Empire of Scrounge: Inside the Urban Underground of Dumpster Diving, Trash Picking, and Street Scavenging

Abstract

70 Social Control, Deviance, and Law From an occupational perspective, gang units seem to afford officers less structure, greater independence, and more excitement, along with special status. Officers often joined a gang unit with this expectation, hop- ing to be real “crime fighters,” while those stakeholders in the officers’ institutional envi- ronment often placed greater emphasis on functions such as intelligence and preven- tion. And while the great expectation was that gang units would embed themselves solidly in the community policing approach, this study provided little evidence of that. In- stead, the authors found, overall, poor train- ing and only a general appreciation for com- munity policing, without any significant and meaningful integration of gang policing and community policing (ironically, Inglewood’s gang unit was somewhat of an exception to this, even though the department had not formally implemented community policing!). Worse, the study produced some evidence of racial profiling, harassment, falsification of records, and fabrication of pretexts for ag- gressive enforcement actions. Such tactics, according to this study, rose to the level of Standard Operating Procedures CSOPS) in two of the four study sites. Predictably, such tactics fueled gang resentment, with the un- intended consequence of enbancing gang solidarity and cohesion. The authors found that most of these units were physically and organizationally disconnected and did not engage in the kind of problem-oriented com- munity policing that was widely expected. Instead, they adopted a much more tradi- tional style of interacting with the communi- ty. Although the representativeness of these four gang units cannot be assumed, the find- ings of this study generally parallel other scholarly studies of attempts to implement and sustain reforms in traditional police or- ganizations. Contemporary Sociology 36, 1 Empire of Scrounge: Inside tbe Urban Underground of Dumpster Diving, Trasb Pic/eing, and Street Scavenging, by Jeff Ferrell. New York, NY: NYU Press, 2005. 235 pp. $22.00 paper. ISBN: 0814727987. JACK KATZ University of California, Los Angeles For about eight months in 2002, Jeff Ferrell was a “Dumpster diver and trash picker” in Fort Worth, Texas. He began scrounging af- ter resigning from one tenured sociology job and before nailing down the next. Ferrell could rely on a modest house, a working partner, and a trickle of royalties from previ- ous books, but he mainly “survived” by trans- forming what he found into personal posses- sions or cash at junk/antique stores and re- cycling centers. Ferrell weaves carefully detailed fieldnotes into 200 continuously compelling pages. He reveals the distinctive practical activities re- quired to scrounge successfully; provides subtle appreciations of how scroungers inter- act with others, such as other scroungers, res- idents, police, and managers of recycling centers; and he conveys the sensual-aesthet- ic dimensions of trash picking in a stream of surprisingly inspiring sociological reveries. Labeling his analysis ethnomethodologi- cal, Ferrell details how the distinctive prac- tices of scrounging are based on routine cog- nitions, which in turn are the product of the scrounger’s uniquely crafted folk sociology. Seeing trash within an approaching time horizon defined by the garbage collector, scroungers discipline themselves tightly to the calendar. Scroungers interpret as they dig, inferring a move, divorce, or death in a given trash pile, picking up much more about abruptly abandoned social lives than they take away physically, As an interaction analyst, Ferrell appreci- ates how scroungers interact with versions of themselves at different points in time and with others they never directly meet. Every scrounger, whether Ferrell on his bicycle, an apparently homeless man pushing a shop- ping cart, or the driver of a pickup truck, has a limited carrying capacity; thus all must con- stantly choose. Anticipating the journey ahead, scroungers “dress” the items they pick up, discarding less useful and heavier parts,