Alice Goffman’s Implausible Ethnography

Near the end of Alice Goffman’s acclaimed 2014 book, On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City, she interviews George Taylor, father of Linda, who is one of the central characters, and grandfather of Linda’s three sons, whose lives dominate the narrative. (George and Linda, like most of the names in the book, are pseudonyms.) Taylor’s parents had been Georgia sharecroppers, and like so many African-Americans of their generation, they had headed north in search of a better life. They settled in Philadelphia when George was 5.

Taylor did well in school, joined the Army, and then embarked on a 44-year career with the Postal Service. A few years after getting that job, he bought a three-bedroom row house in what was then a quiet, tree-lined neighborhood on the outskirts of the city. Taylor and his daughter (his wife had left him) were among the first African-Americans to move into the neighborhood, but many middle-class blacks followed, hoping, in Goffman’s words, “to escape the crowded and run-down ghetto by moving just past its outer edges.”

By the 1980s, that hope was fading. All of the area’s white residents had moved out, and crack cocaine had moved in. Linda developed what would become a decades-long addiction. The neighborhood slid into crime and poverty and was subjected to ever-intensifying police surveillance. Linda’s three sons — Chuck, Reggie, and Tim — were born between 1984 and 1990, and they grew up in a world in which a high percentage of young African-American men in such neighborhoods were, in one way or another, on the run from the law.

Goffman’s book is focused on the years 2003 through 2007. During that time, Taylor allows Linda and her sons to live in his house rent-free, as long as they follow some basic rules. One of those rules is not to bring the police to the door. But the boys’ criminal activity, from low-level drug dealing to attempted murder, leads to a SWAT team’s literally knocking that door off its hinges. This incident is a small part of the havoc the police cause in a series of raids intended to capture Linda’s fugitive sons.

In late 2006, Taylor kicks Linda out, telling her she cannot return if she continues to hide her sons from the police. By the following fall, according to Goffman, Chuck and Reggie are incarcerated. After visiting Chuck in jail, Goffman sits down with Taylor over beer and cigarettes in his now-quiet house, and she takes notes as Taylor gives an impassioned speech:

I’ll tell you [shakes his head] I feel sorry for the man with sons. What’s the use of raising a boy today? You feed him and clothe him and teach him how to ride a bike and you done checked his tests, and at 15 they shipping him off to juvie. You don’t know when you going to see him again. Maybe he makes it to 18 before they take him away. And once they grab him, that’s it! Your son locked in a cage, just sitting. And the worst part about it is, you still supporting him! Even though you can’t see him, you can’t watch him go to school, go to work, have kids of his own, he can’t do nothing but just sit, and you still supporting him. You put money on his books, visitation, he come home for a few months, go back in. You worry about him, what’s happening in there. You hope he come home and do what he’s supposed to be doing. You hope and pray he don’t tear your life apart, put you in jail. That’s the most you can hope for. Or you can say I can’t do it, I’m not getting involved. I wash my hands. They say it’s changed now with Obama, it’s a new era. But can’t nobody protect our sons, not even the president. I’m telling you, if I was 30 years younger, I’d be praying for girls. If I had a son I’d be done lost my mind by now. I’d start mourning and praying the day he was born.

Those words make a moving statement, spoken as they are by a man who has worked hard all his life to overcome the racism that blights American society, and who has seen his daughter and his grandchildren fall victim to drug addiction, chronic unemployment, and a criminal-justice system that imprisons an astonishingly high percentage of African-American men.

Unfortunately, it’s difficult to know if George Taylor actually said those things. Indeed, Taylor’s speech raises the possibility that Goffman embellished or conflated some of the most compelling material in her book.

Attentive readers will have noticed that Taylor’s remarks appear to have been made after Barack Obama became president. Yet Goffman dates her interview with Taylor to the fall of 2007, when Obama was just emerging as a serious candidate for the Democratic nomination, and did not yet herald the coming of “a new era” to anyone.

Even more inexplicably, readers will discover two pages later that Chuck, whom Goffman says she has just visited in the county jail before meeting his grandfather, was no longer alive in the fall of 2007, since, as the book recounts, he was murdered in the summer of that year. As far as I’ve been able to determine, none of the book’s many enthusiastic reviewers — not to mention its editors or the academic referees who vetted the manuscript for the University of Chicago Press — seem to have noticed this incongruity. (Douglas Mitchell, an executive editor at the press, declined to answer questions about On the Run.)

Standing alone, this kind of mistake might not be particularly significant. Perhaps Goffman misread her field notes, and the interview with Taylor took place in 2008 or 2009. Perhaps the reference to visiting Chuck several months after his murder can be explained in similar terms, although that seems improbable; Goffman describes Chuck’s death as a shattering emotional event for her personally, so it’s hard to imagine how she could have made such an error.

But this incident is just one of numerous and significant incongruities, contradictions, inaccuracies, and improbable incidents scattered throughout On the Run. (Goffman declined interview requests, and decided not to answer most questions by email. The Chronicle Review has invited Goffman to respond to this article.)

I approached On the Run as a legal scholar with an interest in punishment and criminal law. And the book is a compelling read. Goffman writes well, and she is dealing with fascinating and important source material, which she collected in an intrepid manner. Furthermore, her central thesis — that the hyperpolicing of poor, predominantly African-American communities, the explosion in the nation’s prison population, and the war on drugs are examples of perverse and destructive public policies — is one to which I’m broadly sympathetic.

It’s therefore all the more disturbing that what should be a valuable and important book is undermined by doubts about the author’s credibility. But the fault is not Goffman’s alone. On the Run reveals flaws in the way social science in general, and ethnography in particular, is produced, evaluated, and rewarded. That those flaws managed to go largely unnoticed for so long reflects a troubling race-related blind spot among academic and media elites. The failure of On the Run is not only the failure of an individual book and author, but of the system that produced them.

Consider another passage in the book. Goffman refers to “field notes taken in 2009,” which describe Chuck, who by then had been dead for two years, driving his youngest brother to a court hearing. This, too, failed to be noted by reviewers, although it was noted in an anonymous document sent to the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where Goffman is an assistant professor of sociology. This document raised a number of questions and was taken seriously enough by the institution that it conducted an investigation, which led to a statement on June 3 declaring that the university had found claims of research misconduct by Goffman to be “without merit.” (The university has thus far not fulfilled an open-records request for documents related to its investigation.)

When interviewed by Slate, Goffman had an explanation for the 2009 field-note passage:

Goffman said that Chuck was indeed alive at the time of the court hearing. But the field note in which he is described giving his brother a ride was not written down in 2009 — Goffman just labeled it that way in the book as part of the anonymization process. When it came to court hearings, she explained, she felt it was especially important to scramble dates because public records can be used with relative ease to identify cases and thus people. In this instance, Goffman said, her failure was in neglecting to make sure that the timeline as presented in the book was internally consistent.

There are at least three reasons Goffman’s response is unsatisfying. First, if she was seriously committed to anonymizing the identities of her subjects, she did a terrible job. It took me 10 minutes of Internet research to find Chuck’s real name, date of birth, home address, and criminal record. It took just a little more time to identify many of the book’s other central characters, as well as the precise location of the Philadelphia neighborhood — Goffman calls it “6th Street” — where the narrative takes place.

Second, as emphasized by the Columbia sociologist Shamus Khan, there is a tension between Goffman’s rationale for anonymization and arguments about hyperpolicing. “If it’s the case that the urban poor are constantly enmeshed in a web of legal problems, are already fugitives, and are subject to a police system that can and does arrest them for little or no reason, it’s not clear that anonymization affects their compromised legal status significantly,” Khan says by email. “This is especially the case given that authorities could always subpoena an ethnographer if they were so inclined.”

Third, even if one were to accept Goffman’s anonymization rationale, it does nothing to explain the specific statement that she had gone to visit Chuck immediately before her talk with his grandfather in the fall of 2007, since that is a narrative detail that could not possibly help protect her informant’s identity.

Here is another example. Goffman describes her supposed detainment by undercover police officers who are working a drug investigation of, among others, Chuck and Reggie. She is brought to the station:

They take me up the stairs to the second floor, the Detective Unit. I sit in a little room for a while, and then two white cops come in, dark green cargo pants and big black combat boots, and big guns strapped onto their legs. They remove the guns, and put them on the table facing me.

I interviewed Lt. John Walker, a supervising officer in the Philadelphia police department, and read him Goffman’s description of her interrogation. It would be an understatement to say that Lieutenant Walker was incredulous. He said that, first, only SWAT members wear guns on their legs, and that interrogations aren’t done by SWAT; they’re conducted by investigative officers, i.e., detectives. Second, detectives wear business dress on the job. Third, as a matter of basic security, all personnel are prohibited from bringing weapons into interrogation rooms, let alone placing guns on a table where they could be seized by a suspect. Anyone who breaks that rule is subject to suspension without pay. (I independently confirmed these statements with two other Philadelphia police officers.)

Again, as in the case of George Taylor’s eloquent speech, which so neatly encapsulates the major themes of Goffman’s book, it’s possible that these events took place as Goffman describes them. Perhaps, for some unexplained reason, SWAT members rather than detectives interviewed her. Perhaps they openly flouted the rules about bringing weapons into interrogation rooms. Or perhaps Goffman embellished the details of her interrogation.

Whether or not the reader is willing to give Goffman the benefit of the doubt when encountering the improbable events she relates in On the Run turns on a more general judgment about whether she is a reliable author.

Serious doubts about Goffman’s credibility have been raised by the Northwestern University law professor Steven Lubet. He points, among other things, to her assertion that the Philadelphia police, when bringing crime victims and suspects to the hospital, use the opportunity to check patient and visitor logs in search of people with outstanding warrants. Goffman writes:

According to the officers I interviewed, it is standard practice in the hospitals serving the Black community for police to run the names of visitors or patients while [the officers] are waiting around, and to take into custody those with warrants ...

Goffman describes how she witnessed a pair of police officers arrest Alex, a new father visiting his girlfriend in the maternity ward. He is taken away in handcuffs, as the mother of his child begs the police to let him stay with her and their newborn: “Please don’t take him away. Please, I’ll take him down there myself tomorrow, I swear — just let him stay with me tonight.” The police ignore her pleas, and they go on to arrest two other new fathers on the delivery-room floor. They then take time to respond to Goffman’s inquiries regarding their actions:

The officers told me they had come to the hospital with a shooting victim who was in custody, and as was their custom, they ran the names of the men on the visitors’ list.

Lubet ran Goffman’s account past a source in the Philadelphia police department, who described it as “outlandish.” I read the relevant passages to Lieutenant Walker and John Verrecchio, a detective in the homicide unit who led the five-year investigation that resulted in the arrest and conviction of Chuck’s killers. (Both Walker and Verrecchio said they had never heard of On the Run.) They responded in unequivocal terms when asked whether Goffman’s account of the “standard practice” of checking patient and visitor lists, and then arresting hospital visitors with outstanding warrants, was accurate. “One hundred percent false,” Walker said. In his many years on the force, he’d never heard of a single arrest that had been made from the use of such a procedure.

Verrecchio burst into laughter when he heard the passage describing the arrest in the maternity ward. “Never happened,” he said flatly. What about the more general claims regarding checking visitor lists? “They’re nonsense.”

The hospital incident involves an eyewitness narration by Goffman. It can’t be explained away by the hypothesis that in some instances she was too credulous in regard to accounts she heard from her subjects. Goffman has declined to identify the hospital, so it’s not possible to determine whether this incident took place. But it is possible to determine whether the statements Goffman says the officers made to her about the arrest’s routine nature are true, and they don’t seem to be. Independent inquiries by Lubet, Jesse Singal of New York Magazine, the Yale law professor James Forman Jr., and me have all failed to find anyone in the Philadelphia criminal-justice system who has ever heard of police officers’ checking patient and visitor lists in order to arrest people with outstanding warrants. (These inquiries included speaking to public defenders and other criminal defense lawyers, whose clients might have been arrested via such procedures. These lawyers would have no incentive to cover up questionable police practices, and would presumably be eager to confirm Goffman’s claims. None did.)

That leaves the possibility that Goffman’s account is true, and that the officers who explained their actions to her were lying about its supposedly routine nature, or they were lying about how they located Alex. But the problem with that hypothesis is that it makes Goffman’s witnessing of Alex’s arrest a piece of unbelievably — in the literal sense of the word — good fortune in regard to how it illustrates the book’s central thesis. If such arrests take place at all, they are apparently so rare that Forman, Lubet, Singal, and I could find no evidence of them. What are the odds that one of Goffman’s own primary informants was subjected to this extraordinary procedure and underwent this ordeal while Goffman herself was there to witness it?

Lubet doesn’t mention an even more improbable Goffman assertion about police and hospitals: “To round up enough young men to meet their informal quotas and satisfy their superiors, the police wait outside hospitals serving poor Black communities and run the IDs of the men walking inside.”

Because Goffman doesn’t reveal the hospital where such incidents took place, or the names of the officers who she says told her they were engaging in a standard departmental practice, the conflict between her narrative and the responses from the police constitute what sociologists call a “credibility struggle.”

The only source for Goffman’s account of police checks of visitor lists, as well as the memorable vignette of the delivery-room-floor arrests, and her assertion that the police wait outside hospitals so they can check the IDs of men walking inside, is Goffman herself. These assertions are not minor details in the book. They are presented as key pieces of evidence for her broader argument about how the criminal-justice system transforms social spaces into what she calls a “net of entrapment,” forcing many poor young African-American men to be perpetually on the run.

Should we believe Goffman?

Her response to Lubet’s most serious charge is revealing. Lubet — who was a criminal defense lawyer in Chicago — points out something that apparently all of On the Run’s previous reviewers and editors had missed, which is that the book ends with its author claiming she committed a serious crime.

George Taylor’s grandson Chuck was murdered in July 2007. The killing was a consequence of a feud between two groups of heavily armed young men (Goffman assiduously avoids the word “gang” in the book’s main text), whom Goffman calls the 6th Street Boys and the 4th Street Boys. Taylor’s grandsons are with the 6th Street Boys, and some months before the summer of 2007 — Goffman’s chronology is unclear on this point — someone affiliated with the 6th Street Boys kills a 4th Street Boy while trying to rob him during a dice game.

The 6th Street Boys know the 4th Street Boys are certain to retaliate. By now it has been months since Goffman spent time on 6th Street. She did so as an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, but now she is a graduate student at Princeton, and the man she calls Mike, her main connection to the group, is in prison. She writes:

When Mike got taken into custody … I lost the right to hang out on the block. … I was, at the time, only Mike’s person — there was no reason for me to hang out on 6th Street with him sitting in state prison. I was cut off from the block before I had fully worked out what was happening there.

Yet, at a moment of crisis, she is called back to 6th Street:

One night, Chuck’s younger brother Reggie, now nearly 18, phoned to tell me that a man who was loosely associated with the 6th Street Boys had killed a man from 4th Street during a botched robbery at a dice game. He insisted that I come immediately to his uncle’s basement, where the guys were assembling to work out what to do next. I sat on top of the washing machine for four hours and listened while five men berated the shooter for his thoughtless actions, discussed what the fallout would be from this death, and whether and when to shoot at the guys who they knew without question were now coming for them. In those four hours I learned more about gun violence than I had in my previous three years in the neighborhood.

In the end, nobody strapped up. The plans fizzled, and we parted ways around 3:00 a.m.

Through this emergency, it seemed I’d somehow been asked to come back to 6th Street — not as someone connected to Mike, but on my own steam. Reggie seemed to feel that as at least a resident guest of 6th Street and the group’s main chronicler, I shouldn’t miss these important events.

Goffman is asking the reader to believe that, after months of being essentially cut off from the 6th Street Boys, she is asked, out of the blue, to attend a lengthy, middle-of-the-night war council where men discuss potential murders. At this point, even the most charitable or credulous reader must be struck by how fortunate it is that Reggie’s supposed desire to chronicle the inner workings of the group conveniently demolishes all the normal methodological obstacles faced by an aspiring ethnographer.

In any event, the 4th Street Boys are soon terrorizing the neighborhood in a series of drive-by shootings:

Chuck took a partial bullet in the neck, and Steve [another 6th Street Boy] took a bullet in his right thigh. Neighbors stopped going outside and instructed children to play indoors. From prison, Mike sent heated letters home to Chuck and Reggie, voicing his outrage that they’d allow me to be on the block during these dangerous times.

In July 2007, the feud between the two groups leads to Chuck’s killing. He is shot on the streets of his neighborhood, in front of his youngest brother, Tim. He dies a few hours later at a local hospital.

Within a few days, according to Goffman, “the hunt was on to find the man who had killed Chuck.” Since Tim had seen the killer, his identity was no mystery to the 6th Street Boys. Goffman writes that she had a “pretty good idea” who the killer was but appears to take it for granted that she, too, will adhere to the code of the street and not “snitch” to the police. (In any case, she doesn’t discuss this ethical choice.) Instead she participates in a series of attempts to find Chuck’s killer:

The 6th Street Boys acquired more and more guns, gearing up for what they assumed would be coming: part three of the 4th Street War.

Many nights, Mike [now out of prison] and Steve drove around looking for the shooter, the guys who were part of his crew, or women connected to them who might be able to provide a good lead. On a few of these nights, Mike had nobody to ride along with him, so I volunteered. We started out around 3:00 a.m., with Mike in the passenger seat, his hand on his Glock as he directed me around the area. We peered into dark houses and looked at license plates and car models as Mike spoke on the phone with others who had information about the 4th Street Boys’ whereabouts.

One night Mike thought he saw a 4th Street guy walk into a Chinese restaurant. He tucked his gun in his jeans, got out of the car, and hid in the adjacent alleyway. I waited in the car with the engine running, ready to speed off as soon as Mike ran back and got inside. But when the man came out with his food, Mike seemed to think this man wasn’t the man he’d thought it was. He walked back to the car and we drove on.

Despite the enormous amount of attention On the Run received before Lubet’s review, which appeared a year after the book’s publication, it fell to Lubet to point out that Goffman’s actions as she describes them in the book constitute a straightforward example, under Pennsylvania law, of conspiracy to commit murder.

Goffman wrote a response to Lubet and posted it on her website:

First, let me say as plainly as possible: at no time did I intend to engage in any criminal conduct in the wake of Chuck’s death. … Most important, I had good reason to believe that this night would not end in violence or injury. …

After Chuck was shot and killed, people in the neighborhood were putting a lot of pressure on Mike and on Chuck’s other friends to avenge his murder. It seemed that Chuck’s friends were expected to fulfill the neighborhood’s collective desire for retribution. Many of the residents in the neighborhood were emphatic that justice should be served, and the man who killed Chuck must pay. But they weren’t actually doing anything.

Talk of retribution was just that: talk.

In the weeks following Chuck’s death, his friends occasionally drove around, ostensibly looking for Chuck’s killer. But these drives, like the talk of the residents, also came to nothing. This was so because it was common knowledge that Chuck’s killer had fled right after the shooting. These drives seemed to satisfy the feelings of anger and pain; they were a way to mourn a dear friend, and showed people in the neighborhood that Chuck’s friends were doing something.

One night, when Mike could not find anybody else to go with him, I agreed to drive. I felt ambivalent, but I went because I knew these drives were about expressing anger and about grieving, not about doing actual violence. I had talked Mike down from violence in the past, as did many other women in his and his friends’ lives.

One has to read On the Run to get the full flavor of how utterly incompatible this recharacterization of the Glock rides is with her description of them in the book, and with everything else Goffman tells us about what she calls “the 4th Street War.”

Note that Goffman can’t keep even a basic detail of her account straight. In the book, she is Mike’s wheel woman on several occasions, but in her response, she says it was “one night.” Beyond that contradiction, consider her argument that “these drives were about expressing anger and about grieving, not about doing actual violence.” In the book, the 6th Street Boys and the 4th Street Boys are portrayed as engaging in a series of gun battles. Chuck’s murder itself is in retaliation for the murder of a 4th Street Boy, which, predictably, the 4th Street Boys responded to with something other than just “talk.”

Indeed, the recasting of the 6th Street Boys’ hunt for vengeance as an essentially benign ritual is, given the portrayal of these young men in the rest of the book, hard to believe. For example, at another point in the book, Chuck and Mike “shot off a few rounds at the home of a man [Chuck] believed was responsible for blowing up his car.” (This leads to the issuing of a warrant for Chuck’s arrest on a charge of attempted murder.) In yet another incident, Mike runs into a man who, he says, had shot him while trying to rob him:

Mike told me the man looked at him, he looked at the man, the man tensed, and Mike opened fire. Mike said, ‘I ain’t know if he was going to start chopping [shooting], you know, thinking I was going to come at him. Better safe than sorry.’

Two days later, Mike and Chuck get into a gun battle with this man, which results in Mike’s car sustaining seven bullet holes, per Goffman’s own count.

And so on and so on. The notion that Mike’s late-night hunting for Chuck’s killer (and not only for the killer; note that the man Mike seems to consider to shoot while Goffman waits in the car, ready to help him escape the scene, is apparently just a random 4th Street Boy) was merely some sort of heavily armed performance art, intended for an audience made up of “the neighborhood” (at 3 a.m.?) is difficult to believe.

Goffman’s response to Lubet’s criticism leaves one of two possibilities: The book’s descriptions of the 6th Street Boys as violent criminals are seriously exaggerated, or her response to Lubet can’t be trusted. Either explanation would undermine her credibility, but it so happens that, unlike most of the incidents described in On the Run, it’s possible to determine which of these two contradictory stories is true.

Goffman’s attempts to hide the identities of her informants collapse after some fairly cursory online research. Such research turns up Chuck’s and Mike’s rap sheets, which make clear that her descriptions of Chuck and Mike as violent criminals are true to life. Given the real-world identities of the 6th Street Boys, Goffman’s attempt to recast the hunt for Chuck’s killer, and her role in it, as lacking serious criminal intent isn’t credible.

And consider another contradiction: After Goffman’s supposed first-person chronicling of the four-hour war council in the wake of the killing of the 4th Street Boy, she says that Mike berates the 6th Street Boys from prison, “voicing his outrage that they’d allow me to be on the block during these dangerous times.” Yet at On the Run’s dramatic climax, we are asked to believe that Mike put Goffman at the perilous center of the hunt for Chuck’s killer.

All of which leads to a pair of obvious questions: How did a book consisting of so many unsourced, contradictory, and improbable events get published by a prestigious academic press and praised to the skies by prominent scholars and intellectuals? And how did all these people — including those who recently investigated Goffman at the University of Wisconsin — essentially ignore her claim that she conspired to commit murder?

In May 2015, the academic world was rocked by news that a paper published in Science appeared to have been based on a fake study. The paper was co-authored by Donald Green, a prominent political scientist at Columbia, but it was actually the work of Michael LaCour, a graduate student at UCLA. The paper reported that a single brief conversation between people who had a stake in the issue and those they were interviewing could lead to significant changes in attitudes toward gay marriage.

The most striking aspect of the LaCour scandal is that, at no point in the submission, review, and publication process did anyone — including Green, the paper’s reviewers, and the editors of Science — have any basis other than, apparently, an implicit faith in that process for their belief that LaCour’s data were genuine.

The Duke University sociologist Kieran Healy had this reaction:

Science is often bitterly competitive but it depends on honesty. It is not set up to weed out liars. Imagine what research, or talks, or conferences would be like if you had to routinely question not simply the quality or competence but the actual honesty of speakers. The same goes for supervision. Consider having to check not just the quality of your grad students’ work, but whether they were lying to you about their data. Much of what we do would become simply impossible.

To which a skeptic might reply: If science is bitterly competitive, and it isn’t set up to catch liars, and there are great rewards for liars who don’t get caught, then one doesn’t need a Ph.D. in social science to realize that this system will produce a whole lot of lying, and that a lot of that lying won’t ever be discovered. It seems clear that LaCour is guilty of fabrication. We don’t know that about Goffman, but her book raises some of the same concerns.

The risk of being taken in by a dishonest author increases in proportion to the degree that the author is telling readers what they want to hear. This is true both inside and outside the academy. Skeptical readers, or those inclined to resist an author’s conclusions, are far more likely to spot inconsistencies, contradictions, question-begging, and other holes in the argument than are readers who are already convinced of what the author has to say. Telling people a story they already believe tends to narcotize their critical faculties.

This is a particularly difficult problem in ethnography, since the conventions of the practice make it difficult, and often impossible, to check many aspects of the researcher’s work. And this is an especially vexing issue in the case of On the Run, since Goffman says that, to protect her subjects’ anonymity, she destroyed her field notes and had Princeton sequester her dissertation. Pressure from critics has since led Princeton to reverse that decision, although the university requires prospective readers to travel to campus to view the document.

Writing in The New York Times Book Review, the journalist Alex Kotlowitz begins, “On the Run is, first and foremost, a remarkable feat of reporting.” That is precisely what the book is not. If it is read as a piece of journalism, On the Run violates the basic canons of that profession repeatedly.

Here is Goffman’s description of the killing that triggers the 4th Street War:

During a dice game one evening, Tino put a gun to Jay-Jay’s head and demanded all his money. Tino had moved to 6th Street only a few months before, so Chuck and Mike considered him only a candidate member of the group — a recent transplant on probationary status. Jay-Jay, who was originally from 4th Street but a frequent guest on 6th, didn’t think that Tino was seriously trying to rob him, and told him to stop playing. Tino had been “wetted” (that is, taking wet [PCP]) all weekend and was now humiliated by Jay-Jay’s refusal to take his robbery seriously; he demanded again that Jay-Jay give him everything in his pockets. Jay-Jay again refused. By this time, Chuck and Reggie were yelling at Tino to put down the gun. Steve, also wetted out that night, was laughing — he didn’t think that Tino had what it took to rob Jay-Jay or to shoot him, and said so. Tino pulled the trigger and Jay-Jay fell to the pavement.

Goffman narrates these events as if she were there, which she was not. Who is her informant? How reliable is he? What might his motivations be for telling her this? Like so many episodes in the book, this scene is presented from the perspective of what in fiction is known as an omniscient narrator, and it produces what in journalism is known as an anonymously sourced story. (Of course, as any reader of, for example, Bob Woodward’s books is aware, anonymously sourced stories delivered by an omniscient narrator are not unknown in journalism. But such practices depart from widely held journalistic norms and are often criticized on precisely that ground.)

Even more problematic, from a journalistic perspective, is the amount of material in the book that depends solely on Goffman as its source. Consider her story about being taken in for questioning by cops who put their guns on the table in front of her in the interrogation room. Where and when did this extraordinary incident take place? What were the names of the officers who questioned her? Did Goffman ever follow up with the police department, when she was no longer “participant-observing,” in regard to the incident? In fact-checking a story, those are questions that any competent newspaper or magazine editor would ask of any reporter. (Such an editor might also note that a similar scene — in which a police interrogator places a gun on a table facing a suspect — takes place in the movie Menace II Society, and that Goffman reveals that she often watched gangster movies with the 6th Street Boys.) When asked by email where she was interrogated, Goffman declined to provide this information on the grounds that doing so would be “stepping far outside the IRB guidelines for protecting the identities of human subjects.” Why an institutional review board would protect the identities of the officers who interrogated her, who were not her research subjects, is unclear.

But Goffman was not engaged in reporting. She was doing ethnography, which apparently means that readers are expected to accept the credibility of her accounts on the assumption that she herself is a reliable source. That credibility must be based on the assumption that ethnographic scholarship has been vetted adequately by academic institutions that distinguish good work from that which is inaccurate, misleading, or fabricated.

In regard to On the Run, that latter assumption appears not to hold. This becomes more evident if we consider the book’s precursor, Goffman’s article “On the Run: Wanted Men in a Philadelphia Ghetto,” which appeared in 2009 in the American Sociological Review, the top journal in the field.

The article features a survey of the five-block area making up the 6th Street neighborhood. Goffman says she and Chuck conducted the survey in 2007. (This study is also in the book.):

Of the 217 households that make up the 6th Street neighborhood, we found 308 men between the ages of 18 and 30 in residence. Of these men, 144 reported that they had a warrant issued for their arrest because of either delinquencies with court fines and fees or for failure to appear for a court date within the past three years. Also within the past three years, warrants had been issued to 119 men for technical violations of their probation or parole (e.g., drinking or breaking curfew).

To those who have conducted a social-science survey, Goffman’s results must seem implausible. First, the description of the survey indicates a 100-percent response rate, which is practically impossible for a survey of this size, and especially for a survey of a marginalized, often legally compromised, and understandably suspicious population. In an interview in June, Goffman said that the first sentence in the quotation above involved an editing error, and that it should have read, “of the 217 households that we interviewed.” That is a striking mistake for the journal’s referees and editors to allow into the article’s text.

Second, the sheer logistics of the survey as described are daunting. Philip Cohen, a sociologist at the University of Maryland at College Park, who has done many comparably-sized surveys, estimates that it would take about an hour per participating household to conduct the survey Goffman says she and Chuck undertook. That adds up to nearly six weeks of full-time work just to collect the raw data, assuming five eight-hour days per week. And that does not include all the time spent contacting the unknown but surely much larger number of households that declined to participate in the survey.

While it is easy to imagine Goffman making such an effort, what about Chuck, who at the time was being hunted by a rival gang and had recently acquired a bullet wound in his neck? Did he spend six weeks working full time on an ethnographic survey while presumably dodging both the police and the 4th Street Boys — who would kill him shortly after the survey was conducted?

More puzzling, Goffman states in her response to Lubet that “in the months before he died, Chuck was actively working to preserve a precarious peace between his friends and a rival group living nearby.” Goffman says the survey was done in the summer, during the weeks immediately before Chuck was shot. That seems like a remarkable task for Chuck to have taken on under any circumstances, but especially when he was in the midst of trying to keep a gang war from breaking out.

Third, Goffman is asking readers to believe that she, a young white woman, got 308 mostly African-American men between the ages of 18 and 30, or their proxies, all living in a five-block area, almost all of them poor, and many of them on the run from the police, to provide answers to the most sensitive questions regarding their current legal status. That is an improbable level of cooperation from a demographic group in which, as she emphasizes, a large percentage of the members are literally fugitives.

And, because the article’s referees and editors did not require Goffman to reveal much about the survey’s methodology, readers can only guess how many households Goffman and Chuck had to contact initially in order to construct their sample. (For surveys of this type, a 10-percent response rate is considered exceptionally high, which implies that Goffman is claiming that she and Chuck contacted well over 2,000 households in this five-block area.) Furthermore, Cohen points out that based on census data of comparable Philadelphia neighborhoods, 308 men between the ages of 18 and 30 is more than twice as many men in that age range as one would expect to be living in these 217 households.

But there is an even bigger methodological puzzle in Goffman’s survey. In the book, she repeats the figures of 217 households and 308 men between the ages of 18 and 30, but she also states, in another passage, that the survey of those households yielded interviews with 146 women. Note: not 146 women between the ages of 18 and 30, which would be inexplicable enough, given that she and Chuck purportedly surveyed more than twice as many men in that age range — and in a neighborhood in which women certainly outnumber men — but 146 women of all ages. Is that another editing error?

I made several attempts to interview Goffman for this article. She agreed to answer just one question, by email: a query about the disparity between the number of men and women in the household survey. That was a result, she wrote, of her decision to interview more men than women, “partly because my primary interest was in figuring out how much the experience of young men I’d gotten to know was reflected in the lives of other young men in the neighborhood, and partly because Chuck knew a lot of young men in the neighborhood and we were in part relying on his contacts to do the survey.”

The point of the survey, she explained, “was to establish if the young men I happened to get to know were ‘bad apples’ in various ways or if many other young men in the area were getting arrested, going through court cases, living on probation or with warrants, etc.” In order to measure this, “we counted men who were affiliated with the household, lived there part time, were in jail or prison or job training but expected to return there when they came home, this sort of thing.” By contrast, women who weren’t home when the survey was conducted, she says, were not included.

Cohen points out that the survey’s methodology is so flawed that its purported results are useless. For one thing, he wrote in an email, if the purpose of the survey was to determine whether Chuck’s group was made up of “bad apples,” interviewing a sample made up to some unknown extent of Chuck’s contacts skews the sample fatally. For another, using proxy responses — some of the men Goffman “interviewed” were not actually present — to measure arrest rates in a neighborhood is an extremely inaccurate method for gathering such data.

The question here, however, is not just whether the survey as described was badly designed, but rather something more fundamental. Goffman’s assertion that her selection criteria resulted in more than twice as many 18- to 30-year-old men in the survey than women of all ages remains hard to believe. As a matter of basic demographics, those households could be expected to have four times as many adult women of all ages as 18- to 30-year-old men, which means that such men are overrepresented in Goffman’s survey by a factor of more than eight (since there are more than twice as many men in her survey than women). Her explanation that this dearth of women is accounted for by the exclusion of those who weren’t home when the survey was taken is not convincing.

Given all the other problems with Goffman’s credibility, these incongruities suggest there are good reasons to doubt whether Goffman ever conducted anything like the survey featured in her American Sociological Review article, and which provides much of the quantitative data in her book. Indeed, far from being “a remarkable feat of reporting,” On the Run, and the reception it received, raises questions about why high-profile academic work is subjected to fact-checking less rigorous than that found in ordinary journalism.

In one sense, the publication of On the Run could not have been better timed. The book appeared just as concern about police violence in African-American neighborhoods was becoming a major focus of both traditional news media and social media. The deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, and Freddie Gray all seemed to reflect the very things Goffman describes in her book: hyperpolicing of predominantly African-American neighborhoods, police violence in response to petty criminal offenses, or, in the cases of Rice and Gray, no apparent offense at all, and a deep-rooted indifference not merely to the basic welfare but also to the very lives of poor young black men. “Black lives matter” became the rallying cry of the nationwide protests these killings inspired.

With police brutality and the plight of black urban neighborhoods in the spotlight, On the Run’s analytical framework and gripping narrative seemed timely and trenchant, and the book elicited a tsunami of critical praise. Cornel West called it “the best treatment I know of the wretched underside of neo-liberal capitalist America.” Christopher Jencks judged it “an ethnographic classic.” Tim Newburn, a professor of criminology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, called it “extraordinary” and “the most powerful work of ethnography that I have read for a very, very long time.” The Yale sociologist Elijah Anderson, a professor of Goffman’s when they were both at the University of Pennsylvania, concluded that On the Run was the rare scholarly work that should have influence far beyond the academy: “This brilliant book should be required reading for everyone, including President Obama, Congress, and public officials throughout the nation.”

Goffman’s book confirmed the suspicions of many readers that not only police misconduct but also standard policing practices, and indeed the very structure of the criminal-justice system, play key roles in maintaining the oppressive and dysfunctional status quo in America’s inner cities.

In retrospect, the widespread failure to notice On the Run’s contradictions, incongruities, and improbabilities can be explained, in part, by the same factors that led Science to publish Michael LaCour’s fraudulent study, which told a story many readers wanted to hear about how to overcome opposition to gay marriage.

In the same month that the Science article appeared, a set of similar dynamics persuaded the editors of Rolling Stone to run a bombshell article about a gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity — a tale that more than confirmed readers’ worst suspicions about the violent misogyny of privileged frat boys at elite institutions.

After the rape story began to fall apart, the magazine asked the dean of Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism to investigate, which led to the conclusion that the much-lauded story was, in the words of the Columbia journalism professor Bill Grueskin, “a mess — thinly sourced, full of erroneous assumptions, and plagued by gaping holes in the reporting.” How, then, did it get published? Writing in the Columbia Journalism Review, Grueskin commented:

Columbia’s report indicates that a groupthink settled upon the people responsible for doing the vetting and challenging that any such controversial story would require. The magazine placed so much trust in [reporter Sabrina] Erdely, and in the young accuser’s account, that it willingly and repeatedly suspended basic rules of journalistic due diligence.

Here again we encounter a disturbing fact: In the world of journalism, something like the Rolling Stone fiasco can happen only after a failure of what is in theory, and often in practice, a vigorous fact-checking process. By contrast, in the academic world in general, and in the discipline of ethnography in particular, there often is no fact-checking process to speak of — at least not one that will keep flawed, dishonest, and even fraudulent work from getting into the literature. In New York Magazine, Jesse Singal mused that “maybe Goffman came from a different culture of fact-checking — one that’s less concerned with the nitty-gritty details that obsess journalists and lawyers.” When asked about that, Khan objected to the idea that ethnography should be held to a weaker standard of proof than journalism, saying that such a view was both mistaken and “irresponsible.”

In the case of On the Run, groupthink and confirmation bias provide only part of the answer to the question of how this at best unreliable book achieved mainstream acclaim. Something more invidious than negligence and wish fulfillment is at work here. What that might be is suggested by the fact that, for more than a year after the book’s publication, no one — in print, at least — seemed to notice that Goffman had admitted to conspiring to commit murder, and that indeed she had, by her own account, engaged in behavior that would make her guilty of that crime in every criminal jurisdiction in America.

How did this happen? If black lives matter, why did no one care that Goffman may have come close to participating in the murder of a young black man? Why was someone who recounted driving a would-be getaway car rewarded with a big book contract and a TED talk that has been viewed almost one million times?

Imagine, for a moment, that Alice Goffman had revealed she had driven around Princeton in repeated attempts to murder an academic or romantic rival. Whether or not such an admission would have led to her arrest, it is safe to say it certainly would have put a damper on her career prospects.

For all the talk about how black lives matter, the (non)reaction in the academy and in the elite media to Goffman’s description of driving around Philadelphia with Mike suggests that such lives still don’t matter much — at least not if the lives in question are those of people low enough in social status that they find themselves trapped in the web of poverty, chaos, and violence that On the Run repeatedly deplores, yet also exploits to maximum voyeuristic advantage.

At the same time Goffman was immersing herself in the world of 6th Street, HBO was broadcasting The Wire, a crime drama focused primarily on the drug trade in Baltimore. The series elicited something close to a universal critical orgasm among high-brow reviewers. More than one compared On the Run to The Wire, and the comparison is telling. There is something about the intractable nature of the deep-rooted catastrophes that grip the contemporary American ghetto that makes it a morbidly fascinating, profoundly guilt-inducing, and yet utterly foreign and unreal land to most Americans, and to American elites in particular.

To read about a murder on 6th Street is like reading about street fighting in Syria or some other almost unimaginably distant (in psychic and practical terms) place. It is like a television show: It may be thought-provoking, captivating, even viscerally horrifying, but in the end, it isn’t exactly real — not for “us,” anyway. And because it isn’t exactly real, what happens there somehow doesn’t end up being subjected to the same moral judgments we apply to ourselves.

For Goffman, of course, it did become real, at least for a time. Like another entrepreneurial missionary, Conrad’s Mr. Kurtz, she traveled into the heart of darkness, and while there, it seems that her methods became unsound.

Here is Alice Goffman’s description, in On the Run, of her difficult transition from the world of 6th Street to graduate school at Princeton:

The first day, I caught myself casing the classrooms in the Sociology Department, making a mental note of the TVs and computers I could steal if I ever needed cash in a hurry. … The students and the even wealthier townies spoke strangely; their bodies moved in ways that I didn’t recognize. They smelled funny and laughed at jokes I didn’t understand. It’s one thing to feel uncomfortable in a community that is not your own. It’s another to feel that way among people who recognize you as one of them. …

More than discomfort and awkwardness, I feared the hordes of white people. They crowded around me and moved in groups. I skipped the graduate college’s orientation to avoid what I expected would be large numbers of white people gathered together in a small space. In cafeterias and libraries and bus and train stations, I’d search for the few Black people present and sit near them, feeling my heart slow down and my shoulders relax after I did.

Above everything, I feared white men. Not all white men: white American men who were relatively fit, under the age of 50, with short hair. I avoided the younger white male faculty at all costs. On some level, I knew they weren’t cops, they probably wouldn’t beat me or insult me, but I could not escape the sweat or the pounding in my chest when they approached. Office hours were out — I couldn’t be in a room alone with them. When I had to pass them in the hallways, I could feel my heart racing, like I was getting ready to run.

Alice Goffman is the daughter of Erving Goffman, one of the greatest sociologists of his generation. Her mother is the noted sociolinguist Gillian Sankoff, and her adoptive father (Erving Goffman died when she was an infant) is the influential linguist William Labov. Until their recent retirements, both Sankoff and Labov were on the Penn faculty. Goffman grew up, in her own words, “in a wealthy white neighborhood in downtown Philadelphia.” She attended the Baldwin School, an elite preparatory academy, before her years as an undergraduate at Penn and a graduate student at Princeton.

Given her life experience, it seems extraordinary that Goffman could have been transformed, psychically speaking, into a poor black resident of the ghetto living in terror of the police and constantly ready to go on the run.

Yet, unlike other things in her book, this passage, oddly enough, rings true. Throughout On the Run, the author’s desire not merely to understand but to identify totally with her subjects — to become in every way a part of their world — is palpable. For example, the most plausible interpretation of Goffman’s decision to write about her middle-of-the-night Glock rides with Mike is that these descriptions, which make up the book’s narrative and thematic climax, are intended to convey the lengths she was willing to go to become part of the group — to make her bones, as a Mafioso would put it. (For those purposes, it doesn’t matter whether Goffman actually drove Mike around; what matters is that she wants us to believe she did.)

Indeed, one of On the Run’s striking features is its author’s almost flamboyantly nonjudgmental attitude toward the violent criminals of the 6th Street Boys. Not that Goffman is a disinterested observer merely recording the scene of which she made herself a part. On the contrary, On the Run is a polemical and even moralistic book. It is just that Goffman’s sympathies lie almost wholly with those who are on the run rather than those who pursue them. There is exactly one paragraph in this nearly 300-page book that expresses sympathy for law enforcement:

The police are in an impossible position: They are essentially the only governmental body charged with addressing the significant social problems of able-bodied young men in the jobless ghetto, and with only the powers of intimidation and arrest to do so. Many in law enforcement recognize that poverty, unemployment, and the drugs and violence that accompany them are social problems that cannot be solved by arresting people. But the police and the courts are not equipped with social solutions. They are equipped with handcuffs and jail time.

That is very well said. If Goffman had been inclined to pursue more analysis in a similar vein, On the Run would have been a better book, and its author might have avoided some ethical pitfalls, which culminate in her claim that she participated, on multiple occasions, in a conspiracy to commit murder.

Yet to simply condemn Goffman’s authorial and ethical failings overlooks the social milieu that enabled them, just as dismissing the 6th Street Boys as “thugs” or “gangbangers” misses the extent to which they are the inevitable products of social conditions the rest of society has learned to ignore, except when the police are sent in to perform their impossible mission.

Consider one more passage from On the Run. This scene takes place soon after Goffman begins her graduate work at Princeton, when she is still in her early 20s:

Later, [Goffman’s dissertation adviser] Mitch Duneier and I were entering a restaurant in New York when a flock of birds flew out of the rafter, passing quite near us. I walked out of the restaurant and stayed out for a number of minutes, my hand on my chest. Mitch came out and gently remarked, “I’m sorry, that must have really scared you. Do you want to eat somewhere else?” Around that time a friend of Chuck’s had been shot and killed while exiting my car outside a bar; one of the bullets pierced my windshield, and the man’s blood spattered my shoes and pants as we [presumably Goffman and Chuck] ran away. I had been staying at Mitch’s spare apartment in Princeton for a few days until things calmed down.

This vignette, like so many others in the book, raises inevitable questions. Was a friend of Chuck’s actually murdered before Goffman’s eyes, forcing her to run away, with blood spattering her shoes and pants? Did she avoid being questioned by the police, who, one presumes, would have discovered both a body and Goffman’s car when they arrived on the scene? How is it that having someone murdered right in front of her merits no more than one almost throwaway sentence in her book? Did she experience any ethical qualms about — apparently — doing nothing to help the authorities solve this murder?

Duneier, a professor of sociology at Princeton and author of the 2011 article “How Not to Lie With Ethnography,” explained in an email that he had learned about this killing many months after Goffman stayed at his apartment, and that some details weren’t known to him until he read On the Run. He also stressed that “none of the material in the appendix comes from the dissertation.” (The last section of the book is a 50-page “methodological note.”) A reading of that dissertation reveals that much of the book’s most dubious material does not appear in it, including George Taylor’s speech, the murder of Chuck’s friend, and, most notably, Goffman’s purported role in the hunt for Chuck’s killer.

It seems both ethically and intellectually questionable for a graduate student to withhold this kind of information from her adviser and other members of her dissertation committee, even if those events took place before the committee’s formation. (The other members of Goffman’s committee — Viviana Zelizer, Paul DiMaggio, Devah Pager, and Cornel West — did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

But again, to focus exclusively on Goffman’s individual conduct misses the larger point. Alice Goffman is a product of system that uncritically rewards the kind of things she was doing, even when those things may have included engaging in serious crimes, or serious academic misconduct.

On the other hand, that Goffman’s behavior was influenced by powerful and often perverse social forces does not deprive her of moral agency, any more than growing up in a Philadelphia ghetto robbed Chuck, Mike, and her other friends of their ability to make moral choices.