre (2015) thatsurveyed 351 unhoused San Franciscans,including 43 in-depth interviews about theirexperiences of criminalization.6 Together,
these methods provide a relational ethnography (Desmond 2014) by analyzing the process of criminalizing homelessness throughthe double-edged perspective of both thepolice and the policed, and a structural ethnography (Burawoy 2017) by analyzing how,when, and why these interactions occur underthe broad structures of state, market, andcommunity institutions that constrain andshape these interactions.

10		

American Sociological Review 00(0)Figure 2. SFPD Dispatches for Homeless Complaints 2011 to 2018
Source: DEM 2018.

A Crisis of Complaints:
The Triggers of Policing
Homelessness
Outrage over homelessness has been evergreen in San Francisco since the early 1980s(see Bourgois and Schonberg 2009; Gowan
2010), but the situation has taken on a newurgency of social crisis. In 2015, the city’s
Board of Supervisors declared an official“shelter crisis,” following nearly a dozen
other west coast municipalities, including its
Bay Area neighbors Berkeley, Oakland, and
San Jose, as well as Los Angeles, Portland,
Seattle, Eugene, and others (NAEH 2016).
Even in “left coast” San Francisco, there havebeen increased calls for the criminalization ofhomelessness, quite literally. In 2012, 57,374
911 calls for quality-of-life violations
involved the unhoused. By 2017, the last fullyear of data collection, there were 98,793
police dispatches for homeless complaints(see Figure 2). This same period saw evengreater increases in complaints to the city’s
311 service request line. Reports categorized
as “homeless concerns” grew from 9,590 in2012 to 84,486 in 2017. A portion of thesecalls, between 4 and 9 percent in any given
week, are dispatched to police. Most are dispatched to street cleaning crews, whichshould also be considered a form of criminalization, as their operations are backed bythreat of a police response and, as I will
elaborate, result in punitive outcomes that
undermine the health and stability of individuals on the streets.
Yet despite this surge in complaints, andnews stories that portray San Francisco as in
the throes of an unparalleled “homeless crisis,” the city’s homeless population has
remained relatively stable. According to thecity’s point-in-time count, the overall homeless population grew only 8 percent between
2011 and 2017, from 6,455 to 6,986 (Applied
Survey Research 2011, 2017).7 Even moresignificant is the fact that between 2013 and2017, when 911 dispatches increased at theirfastest rate, the unsheltered homeless population increased by only 1 percent. In otherwords, unsheltered homelessness increased byless than 1 percent between 2013 and 2017,yet 911 dispatches for homeless complaints
increased 72 percent and 311 complaints
increased 781 percent. As depicted in Figure
3, which shows two typical weeks in 2013 and2018, police responded to 1,289 911 calls thefirst week of March in 2013 and just over
2,000 calls that same week in 2018, and 311
requests surged from 201 to 1,514 per week.
In San Francisco, the “homeless crisis” asHerring

11

Figure 3. Spatial Distribution of Homeless Complaint Calls for 911 and 311 in First Weeks
of March 2013 and March 2018

rendered by the media and state is not so mucha product of growing homelessness but growing complaints in a rapidly changing city.
What are behind these complaints and how
do they result in the criminalization of homelessness? According to the SFPD lieutenantcommanding the homeless outreach unit, over
90 percent of police and homeless interactions
across the city are initiated through complaints,
with the remainder occurring through officers’
discretion on their beats, largely concentrated
in the city’s Tenderloin neighborhood, whichhosts the majority of recovery services andsingle-room-occupancy units in the city.
Complaint-oriented policing is provokedexternally from three sets of actors: it is initiated from below directly by the citizenry, businesses, or homeowner associations calling 911
or 311; horizontally from city agencies, particularly the departments of public works, public health, and parks; and from above by city
supervisors and the mayor’s office.
The largest volume of complaints in San
Francisco derive from 911 or 311 reports.
Like most U.S. cities, San Francisco has multiple anti-homeless ordinances under its
police code, including bans for sitting andlying on sidewalks, camping, and panhandling (Fisher et al. 2015). As one police lieutenant explained, “If Mrs. Smith continues to12		

American Sociological Review 00(0)Figure 4. Screenshots of Reports of “Homeless Concerns” on the 311 Mobile App

call 911 because some guy’s sleeping on her
door step, we are duty-bound to respond.” In2018, an average of 7,623 calls were dispatched to police patrol cars in the city eachmonth as “homeless concerns” (DEM 2018).
These dispatches derive from 911, police
non-emergency calls, and 311 calls. They arealso dispatched through mobile-app reports
related to homelessness, a technology quickly
spreading in popularity across major U.S. cities. Initially developed to allow residents toreport potholes, graffiti, and vehicles blocking
driveways, in 2015, following New York City,
the app added “homeless concerns” as a category of complaint. The app allows citizens totake photos of the “concern” and choose froma host of subcategories, including “well-being
check,” “encampment,” and “clean up.”
Although most reports are dispatched to the
Department of Public Works, between 4 and 9
percent of 311 reports in any given week aredispatched to the police (DEM 2018). For
instance, each month hundreds of “well-being
checks” reported on 311 are dispatched topolice.8 As seen in Figure 4, a caller requested
a “well-being check” for a woman reported ashaving “blood on her body” and who “looks
very sick”; the woman was not issued an
ambulance, however, but a citation. For thesereasons, within days of the app’s release, it

was deemed the “snitch app” by those I was
spending time with on the streets.
Anti-homeless laws are mobilized not only
through individual residents and workers, butalso through organizations, including merchant associations, homeowner associations,and most prominently Business Improvement
Districts (BIDs). BIDs garner an additional
property tax from all businesses in their area,
primarily to fund increased sanitation andsecurity services. In 2000, San Francisco had
only one BID; in 2015, there were 15. During
my time recycling, panhandling, or simply
hanging out with houseless companions inthese districts, we would be stopped regularly
by BID security and sanitation staff, officiallycalled “community ambassadors,” and told toleave the area or else the police would becalled (see also Selbin et al. 2018). In theirmonthly operational reports, one BID published data on the number of times private
security guards and community ambassadors
enforced specific homeless-related qualityof-life offenses; these reports show anincrease from 24,101 instances of enforcement in 12 months over 2014 and 2015 to
43,907 in a similar period between 2018 and2019 (Union Square BID 2015:7, 2019:6).
This amounts to an 82 percent increase ofenforcement interactions between private

Herring

third-party security forces and unhoused individuals within this single 25-block commercial district.
BIDs also use the city’s 10B program tohire sworn off-duty SFPD officers to patrol
their areas. For instance, in 2014, one BID
spent $2 million for an additional 10,000
hours of SFPD coverage (Garnand 2016).
Even with all this additional security, hundreds of calls for service were made eachweek for policing and street cleaning withinthese districts. Although covering only 5 percent of the city’s land area, 28 to 32 percent
of all 911 dispatches for homelessness
between 2013 and 2018 occurred within BIDs
(Garnand and Herring 2019). During my ridealongs with officers, I observed several community ambassadors and security guards who
were on a first-name basis with officers. On
my first ride-along with officers, we arrived
at the entrance to the Civic Center Auditorium to evict an encampment, and before weeven got out of the vehicle, a community
ambassador walked up to the car window totell us, “it’s always the best time of the day
seeing you guys roll up.”
Another collective and privileged mechanism organized groups used to lodge complaints
was the monthly community police meetings
held in each precinct. In the 11 police meetings
I attended across central city police districts,
no issue was more frequent, time-consuming,and cathartic than homelessness. The complaints spanned a host of concerns, from thesanitary to public safety, medical, environmental, and economic. Take, for example, residents’ and merchants’ reports from a meetingin the city’s Castro neighborhood:
I have a business at 2299 Market, so we havea similar challenge where someone will be
moved from the library and then they end up
in front of our store. . . . I care for all of thosepeople and I want them to get help, but I
don’t want them in front of my store because
it’s scaring customers away.
. . . a homeless person at 4a.m. rang mydoorbell because they were mad at me

13
because I asked them to move off the sidewalk earlier. And I realized I had to go
through a fair amount of effort to get theirname. . . . And I don’t know where this goes,but if cops are going to get people service,
they actually have to know their names andbe able to track and identify people.
So two weeks ago I heard screams, I saw awomen beating her head against the brickwall of my building, hurting herself. Called
911, the police showed up. The police cameto me and told me she was angry because
she spilled her coffee. I’m like this is nuts,
she was on something. They said “that’s all
we can do” she’d already been in to thehospital before and turned back out.

These sorts of complaints would be heard
directly by captains who took down specificaddresses. The encampments would be dispersed by either more frequent policing or
harsher ultimatums of citation or arrest. As acaptain in the Haight Ashbury neighborhood
explained to a complaining resident,
Ok. I hear you’ve called 911 over and overagain and this group of homeless folks keeps
coming back, but did you email me personally? No. Did you ever call me? No. So as I
say at each of these meetings, if you just call
911 or 311 all we’re going to do is address
the immediate concern. If we want to get to
the root of these issues, I need all of you tohelp us be vigilant. Reach out to me.

Enlisting the public as partners in policing,the captain made clear the distinction between
typical caller complaints and concerted complaints by organized citizens to “resolve
encampments.” After being dispersed, theseclearances would be highlighted at the following meeting in the captain’s report as a“resolution,” despite the predictable emergence of a new set of encampments thatwould then be brought to the agenda bynearby merchants and residents (see Photo 1).
Along with citizen complaints, a second
trigger to policing homelessness is demands

14		

American Sociological Review 00(0)Photo 1. Park Police District Community Meeting; Officers Showing Proof of a Camp
Resolution That Was Cause of Complaint at the Previous Meeting (photo by the author)

from other agencies. During my two years offieldwork, I observed the departments of public works, public health, fire, parks, andhuman services agencies all call on police toenforce anti-homeless laws to deal with various problems. Far and away the largest draw
on policing resources was the Department of
Public Works (DPW), which is responsible
for cleaning San Francisco’s streets. There
was a tight and oftentimes indistinguishable
connection between the sanitization and thecriminalization of homelessness. Weekday
mornings, three “alley crews,” each composed of 6 to 12 sanitation workers, would be
dispatched to clean areas of homeless encampments; every crew was escorted by a police
patrol car with two officers. In this case, thesanitation crews guided the policing of homelessness every morning. The public healthoutreach workers I observed made it a point
to avoid doing outreach amid police presence,
so as not to be seen as collaborating with
officers, which would stoke suspicion, distrust, and barriers to providing services fortheir clients, but several evictions spurred by“health abatements” issued by their department resulted in a police response to remove
encampments. These are just two examples ofbureaucratic burden shuffling (discussed at
length in the next section), in which city
agencies concerned with homelessness utilized police to accomplish their goals.
The third way the policing of homelessness was initiated through complaints was bypoliticians. One day in the patrol car, as theofficer was working down his list of calls on
the dashboard, he received a call from thelieutenant. After the call the officer told me:“Well looks like we’ve got to go clear out theplaza by Scott Weiner’s [a district supervisor]
place. He’s always calling the captain.” District supervisors would often email the mayor’s office or captains about powerfulconstituents demanding a camp removal.
During my time as a research assistant in the
mayor’s office, the director’s morning typically began triaging complaints in his email
inbox and voicemail from agency directors,

Herring

15

Figure 5. Sources of Complaint-Oriented Policing

politicians, business owners, and residents.
Many officers would complain about thisprivileging of complaints:
I mean, I’m trying to get through this queue[of homeless complaints] and it’s like justbecause the supervisor’s friend or supporter
has an issue, or some camp near the highway turnoff in his district makes him look
like he’s not dealing with homelessness wegot to deal with it.

In these ways, residents’, businesses’,agencies’, and politicians’ complaints,
whether individual or organized, triggered theenforcement of quality-of-life laws against
the unhoused (see Figure 5). Although thenumber of individuals experiencing homelessness on any given night remained relatively constant over the past decade, the city
they inhabited rapidly changed. Developmentof luxury condos and corporate offices for thebooming tech sector rose on under-developed
land in formerly industrialized areas of thecity where the unhoused had long camped outof sight and out of mind of public view—as in
the areas featured in Gowan’s (2010) and
Bourgois and Schonberg’s (2009) ethnographies of homeless campers in San Francisco.
The amount of leased commercial space inthe city more than doubled from 5.9 million

square feet in 2009 to 11.9 million square feetin 2018 (Li 2018). The city’s residential population grew from just over 767,000 in 2008
to nearly 885,000 in 2018, and the number ofjobs in the city grew from 446,447 to 627,915(U.S. Census Bureau 2018), drawing an
influx of daily commuters. This growth indevelopment, BIDs, commuters, and residents made homelessness both more visible
and more likely to draw complaints. At thesame time, changes in urban governance (e.g.,technological innovation with the more convenient 311 phone app), increased staffing ofsanitation teams assigned to homeless camps,
and growing political pressures to address
homelessness all increased demand for policing homelessness, yet the number of police
officers, policy, protocol, and criminal justiceprocessing of homelessness remained relatively stable.

Burden Shuffling:
Displacing Poverty
Temporally, Spatially,
and BureaucraticallyOnce dispatched, how are 911 calls for homeless complaints resolved? And how do police
officers understand the demands of their daily
work? To answer these questions, it is first

16		

necessary to elaborate the structural dilemmas of scarcity faced by officers. Calls ofhomeless complaints increased rapidly
between 20011 and 2018, but the number of
SFPD officers remained flat until 2017. During this same time, the city experienced asignificant growth of car break-ins and otherproperty crimes that take priority over homeless complaints. Although technically classified as a level C priority in terms of its risk topublic safety, the outsized call volume andcallers’ outrage at homeless “crimes” functionally upgraded homelessness and led to thecreation of a homeless outreach unit composed of 15 to 32 officers at any given time.
Since 2005, San Francisco, like dozens of
U.S. municipalities, has designated specialized patrol units to exclusively respond tohomeless complaints (Wexler 2018).
Yet even with the specialized police unit,
officers faced impossible dilemmas in working with homeless populations. Not once during my ride-alongs was the queue of homelesscomplaints ever cleared. Spending more time
addressing any single call would result in a
growing backlog of new complaints. When
police commanders reacted to the growing
number of calls by dedicating more officers to
the homelessness unit, reducing the response
times to homeless complaints, many officers
believed complaints increased rather thandecreased. As Lipsky (1980:33) observed, “A
distinct characteristic of the work setting ofstreet-level bureaucrats is that the demand forservices tends to increase to meet the supply.
If additional services are made available,
demand will increase to consume them.” Unable
to resolve the homeless problem, police officers
are only able to manage it through a process ofburden shuffling (Seim 2017). This manifests
in three principal patrol practices: displacing
homelessness temporally, spatially, or bureaucratically to neutralize poverty.

Spatial and Temporal Shuffling
Officers repeatedly told me two mantras
throughout my fieldwork: “we can’t arrest
our way out of this problem” and “this should

American Sociological Review 00(0)be a social worker’s job, not a policing job.”
Booking a person in jail would take officers
off the street, reduce call-response times, andbuild a backlog of work. Most individuals
booked would be released back to the streetsin 3 to 8 hours. Shelters were similarly understood as an ineffective means to resolve
complaints. Some officers understood homelessness as pathological, a result of poor
choices, and people on the streets as serviceresistant. Others saw homelessness as a structural social problem and a product ofinadequate shelter, housing, and social safetynets. Most saw it as some combination. Yet,
there was widespread consensus that policing
people into services was impossible or awaste of time. Expressing a similar sentiment
to the inadequacy of jail, an officer described
the shelter option as equally meaningless:I can take a guy to shelter, but it’s only going
to be for one night and then they’re going to
be back out on the street. Some of thesepeople are crazy or addicted, and that’s likea disease. Who are we kidding in thinking
they’ll do well sleeping bunked with 200
other guys. . . . Policing these folks doesn’t
do anything to get them off the streets. Ifanything, it keeps them there longer.

Recognition of the limits of aggressive
patrol and therapeutic policing left officers tohandle most complaints through spatial andtemporal management. According to police
call data, which matched my own observations, 89 percent of dispatches for homelesscomplaints resulted in a move-along order,
rather than a citation or arrest (DEM 2018).
As depicted in the opening vignette, in mostcases officers first sought to convince thetarget of a homeless complaint to move without citation, arrest, or an offer of services.
One officer explained to me the strategic
importance of a dedicated homeless policing
unit after a full shift without issuing a single
citation or arrest:
The good thing about the homeless unit isthat we get to know the folks on the street

Herring
and they get to recognize us. You can usually get someone to cooperate more without
citing. Though sometimes you gotta cite sothey know you’re serious or if the camp isjust being stubborn and not moving to show
the residents calling that we’ve responded totheir call. A lot of unpaid citations turn intoa warrant and that gives you real leverage.
Then they’ll respond because they know we
can always run their name and arrest. But
we’re doing more outreach than anything. I
mean we’re citing, but a lot of times you get
more by doing the outreach part, because
people will work with you a little more.

Officers in the homeless outreach unit did
not have any special training in social service
outreach or crisis intervention.9 The unit waslargely composed of rookies forcibly assigned
to the unit due to their lack of seniority. A common conception of outreach, as expressed
above, was not getting individuals on the streets
into services, but rather getting them to be“respectful and understanding of their housedneighbors,” as one officer put it, by keeping
camps clean and most importantly obeying
police orders to move-along. When citations
and arrests were used, they were not issued aspunitive ends to resolve or prevent the offending behavior, or a means to encourage people
into services, but as tools to coerce homelesspeople to move. The primary benefit of having
a dedicated patrol assigned to homelessness
was their ability to build a personal rapport tocultivate cooperation to move-along.
Officers were not permitted to instructhomeless people on where to relocate, butthey often gave tips on where they might
avoid future complaints. One morning when I
was camping with a small group in the city’s
financial district in front of the construction
site for Salesforce Tower, what would become
the city’s tallest building, an officer explained,“Look we’re starting to get calls like all thetime from the shop owner across the street,you got a good spot here, but you’d probably
be better off on the other side, which faces
another construction site” where people
would be less likely to call. When sleeping

17

out in the city’s rapidly gentrifying Mission
District, officers would suggest heading further toward the more industrial neighborhoods of Dogpatch and the Bayview where it
was easier to stay hidden. As in the statement
above and in the opening vignette, officers
almost always began their request to move bymaking clear it was not them personally, oreven the police department, who was initiating the order, but a caller. The homeless andofficers held a thread of solidarity with ashared frustration of having to respond tocaller complaints and a mutual interest in
diminishing them. At the conclusion ofanother move-along order I experienced
while camping with a group in tents outside amunicipal bus yard, the officer apologized: “I
don’t know why they’re calling, I mean thisseems like an ideal spot, out of the way, andyou all are keeping this spot clean. I mean, I
know this is pointless, but you gotta move.”
One of the homeless men replied, “Yeah, it’sa bummer. It’s all good. I know you’re justdoin’ your job. It’s a shitty job.”
The outcome of these interactions was aconstant churning of homelessness in public
space. In a community-based survey conducted during the research period with 351
homeless individuals across the city, we asked
respondents where they relocated following
their most recent move-along order. Only 9
percent of respondents reported moving
indoors. Of these, some reported moving todrop-in centers, but the most common
responses were moving to a public library or
taking a ride on the bus—temporary indoor
public spaces with limited nighttime availability. Most respondents, 91 percent, remainedon the streets or in parks. Most moved only
within a few city blocks (64 percent), andonly 21 percent of displaced respondents
moved to a public space in a different neighborhood following their most recent movealong order. With so much spatial churn,businesses and residents only get a temporary
break from homelessness outside their doors
and so call again. Over eight years of 911 calldata for homeless complaints, 121 single
addresses called an average of once a month,18		

and 80 addresses called once a week (DEM
2018).
One day on a ride-along, an officer pulled
up on his dashboard all the calls at a single
intersection:
So right here, we’re looking at three months
and at this location we’re looking at over
100 calls. And you know it could be different situations—different people. Like people might be reacting and moving, but thenyou get someone new moving in. It’s a shellgame.

One camp of five people I resided with forthree consecutive weeks and followed forover a year within the city’s Dogpatch neighborhood had a circuit between three spots
they would migrate to when faced with evictions—a piece of sidewalk in front of a
U-Haul parking lot, a grassy area under an
overpass, and a well-guarded spot behind astand of trees in a traffic island. In a few
instances during my fieldwork, larger
encampments of 20 to 40 campers would be
tolerated in a single area, and in one circumstance nearly 300. These mass encampments
were often seen as mutually beneficial forboth the homeless, who had more security
and stability, and the police, who saw complaint calls reduced due to greater concentration (see also Herring 2014). However,
eventually some event would trigger an eviction and the dispersal would lead to anincrease of complaints. For instance, after themass eviction of the largest tent-city during
my fieldwork, citywide calls of homelesscomplaints increased by 30 percent, from justunder 4,000 to over 5,000 in a single month(DEM 2018). Officers I was going on ridealongs with at the time directly attributed thisincrease to the eviction.
Another form of spatial shuffling on abroader geographic scale was police officers’
use of the Human Services Agency’s Homeward Bound program. I first became aware of
the program on a damp January evening
sleeping out on the city’s Embarcadero waterfront when an officer woke me up to offer abus ticket out of town. The officer pitched theAmerican Sociological Review 00(0)program: “As long as you’ve got someone on
the other end of the line who will take you in,and haven’t used the program before, we’ll
give you a free bus ticket to anywhere in thecontiguous U.S., some clean clothes, and $10
a day for food.” Such programs are widespread across U.S. cities (see Gee 2017), but
I was surprised to receive the offer from an
officer, rather than a social worker from the
Human Services Department that manages
the program. I turned down the offer andluckily was not rebuked with a ticket orarrest, although I was told by social workers
and homeless individuals of such instances.
Later during my fieldwork, I would go on
an evening ride-along officially called “Operation Homeward Bound” with a detail of six
officers offering bus tickets to individuals on
the streets. At the start of the operation, one
officer explained to the team:The big concern tonight is get easy grabs, if
we can get ’em and get ’em gone it’s a success, because it costs the city dollars, but it’sservices that are eaten in the department
because the people we send out are saving
calls for cops tomorrow on the beat.

By the end of the night the officers had sent
away three people. One had only just arrived
two hours earlier from Seattle where he wasalso unhoused, but on his way he decided thetrip to San Francisco was a bad idea. Anothercouple, after trying fraudulently to get tickets
to New York City, ended up taking tickets anhour south to where one of their mothers
lived. Equally telling of the operation’s ineffectiveness was that seven of the 38 people I
observed receive offers that evening said they
had already used the program in the past.
Although city officials count the 10,570 program participants over the past 13 years intheir statistics of people housed by the city of
San Francisco, the program’s effectiveness at
resolving homelessness, even temporarily, isentirely unproven. During my fieldwork, I met
several people on the streets and in shelters
who had received bus tickets from other cities
to get to San Francisco, and several more who
had used the program only to return.

Herring

19

Photo 2. Typical Tag-Team Effort of Police and Sanitation Teams Addressing HomelessEncampments (photo by Kelley Cutler)

Bureaucratic Shuffling
Another process of burden shuffling wasbureaucratic: police would reclassify thehomeless problem to another agency. Officers
primarily saw their policing of homelessness
as a misplaced priority that should be handled
through social welfare, medical, or sanitation
agencies and that distracted them from what
they considered “real police work.” Officers
would frequently draw my attention to otherpolicing tasks they felt were being undertreated due to the department’s legal requirement to address caller complaints ofhomelessness. During the Operation Homeward Bound ride-along, an officer pointed tothe dashboard and said, “See that call. That’s
code for domestic abuse and it’s been hanging
there for over an hour. This is what I should be
addressing, but instead I’m on this detail.” On
my ride-alongs, I began to realize that whenever officers spoke about policing homelessness, they almost always referred to it in thecustomer service register of responding to“calls for service.” When they discussed
assignments on thefts or violent offenses, theywould refer to them as “crimes.” Many

described their assignments to homelessness
as a degradation of their vocation, as playing“mall cops” and “maid service for entitledhomeowners.” Officers would thus attempt toreclassify homeless calls to other agencies bysanitizing, medicalizing, and socializing
homelessness. Yet these efforts were limited
and, in most cases, still experienced as criminalization by the unhoused.
In the previous section I discussed how thecity’s sanitation department (DPW) criminalized homelessness by travelling with police
escorts or calling the police to encourage
individuals camping to move from areas they
were cleaning (see Photo 2). However, police
officers would also shift homelessness onto
the DPW by calling for continual cleanings.
Having a cleaning crew power wash the sidewalk a few times a week, or even multiple
times a day, would often convince campers tofind a spot with less frequent disruptions (seealso Hopper 1992:781–2). Most individuals I
spent time with on the streets feared the sanitation teams more than the police, due to theformer’s ability to confiscate and destroy
property, which was viewed as a punishment
worse than arrest.

20		

In fact, the primary way I observed officers
using arrest was to clear property. One day onoutreach as a representative of the Coalition
on Homelessness, I came across a woman
being arrested whom I had known over a number of months. Cindy was in her early 60s, hadserious necrosis in both legs, and was always
much slower to pack up her cart of belongings
than others. As she sat cuffed in the patrol car,I asked the officers about her arrest, pressing
them as to why she in particular was beingarrested while others had not. One officer
replied, “Look, others are cooperating with us
when we ask them to move. We’ve given her
multiple warnings and she’s accumulating
way too much stuff.” Rather than driving
Cindy directly to jail, the officers waitednearly 30 minutes until a sanitation truck
arrived to take away all her belongings. WhenI tried to save her valuables, the officer ordered
me not to “steal” her property. When I caught
up with Cindy the next afternoon, who was in
the same clothes she had been arrested in after
spending the night sleeping without a tent, shesaid, “I was out of jail in three hours and they
didn’t even charge me. When I asked where I
could get my stuff, they told me that’s not their
responsibility.” Complaint-oriented policing
was not void of officer discretion, no policing
could be, it was simply more tightly directed
and aimed at reducing complaints. On myride-alongs, outreaches, and time residing on
the streets, I observed police regularly target
individuals like Cindy who had the most property, the dirtiest tent, or tried to delay cleaningand protect their belongings from being
confiscated.
The powers of the police and sanitation
departments to criminalize homelessness wereintertwined. Cleanings without the threat ofpolice action were meaningless, and arrests
were much less effective without the threat of
having one’s property destroyed during thebooking process. In this way, the criminalization of homelessness was often masked asmerely sanitizing public space for publichealth. However, neither workers on sanitation crews nor police patrols described theirwork in these terms. As one street-cleaningcrew supervisor explained, “We just clean, we

American Sociological Review 00(0)don’t make anyone move, that’s the police’sjob.” The officers saw their role differently. As
one officer working alongside this same crew
supervisor told me, “We’re just here to keep
the DPW workers safe. You know they have towake people up to clean the streets and sometimes there’s threats or even assaults.”
Another way police would shift the burdenof homelessness to other agencies would be to
medicalize the condition. In particular, officers could call for an ambulance, especially if aperson was unresponsive to a move-alongorder and not resistant to a ride to the hospital.
One day on outreach I came across John, a
middle-aged man, nearly passed out at the bottom of a subway staircase, a plastic bottle ofvodka in his hand. A police officer was trying
to get him to move, but to no avail. Perhaps
realizing how difficult it would be to detain
John, who must have weighed over 250
pounds, the much smaller officer said, “You
don’t sound good. Are you having any chest
pains? Do you need me to call an ambulance?” John’s head nodded and he mumbled
something unintelligible. “I’ll take that as ayes,” the officer said, calling for an ambulance. Although John was clearly unwell, it
was unclear if he had what EMS workers
would consider a “chief complaint” that would
warrant an ambulance transport. Police also
medicalize homelessness by issuing 51-50s,
the California law code for involuntary psychiatric commitment for individuals who present a danger to themselves or others due tosigns of mental illness. This determination
relies on the discretion of the officer. Individuals residing on the streets, as well as medics
and public health outreach workers I observed,
all told me that police would sometimes issue
51-50s to diffuse complaints even when psychotic behavioral symptoms were absent, as away to avoid the work required for arrest (seealso Seim 2017:465). However, like arrest or
short-term shelter offers, the vast majority ofholds lasted less than 24 hours.
Finally, police would sometimes try tosocialize homelessness and get individuals
residing on the streets to access social services
such as shelter. This strategy was relatively
rare compared to sanitizing or medicalizing

Herring

homelessness, due to the fact that resources
for homeless services in San Francisco, as inmost U.S. cities, are quantitatively scarce andqualitatively inadequate. During the time of
my research, there was a continuous waitlistof between 500 and 1,200 people for a 90-day
shelter bed that would take anywhere fromthree weeks to two months to access. A single-night bed typically required a 4- to
10-hour wait in line, and some found shelters
entirely inaccessible due to their disability, or
pets, partners, or property that were all
restricted. With nearly 7,000 single homelessadults on any given night, the city had justover 2,000 available spaces in temporary
shelters—a ratio of sheltered versus unsheltered homeless populations that falls in the
mid-range of western U.S. cities (HUD2017).
Regardless of an officer’s awareness of the
scarcity and squalor of shelter, or their diagnosis of homelessness as being rooted in individual pathologies or structural poverty, theirprescriptive perspectives were largely thesame. Rather than believing it was their
responsibility to “cure” homelessness througha paternalistic brand of moral discipline, using
punitive ultimatums to pressure the unhoused
into shelter, most felt this was ineffective andsimply not their job. The few instances when I
did observe officers connect individuals on
the streets with shelter, the officers were not in
the role of enforcer but advocate, using personal relationships with public health workers
who could fast-track them inside. However,the scarcity of these outreach workers led
officers to avoid even trying in most cases.
When officers did advocate for a particularperson, this would often frustrate social workers who felt those receiving services should
get assistance based on their medical or
psycho-social needs as determined by social
work or medical professionals, not police
officers. As one public health worker expressedto another on an outreach when scarce shelter
beds were being offered exclusively for agroup of campers targeted for eviction thanks
to a rash of complaints, “This isn’t how weshould be distributing shelter. We should be

21prioritizing based on needs and vulnerabilities, not police complaints.”
Even when shelter was expanded, which
one might expect to shift the burden of homelessness from agencies of criminal justice tosocial welfare, complaints continued to rise,and I observed a number of mechanisms
through which increased welfare provisions
instigated increased policing. From 2014 to2017, when homeless complaints rapidly
increased, San Francisco opened five new
shelters after a decade of building only one.
Although the rhetoric of therapeutic policing
rarely circulated among police, it was a dominant discourse in the political and policy
fields. Politicians used the new shelters tolegitimate increased criminalization. For
instance, a city supervisor told the audience at
a community forum, “I strongly believe that it
is not compassionate to allow human beings
to live on our city streets. We’re investing a
lot more money in services and we need toencourage people to utilize them and be clearthat camping is unacceptable.” The openingof new shelters resulted in coordinated police
crackdowns directly surrounding the facilities, and city supervisors and police officials
encouraged residents to call 311. After the
opening of a new shelter in the Missionneighborhood, the district captain told a community meeting, “We are opening up 100 new
beds . . . so if you see someone on the streets
who could use assistance call 311 and we will
try to get them inside.” Despite the continual
inaccessibility of shelter for the vast majorityof people on the streets, the new shelters
encouraged complaints and penal repression.

The Effects of ComplaintOriented Policing
Most of the officers I got to know did not feel
their policing of homelessness was particularly punitive or harsh. As one officer told meafter a five-hour shift chasing homeless complaints without a single citation or arrest:
We’re just moving people around, we aren’t“criminalizing homelessness” [flashing air

22		
quotes]. Look, you’ve researched other cities. You gotta admit, what we’re doing isreally soft-glove compared to other places.

Although it did seem San Francisco had
fewer arrests for anti-homeless laws thanother west coast cities, officers’ efforts tomove, sanitize, medicalize, and even socialize homelessness was nonetheless experienced as criminalization by the unhoused.
These efforts coalesced into a process ofpervasive penality (Herring et al. 2019), a
punitive process of policing through movealong orders, citations, and threats of arrest
that falls short of booking but is pervasive in
its reach across a targeted population and inits depth of lingering impact. This section
elaborates how complaint-oriented policing
fuels this pervasive penality and perpetuates
the urban disorder that it claims to reduce by
prolonging homelessness, increasing conflictamong vulnerable people, and further disorganizing already chaotic lives.
In a community-based study surveying a
representative sample of 351 homeless individuals across San Francisco, we found criminalization to be widespread, frequent, and withlingering effects (Herring and Yarbrough 2015).
In contrast to frequent statements by proponents of quality-of-life ordinances who claimthat such laws are targeted at specific behaviors
and problem individuals rather than criminalizing homeless status, the study found that fully
70 percent of respondents had been forced tomove in the past year by a police officer, over athird had this happen at least once a month, and20 percent on a weekly basis.10 According topolice data, only 11 percent of homeless complaints are resolved through citations, but oursurvey found that 69 percent of all respondents
had been cited in the past year, with 22 percent
receiving more than five citations. In 2014,
14,881 citations were issued for homelessspecific quality-of-life offenses.
The lingering effect of enforcement of antihomeless laws is also pervasive. Over 60 percent of survey respondents could not pay theirmost recent citation, which resulted in a further$300 assessment, revocation of their driver’s

American Sociological Review 00(0)license, a bench warrant issued for their arrest,
and the fine being sent to collections. This
negatively affected people’s credit and createdbarriers in accessing services, housing, andwork. For instance, having a warrant disqualifies you from section-8 housing and from voluntary drug or mental health treatment throughthe city’s behavioral health services. Movealong orders also frequently resulted in the lossof personal property. Among survey respondents, 46 percent reported having their belongings taken or destroyed by city employees.
During my fieldwork embedded within
encampments, individuals I resided with had
had lost tools, bikes, and computers used forwork; expensive medicines for HIV and Hepatitis C; ID and benefit cards that were key totheir survival; and their last remaining treasured possessions, such as family photos, letters, and priceless mementos.
Most individuals residing on the streets
considered property destruction the greatest
threat to their survival; this always involved
either a police presence, the threat of police
being called, or leveraging anti-homeless ordinances to provide legal cover for property
confiscation. This fear pervaded daily routines. In the camps I resided in, people would
rotate leaving the camp to work, attend
appointments, gather food or supplies, or go to
the toilet, leaving their belongings under thewatch of fellow campers. However, when acamp clearance occurred, we were limited in
the amount of property we could salvage, as
sanitation workers and police would prevent
us from packing more than we could carry ina single trip, and they sometimes barred us
from taking items that were not our own.
Photo 3 depicts one such instance: the ownerof the tent being disposed was not present
when the street cleaners arrived, and we wereunable to convince the sanitation workers orofficers present to let us take their belongings.
In another instance, an elderly man in his 70s
had his walker crushed in a dump truck,despite the fact that those present told sanitation workers and officers that he was hospitalized. Another elderly man I resided with forweeks in a camp had all his belongings

Herring

23

Photo 3. A DPW Team Disposes a Tent and Its Belongings Deemed Contaminated (photo by
the author)

destroyed by sanitation workers while he washospitalized for a stroke. Although wedemanded the workers follow the department’s “bag and tag” policy, storing a person’s
belongings for 30 days so he might reclaim
them, the workers claimed, as they often did,that the tent contained perishable items so thewhole tent with all its belongings had to go.
The threat of property destruction resulted
in homeless people avoiding the hospital,
missing social service appointments, andbeing unable to hold a job. During my observations with public health workers on outreach and while residing in camps, I witnessedpeople refuse hospitalization in the face ofgruesome infections, debilitating pain, andchurning stomach sicknesses, primarily out offear of losing their belongings at the hands ofcity workers. One of the elderly men who lost
his property while hospitalized had called mycell phone before calling 911, as he lay paralyzed on a city sidewalk during a stroke, in
hopes I could get to camp to watch his property before he was taken to the ER. It wascommon for people to miss appointmentswith social workers to protect their property,
which would result in their benefits lapsing.

Public health outreach workers were often
frustrated when clients lost access to medicine or services due to a brief incarceration.
Other times, outreach workers could not
locate their clients on the streets to distributemedicine or notify them they had been granted
access to shelter, rehab, or even housing
because they had been relocated during a
sweep. The few people I came to know who
resided on the streets and managed to getwork were all either fired or came repeatedly
close to losing their job due to missing or
leaving a shift to salvage property fromsweeps. In these ways, the criminalization ofhomelessness undermined other state efforts
of socialization and medicalization, as well as
individuals’ personal efforts to pull themselves out of homelessness.
The constant move-along orders provokedby complaint-oriented policing also resulted
in conflict between the unhoused and thehoused. The state’s theft of homeless people’s
property sometimes provoked unhoused people to steal in response. In one of the camps I
spent months following, the group drew on
their work as informal recyclers as a moral
boundary of dignity between themselves and24		American Sociological Review 00(0)Photo 4. A Sign Posted at the Base of an Encampment That Expresses the Tensions Createdbetween Those Trying to Find a Safe Place to Camp: “According to San Francisco Police
Dept. we have surpassed the allowed capacity of tents and guests that’s tolerable. We at thistime are not accepting new arrivals. We ask you to try finding another place nearby and to
not make this an uncomfortable issue. Thank you.” (photo by the author)“criminals” on the street who stole and the“service dependent” who relied on charity(see also Gowan 2010). However, after aneviction in which they lost everything, eachturned to theft—from people’s vehicles, REI(an outdoor goods store), and the drugstore
CVS. When it was clear which business orhouse had made the complaint that triggered
the eviction, campers would sometimes takeretribution by leaving trash or feces on theirdoorstep. What often appeared to officials
and the public as street violence emerging
from the internal chaos and pathologies ofcamp life was all too often primed and provoked by the subtle state violence enacted
through enforcement.
The policing of homelessness continuallysparked interpersonal conflict between individuals on the streets: first, by disrupting thesecurity and trust established within existing
encampments through eviction, and second
by forcing people into territories of otherunhoused people. Camping in small groups
served as a shield, providing protection

against property theft and harassment, andcreated a pool of shared material and moral
resources (see also Bourgois and Schonberg2009). However, it was also a liability,
increasing visibility and the likelihood ofcomplaints. Following evictions in camps I
was embedded with, we would often break up
into smaller factions to reduce our visibility.
However, evicted campers usually then ended
up near other tents, which indicated a preexisting tolerance by local residents and businesses. Sometimes these campers worried ourpresence would “increase the heat” on police
complaints, and they would ask, or demandwith threats, that we move elsewhere. As
depicted in Photo 4, some people would postsigns to deter newcomers and avoid the awkward to contentious interactions these requests
could provoke. Typically, we were begrudgingly accepted. After all, telling someone they
were not welcome on a particular block could
result in having your belongings stolen or, as
occurred a few times during my fieldwork,
burnt to the ground.

Herring

Homeless individuals rarely had feasible
legal recourse in the face of conflict. One
woman who was raped almost immediately
following a police move-along order thatpushed her into an unfamiliar area in the deadof night explained:
What’s the point? If I called them, theywould have made all of us move. Would he[the officer] even believe me? The wholecamp of new people would hate me, andwhat would stop him [the offender] fromgetting revenge? It’s not like I’ve got alocked door to hide behind.

Similar to how Desmond and Valdez (2012:137) found among the housed that “the nuisance property ordinance has the effect offorcing abused women to choose between
calling the police on their abusers (only torisk eviction) or staying in their apartments(only to risk more abuse),” the unhoused
avoided calling the police in the face of abuseor theft for fear of eviction from public space.
In response to complaint-oriented policing,
individuals on the streets developed a particular “cop-wisdom.” Building on Foucault’s(1977:24) precept that punitive measures not
only repress but are productive in shaping
their targets’ subjectivities, Stuart (2016:135)
describes cop-wisdom as a “cognitive framework designed to reduce unwanted police
interactions.” Whereas Stuart found the copwisdom on LA’s Skid Row centered aroundsignaling sobriety or working a program toconvince police one was not in need of therapeutic policing, in San Francisco I found a
cop-wisdom developed around avoiding complaints. This not only involved seeking marginal spaces out of sight to post-up camp, but
an awareness of jurisdictional boundaries
between the loosely enforced state property of
the California Highway Patrol or county Port
Authority versus the highly surveilled city
land and private property, an astute sensitivity
to one’s neighbors, and for most a constanteffort at curbing crime and keeping sidewalks
clean and clear around campsites. Some of thehouseless built relationships with merchants25

and residents who promised not to call thepolice in exchange for keeping the blocksecure and clean, which often involved shooing away other homeless campers. As previously discussed, campers would dissolve
larger settlements to avoid visibility, do theirbest to stave off new neighbors, and pilferfrom the housed and unhoused to protect theirterritory or simply stay afloat. In summary, thecombined effects of complaint-oriented policing and the individualized everyday acts ofresistance against them encouraged atomizing
practices of material and symbolic distancing
through mutual avoidance and lateral denigration. Pitting individuals on the street against
each other rather than the police, policies, or
publics that oppress them, complaint-oriented
policing creates the conditions of an “impossible community,” perpetually divided against
themselves (Wacquant 2008:184). In theseways, complaint-oriented policing sets off adangerous self-fulfilling prophecy producingthat which city officials claim merely toaddress: crime, violence, community “disorganization,” and a “service-resistant” homeless population.

Discussion andConclusions
This article sketched a policing approach tosocial marginality I call complaint-oriented
policing, which contrasts with existing scholarship in terms of its sources, enforcement,
and impact (see Figure 6). First, the trigger ofcomplaint-oriented policing is not rooted
primarily under police command, nor does ithinge significantly on officer discretion. By
expanding the lens of analysis beyond the
traditional field of crime control and situating the police within a broader bureaucratic
field of poverty governance, we see how
police interactions are initiated by callers,organizations, and a host of government
agencies through third-party policing. Second, use of arrest, which one might expect
under aggressive patrol, is rare, and punitive
sanctions are not used to push the poor into
services, as with therapeutic policing.

26		

American Sociological Review 00(0)Figure 6. Policing Social Marginality: Contrasting Approaches

Note: Based on Herbert, Beckett, and Stuart (2017) with the addition of complaint-oriented policing.

Instead, enforcement practices of spatial,
temporal, and bureaucratic burden shufflingare used to manage homelessness withinpublic space. Third, this policing results inconsistent punitive interactions with state
officials that typically do not result in incarceration but nonetheless exact material, psychological, and social suffering. Thesefindings complicate existing frameworks forunderstanding the policing of social marginality, and they make broader contributions totheories of poverty governance, urban sociology, and citizenship.
First, complaint-oriented policing complicates the Foucauldian renderings of disciplinary power undergirding the frameworks ofaggressive patrol and therapeutic policingthat permeate the scholarship on poverty governance. Complaint-oriented policing does
not primarily entail “taming” and “training”
the homeless into “docile and productive subjects” (Foucault 1977) by using penal repression to push people into jail, as under “rabble
management” (Bittner 1967; Irwin 1985), or
using penal means toward welfare ends toshepherd homeless people into rehabilitative

programs, as under “recovery management”(Stuart 2016). Instead, under complaintoriented policing, we observe how a range ofstreet-level bureaucrats engage in burden
shuffling, aimed at neutralizing poverty
through incapacitation and invisibilization(see Marcuse 1988; Wacquant 2009).
I have shown how this post-disciplinaryand seemingly ambivalent form of poverty
governance results in the reproduction ofhomelessness, a deepening of poverty, andultimately suffering. Expanding the conception of the criminalization of poverty, which
is most often defined in terms of the disproportional impact of mass incarceration or
traditional policing aimed at arresting thepoor (Western 2006), I identified a series ofmechanisms by which move-along orders andcitations collectively work to dispossess thepoor of their property; create barriers toaccessing services, housing, and jobs; andincrease individuals’ vulnerability to violence
and crime. I observed variations in thisenforcement by officers, and variation inmethods of resistance or compliance by theunhoused, on a host of individual and social

Herring

differences, including race, age, gender, anddisability, which I examine at length elsewhere (see Herring forthcoming; Herring etal. 2019), but this article aimed to connect themost systemic mechanisms of complaintoriented policing with its most widespread
effects on homelessness that I observed during my fieldwork. Many of the mechanisms
and outcomes of criminalization identified
here are applicable not only to complaintoriented policing but to the policing of social
marginality more broadly, and these findings
contribute to our understanding of how governing the poor through the penal state intersects and often undermines efforts of thewelfare state.
Second, this article looks beyond changes
within policing and criminal justice policy
toward its intersection with urban change andgovernance to explain increased policing by
citizen demand through 911 and 311, as wellas collective forms of third-party policing thathave been largely overlooked in the scholarship. Although the technological implementation of homeless complaints in the 311 app
was largely behind the massive increase in
311 calls for sanitation responses that led towidespread property destruction and movealong orders, it only explains a small portion,roughly 6 percent, of the increased police
dispatches. To what degree the increase ofpolice dispatches for homeless concerns isdue to more people in the city, changing
demographics of incoming wealthier andwhiter populations who may have a higher
propensity to perceive disorder and call thepolice (see Martin 2008; Sullivan and Bachmeier 2012), San Francisco’s new urban
development that has significantly reduced
the physical space where people can camp outof sight and out of mind (Gowan 2010), or
other factors requires further analysis. Furthermore, when considering that San Francisco’s African American population
plummeted from 11 percent in 1990 to lessthan 5 percent today (Walker 2018), and thatnearly 40 percent of its homeless populationis black (Applied Survey Research 2017),
complaint-oriented policing provides another27

link between urban change, housing insecurity, and racialized criminalization that has
been undertheorized by scholars documenting
the hyper-policing of people of color on the
one hand and those studying the criminalization of homelessness on the other.11
As a final note, complaint-oriented policing
exposes new means of exclusion and fracturesof citizenship. Widening the analysis of thepolicing of marginality beyond the police andpoliticians to encompass the residents andbusinesses who directly instigate the policingof the poor exposes the inherent yet underappreciated tension between the insecurity of thehoused and insecurity of the unhoused. This
study illustrates how those with access to private property who feel threatened by those
without it are able to call on the police toremove them, which in turn directly increases
the insecurity of the unhoused, whose survival
is disrupted by criminalization. This relationship reveals the ways “propertied citizenship”(Roy 2003), a rights-based relationshipbetween individual and state premised on one’s
access to property, is intimately tied to theincreasingly popular brand of urban consumer
citizenship that envisions the government ascorporation, businesses as clients, desirable
residents as customers and clients, and the city
itself as a product (Brash 2011). The tenets ofpropertied and consumer citizenship work
together to permit and normalize city residents’and businesses’ calls on police and sanitation“services” to sweep the poor from city sidewalks, parks, and benches. However, unlike
their housed neighbors, when individuals without shelter are faced with far more dire insecurities of theft, violence, and abuse, which areexacerbated by complaint-oriented policing,
they have nowhere to turn. San Francisco is a
sanctuary city, in part so undocumented immigrants, who may be housed but lack citizenship, may call on and receive protection fromthe city’s police without fear of punishment,
but the city’s unhoused, regardless of their citizenship status, have no such protections.
In my observations of hundreds of police
interactions in San Francisco, complaintoriented policing was the dominant process ofAmerican Sociological Review 00(0)28		

policing homelessness. This is not to say
aggressive patrol and therapeutic policing
were not also used, but rather complaintoriented policing existed alongside these previously well-studied forms of social control.
San Francisco has dozens of officers walking
the beat daily who exercise broad discretionover when to enforce quality-of-life laws, andevery few months during my fieldwork a captain initiated a zero-tolerance campaign intheir district. I witnessed officers justify theiractions as pushing the “service resistant” into
rehab as well as clearing out encampments todeter more serious crime. However, many
interactions I witnessed could not be explainedby theories of policing in the existing scholarship. Differences in urban conditions and poverty governance will likely determine thedegree to which complaint-oriented policing
is dominant, secondary, or tertiary to otherapproaches, and this requires further research.
From my own previous comparative researchon homeless regulation across eight west coast
cities (Herring 2014) and regular correspondence with policymakers and organizers acrossthe country, I have found complaint-oriented
policing is ubiquitous in medium and large
cities, albeit to greater and lesser degrees.
Expanding the analysis of 911 and 311 data, as
well as studying complaint-oriented policing
beyond the case of homelessness (e.g., drug
use and dealing, noise violations, illegal vending, and other offenses that disproportionately
affect the poor), would all be fruitful lines ofresearch to better understand the relationshipbetween urban change, poverty governance,and policing.
The recognition of complaint-oriented
policing as a mode of governing the poor also
requires us to rethink policy approaches toreducing the criminalization of social marginality.12 Were the locus of policing power
concentrated more firmly in the hands ofpolice command, powerful mayors, or thediscretion of officers, one might simply aim
reforms at these targets. The fact that thepower to mobilize policing is much more
widely distributed through caller complaints
and third-party organizations suggests deeper

structural changes will be necessary. Furthermore, the court reforms emerging aroundbail, fines, and fees, although mitigating the
problems caused by incarceration and citation, will not blunt the punishments of property destruction and move-along orders
revealed in this article. In light of the study’s
findings, nullifying anti-homeless laws either
through constitutional challenges (Foscarinis
1996; Martin vs. City of Boise 2018) or legislation would seem more effective. Beyond
these defensive maneuvers to decriminalize
poverty, the recognition of complaint-oriented
policing highlights the need for proactive
measures that treat homelessness throughincreased public health services, social services, and ultimately housing. Otherwise,
homelessness and poverty more generally
will continue to be displaced into the hands ofthe police and the criminal justice system,
which, through legal mandate or relative
resource investment, inevitably become the“service providers” of last resort.
Acknowledgments
I thank the homeless individuals, police officers, sanitation workers, social workers, members of the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness, and city officials who
allowed me to spend time with them. I would like tothank Loïc Wacquant, Teresa Gowan, Armando LaraMilan, Neil Gong, Alex Barnard, Dilara Yarbrough,Andrew Jaeger, and Fatinha Santos who all provided
helpful comments on earlier drafts. A special thanks toJeff Garnand who co-produced the maps included in thisarticle. The comments of reviewers and editors of theAmerican Sociological Review sharpened this article’s
arguments.

Funding
Funding for this research included grants from the
National Science Foundation, UC-Berkeley’s Human
Rights Center, the Center for Engaged Scholarship, andthe Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy.

ORCID iD
Chris Herringhttps://orcid.org/0000-0002-1873-426X

Notes
1.

Herbert and colleagues (2017) present three
approaches to policing marginality: aggressiveHerring

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

patrol, therapeutic policing, and officer-assisted
harm reduction. The harm reduction approach isa nascent model that comprises extremely small
teams of officers in early adopting cities, and thus I
do not consider it in this study.
I took various steps to ensure to the best of myability that I did not take a shelter bed from someone who needed one. Shelters were at full capacity nearly all the time, but during the first week ofeach month there were often free beds due to welfare payouts; during the winter months, with shelter
expansion, one-night beds also became regularly
available. Many nights I would wait for hours
and walk out if it was apparent someone may notreceive a bed.
My main ethical concerns of observations on official ride-alongs were gaining authentic consent andavoiding traumatizing or losing trust among individuals I had spent time with on the streets, whether
as a researcher or an advocate. I worried about thecoercive incentive of gaining permission in thepresence of law enforcement, but many people later
told me that they were grateful I was present andfelt I provided a shield from harsher or improper
treatment.
The 911 data used in this analysis can be found on
my website (http://Chrisherring.org) under “DataSets.” Addresses are removed due to privacy restrictions of a data-use agreement I signed with the San
Francisco Department of Emergency Management.
I later confirmed the accuracy of the officer’s
understanding of the radio code with Departmentof Emergency Management officials. Anotherbenefit of multi-sided ethnography is the ability tofact-check “hearsay” of bureaucrats implementing
policies with those supervising and vice versa (seeLubet 2018).
Because of the inherent methodological shortcomings in surveying a hidden population (Dennis
1991; Marpsat and Razafindratsima 2010), the survey used a nonrandom purposive sampling methodwith the aim of including homeless people fromeach neighborhood in San Francisco’s central city.
Survey proctors focused on public spaces where
homeless people spend time, such as encampments
and parks, as well as social service centers including shelters, drop-in centers, and soup kitchens.
This locational assignment ensured a sample thatwas not biased toward frequent users of homelessservices or those disconnected from these institutions, a common problem with surveys that rely on
shelter users or soup kitchen patrons (see Dennis
1991). The surveys were completed over two weeks
to reduce chances of duplication. The relative frequencies of homeless people by race, disability,
sexual orientation, and shelter status in our sample
were within the range of the frequencies reported in
the two most recent survey samples of 1,200 homeless people conducted by the city.

29
7.

Although the bi-annual homeless count remained
relatively constant during the research period,
the recently released 2019 count found an overall
increase of 30 percent and a 19 percent increasein the unsheltered population (Applied Survey
Research 2019).
8. This dispatch protocol ended in 2018 after preliminary
findings of this research were presented to the San
Francisco police commission and recommendations
were made to reform call triage. “Well-being check”
was removed from the 311 app as an option for users.
Subsequently, 311 homeless complaints decreased,as did the portion of police dispatches, which a DPW
administrator attributed primarily to this option’s
removal. This points to the power of technological andbureaucratic classification in the policing of poverty,
as well as the role of research and community organizing in targeting these levers of power.
9. Although homelessness ranks as a top 911 call forservice, the only training officers received on theissue was a 30-minute overview of homelessness inthe city during their Academy training. By the endof my fieldwork, I had become an instructor for thisoverview.
10. Our citywide survey comprised a representative
sample of individuals experiencing homelessness
across shelter/street status to match the city’s official point-in-time count. Only 50 percent of thosesurveyed resided primarily on the streets; others
resided in shelters, vehicles, or hotels. For the subpopulation residing in public space, police interactions were much more frequent: over 90 percent had
been forced to move from public spaces and 85 percent had received citations, with nearly 40 percent
receiving five or more citations in the past year.
11. In similar disproportions to San Francisco, 12 percent of the U.S. population is African American, 23
percent of those in poverty are African American,
and 41 percent of those counted as homeless are
African American (HUD 2017).
12. For a case study of how parts of this research incollaboration with the San Francisco Coalition on
Homelessness has worked to de-criminalize homelessness in San Francisco, see Alatorre and colleagues (forthcoming).

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Chris Herring is a PhD Candidate of Sociology at the
University of California-Berkeley. His research examines
housing insecurity, poverty, criminal justice, and urban
government. His dissertation examines the causes, practices, and consequences of criminalizing homelessness inthe contemporary metropolis. He has also publishedcomparative research on mass homeless encampments
across the western United States, housing policy struggles in New Orleans after hurricane Katrina, and teachingsocial theory. Chris’s writings, interviews, and links torelated research can be found at chrisherring.org.