Skateboard crime and the pirating of urban space

Abstract

This paper seeks to analyze “skate crime:” what skateboarders do, why they do it, and why it is criminalized even in public spaces. I begin with a case example of the Dolores Street Hill Bomb in San Francisco, a seemingly over-criminalized annual event that treats skaters as enemies of the city, a logic of enmity. This same logic was used to criminalize 17th–18th century “Golden Age” maritime piracy, a heuristic that helps assess the role that stigmatization by dominant orders of authority plays in skate crime. I deepen this narrative of skate crime by discussing four diverse facets that distinguish whether they are caused by political motivations or not and whether they have effects of social harm or not. I argue further that Golden Age piracy also fits this four-fold narrative, leading to my conclusion that skateboarding might be considered a kind of piracy, a “street piracy.”