On The Run: Fugitive Life in an American City

by Alice Goffman

  MIKE: Yo, just stay here till you hear something. I’m about to leave out.

  ALICE: Okay.

  MIKE: I’m not trying to get locked up off of Ronny and then they run my record and I got, like, three warrants out for me, you feel me?

  When Ronny’s cousin was shot and killed later that year, the men from 6th Street attended his funeral in the same fashion that they had gone to the hospital—quickly and quietly, ducking in and out:

  REGGIE: We couldn’t really stay, you know, at the funeral or whatever, you know they’re on my ass [the cops are looking for him]. But we ducked in and out and saw the body and everything. We ain’t go to the gravesite though, but we saw his [the dead man’s] grandmom, and she saved us a plate [of food] from after [the get-together at her house]. Lucky it was so many people at the church, because the cops was definitely out, boy.7

  Cultivating unpredictability not only helps with evading the police; it also helps to reduce the risk of friends and family informing. Simply put, a man’s neighbor, girlfriend, or mother cannot call the police on him if she doesn’t know where he is.

  Chuck, twenty at the time, explained the dipping and dodging sensibility to his thirteen-year-old cousin:

  The night is really, like, the best time to do whatever you got to do. If I want to go see my moms [mother], see my girl, come through the block and holla at my boys, I can’t be out in broad day. I got to move like a shadow, you know, duck in and out, you thought you saw me, then bam, I’m out before you even could see what I was wearing or where I was going.

  Young men are so wary that their relatives, girlfriend, or neighbors may set them up that they may take any request from those close to them to show up or stop by as a potential threat. Mike noted:

  Nine times out of ten, you getting locked up because somebody called the cops, somebody snitching. That’s why, like, if you get a call from your girl, like, “Yo, where you at, can you come through the block at a certain time,” that’s a red flag, you feel me? That’s when you start to think, like, “Okay, what do she got waiting for me?”

  When Chuck’s nineteen-year-old neighbor had a bench warrant out for failure to appear in court, he was determined, he said, never to go back to jail. He slept in a number of houses, staying no more than a few nights in any one place. On the phone, he would lie to his family members, girlfriend, and fellow block members about where he was staying and where he planned to go next. If he got a ride to where he was staying, he requested to be dropped off a few blocks away, and then waited until the car was out of sight before walking inside. For six months, nobody on the block seemed to know where he was sleeping.

  Young men looking over their shoulder for the police find that a public and stable daily routine becomes a path to confinement. A stable routine makes it easier for the police to locate a man directly, and makes it easier for his friends and family to call the police on him. Keeping a secret and unpredictable schedule—sleeping in different beds, working irregular hours, deceiving others about one’s whereabouts, and refusing to commit to advance plans—serves as a generalized technique of evasion, helping young men avoid getting taken into custody through many of the paths discussed here.

  PAYING TO PASS UNDETECTED

  When Mike and Chuck and their friends had a little money, they spent some of it securing an array of underground goods and services that would help protect them from the authorities or postpone their admission to jail and prison.

  One major item they sought was a clean ID.

  Many readers may not be aware of how often they are asked to present some form of ID, or to hand over a credit card or proof of address, throughout the course of a day. Those who have these things, and who are free from the threat of the police, tend not to think about it when these documents are required of them. For young men around 6th Street concerned that the police are tracking them or will take them into custody on the spot, legitimate identification is the source of considerable concern.

  On the one hand, Mike and Chuck and their friends feared discovery and didn’t want their identity known. They hesitated to carry ID, to tell people their real name, or to write that name down. Around 6th Street, it is considered improper for even close friends to ask each other their last names, and young men routinely give fake names to people they meet, just to be on the safe side. Close male friends sometimes go years without knowing each other’s last names. Yet at the same time that young men wish to conceal their identity, and fear using it, they need proof of it for all kinds of life’s necessities, but can’t get it. The formal documents needed to apply for a job, enter a building with a guard in the lobby, buy a cell phone, or put a car in the shop elude them through a complex combination of their poverty, residential instability, and legal entanglements and fears.

  For the eleven years that I have known Reggie, he has been sitting in jail or prison, dealing with a pending court case, a warrant, or a probation or parole sentence, or working through some combination of the three. During a rare month that he was newly paroled from prison and had no pending court cases or warrants, he asked me to help him obtain a state-issued ID. Not a driver’s license, which seemed an almost unattainable goal, but a non-driver’s state-issued identification card. In addition to allowing him to apply for jobs, visit family and friends in jail, and check into hotel rooms, this ID would mean that when Reggie got stopped by the police, they could run his name immediately and verify that he had no pending warrants.

  We first needed to apply for his birth certificate, which his mother had only a vague memory of possessing before she left the homeless shelter in which the family had spent the first few years of Reggie’s life. Obtaining this document required many trips to the government offices downtown and other proofs of identity: a social security card and two pieces of mail (not letters but something more formal, such as a bill). After three weeks of collecting these items and two long days spent in fruitless trips to the Division of Vital Records downtown, Reggie shook his head, noting that ID is basically for rich people. “Because you have to have ID to get ID,” he said. “Just like money.”

  Having gotten nowhere, we found a man in the 6th Street neighborhood who specialized in applications for birth certificates and other ID. People showed him their proofs of identity and he sent away for their birth certificates from the downtown office, taking forty dollars for this service. Ultimately, this man wasn’t satisfied with any of the documents Reggie could come up with to apply for the birth certificate, and finally suggested we use a close relative’s death certificate to prove his identity and residence. His mother at first refused to allow Reggie to take the death certificate out of the house, so we were stalled once again.

  After six weeks of hard effort and considerable expense, Reggie had a birth certificate, two pieces of mail that would count for his proof of address, and a social security card. With these precious documents in hand, we drove to the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation.

  As we approached the parking lot adjacent to the building, Reggie began to move around in his seat, fidgeting and adjusting his clothing. Once I’d parked the car, he made no move to get out. I turned to him and asked if he wanted me to go in first and get a ticket for the line. He sat silently for a while and then began to explain his concerns. Showing up and applying for this ID would lead employees to run his name and bring up some outstanding ticket or warrant. He eyed the security guards warily, saying that undercovers probably hung out at the Department of Transportation as well. “It’s like, I’m home now, you feel me? I don’t want to be back in there tomorrow . . .”

  We sat in the DMV parking lot for over ten minutes while Reggie attempted to get up the courage to walk through the door. In the end, he couldn’t go through with it, so we drove back to the block.

  Like Reggie, a great many people living in the 6th Street neighborhood don’t have government-issued ID, fear using their ID if they do have one, or have ID but can’t do much with it because of their unpaid tickets, outstandi
ng warrants, or the restrictions of their probation or parole. Local entrepreneurs recognize this core problem of poor and legally compromised people, and attempt to solve it in two ways: first by selling fake IDs and documents, and second by supplying the goods and services that typically require ID as part of the sales transaction, with no questions asked.

  In the early 2000s, Mike and his friends bought fake licenses, social security cards, car insurance and vehicle registrations, and birth certificates. Merchants around 6th Street offered these goods under the table, if customers made the request appropriately. Salesmen on foot also offered these items as they made their rounds at bars, barbershops, and corner stores.

  Mike used fake registration and car insurance documents when he got stopped in the early 2000s. The police didn’t run his real name and so didn’t discover that he had no license or registration for the car. Nor did they find out that he was on probation and prohibited from driving a car in the first place. Chuck was once able to get through an entire court case using a fake name and identification he had purchased from a man operating a stand outside a sneaker store. This fake identity allowed him to be tried for the case at hand without his previous cases coming into play.

  Improved law enforcement technology has made it more and more difficult to use a fake identity to get through police stops. Indeed, giving a false name to the police has become all but impossible: beginning in the mid-2000s, squad cars were equipped with computers for running IDs. Philadelphia police around 6th Street now refuse to accept a driver’s license or non-driver’s state ID, asking instead for the man’s photo number. This number is issued at a person’s first arrest, and as one officer told me, “Any guy who says he doesn’t have one is lying.” Through the photo ID number, the officer can pull up an extensive description of the man, along with pictures of his face and body, from the computer in the police car. Some police cars in Philadelphia are now also equipped with finger print machines, so that a man’s prints can be run quickly and on the spot without the trouble of taking him down to the police station.

  As another strategy for passing under the radar, young men around 6th Street pay those with legitimate identities to put things in their name, such as apartment leases, utility bills, even accident claims. This makes it significantly harder for the police to track them. Before Mike was sentenced to a year and half in prison, he was doing very well financially. He had two used cars in two different women’s names, lived in an apartment in a friend’s name, had a gun registered to a friend of his uncle, had a cell phone in his children’s mother’s name, owned a dirt bike in the name of the previous owner, and rented furniture in his mother’s name. In exchange for borrowing their identities, he gave these relatives and neighbors cash, food, drugs, and DVDs. Some also had occasional use of the items.

  Five times over the six years I spent in the neighborhood, I observed people stopped by the police successfully use the name of another person they knew to be “clean.” Once Mike gave a friend’s name to get through a traffic stop and then went to court to pay the tickets for the moving violation, still using the man’s identity. As compensation, Mike lent this man his leather Eagles jacket for a season.

  A number of neighborhood businesses allow people to make purchases with no questions asked. Wanted people seek places to shop that don’t require any documentation, because getting an ID in the first place could lead to an arrest; buying things using an ID would make it easier for the police to track them; and their dealings with the criminal justice system have rendered unusable the identification they have (for example, their licenses are suspended). These places where items ordinarily requiring identification may be bought without showing ID, signing one’s name, or showing proof of insurance are known as ducky spots.

  A man concerned that he may be taken into custody also fears using the hospitals, and so purchases a variety of medical goods and services from people in the neighborhood who work in health care and who supply drugs, medical supplies, and their general expertise to legally precarious community members. Chuck paid a neighbor working as a custodian at the local hospital around forty dollars for antibiotics when his foot got infected after he ran through some debris during a police chase. After two weeks of severe tooth pain, Chuck’s neighbor, a twenty-year-old man, pulled his own molar with a pair of pliers and paid his cousin, who worked at a doctor’s office, eighty dollars for a course of antibiotics. Reggie broke his arm when he tripped over the curb while running from a man trying to stab him. His neighbor brought over material for a cast from his job at the VA hospital, heated it in a pan of water on the stove, and made a hard splint that Reggie wore for five weeks. Reggie gave him a large bag of marijuana as compensation.

  Mike and Chuck and their friends around 6th Street also paid friends and neighbors for their silence and cooperation, and for news about the police. In a community filled with suspects and fugitives, every resident is a potential conduit of information, either for the police or for the men they’re after. Mike and his friends tried to ensure that neighbors who could alert the authorities to their whereabouts or activities were instead helping them hide.

  In the same way that payments for sex can be placed on a continuum from prostitution to marriage, the money that legally entangled people pay others in the neighborhood to help protect them from the authorities ranges from explicit, short-term, quid pro quo exchanges, in which a set fee is paid for a single piece of information or a single refusal to talk to the police or testify as a witness, to longer-term relationships, in which the arrangement is largely tacit, and the legally precarious party provides extended financial support in exchange for silence, watchfulness, and general help in evading the authorities.8

  The most extended relationship of this kind that I observed on 6th Street involved two brothers who sold marijuana in the area. The pair had grown up in the neighborhood but had long since moved away. They didn’t mention their business or anybody else’s illicit doings over the phone, they came and went quickly, and to my knowledge, no person on 6th Street had ever been to their house—or even knew where it was.

  When the two brothers came around in their dark SUV to drop off drugs or pick up payments, they gave back to the community. They helped pay for the funerals of three young men who were shot and killed during my time there. They also contributed grocery money to the mothers of the deceased, rent money to their girlfriends, and haircut money for their sons. They gave cash to people who had recently come home from prison: a kind of get-started money. They put money on the books of neighborhood men who were fighting cases in county jail.9

  As these two brothers coached and mentored younger guys on the block, they often discussed the importance of giving as a core obligation to those less fortunate. But they also occasionally mentioned that their generosity encouraged others to protect them from the authorities. In particular, they made sure that those neighborhood residents with frequent dealings with the police didn’t feel angry or resentful toward them. The older brother explained it like this to a younger boy on the block:

  What makes a nigga call the cops? Hate [jealousy]. It’s only a matter of time before they see your picture or your name comes up [during a police questioning]. You want them to pass right by [the picture], you want them to choose the other guy, the guy who never did nothing for them.

  Mike and Chuck regarded this practice with admiration, acknowledging that it’s smart to send money to a man in jail who, if he gives you up, will see his commissary account quickly dry up. But like a marriage, this relationship requires consistent income, and most men in the neighborhood have only sporadic work in either the formal or the informal economy, with quite uneven and low returns.

  Mike and Chuck certainly couldn’t afford to maintain long-term relationships in which a steady flow of cash or other resources guaranteed the ongoing cooperation of neighborhood residents. But they did occasionally scrape together enough money for one-time payments, mostly to witnesses during trials.

  Ac
cording to Mike, about two years before we met, he had been walking home from a dice game with a large wad of cash when a man put a gun to his head and ordered him to give up his money.10 Mike told me that he refused, and attempted to draw his own gun when the man shot him. Other accounts have it that Mike attempted to run away and shot himself by accident, whereupon this man took his money and then stripped him of his sneakers and watch. Whatever the details of this encounter, Mike emerged from it with a bullet lodged in his hip. His mother looked after him for five months while he was unable to walk, and then drove him to the outpatient clinic twice a week for months of physical therapy.

  By the time we met, Mike could walk normally, though he said his leg hurt when he ran or stood for long periods, or when the weather changed. He believed this man had left the neighborhood, but about a month later he thought he spotted him driving around in a Buick. Mike told me that the man looked at him, he looked at the man, the man tensed, and Mike opened fire. Mike said, “I ain’t know if he was going to start chopping [shooting], you know, thinking I was going to come at him. Better safe than sorry.”

  Two days later Mike saw him again, this time while driving with Chuck and another friend. Although I wasn’t present, Chuck told me immediately afterward that the men in both cars opened fire, shooting at each other as they drove by in opposite directions. I couldn’t confirm the shots that Mike, Chuck, and another friend fired, but the glass in the side and back windows of Mike’s car was shattered, and I counted seven bullet holes in the side doors. Mike quickly towed the car to a friend’s garage, worried that the police would see it if they hadn’t been alerted to the shootout. This was around noon.