Police Homicide Files as Situated Media Substrates: An Exploratory Essay

General books on policing provide a plethora of details on subjects such as police history, the role of the police in the community, the discretion of police officers, the subcultures officers create and to which they introduce recruits, police corruption, the use of force, and police management and administration. ¹ A smaller number of books eschew the formulaic approach of the textbook genre and examine more controversial aspects of law enforcement such as the reproduction of racial inequality, ² class relations, ³ and patriarchy. ⁴ Few of the books that eschew the formulaic approach have been as influential as Hall, Critcher, Jefferson, Clarke, and Roberts’s Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (1978). Hall et al. demonstrate how the social phenomenon of mugging became one vehicle for the amplification of coercive state control in Britain. This amplification occurred during the early 1970s, a period of crisis in British capitalism and race relations. According to certain moral entrepreneurs, mugging and the broader social malaise it evidenced threatened the very fabric of British life. Muggers, ostensibly young black urban youth, became scapegoats or folk devils at the heart of what Hall et al. identify as a moral panic. As a symbol of social malaise the mugger attracted disproportionate amounts of attention from the criminal justice system. The overreaction of the state apparatus to muggers was an integral part of a much broader gearing up of the punitive criminal justice industry. This gearing up obscured deeper-rooted crises in the capitalist state evidenced by rising unemployment, poverty, and despondency. The news media played a central role in the initial construction and later intensification of this panic, thereby encouraging a cultural climate more favorable to coercive state control strategies. This shift from consent to coercion altered the long established “truce” between the ruling and subject class. One of Hall et al.‘s original contributions to our understanding of 278 policing is their thoroughgoing analysis of the synergistic relationship between law enforcement and the media portrayal and justification of more coercive social control measures. Without this synergy and the tenuous consent that it helped manufacture, British policing would have had far greater difficulties in managing and mediating the tensions of class and race relations.