The geographic containment of vice, Fischer suggests, was itself a law enforcement strategy. Once vice had been relegated to Black neighborhoods, those neighborhoods became ever more associated in the white public imagination with “sexual deviance and lawlessness,” which helped justify the criminalization of their residents. When periodic flareups of white moral outrage exposed police corruption, white reformers called for—and were appeased by—crackdowns on public displays of sexuality and sexual commerce. “Black neighborhoods had become the go-to sites for morals arrests,” Fischer writes, “but those arrests were not designed to repress vice.” As one Black vice-syndicate member in Los Angeles said in 1924:
It has always been the custom here…when the town gets too bad…to go over to Central avenue and clean up the negroes. That always satisfied the longhairs [white moral reformers]…. And the blow has fallen where there is least resistance—on those who have the smallest chance of a comeback.
The failure of Prohibition, Fischer writes, left “police publicly discredited and widely reviled.” So they rebranded themselves as “crime fighters” charged with confronting not wayward girls but manly gangs, even though this didn’t reflect reality. By 1930, as “law men trumpeted ‘scientific’ data gathering and cutting-edge weapons and surveillance technologies,” in Fischer’s words, arrest rates were being collected and publicly circulated. The police made more and more arrests—although not because of a touted crime wave. What actually increased were rates of arrests on morals charges.
“Between 1932 and 1937,” Fischer writes, “the FBI reported that the number of arrests of women increased by 75 percent,” while the arrests of men rose by only 40 percent. A third of these women were arrested either specifically for prostitution—a charge women faced overwhelmingly more often than men—or for the vaguely defined crimes of disorderly conduct and vagrancy. The FBI started breaking down crime by gender in 1932 but did not account for race within those statistics. Simply drinking, going out at night in public spaces defined by vice, or being sexually available could qualify as disorderly conduct or the even vaguer “suspicion of promiscuity.” Fischer writes that by 1930 “prostitution and promiscuity blurred into a single legal category.”
This trend was lethally combined with what Fischer calls the “new invasion” of Black areas by white vice consumers and workers, from male customers and female companions game for transgressing social boundaries to underclass and marginalized women—presumably including queer women, though Fischer does not adequately address them. The best documentation of how Black residents experienced white people arriving to party on their streets comes from the Black press. Local newspapers, Fischer writes, “brimmed with accounts of police collusion and political corruption as Black neighborhoods’ dignity and safety were traded for white men’s pleasure and profit.”