As part of our theorization of the place-making conduct of new residents living in a gentrifying neighborhood of Los Angeles, we identify a curious paradox in which white liberals openly disavow overtly punitive policing practices, yet continue to actively call for or tacitly accept police action taken against individuals they perceive to be “out of place.” We examine this seeming contradiction in the context of a contemporary legal mechanism called a civil gang injunction, which allows for the banishment of purported “gang members” from parts of the city even in the absence of actual criminal activity—that is, on the basis of subjective perceptions about what and who constitutes a nuisance. Diverging from traditional approaches to revanchism rooted in vengeful intent, we argue that the direct and tacit endorsement of gang injunctions is motivated by what we call “implicit revanchism”—a no less harmful phenomenon that reflects the persistent and potent effects of implicit racial bias in processes of urban place-making.
Addressing a need for carceral geographical research conducted from inside prison gates, we discuss the spatial context in which racialisation occurs, including its relationship to the performance of prison "politics". We argue that the convoluted and contentious racial categorisation of prison inmates that begins with "racial priming" and results in "racial sorting" possesses a spatial logic derived from institutional partitioning and street-level cordoning of individual and group identities. We reveal how racialisation is relied upon through both a self-segregation and institutional classification system at the micro scale. Based on autoethnographic reflection as formerly jailed and incarcerated individuals, and through a reading of sociological, criminological, and geographical literatures, we argue that the logic of everyday micro-scale racial identity formation has more to do with location, gang alliances, antagonisms, and the necessary navigating of prison "politics" and protocol than with conceptualisations of "race" engendered by racial capitalism and enforced by the racial state.
The car is a primary locus for police-civilian interaction as measured by routine legal intrusion into the lives of vulnerable populations – communities of color, undocumented immigrants, and those experiencing homelessness in particular. It is the car’s ability to transport bodies as well as its legal liminality as a hybrid public-private space that facilitates such coercive and carceral contact. I therefore argue for the increased inclusion of the car and contact made with its operators and occupants within studies of policing by geographers. In this article, I provide a review of how car space and the automobile have been discussed by social scientists more broadly, followed by a call for geographers to take the lead in centering the car in research looking at everyday policing and routinized state control of people occupying and moving through public space.
We provide an example of how race- and place-based legacies of disinvestment initiated by New Deal Era redlining regimes under the auspices of the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) were followed by decades of anti-gang over-policing tactics at the scale of the neighbourhood. We show how HOLC-mediated and mapped redlining has sustained community disinvestment and stigmatisation wrought by unjust and racist social policy seen to this day in contemporary geographies of gang abatement in the form of mapped gang injunction ‘safety zones’. As we illustrate with the use of two case studies from Los Angeles – in South-Central LA and LA’s San Fernando Valley – it is overwhelmingly redlined neighbourhoods that have remained marginalised, becoming civilly enjoined ‘gang’ neighbourhoods faced with oppressive anti-gang policing tactics over the past few decades.
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