Property, Personhood, and Police: The Making of Race and Space through Nuisance Law

Abstract

This essay is concerned with public nuisance law as a space‐making project, decisively shaping property relations through speculative policing. With a focus on the Citywide Nuisance Abatement Program (CNAP) in Los Angeles, we show how the transformation of “gang‐controlled” neighbourhoods anticipates capital investment through the reformation of property. We situate the contemporary reanimation of public nuisance law in the socio‐spatial histories of racial capitalism, including colonial dispossession, the control of free and fugitive Black people, and formations of counter‐insurgency such as community policing. In doing so, we draw attention to the lawlessness of the law, which in the case of CNAP is apparent not only in its legal hybridity but also in its preemptive logics of surveillance, criminalisation and banishment that target racial others.

A Legal Geography of Prison and Other Carceral Spaces

“…Today, the power to evict people from Section 8 and other government subsidised housing has greatly expanded. Aside from failure to pay rent or other breaches of contract, residents are faced with the constant process of proximate displacement and "evicting" (Baker 2021; Bloch 2022b) for making "chronic" calls to 911, which includes emergency calls for domestic violence (Arnold 2019;Cassidy 2023;Desmond and Valdez 2013; see also Cuomo 2021), "unnecessary" foot traffic, "excessive" noise, and any number of other subjective criteria as determined by apartment managers, on-site security, and housing boards (Graziani et al 2022;Gromis et al 2022). 6 Eviction from public housing on nuisance grounds can be thought of, more broadly, as what Blomley (2020:46) identifies as a "naked form of territorialised legal power", which relies on criminal exclusion to settle non-criminal contract disputes.…”

Displacement beyond dislocation: Aversive racism in gentrification studies

“…While richer, whiter newcomers are attracted by the idea of authenticity, they are often also "repelled" by the consumption practices of existing residents, "or by the way their bodies consume public space" (Zukin, 2008: 745). Such repulsion extends beyond the safeguarding of "moral geographies" (Cresswell, 1996;Hubbard, 2000) and personal feelings of what Sibley (1995) and Pile (1996) have identified as disgust and anxiety for how others inhabit space, to the "dangerous" animals they keep (Bloch and Martínez, 2020;Tissot, 2011), the speed at which they move (Kern, 2016), the soundscapes they produce (Summers, 2021), and the legal nuisances they produce with their very being (Bloch and Meyer, 2019;Graziani et al, 2022; see also Blandy and Sibley, 2010). Summers ( 2019) more recently addresses and complicates the concept of targeted consumption as integral to displacement practices (see also Summers and Howell, 2019), whereby the aesthetic of disembodied Blackness, but not lived Blackness itself, is a desirable form of capital for land speculators and consumers of already existing places.…”

Latency, uncertainty, contagion: Epistemologies of risk-as-reform in crime forecasting software

“…The actual interventions initiated can be read as of a piece with policing tactics that use the requirements of civic bureaucracy, such as the enforcement of city code, to either criminalize houselessness, public behaviors and physical disrepair (Bloch and Meyer, 2019;Christensen and Albrecht, 2020;Ram ırez, 2019) or divert city resources through naturalizing the presence of 'disrepair' in marginalized communities (Bartram, 2022;Graziani et al, 2021). Scholarship on the 'data-driven' technologies used to securitize urban spaces has tended to understand the spatial modality in which they operate as one of containment and sequestration, evincing a geographic mode that scales the mechanics of national borders down into the city and analogizes spaces of control such that US-occupied foreign territories require similar tactics to 'high-crime' municipal areas (Jefferson, 2017: 103;Jefferson, 2020;Miller, 2019).…”