Fellows Lecture: Rahim Kurwa, “How policing became property–and how people are fighting back”

Building from Cheryl Harris’ work on whiteness as property, this talk traces the historical processes by which policing has come to function in the same manner. Using a case study of the policing of Housing Choice Vouchers, the nation’s largest rental assistance program, I suggest that policing has been metabolized into the everyday ways that residents reproduce hierarchy within neighborhoods. Today, local laws encourage individuals to surveil and file complaints about their neighbors through city bureaucracies and police departments, who often respond using eviction. When individuals participate in policing their neighbors, they acquire social status and power through dispossession. As these practices spread through Los Angeles’ Antelope Valley, tenants fought back. I trace their strategies and challenges, and show how they dismantled key parts of the policing apparatus they faced. Their work created a model for tenants around the country and illustrates the abolitionist stakes of housing struggles.

RAHIM KURWA is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminology, Law, and Justice and Department of Sociology (by courtesy) at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). His work is broadly focused on the policing of housing, and he has published scholarship on this topic in City and Community, Du Bois Review, Feminist Formations, Housing Policy Debate, Social Service Review, and Surveillance and Society. He is writing a book tracing the past century of Black history in Los Angeles’ Antelope Valley, showing how its pre-1968 methods of racial segregation have been replaced by policing, and how a tenants’ rights movement has grown to challenge the policing of housing.