Alice Goffman’s widely acclaimed On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City has drawn more positive attention than almost any sociology book in recent years. The success of the book led to a lecture tour of at least twenty sociology departments and conferences. Her TED talk, which was often interrupted by applause, has had nearly 700,000 views. Originally issued by the University of Chicago Press, a paperback edition was recently issued by Picador, following a bidding war for the rights. A careful reading of On the Run, however, leaves me with vexing questions about the author’s accuracy and reliability. There are just too many incidents that seem unlikely to have occurred as she describes them. One must try to keep an open mind about such things—especially regarding someone as obviously gifted and dedicated as Goffman—so readers may disagree with me about the extent of her embellishments. In any event, there is a bigger problem. As I will explain below, Goffman appears to have participated in a serious felony in the course of her field work—a circumstance that seems to have escaped the notice of her teachers, her mentors, her publishers, her admirers, and even her critics.

Goffman appears to have participated in a serious felony in the course of her field work.

On the Run is the story of the six years Goffman spent conducting an ethnographic study in a poor black community in West Philadelphia. Beginning in her sophomore year at the University of Pennsylvania and continuing through her graduate work at Princeton, she observed a group of young men in a neighborhood she pseudonymously called 6th Street. Goffman eventually moved into an apartment in the neighborhood, sometimes taking in two of them as roommates, while she chronicled their lives, challenges and, most notably, their nearly endless interactions with the law on matters ranging from trivial to homicidal.

Goffman’s research subjects, whom she calls the 6th Street Boys, were almost constantly subject to arrest on outstanding warrants—for missing court dates or failing to pay fines and fees, for parole or probation violations, or, less often, because they were wanted for serious crimes. Consequently, they led lives of perpetual “dipping and dodging” in their attempts to sidestep even the most incidental contact with the police. Lacking official identification or burdened by past convictions, Goffman’s subjects could not obtain or hold steady jobs, and were forced into an underground economy of loans, barter, theft, and small-time drug dealing, simply as a matter of survival. Ever fearing arrest, they avoided such ordinary places as hospital emergency rooms, driver’s license facilities, and even their children’s schools.

None of that was sufficient to keep the law at bay. During just her first eighteen months on 6th Street, says Goffman, she saw police officers stop and search pedestrians or drivers “at least once a day.” She “watched young men running and hiding from the police on 111 occasions,” while also seeing officers “break down doors, search houses and question, arrest or chase people through houses fifty-two times.” She saw police helicopters overhead nine times, and on fourteen occasions she “watched the police punch, choke, kick, stomp on, or beat young men with their nightsticks.” Her sympathies were with the arrestees and the fugitives, many of whom became her friends, and her mission, as she saw it, was to expose the “more hidden practices of policing and surveillance as young people living in one relatively poor Black neighborhood in Philadelphia experience and understand them.”

But how much did Goffman really understand herself?