On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City by Alice Goffman Page A

settle disputes because the police were so often absent and
     uninterested, now it seems that residents face an additional barrier: they cannot
     turn to the police because their legal entanglements prevent them from doing so. The
     police are everywhere, but as guarantors of public safety, they are still out of reach.
    The hesitancy of legally precarious men to turn to the authorities has some important
     implications. First, steering clear of the police and the courts means that young
     men tend not to use the ordinary resources of the law to protect themselves from crimes
     committed against them. 5 While those on probation or parole may make tentative use of these resources (and
     sometimes regret it later, when the police arrest them using new information they provided), men with warrants typically stay away. During
     my first year and a half on 6th Street, I noted twenty-four instances of men contacting
     the police when they were injured, robbed, or threatened. These men were either in
     good standing with the courts or had no pending legal constraints. I did not observe
     any person with a warrant call the police or voluntarily make use of the courts during
     the six years of the study. Indeed, these young men seemed to view the authorities
     only as a threat to their safety.
    Ned, age forty-three, and his longtime girlfriend Jean, age forty-six, lived on Mike’s
     block. Jean smoked crack pretty heavily, although Chuck noted that she could handle
     her drugs, meaning she was able to maintain both a household and her addiction. Ned
     was unemployed and for extra money occasionally hosted dollar parties—house parties
     with a dollar entrance fee offering drinks, food, and games for a dollar each. He
     also engaged in petty fraud, such as intercepting checks in the mail and stealing
     credit cards. The couple’s primary income came from taking in foster children. When
     Ned and Jean discovered they might be kicked out of their house because they owed
     property taxes to the city, Jean called Reggie’s cousin, telling him to come to the
     house because she had some gossip concerning his longtime love interest. When he arrived,
     a man in a hoodie robbed him at gunpoint. Reggie later remarked that his cousin should
     have known better than to go to Ned and Jean’s house: as the only man on the block
     with a warrant out for his arrest at the time, he was an easy target for a couple
     under financial strain.
    If young men known to have a warrant become the target of those looking for someone
     to exploit or even to rob, they may resort to violence themselves, for protection
     or for revenge.
    One winter morning, Chuck, Mike, and I were at a diner having breakfast to celebrate
     that the authorities hadn’t taken Mike into custody after his court appearance earlier
     that day. Chuck’s mother called to tell him that his car had been firebombed outside
     her house, and that firefighters were putting out the blaze. According to Chuck, the
     man who set fire to his car had given him drugs to sell on credit, under the arrangement
     that Chuck would pay him once he sold the drugs. Chuck hadn’t been able to pay, however,
     because the police had taken the money from his pockets when they searched him earlier
     that week.This was the first car that Chuck had ever purchased legally, a 1994 Bonneville he
     had bought the week before for four hundred dollars from a used-car lot in Northeast
     Philadelphia. He didn’t speak for the rest of the meal. Then, as we walked to Mike’s
     car, he said:
    This shit is nutty, man. What the fuck I’m supposed to do, go to the cops? “Um, excuse
     me, officer, I think boy done blown up my whip [car].” He going to run my name and
     shit, now he see I got a warrant on me; next thing you know, my Black ass locked the
     fuck up, you feel me? I’m locked up because a nigga firebombed my whip. What the fuck,
     I’m supposed to let niggas take advantage?
    Chuck and Mike discussed whether