Leonard Blumberg

The Homeless Man and Law Enforcement Agencies

THIS PAPER is about the homeless skid row man. It will discuss briefly some of the characteristics of skid row men and their contacts with law enforcement agencies.’ There is reason to believe that a substantial proportion of those born in indigent families tend to remain indigent throughout their lives. In civic practice, there is a tendency to treat the indigent in a similar manner. The behavior of indigent persons tends to be similar. There is

FRANK F. LEE. Negro and White in Connecticut Town. Pp. 207. New York: Bookman Associates, 1961.

Long, on community self-surveys, are either thin surveys of areas more economically treated in good race relations texts-Burma, Dai, Henderson and Longor are based on secondary and even tertiary sources-Masuoka. A second group of papers, more in the tradition of the man memorialized, attempt to state theory-or possibilities for theory or method. The papers of Robert Redfield, on primitive and civilized race relations ; of Everett C. Hughes, on racial frontiers; of Guy B. Johnson, on race conflict and racial movements in the South; and of Edgar T. Thompson, on language and race relations, show an intellectual sympathy with Park, and extend or clarify some of his work. Attempts by Herbert Blumer-prejudice as a sense of position; by Inez Adams-values, status and social issues; and by W. F. Ogburnsocial change and race relations-fail to produce contributions of equivalent value. Papers by Guy Johnson, by Preston Valien-on the Montgomery bus strikeand by Leslie W. Jones-on disfranchisement in Tuskegee-would be much more valuable had more extensive treatments

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some five thousand symbols in various editorials, personal columns, and news items. Unfortunately, the author failed to include a single example of an article from which he had selected and scored some of the symbols, thereby limiting the possibility of any independent comparison based on a set of recent editions. The overwhelming drift of editorial and personal comment in 1948 was favorable to the &dquo;American Creed,&dquo; particularly in relation to the ideal patterns concerning civil liberties, equality, the franchise, democracy, the Supreme Court, and the Constitution. At the same time, the five newspapers were &dquo;uncompromising&dquo; in their rejection of social practices which perpetuate the status of second-class citizenship. Thus, &dquo;their criticism is directed against barriers that tend to restrict the Negro’s participation in the social order, rather than against the nature of the social order itself.&dquo; The book provides the social scientist with a good example of the research advantage which can be gained from a rigor-