As the Chicago Police Department plans to flood the city with nearly 1,000 more cops, University of Chicago sociologist Forrest Stuart’s first book couldn’t be more timely. Down, Out, and Under Arrest is a study of life in Los Angeles’s Skid Row community relevant to every city where segregated, poor African-American communities and aggressive policing policies intersect.

The advent of “broken windows” policing and welfare reform in the 1990s, however, revived 19th-century law enforcement and social service practices, as the LAPD and the “megashelters” teamed up to carry out what Stuart calls “therapeutic policing,” a strategy that relies on heavy surveillance and constant intervention on the part of the cops, with basic services like food and shelter contingent on formal participation in various rehabilitation programs like job training and addiction counseling. During the author’s time in the neighborhood, between 2007 and 2012, he recorded not only the oppressive effects of this policing strategy on residents but the shortfalls of this coercive rehabilitation approach as well.

One chapter of Down, Out, and Under Arrest is devoted to a group of health-conscious Skid Row weight lifters who lead highly regimented, disciplined lives and support each other while shunning the police-sanctioned “mega-shelters” and the social services there because they feel infantilized by staff (“All they wanna do is talk to you like you’re some kind of retard, like you’re a little kid,” one of the weight lifters says). These are men who might have the potential to become leaders and positive role models for others but who, Stuart suggests, have been forced by constant policing to actively disaffiliate from anyone who appears weaker, undermining the building of empathy and solidarity among community residents. But the weight lifters’ survival tactic backfires: looking too clean and healthy in Skid Row is a magnet for police attention. The LAPD ultimately forbids them from congregating, and later on some of the weight lifters fall back into addiction, or move out of Skid Row into the neighborhoods they’d been trying to escape for a fresh start.

By Forrest Stuart (University of Chicago Press) Stuart is joined in conversation by Invisible Institute founder Jamie Kalven Wed 10/12, 6 PM Seminary Co-op Bookstore 5751 S. Woodlawn 773-752-4381semcoop.com Free