From ’Rabble Management’ to ’Recovery Management’: Policing Homelessness in Marginal Urban Space

Over the past three decades, scholars have documented the emergence of a new model of urban governance predicated on the spatial exclusion of visible poverty. In order to revitalise and recommodify the prime spaces of the urban core, municipal leaders enlist the police to coercively relocate homeless people to marginal spaces. Unfortunately, little is known about the policing of homelessness in those areas into which homeless people are exiled. To address this lacuna, this article employs an ethnographic analysis of police patrols in Los Angeles’ Skid Row district. The findings demonstrate that, contrary to the dominant framework of exclusion, policing in marginal space takes on a disciplinary model of ‘recovery management’ designed to coercively shepherd homeless people into rehabilitative programmes and ameliorate the individual pathologies deemed responsible for homelessness. The article thus provides an analysis of how, why and with what consequences the policing of homelessness varies over space.