On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City (8 page)

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, outstanding 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 ma
terial 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 obliga
tion 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.