‘Alley Work,’ Surveilled
The following is a blog post from Freda Fair, whose new article, “Surveilling Social Difference: Black Women’s “Alley Work” in Industrializing Minneapolis” appears in the new open issue of Surveillance & Society.
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In an article published in December 2017 in the journal Surveillance & Society, I ask: What has been the relationship between black women and surveillance in the city of Minneapolis? What began as a general interest in the history of black people in public space in the city of Minneapolis, ended up leading me to archives inside Minneapolis City Hall that document black women’s sexual labor and the expansion of policing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries in Minneapolis. More specifically, black sexual labor is represented in the archive through “alley work,” an informal sexual economy in which black women were concentrated.
This archive, a collection of arrest records, further situates alley work in the context of the early stages of the departmentalization of policing in the Twin Cities and the shift from the era of regulated prostitution to that of its active criminalization. With no designated space on the actual arrest records for depositions or statements from those arrested, the records themselves further legitimize the police and establish policing as a condition of modern urbanization. Thus, black women can only emerge in the archive through a mediated account of their arrests as deposed by the police.
I was interested in how the police made sense of alley work through the categories and language they used to describe it. With respect to alley work, the Minneapolis Police Department’s adoption of the Bertillon System of Criminal Identification in 1899 organized police categories and descriptions in ways that directed criminalization — equating alley work with black women.
This establishes “alley work” primarily as a tool of identification and surveillance rather than a categorically criminalized offense
The information on the police records teaches us about the racial, gendered, sexual, and spatial effects of police regulation and criminal identification. For example, the Bertillon system police record of Ethel Walters arrested in 1908 describe her as an “alley worker” and a dark “Brown Skin Negra” who was: “suspected of having robbed a man of his pocket book and contents.” As is the case with many of the alley work records, the men who are the clients and solicitors are never identified, and the women are arrested for petit or grand-larceny instead of alley work. This establishes “alley work” primarily as a tool of identification and surveillance rather than a categorically criminalized offense at least until the years just prior to 1920.
In addition to the categories and descriptions present on the arrest records, the connection between policing and surveillance is also illustrated in an 1899 Annual Report written by then Superintendent of Police in Minneapolis, James D. Doyle. In the report, Doyle requests funds to install electric lights in alleyways making the clear connection and intersection between police surveillance, identification, and criminalization: “I would recommend that arrangements be made for the placing of electric lights in all the alleys in the downtown districts. This would be a great assistance to the officers and do considerable to prevent crime in this district, there being no more powerful deterrent of crime than well lighted streets and alleys” (1899: 490). If the alley emerges in the Bertillon system arrest records as a site overdetermined by social transgression and characterized by darkness, then an examination of the labor organized there as documented through black women’s alley work offers us an account of the economic and political construction of public space and crime with regard to racialized, gendered, and sexualized policing.
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You can read “Surveilling Social Difference: Black Women’s “Alley Work” in Industrializing Minneapolis” here.
