Raymond, Jungleib, Zimmerman and Jones "Rules and Policeable Matters Enforcing the Civil Sidewalk Ordinance for "Another First Time"

Rules and Policeable Matters  

Enforcing the Civil Sidewalk Ordinance for "Another First Time"

Geoff Raymond, Lillian Jungleib, Don Zimmerman and Nikki Jones 

INTRODUCTION BY WAYNE MARTIN MELLINGER, PH.D.

This chapter, drawn from The Ethnomethodology Program, represents a masterful application of ethnomethodological and conversation analytic methods to the study of law, policing, and homelessness. The authors—Geoffrey Raymond, Lillian Jungleib, Don Zimmerman, and Nikki Jones—use video recordings and ethnographic observation from police ride-alongs in "Golden City" (San Francisco) to examine how officers enforce the Civil Sidewalk Ordinance (the "sit/lie" law) against chronically homeless residents.

      The central argument is captured in Garfinkel's phrase that rules are always applied "for another first time." This seemingly paradoxical formulation points to a fundamental insight: every application of a rule is simultaneously an instance of a general pattern ("another" application of the same rule) and a unique, context-specific accomplishment (done "for the first time" in just these circumstances, with just these participants, at just this moment). The chapter demonstrates this through meticulous analysis of actual police-citizen encounters.

Key Findings

1. The Role of Knowledge in Rule Enforcement. Because the CSO is a mala prohibita offense (wrong because prohibited, not inherently wrong), officers cannot assume that citizens know about it. This makes "what the subject knows" a live interactional issue. Officers use various methods to probe or presume knowledge: "You know you gotta sit up in the park, right?" The design of such utterances reveals officers' practical reasoning about whom they're dealing with and what enforcement approach is warranted.

2. Tacit Agreements and the Boundaries of Enforcement. A strict enforcement of the CSO would be practically impossible—officers would spend all their time ensuring homeless residents remain standing for 16 hours a day. Instead, officers and homeless residents have developed unwritten understandings about when, where, and how the ordinance will be enforced. Morning contacts are "wake-up calls," not citations. Certain streets are treated as "relaxed" zones. These tacit agreements allow daily life to proceed for both parties.

3. Officers as Accountable Actors. A striking finding is that officers themselves become accountable when enforcement departs from these tacit agreements. When responding to a housed resident's complaint, officers apologize to homeless subjects, position themselves as beneficiaries of cooperation, and explain that "someone called." The officer's authority is not absolute but is itself shaped by the normative environment of the interaction.

4. Presence as Enforcement. Officers can use their mere presence as an enforcement mechanism. Because chronically homeless residents know the ordinance and how it will be enforced, an officer's focused attention—parking nearby, watching—is often sufficient to move a person along without any verbal interaction. As Bittner observed, officers "install themselves in the center of people's lives and let the consciousness of their presence play the part of conscience."

Theoretical Significance

The chapter advances Garfinkel's critique of what the authors call the "normative paradigm" in sociology—the view that rules cause behavior, that conformity is automatic, and that departures from rules require special explanation (deviance theory). Against this view, the chapter shows that rule-following is an active, interpretive, interactional achievement requiring practical reasoning, categorization, and negotiation.

The analysis demonstrates that:

Rules cannot apply themselves. Situations do not arrive pre-labeled as instances of particular rules. Participants must do the interpretive work of seeing this situation as an instance of that rule, and this work is itself observable and analyzable.

Rules are resources, not causes. Officers use the CSO as a resource for accomplishing practical tasks ("keeping the peace"), not as a mechanical trigger for behavior. The same rule can be invoked in radically different ways depending on circumstances, relationships, and practical exigencies.

Accountability is distributed and negotiated. Both officers and homeless residents display their orientation to the rule and to each other through the details of their conduct—who apologizes, who explains, who thanks whom for cooperation.

Methodological Significance

The chapter exemplifies the integration of ethnographic observation and conversation analysis. The researchers' presence on police ride-alongs provides access to the range of situations in which the law is enforced, while video recordings preserve the details of those encounters for systematic analysis. This combination allows the authors to:

Document variation across encounter types (morning wake-ups vs. mid-day enforcement vs. complaint-driven contacts).

Analyze the sequential organization of talk (how officers formulate rules, how residents respond, how knowledge is probed and displayed).

Identify the tacit agreements that shape enforcement but that would be invisible without extended observation.

Ground claims in the observable conduct of participants rather than in analyst-imposed categories.

Practical and Political Significance

While the chapter maintains an analytic rather than advocacy stance, its implications for understanding homelessness, policing, and quality-of-life laws are substantial:

The criminalization of homelessness. The analysis shows how laws that appear neutral ("no one may sit on the sidewalk") function in practice to criminalize the life-sustaining activities of people who have no private space in which to perform them. The very existence of such laws, regardless of how gently they are enforced, positions homeless persons as perpetual potential offenders.

Police discretion. The chapter reveals the enormous discretion officers exercise in enforcing quality-of-life laws, and the informal normative systems that guide that discretion. This has implications for accountability, for equal treatment under the law, and for understanding what "the law" actually is in practice.

The practical impossibility of literal enforcement. The analysis demonstrates that strict enforcement of the CSO would be practically unworkable. This raises questions about the purpose of such laws: if they cannot be literally enforced, they function primarily to extend police authority and to mark certain populations as subject to perpetual surveillance and potential intervention.

Connection to Critical Interactionism

This chapter is directly relevant to the development of Critical Interactionism as a sociological method. It demonstrates how ethnomethodological attention to the details of interaction can illuminate:

How power operates in everyday encounters—not as abstract domination but as specific interactional moves, categorizations, and accountabilities.

How marginalized persons navigate institutions that simultaneously control and (partially) accommodate them.

How "the law" is not a fixed text but an ongoing interactional accomplishment, negotiated encounter by encounter.

How resistance and accommodation are woven together in the conduct of those subject to institutional power.

The chapter thus provides a model for what Critical Interactionism can accomplish: rigorous microsociological analysis that is simultaneously attentive to structures of power and to the agency of those who navigate them.

Note on Authors

Don Zimmerman (co-author) was a founding figure of the Santa Barbara School of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. His work on the practicalities of rule use, on identity and social categorization, and on institutional interaction has shaped the field for over five decades. This chapter, co-authored with Geoffrey Raymond (a leading conversation analyst), Lillian Jungleib, and Nikki Jones (a sociologist of race and urban life), represents a continuation and extension of his foundational contributions to understanding how social order is produced through the details of everyday practice.

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Chapter 6

Rules and Policeable Matters

Enforcing the Civil Sidewalk Ordinance for "Another First Time"

Geoffrey Raymond, Lillian Jungleib, Don Zimmerman, and Nikki Jones

Introduction: Rules and Social Action

Garfinkel's re-specification of the relationship between rules, practical action, and social order stands among his most important and far-reaching contributions to the human sciences. Virtually no account of social life, whether focused on organizations, institutions, religion, family life, the law, politics, or the economy, can lose sight of the central role played by rules, laws, norms, or other idealized standards of behavior (which we will gloss as "rules" in the following discussion) that participants draw on in organizing and evaluating their own and others' conduct. Evidently, in addition to their centrality to social life via laws and institutions, rules and normative expectations are directly bound up with notions of morality, and so constitute a central dimension of social action and human relations.

Prior to Garfinkel's paradigm-shifting insights, theories of social action—and the place of rules in it—were dominated by the approach Parsons (1937) and others developed in response to the limitations of utilitarian theories of social action. In this approach, which we call the "normative paradigm" (following Wilson 1970), conduct that conforms to the normative expectations embodied in a rule is effectively treated as "caused" by that rule. Conversely, departures from rules are explained by reference to a range of analyst-generated conceptions of "deviance." The result is a highly reductionist account of social action that significantly underplays the range of ways in which participants can orient to rules, the complex cognitive and social processes that underpin the possibility of intersubjectively organized social action conducted by reference to rules, and the range of ways that members can use rules in everyday and institutional settings.

In his dissertation and later writings, Garfinkel recognized that the normative paradigm's view of rules misunderstands basic elements of social action and massively constrains the scope of sociological inquiry. Proponents of the normative paradigm argued that patterns of social actions, and the stability of the social system of which they are a part, can be explained by the complementary relationship between "needs dispositions" that actors develop via processes of socialization and the sanctioned expectations associated with the institutionalized roles those actors may occupy in their interactions with others. Crucially, these dispositions and expectations are treated as governing or regulating action insofar as the theory treats them as the link between actors' situations and their actions in those situations.

Garfinkel (1967) famously noted that such a theory renders social actors "judgmental dopes" because norms push and pull them through their encounters with others, but they never have to choose, judge, or reason. Moreover, because the analyst recruits rules, norms, and values primarily to explain departures from "rationality," the focus of social inquiry is reduced to a "sociology of error" in which analysts become preoccupied with the distance between ordinary and scientific reasoning, and with explaining why, on occasion, people depart from rules or fail to meet expectations.

Drawing on insights from Wittgenstein and Schutz, Garfinkel shows that a range of the normative paradigm's underlying assumptions about rules turn out to be problematic and limiting. Two assumptions are particularly important. First, these approaches assume that the application and use of rules in actual situations and settings are largely straightforward or unproblematic. For this to be so, however, one must assume both that the rule itself and the conditions of its use can be sufficiently elaborated to account for the entire range of circumstances in which it might be applied, and that each person using the rule has an identical understanding of it, the conditions of its use, and any circumstance in which it is actually applied. From accounts of even the simplest unwritten norms and rules that govern mundane or everyday conduct to the application of laws in liberal democracies, however, these assumptions have proven to be problematic.

In a most basic sense, rules cannot apply themselves. As H. L. A. Hart (1961) argued:

Particular fact situations do not await us already marked off from each other, and labeled as instances of a general rule, the application of which is in question; nor can the rule itself step forward to claim its own instances.

As a consequence, persons acting in concert with others must apply rules, and in doing so they must draw on interpretive resources to make sense of their settings, situations and choices. Garfinkel (1967) found that in applying rules, members draw on "such considerations as 'et cetera,' 'unless,' 'let it pass' and 'factum valet'" to manage the fundamentally open range of circumstances that any rule must cover, and thus the wide range of meanings that may be associated with their use in specific circumstances.

Second, these approaches assume that rules, norms, and laws hover above or outside of settings, institutions, and actions, and thus that their actual use on specific occasions is essentially uninteresting. In viewing rules in such an idealized way, analyses of the use and application of rules tend to lose just how those using rules "render such idealizations relevant as prescriptions, justifications, descriptions, or accounts of their activities." Rather than being viewed as above, or outside of institutions and situations, Garfinkel argued that rules, norms, and laws "can be treated as topics and as features of the very settings they are taken to organize." Accordingly, Garfinkel's re-specification highlights the embodied character of rule use: rules are used by actual people, with agency, acting in the company of other people, also with agency, managing situations whose salient features and participants' orientations to them have to be coordinated. Thus, those using rules are agents in situations in which their actions have consequences that overflow the literal sense of a rule, while they nevertheless remain accountable to it.

This approach is perhaps nowhere more masterfully demonstrated than in Bittner's analysis of the work-a-day world of policing (Bittner 1967a, 1967b). His observations on the peace-keeping practices used by police patrolling skid row open an especially vivid window into the ways in which participants orient to, invoke, and use rules and laws in their encounters. In discussing the matter of "discretion" in policing, Bittner writes:

...it is the rare exception that the law is invoked merely because the specifications of the law are met. That is, compliance with the law is merely the outward appearance of an intervention that is actually based on altogether different considerations. Thus, it could be said that patrolmen do not really enforce the law, even when they do invoke it, but merely use it as a resource to solve certain pressing practical problems in keeping the peace.

Drawing on these insights, this chapter examines occasions in which officers in "Golden City," California, enforce a controversial ordinance, the Civil Sidewalk Ordinance (or CSO, colloquially referred to as the "sit/lie" ordinance), which prohibits sitting or lying on the street during much of the day. In explicating how the participants use the CSO "for another first time" we can begin to appreciate how any participant's use of a rule illuminates the particulars of a scene and much that extends before and beyond it.

The Civil Sidewalk Ordinance

The CSO, which was adopted by voters in Golden City in November 2010, is simple enough: it prohibits persons from sitting or lying on the sidewalk between 7 a.m. and 11 p.m., with certain exceptions. Drawing on a database of several hundred hours of video and interviews collected in ride-alongs with the Golden City Police Department, this chapter explicates how officers and residents use and make sense of the law across a range of settings and activities and how they manage what are formulated as sanctioned exceptions to it.

The CSO is one of many quality-of-life laws adopted to help the city manage nonviolent activities considered nuisances in public spaces. The Golden City Police Department identifies 36 such laws, more than any other city in California, intended to "protect the well-being of [non-homeless] residents" and "preserve the quality of public spaces." These include regulations concerning sitting, sleeping, eating, urinating/defecating, camping, panhandling, soliciting, drinking in public, and so on. Because most of the behaviors they prohibit are not wrong in and of themselves (they fall under the legal rubric mala prohibita, or "wrong as or because prohibited") and would not be illegal were they to occur on a person's private property (e.g., in contrast to mala in se crimes such as assault, theft, rape, murder, etc.), quality-of-life laws disproportionately impact chronically homeless citizens.

Quality-of-life laws, such as the CSO, emerged after the broad vagrancy laws of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were declared unconstitutional. In this legal environment, cities responded to growing populations of homeless persons in the 1980s by adopting more narrowly targeted laws that banned specific behaviors in specific places, creating a network of laws that effectively criminalize "life-sustaining behaviors" of the chronically homeless. Such quality-of-life laws targeting the chronically homeless citizens are on the rise across the country.

Officers enforcing the CSO refer to their encounters as "move-alongs" because their basic aim is to move the subject from the current position or place. The formal contents of CSO are straightforward and unambiguous: persons are prohibited from sitting or lying on any public sidewalks between the hours of 7 a.m. and 11 p.m., though persons can only be ticketed and fined for the offense after they have been warned or informed of its provisions. The ordinance also includes escalating penalties ranging from fines ($50–$100) up through a misdemeanor offense with a penalty of 30 days in county jail if a person fails to comply with an officer's directives or is found sitting or lying on a public sidewalk for a second time within 24 hours.

We can render the gross outlines of the practicalities of rule use observable by considering the hypothetical case of a "strict" or literal enforcement of the CSO. Were officers to follow the letter of the law, they would be required to ticket, fine, or arrest most of the homeless people they encounter on a daily basis, and would spend virtually all of their time keeping these residents on their feet for 16 hours a day—knowing that they will encounter the very same people and circumstances the following day. To avoid the conflicts and endless entanglements that a strict enforcement style would entail, officers and homeless residents have arrived at a range of unwritten, tacit agreements regarding when, where, and how the ordinance will typically be enforced. In this respect, the patterns of enforcement that have emerged over time reflect a set of tacit agreements between officers and the chronically homeless population regarding which aspects of street life are, and are not, "police-able."

These broad, unwritten agreements enable its primary targets—the chronically homeless residents of the city—to anticipate how the ordinance will be enforced, and thus to conduct themselves in accordance with its basic provisions most of the time. It is the participants' use of the rule in practice, fitted to the exigencies of actual scenes of social activity, that we explicate in what follows.

Enforcing the CSO: Knowledge and Policeable Subjects

We begin by examining encounters that officers treat as basic or gross violations of the CSO: when chronically homeless persons are sitting or lying on the sidewalk or park in a time or place where the ordinance is regularly enforced. In doing so, we consider variations in the ways that officers and residents initiate and conduct these encounters, focusing on two basic features: how subjects are positioned as accountable for violating the CSO, and how officers raise or probe how and what the subjects know about the CSO.

In contrast to mala in se offenses, officers cannot assume that residents are aware of mala prohibita offenses such as the CSO because they apply to ordinary forms of conduct that are legal in most other circumstances. Indeed, the text of the CSO stipulates that persons cannot be cited for violating it until they have been warned of its provisions. In addition, precisely because the CSO prohibits conduct that is not otherwise morally problematic, officers and residents may view aspects of its enforcement as unjust or problematic even in circumstances where all agree that persons are subject to its provisions.

Consider a simple instance of enforcement in which both the officers and the subject treat their shared background knowledge of the CSO as a basis for making sense of the subject's violation of it, and the ways that each is accountable to the other for aspects of its enforcement. Two officers walking through a park find a man lying down in a sleeping bag with his eyes closed. Following an opening in which the officers identify themselves and exchange greetings with the subject, the latter anticipates the reason for the encounter by explaining how they came to find him in his current position: "I lay down for a minute... I lay down for about a minute and I fell asleep."

The subject's preemptive explanation reveals the cognitive and moral dimensions of the ways participants use rules. In a most basic sense, the subject's explanations anticipate that the officers have contacted him for violating the CSO. In this respect, the subject's knowledge of the rule, together with his reflexive awareness that he is currently violating it, provides a basis for making sense of the officers' presence and the project that prompted them to initiate contact. But his claims also reveal his orientation to the moral dimensions of violating a rule: he claims that this violation was an accident—an inadvertent, unintentional byproduct of falling asleep.

After registering and appreciating the subject's account, the female officer explicitly invokes the CSO by inviting the subject to confirm that he "knows" about its provisions: "You know you gotta sit up in the park, right?" This utterance constitutes an intervention into the situation it formulates: By inviting the subject to confirm that he knows about the ordinance, the officer treats his current position as reflecting a lapse in his abiding by a rule of which he is aware, and thereby implicitly requests that he remedy this lapse. At the same time, the officer's use of this method for intervening (essentially "reminding" the subject what he knows), together with its sequential positioning, treats her enforcement of the CSO as incidental to the occasion, and as morally benign.

Several features of this encounter are noteworthy. First, the officer proffers the most benign grounds for the resident's blatant violation of the CSO and the tacit agreements that otherwise inform its enforcement by initially seeking to establish that he "knows" about it. Second, having confirmed that he knows about the CSO, and having been "caught out" nonetheless, the resident continues to anticipate the officer's concerns by offering a preemptive and minimizing explanation for and remedy to them. The anticipatory dimension of his actions evinces a basic moral commitment to the CSO (and respect for the officer) even as his current position (in a sleeping bag) reveals him to be flagrantly violating it.

While such encounters are prompted by residents' violations of the CSO, the method the officers use to enforce it—a "reminder" composed using a "you know" prefaced formulation—partly reflects the ordinance's status as a mala prohibita offense. While one can credibly claim to have forgotten about, or to be unaware of, mala prohibita ordinances, competent members of a society cannot make similar claims about mala in se offenses. Thus, the use of a reminder to enforce laws pertaining to assault, theft, or murder would sound bizarre.

Officers can exploit this orientation to knowledge, using their sheer presence as a means of "moving along" chronically homeless residents who are aware of the ordinance. For example, an officer may pull his police car parallel to an apparently homeless person sitting on the sidewalk of a main street in the middle of the day. Upon seeing the police car, the subject gets up and begins to walk away, moving in the opposite direction of the squad car. As this officer explains, establishing a focused presence can be enough to move a person out of the area. Such practices suggest that the modes of engagement police developed for policing "skid row" have been expanded to cover the chronically homeless wherever they may be found. As Bittner observed, officers patrolling skid row "install themselves in the center of people's lives and let the consciousness of their presence play the part of conscience."

When officers encounter homeless residents who appear to be conscious and minimally aware of their presence but who remain sitting or lying on the sidewalk, they may treat those residents' apparent failure to comply with the rule as a basis for action and inference that are reflected in the officers' approaches to enforcement. Officers approaching subjects who remain sitting or lying on the sidewalk may entertain other possible reasons for their apparent inaction. For example, when an officer's focused presence fails to prompt a sitting subject to move, the officer may explore the possibility that he may not be a local or is unaware of the ordinance, instead of simply treating him as uncooperative.

The case of a potentially ambiguous subject illustrates the complexity associated with enforcing even a simple rule "for another first time." Here the officer treats the subject's lack of movement once she established her presence as an indication that he may not be a member of one or another of the intersecting categories presumed to possess a working knowledge of patterns of enforcement in the city. In this respect, the officer's enforcement of the sit/lie rule is sensitive to her understanding of "what socially defined types of persons are legitimately entitled to have what kinds of trouble."

Laws and Tacit Agreements: Enforcement at the Boundaries of the CSO

Officers contacting residents for mid-day violations of the CSO in locales subject to strict enforcement only account for a small subset of move-alongs in our database. More common are contacts at what might be called the "boundaries" of the CSO, such as when enforcement begins in the morning or phases out in the evening, or takes place on streets and neighborhoods subject to less stringent enforcement. Residents and officers take a different approach to these encounters, even though they also involve violations of the CSO. In these cases, assumptions about what residents know, and the methods officers use to manage compliance, reflect participants' orientations to the ways that any actual occasion of enforcement aligns the tacit agreements that shape the CSO's routine enforcement.

We begin by documenting the reality of the tacit agreements that inform how officers enforce the CSO, which are perhaps best exemplified by the "morning wake-up call." Although the law prohibits sitting or lying on the sidewalk between 7 a.m. and 11 p.m., and makes a second contact within 24 hours a ticketable offense, officers contacting homeless residents in the morning (after 7 a.m. and before 12 p.m.) approach their encounters as a "wake-up call." They rarely if ever give tickets (for an initial contact at such times), even though they encounter the same residents daily (i.e., within a 24-hour time frame). Instead, officers seek to rouse the sleeping men they encounter with phrases like "Rise and shine. Hey get up" or "Larry! Let's not get cozy. Let's get up and get our stuff."

The treatment of these encounters as "routine" is reflected in the ways that the basis for them remains tacit. The officer's encouragements and admonitions index, and rely on, participants' knowledge of the CSO as the basis for the encounter's projects without either party explicitly topicalizing it. Moreover, even as officers seek to get the residents up and moving, neither party orients to the homeless resident's position and state (e.g., sleeping) as problematic.

Officers' enforcement of the CSO also varies by locale, even though the ordinance ostensibly applies to every sidewalk in the city. In cases where they encounter residents near an area where enforcement is typically relaxed, officers may direct the residents to those places—to adjacent neighborhoods or from a main avenue to a less exposed place on a side street.

Evidently, if officers did not make some such accommodations for the ordinary routines of daily life, they would either be forced to ticket most of the chronically homeless persons they encountered every day, or they would be forced to ensure that the chronically homeless persons they encounter remain on their feet for 16 hours a day. These tacit accommodations regarding when and where the ordinance will be enforced allow officers to avoid becoming continuously entangled in managing the problems of chronic homelessness, even as they work to mitigate many of the conflicts that gave rise to the CSO's adoption.

Although the CSO ostensibly governs the conduct of residents that lie or sit on the sidewalk, officers nevertheless also find themselves accountable to it. The broad discretion officers have in deciding when, where, and how to enforce the CSO is tempered by complaints that other (presumably housed) residents may call in. Because these residents may not be aware of (or accountable to) the tacit agreements that otherwise inform the CSO's enforcement, responding to such complaints may require that officers depart from them. In our data, officers manage apparent departures from these informal agreements by invoking the "calls" and "complaints" that have occasioned the contact, thereby suggesting that they must be attended to lest they be viewed as failing to do their job.

In encounters prompted by complaints, it is the officer who treats enforcement of the ordinance as the accountable matter. The officer positions herself as a beneficiary of the subject's cooperation and invokes the caller's complaint, rather than the CSO per se, as grounds for moving the subject: "I have to move you along—I got a complaint, ok?" or "Unfortunately someone called... Yeah, you know usually I wouldn't—you know: I hate to do it." In these cases, officers strongly assert their authority to enforce the CSO in circumstances where the text of the law and the tacit agreements align in locating a resident's position as problematic. By contrast, officers' orientation to their diminished authority to enforce the CSO in circumstances that depart from these tacit understandings can be found in the accounts, apologies, and remedial actions they produce in doing so, and in their positioning as beneficiaries of the residents' cooperation.

Concluding Remarks

In this chapter, we have canvassed Garfinkel's respecification of rules, accountability, and social action, and have used the empirical case of police officers enforcing the CSO to begin illustrating how this intervention opens a window onto the endogenous methods that participants use to organize their encounters with others. As the details of these analyses demonstrate, Garfinkel's innovation vastly expands the ways in which settings and activities can be studied and understood, how analysts can ground their claims in the conduct of the participants being studied, and thus how they can account for both recurrent features of social life and the distinctive moments through which that recurrence is produced.

As we have shown, Garfinkel's re-specification of the way participants use rules retains the normative paradigm's emphasis on the moral dimensions of social action while avoiding its pitfalls. In place of the normative paradigm's "judgmental dope," Garfinkel's re-specification places the problems of social action and morality in the hands of the participants—without introducing the randomness and indeterminacy characteristic of other approaches that emphasize actors' agency. In a most basic sense, tracking when, where, how, and with what import participants invoke rules enables us to see how rules constitute an environment of "considerations" and a texture of accountability that shapes behavior through the reasoned, or at least reasonable, choices it opens up for them. Knowing about the rule and how it will or may be invoked allows participants to see both what they should roughly do, what they can get away with, and the possible consequences of being found in breach of the rule. In this way, we can appreciate how Garfinkel's approach allows us to capture how those using rules are agents in situations in which they act, while nevertheless remaining accountable to the rule.

It is the granular details of this emphasis on agency and accountability that, in turn, enables us to see how rules are used "for another first time." As we have shown, officers' use of the CSO as part of their peacekeeping efforts—when and where they enforce it, the methods they use in doing so, the various ways in which officers and residents alike are accountable to the ordinance, who apologizes to whom, and so on—reflects how they cast the specific particulars of those scenes as documents of an underlying pattern described in the text of ordinance, the exceptions it provides for, and the sedimented patterns of enforcement that have preceded the current encounter. And yet, in each case, we can also see how their use of the rule reflects the particularities of just this occasion, as well as projects and activities that may extend beyond the rule itself.

For example, any use of the CSO reflects how officers categorize this subject (as homeless, local, etc.) and what he is presumed to know about the ordinance. Similarly, officers and residents flexibly adapt the practices they use to initiate encounters and invoke the rule. Our analysis explicates the specificity achieved via any number of variations: how officers approach subjects and how the residents respond to the officers' presence and approach; how the rule is introduced and formulated; how any specific occasion for enforcement is positioned as consistent (or not) with the myriad tacit agreements that inform its use or the exceptions it provides for; and how enforcement or compliance may figure in the emerging relationship between the participants.

In this way, we have sought to explicate how those using the CSO are agents in situations in which their actions have consequences that overflow the literal sense of it as an ordinance, while they nevertheless remain accountable to it. Indeed, in just the ways that these scenes are fashioned as "another" violation of the same ordinance—the varied and detailed practices required to constitute a unique moment as a violation of the "same" ordinance—is itself a source of variation and complexity. That is, the effort to produce "recurrence" is, itself, a source of "distinctiveness." In finding how participants apply rules "for another first time," we can begin to appreciate how any participants' use of a rule illuminates the particulars of a scene and much that extends before and beyond it.