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Getting in people’s faces: On the symbiotic relationship between the media and police gang units
Abstract
The current study explores the relationships among high-profile homicide incidents, media representations of gang homicides, and the establishment of specialized police task forces in British Columbia, Canada. The sample includes all articles on homicide published between 2004 and 2010 in a major daily newspaper (N = 2,873). We examine the attention given to gang-related homicides compared to other homicides, explore the impact of high-profile shootings on trends in reporting, and discuss the timing of media reports in relation to the creation of specialized police forces. Results are discussed with respect to the symbiotic relationship between police organizations and the media.
... These fears reflect "availability heuristic," in which the likelihood of an event occurring is related to the ease at which it can be recalled (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). Media overrepresentations of sexual violence, particularly violence perpetrated by strangers (Peelo et al., 2004;Waters et al., 2017) feed directly into women's levels of fear as they can more readily recall media coverage of sexually dangerous situations (Chermak, 1995;Gravel et al., 2017;Waters et al., 2017;Wong & Lee, 2021). However, literature has established that women routinely consider their risk to be lower when comparing themselves to others in their demographic (Chapin & Pierce, 2012;Messman-Moore & Salim, 2019). ...
Studies exploring perception-based sexual violence risk across the United Kingdom are limited, but research that examines how mothers consider their daughter's risk is even more uncommon. This interview-based study compared the experiences of 10 mothers with 10 young women based in the United Kingdom to understand their perceived sexual violence risk, and how they manage such risks. Findings indicate conflicting ideas of risk perception, yet similarities across risk management strategies, and concerns over the UK government's ability to respond to sexual violence. Prevalence of sexual violence fear, current flaws within policy, and the importance of further studying the mother–daughter dyad are highlighted.
... Like the criminal gangster youth, these synonymous historic representations were also each an outsider status. The second is the more recent history (from the 1990s) wherein one can observe narratives outlining the evolution of gang talk (Hallsworth, 2013;Hallsworth and Young, 2008 ), denoting the so-called media (re)discovery of the youth gang ( Gravel et al ., 2018 ) and policies and practices occurring in response. ...
Chapter 5 develops an account of racialized youth’s disproportionate incarceration, as a contemporaneous continuity of their historic positioning as intractable, deviant outsiders. This signifies their enduring marginalization from resources deemed essential for enabling youth’s transformative potential. This positioning, it is argued, is best understood for its antithesis to the aims of early youth penal reform which attributed the White, working-class youth a malleability and transformative potential, as future social participants and citizens. Whether viewed as utilitarian or egalitarian, early modern youth penal reform aims were consistent with the broader aims of modern justice, which professed a prioritization of proportionality. This denoted a goal to privilege restraint over brutality, with brutality indicating an outsider status of one excluded from the benefits of equal justice, including lenience. As has been explored, thus far, a paradoxical process of racialization unfolded alongside expanding enlightenment ideals, normalizing the exclusion of racialized peoples from the benefits of modern justice. The I/M framework proffers that the paradox can be read in youth’s antithetical positioning, as outsiders, but more specifically as part of youth’s recognition as intractable compared to the malleability and transformative potential attributed to the White, working-class youth. The stipulation that the past occupies the present, therefore, denotes continuity in Black youth’s contemporary positioning as a reproduction of their historic intractable designation. This, despite the change in contemporary YJ, to a purportedly more progressive system, underpinned by a reorientation of youth’s status from passive paternalist objects of care to dynamic subjects with rights.
... Some of the language and rhetoric associated with gang membership is not unique to being a gang member. For example, mainstream media have helped spread the basics of gang culture such that it is possible to feign gang membership to the uninitiated (Dunbar & Kubrin 2018;Esbensen & Tusinski 2007;Gravel, Wong & Simpson 2018;Gushue, Lee, Gravel & Wong 2018;Hallsworth & Young 2008;Howell 2007;Howell & Griffiths 2018). Parents, for example, may have concerns that their children are gang members because they listen to "gangsta" rap and wear a particular color or brand of clothing, despite no other indicators of gang involvement being present. ...
Alt-Right Gangs provides a timely and necessary discussion of youth-oriented groups within the white power movement. Focusing on how these groups fit into the current research on street gangs, Shannon E. Reid and Matthew Valasik catalog the myths and realities around alt-right gangs and their members; illustrate how they use music, social media, space, and violence; and document the risk factors for joining an alt-right gang, as well as the mechanisms for leaving. By presenting a way to understand the growth, influence, and everyday operations of these groups, Alt-Right Gangs informs students, researchers, law enforcement members, and policy makers on this complex subject. Most significantly, the authors offer an extensively evaluated set of prevention and intervention strategies that can be incorporated into existing anti-gang initiatives. With a clear, coherent point of view, this book offers a contemporary synthesis that will appeal to students and scholars alike.
... https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3214-3797 Notes 1. As described by Gravel et al. (2018) in the context of police gang units and media reporting of gang-related homicides. 2. Due to the immense number of counties in the United States, we used county population values to guide our inclusion decisions. ...
Police spokespersons exist at the core of organizational representation: they are selected to represent their agencies at all levels of engagement on all public platforms. Given their repeated exposure via traditional and electronic media, perceptions of spokesperson characteristics may impact perceptions of police and police organizations more broadly. Using online search queries of publicly available sources, we collected data for 612 spokespersons from 514 municipal police agencies across the United States. Our analyses reveal that spokespersons are overwhelmingly sworn, White men who are middle-aged and mid-rank. Our analyses also reveal some bivariate relationships between spokesperson characteristics (e.g., gender and employment status) and some variation among characteristics across states (e.g., Texas versus Ohio). By identifying and describing spokesperson characteristics at both national and state levels, we extend historical research regarding police spokespersons, contribute to the scholarly understanding of police representation practices, and theorize the relationships between spokespersons, organizations, and contemporary policing issues.
... British Columbia has experienced a significant number of gang-related shootings, many of which have resulted in fatalities (Bouchard & Hashimi, 2017; British Columbia Task Force on Illegal Firearms, 2017; Gravel, Wong, & Simpson, 2018;Jingfors, Lazzano, & McConnell, 2015). In 2009, the city of Abbotsford was named the "murder capital of Canada" after the Abbotsford-Mission Census Metropolitan Area (CMA) experienced a homicide rate of 4.7 per 100,000 residents, as compared to the Canadian average of 1.8 per 100,000 (Bolan, 2009). ...
The aim of this report is to provide local agencies, individuals and groups concerned with community safety with a deeper understanding of the issues as they undertake innovative and targeted approaches to prevent gang related violence. The work (consultation) undertaken in this report provides a focused approach to understanding violence prevention strategies aimed at South Asian Canadian youth that have been implemented in the Abbotsford region.
... Others (Hawk and Dabney 2014;Innes and Brookman 2013;Simon 1991) note that the lack of victim testimony and the need to preserve the chain of custody transforms a homicide scene into a pressurized, one-time evidence gathering exercise for detectives. Complex incidents such as those that include high profile combatants (Feist and Newiss 2001;Nicol et al. 2004), gang-involved parties (Fancsali 1999;Gravel, Wong, and Simpson 2018), or child victims (Smithey and Ramirez 2004;Unnithan 1994) are shown to require added cognitive and emotional focus on the part of investigators. Furthermore, detectives often feel that co-victims are unappreciative of their efforts to preserve and collect evidence at the crime scene (Goodrum 2007). ...
In the aftermath of a murder, homicide detectives and the loved ones of slain victims have no choice but to interact with one another over a lengthy period of time. These relationships are among the most mutually unwelcome and emotionally challenging that beset the criminal justice system. Drawing upon interviews with homicide detectives and homicide co-victims, the purpose of this study is to examine the patterned aspects of these relationships as they unfold across three predictable phases of the postmortem process: at the crime scene, during the death notification, and throughout the follow up investigation. We document distinct themes to how both groups perceive the stress and trauma that they experience across each phase of the relationship. In doing so, we seek to theorize a largely underappreciated aspect of the criminal justice process and provide direction for policy makers.
... While the prevalence of gang membership has held fairly stable over the past 20 years (Howell 2012;Tapia 2015), problem behaviors associated with gang membership remain a serious problem for individuals and communities across the United States. At the individual level, for example, it has been found to be associated with higher rates of delinquency and crime (Klein 1995;Thornberry 2003;Thornberry et al. 1993), drug use and sales (Decker and Winkle 1996), sexually transmitted diseases (Wingood et al. 2002), teen-age pregnancy (Browning, Thornberry, and Porter 1999), school dropout (Spergel 1995;Wingood et al. 2002), unstable employment (Hagedorn 1988), and injury and death (Gravel, Wong, and Simpson 2017;Range, Anglin, and Pratts 1994). Gang members are also more likely to be arrested (Katz, Webb, and Decker 2005), referred to court (Curry, Decker, and Egley 2002), and sentenced to juvenile or adult correctional facilities (Curry and Decker 2003). ...
The present study seeks to address the gap in our understanding of the role of community-and school-level factors on individual-level gang joining. We assess our research question by bringing together data from a statewide survey of more than 35,000 school youth who were enrolled in more than 250 schools and resided in more than 300 communities. We first use multi-level modeling techniques to examine the independent relationship of community and school on the likelihood of individual youth gang joining. Second, while controlling for individual-level risk and protective factors, we examine the simultaneous relationship of community-and school-level conditions on gang joining. Overall, the results of the present study suggest that both community-and school-level characteristics play a role in gang joining. The results of the cross-classified model suggests that community structural characteristics may serve as protection against gang joining. Individual-level risk and protective factors remain important for understanding gang joining. A variety of factors are related to gang joining. Though individual-level factors are important, community-and school-level factors are meaningful in the understanding of gang joining. ARTICLE HISTORY
Many police agencies – especially large police agencies – employ helicopter units as part of their operations. Helicopter units exhibit the potential to impact an array of policing outcomes, including efficiency and effectiveness. Helicopter units, however, have received only scant attention among scholarly literature. Drawing upon data from two different police agencies in the U.S.A., I provide an empirical snapshot of helicopter units as they operate in frontline policing. My analyses reveal that helicopter units engage in a variety of different activities, most of which are related to crime control, and contribute to a variety of different policing outputs, such as arrests and recoveries of stolen vehicles. My analyses also reveal that approximately half of calls for service handled by helicopter units are classified as crime-specific call-types and that helicopter units are generally quick to arrive at calls once dispatched. I discuss my findings with respect to both policing research and policing practice. I also use my findings to call for future research regarding the use of helicopter units in contemporary policing.
The contemporary youth justice (YJ) landscape pulsates with concerns about deviance and punishment amplification. The historic vision to secure society by assuring youth’s developmental needs—whether viewed as egalitarian or utilitarian—slopes unfavourably towards a criminogenic orientation succeeding in undermining the wellbeing of the most vulnerable youth. The disproportionate incarceration of Black, racialized youth, in Western states like England and Canada, occupies a central place in these concerns. This book provides an analysis emphasizing that Black youth’s position as the most punished, problematically, simultaneously situates them as the most punishable. This positioning sustains their vulnerability, by organizing a series of problematic binaries informing their recognition in the institutions they navigate and within the broader community: as punished but punishable; as victims and perpetrators—as reluctant deviants, but deviants, nonetheless. The book takes the position that Black youth’s disproportionate incarceration is not merely a matter of criminal justice, but a broader matter of the historic unequal status of Black peoples in western society. Following the tradition of deviance invention scholarship, the book writes race into early modern English and Canadian youth penal reform. To date, race’s place in early penal reform, in England and Canada, remains variously hidden, minimized, or erased, within criminological histories. This is despite what the rich scholarship on class and gender reveals about the importance of knowing the historical roots which remain relevant to our contemporary concerns.
The general public relies on news reports to guide their perceptions about crime. Previous research suggests that text elements in crime news reporting are framed in consistent packages for audience consumption, and that newspaper images exert a considerable influence on audience perception of news articles. The current study categorizes homicide articles into four themes and examines how thematic reporting relates to the likelihood of image inclusion. A sample of nearly 4,000 articles published in the Vancouver Sun was coded on a set of 107 variables relating to structural and content characteristics. Results show a significant relationship between image inclusion and the Sympathetic Victim theme, more so than for themes related to fear, sensational events, or media constructions of social issues.
Domestic violence is a widespread issue, with victims suffering emotional and physical harm and severe cases resulting in homicide. Media presentation of extreme instances of domestic homicide may affect public opinion and related public policies. This study examines the presentation of homicide in print news media in the context of victim–offender relationship (domestic vs. non-domestic) using measures of article prominence. The sample includes articles published in the Vancouver Sun over a 12-year period (2004-2015) that reported on a homicide in British Columbia, Canada, with nature of the victim–offender relationship specified (n = 3,877). Results show that domestic-related homicides are reported less prominently than are non-domestic homicides, including being shorter in length, less likely to be placed on the front page, and less likely to include an image. Results are discussed in light of media impact on public opinion and the influence on public efforts to address and prevent the consequences of domestic violence.
Media framing of an event can have a significant impact on both reader response and public opinion. Through an examination of the deadliest gang-related murder to ever occur in British Columbia, the current study extends previous research by analyzing the influence of victim characteristics on the development of a problem frame. We analyze all newspaper articles published in the Vancouver Sun mentioning at least one of the murder victims between October 19, 2007, and December 31, 2016 (N = 210). Results suggest that journalists use a number of techniques when creating a problem frame, including victim differentiation, purposeful inclusion of sources, and use of specific language. We argue that the extensive coverage of the murders provided an opportunity for the media to develop a problem frame that dichotomized victims, capitalized on societal fear of crime, and, consequently, affected calls for policy change.
Media reports can have a significant and lasting impact on public perceptions about crime and criminals. Jonathan, Jarrod, and Jamie Bacon gained notoriety in Vancouver through substantial media coverage for their involvement in gang-related shootings and criminal activity. The present study examines how the media have portrayed the Bacon brothers and their importance in the region's gang scene. We examine all articles published in the area's largest newspaper, the Vancouver Sun, mentioning the Bacon family between 2008 and 2015 (N = 401). Specifically, we explore the media's depiction of the Bacons through developing a thematic content analysis, with themes tested in a keyword analysis using a corpora comparison with a set of reference articles. We argue that the Bacon brothers' family relationship, tumultuous gang alliances, and alleged involvement in Vancouver's worst gang-related shooting led to the media overreporting and sensationalizing their criminal activity and prominence in the local gang landscape. In addition, we contend that the popular theme of crime families provided the media with a narrative that proved useful in a context where the police and the
This research, based on a content analysis of 4,445 newspaper arti- cles, examines the images that emerge from stories of criminal gangs and society's responses to them. Eight recurrent themes were identiüed. It was discovered that articles devoted to the coverage of gang crimes were outnumbered by stories dealing with various community responses. Articles reporting the results of scientiüc research on gangs constituted the smallest category. The results are discussed in light of their importance in the construction of social problems discourse and the maintenance of symbolic power and social control.
Public knowledge of crime and justice is largely derived from the media. This paper examines the influence of media consumption on fear of crime, punitive attitudes and perceived police effectiveness. This research contributes to the literature by expanding knowledge on the relationship between fear of crime and media consumption. This study also contributes to limited research on the media's influence on punitive attitudes, while providing a much-needed analysis of the relationship between media consumption and satisfaction with the police. Employing OLS regression, the results indicate that respondents who are regular viewers of crime drama are more likely to fear crime. However, the relationship is weak. Furthermore, the results indicate that gender, education, income, age, perceived neighborhood problems and police effectiveness are statistically related to fear of crime. In addition, fear of crime, income, marital status, race, and education are statistically related to punitive attitudes. Finally, age, fear of crime, race, and perceived neighborhood problems are statistically related to perceived police effectiveness.
Little is known about homicide co-offending networks at the individual gang member level. Of particular interest is whether and to what degree gang members who are selected to participate in murder are different from those who are not. The current study constructed the co-offense network of 18 participants from the Incarcerated Serious and Violent Young Offender Study who were identified as members of a prominent gang within British Columbia, Canada, referred to as the BC Gang. This gang started to form not long before seven offenders together committed a homicide that was orchestrated by the founder and leader of the BC Gang. After this offense, some of these seven offenders became the most central actors within a large network of co-offenders (n = 137) that was measured at four time periods over a 20-year period. Over this period, a second murder, like the first, was orchestrated by the leader of the BC Gang, offering a rare glimpse into the co-offending recruitment decisions made by a high ranking gang member for two separate homicides. Although only 25% of the 137 co-offenders are BC gang members (n = 35), 100% of the offenders selected for a homicide were members of this gang (n = 13). The network contained 8 separate components at the final measurement period, but all 13 homicide offenders were connected to the same network component of 48 individuals.
This article proceeds in three main parts. First, it provides an account of a moral panic that unfolded during a short period in the Australian state of New South Wales over warring motorbike or ‘bikie’ gangs. Second, it sketches a recent history of laws in New South Wales that have expanded police powers, including ‘anti-bikie’ gang laws. The article shows how policing and crime control has become politicised since 9/11 and, accordingly, the extension of police powers has entailed the blurring of the functions of police and security services. This, in turn, raises serious concerns about civil liberties and the rule of law. Third, the article interprets
the events surrounding the ‘bikie gang wars’ using classic and more recent moral panic theory as well as ideas around the ‘new penology’. The article concludes by considering the utility of applying the concept of moral panic to the bikie case.
Many Americans report that they are fearful of crime. One frequently cited source of this fear is the mass media. The media, and local television news in particular, often report on incidents of crime, and do so in a selective and sometimes sensational manner. This paper examines the role of the media in shaping crime fears, in conjunction with both demographic factors and local crime conditions. Unlike most previous research in this area, which typically focuses on only one medium, the present study examines the effects of several media — local and national television, the radio, newspapers, and the Internet. The findings address four theoretical perspectives on the relationship among the media, real-world conditions, and fear of crime.
Recent years have witnessed a proliferation of interest in the phenomenon of the gang both in the UK and across Europe. Such concern has been driven forward by growing reports of gang activity reported in the media, circulated by populist politicians as well as by academic researchers convinced the European gang has been ignored for too long. This anxiety has coalesced in a perception that the gang is a serious and growing problem, that the rise in lethal violence, as seen recently in inner cities such as London, Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool, is connected to the proliferation of the gang, and that the solution to the problem of urban gang violence lies in its suppression. This article takes a critical standpoint against these statements and challenges attempts to interpret urban violence in the UK as a problem of gangs or a burgeoning gang culture. It argues that the problem of street-based violence is not always reducible to the gang and suggests that the solution to preventing urban violence will not be found by sanctioning crackdowns or gang suppression programmes. It concludes by offering an alternate perception of the gang and urban violence and signposts areas that research on urban violence might need to address.
Despite previous research, there remains no consensus on definitions of who is a gang member, what is a gang, and what is gang activity. This paper examines these issues based on results of a survey administered to two groups involved in responding to gangs—members of a gang task force and officers of an urban police department—and a group of juvenile detainees. Considerable differences are observed among the three groups in their appraisal of the extent and impact of gang activity, number of gangs and gang members, and gang-relatedness of five vignettes. The implications for formulating a policy response to gangs are discussed.
Some social scientists contend that the nature, frequency, and severity of a particular condition or issue are often grossly exaggerated in order to justify further economic or political action or to enhance the legitimacy of various affected organizations. The result can be a “moral panic,” a situation in which public fears and state interventions greatly exceed the objective threat. Using legislative records, media accounts, and official crime data, we examine whether the response to gangs in Las Vegas constituted a moral panic. After reviewing past research, we analyze data to examine the possible discrepancy between the perceived and the actual severity of the gang problem. We also describe factors that lead to the onset and decline of the moral panic in this particular jurisdiction. We conclude with a discussion of the results as they relate to the “threat” hypothesis and to the political and organizational response to youth gangs in other jurisdictions.
For nearly four decades, police agencies of all sizes have established public information officer (PIO) functions to communicate with a variety of audiences, particularly the media. The results of a 2000 survey of PIOs shows that, indeed, whereas most describe their role as media-oriented and reactive, some PIOs also use management-oriented, proactive techniques that are consistent with established public relations models. These findings suggest that PIOs perform a wide array of traditional public relations activities and that they have been instrumental in moving law enforcement from a closed to a more open system of communication.
Specialized police gang units are a rapidly emerging form of concentrated social control. Prior research, however, into the creation of specialized gang units suffers from a number of theoretical and methodological shortcomings. These shortcomings make it difficult to understand which of several potential explanations can best account for the establishment of specialized police gang units. Three perspectives are examined that have been hypothesized by policymakers and academics to explain the creation of gang units: contingency theory, social threat theory, and resource dependency theory. Using data obtained from police departments and communities around the country, the explanatory power of measures derived from these three theories is explored, while controlling for several environmental and organizational influences.
Although researchers have begun to document the programs and activities performed by police gang units, little research has examined why police gang units are created and why they have responded to local gang problems in the way they have over the past 10 years. Using a multimethodological research design, the present study examines the factors that shaped a Midwestern police department's response to its community's gang problem. The results from the present study lend support for the institutional perspective. The data suggest that the gang unit was created as a consequence of pressures placed on the police department from various powerful elements within the community and that, once created, the unit's response was largely driven by its need to achieve and maintain organizational legitimacy.
This paper outlines the distorted nature of press reporting of English and Welsh homicides. We investigated the reporting of 2,685 homicides in England and Wales in three national newspapers: The Times, the Mail and the Mirror in the period 1993–97. By systematically charting the nature of reporting distortions, we explore the contribution of newspapers to the social construction of homicide. The study analysed a wide range of variables to explain homicide story salience: the circumstance of the killing was found to play a crucial role in whether a homicide is reported, with sexual homicides and motiveless acts being more likely to be reported. Homicides involving young children are highly likely to be reported, but infant homicides are not. These public narratives construct homicide differently to the reality of illegal killing, highlighting particular versions of ‘otherness’ and danger. Such distorted contributions to framing criminological problems may, we argue, foster political and social responses to homicide that are not based on statistical reality but media representations of reality.
This book critically examines coordination work between police officers and agencies. Police work requires constant interaction between police forces and units within those forces, yet the process by which police work with one another is not well understood by sociologists or practitioners. At the same time, the increasing inter-dependence between police forces raises a wide set of questions about how police should act and how they can be held accountable when locally-based police officers work in or with multiple jurisdictions. This rearrangement of resources creates important issues of governance, which this book addresses through an inductive account of policing in practice.
Policing Integration builds on extensive fieldwork in a multi-jurisdictional environment in Canada alongside a detailed review of ongoing research and debates. In doing so, this book presents important theoretical principles and empirical evidence on how and why police choose to work across boundaries or create barriers between one another.
Research addressing the effects of mass media on individuals is limited because it does not account for how mass communications involve human agency, various technologies, and social institutions. Recent studies show the mass media to be more open, diverse, pervasive, and influential than most researchers have argued. The mass media do not merely report on events but rather participate directly in processes by which events are constituted and exist in the world. The mass media do not stand apart from people and the various arenas in which they seek justice but are integral to their everyday processes for seeking justice. However, in the very process of participating in these various arenas of justice the mass media expose their own injustices which become subject to regulation and reform. © 1991 The Institute for the Study and Treatment of Delinquency.
The Greater Vancouver Gang Study involved research on and with 128 known gang members. The goals included developing profile data (e.g., age and ethnicity); testing classifications and definitions of gangs and groups; and determining why individuals become involved with gangs. The research focussed upon three main groups: criminal business organizations; street gangs; and wanna-be groups. The causes of the waves of street gang and wanna-be group activity in Vancouver remain elusive, but the research identifies the main reasons why individuals become involved with organizations, gangs, and groups. These reasons include economic and ethnic marginality, material gain, the attraction of supportive peer groups, and flight from abusive family circumstances.
Describing the assumptions, issues, problems, and events that characterize, shape, and define the police response to gangs in America today, the primary focus of this book is on gang unit officers and the environment in which they work. The book is broadly focused on describing how gang units respond to community gang problems, and answers such questions as: Why do police agencies organize their responses to gangs in certain ways? Who are the people who elect to police gangs? What are their jobs really like? How do their responses to the gang problem compare with other policing strategies, such as community policing? © Charles M. Katz and Vincent J. Webb 2006 and Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Based on a series of in-depth interviews with the Senior Investigating Officers (SIOs) of four high-profile murder investigations,
the article describes the various tensions and opportunities that exist between the police and the media in servicing each
other's professional needs. In particular, the article examines the nature of the police/media relationship between the period 1993 and 2006 and details
a potential changing attitude by SIOs, dependent upon the perceived needs of the investigation, towards the influence, usefulness
and impact of the media. The article concludes, however, that despite a new ‘embracing’ police outlook and potential model
of good practice, there appears to remain deep-rooted police suspicion of the media.
This paper draws primarily on research undertaken in the north of England. The research focused on assessing the current situation
in relation to the extent, and nature, of violent gang activity in three predominately Asian (Pakistani and Bangladeshi) areas.
Empirical evidence is provided of the problematic way that the term ‘gang’ is being used and, argued, abused in the United
Kingdom. The uncritical acceptance of the term gang into UK policy and policing practices and the policy transfer that has
ensued has the potential to further marginalize and isolate some ethnic minority communities. The focus here centres upon
the increased surveillance and policing of Asian communities, specifically young Pakistani and Bangladeshi males as a consequence
of the application of gang labels that elevates the perceived level of risk they pose.
The article develops a critical analysis of the concept of moral panic and its sociological uses. Arguing that some of the concept's subtlety and power has been lost as the term has become popular, the article foregrounds its Freudian and Durkheimian aspects and explicates the epistemological and ethical issues involved in its use. Contrasting the dynamics of moral panics to the dynamics of culture wars, the author shows that both phenomena involve group relations and status competition, though each displays a characteristically different structure. The piece concludes by situating 'moral panics' within a larger typology of concepts utilized in the sociology of social reaction.
One of the most groundbreaking sociology texts of the mid-20th century, Howard S. Becker's Outsiders is a thorough exploration of social deviance and how it can be addressed in an understanding and helpful manner. A compulsively readable and thoroughly researched exploration of social deviance and the application of what is known as "labeling theory" to the studies of deviance. With particular research into drug culture, Outsiders analyzes unconventional individuals and their place in normal society.
Twenty-first century policing operates in a highly mediated environment that places an onus to communicate effectively on police personnel throughout ranks and grades and across roles, but especially on the staff of police force `press offices'. This article uses survey-based research to map out the current policy and practice of police—media relations. Drawing on the research data, I argue that threads of continuity run through police—media relations including police forces' stated intentions to work with media organizations as a means of demonstrating accountability and informing various publics. At the same time a concern with controlling the flow and content of information, and with promoting favourable images of policing is evident. Following consideration of diverging and converging aspects of police—media relations I highlight current trends that suggest future policy and practice will follow a trajectory which utilizes the service of specialist civilian communicators. I conclude that this trajectory will not necessarily support democratically accountable policing and, finally, I outline a possible trajectory which could.
The news media are a vital part of the process by which individuals' private troubles with crime—as victims or offenders—are transformed into public issues. The social construction of crime problems may be understood as reflecting the types of relationships that link news agencies to their sources, and the organizational constraints that structure the news-gathering process. The ways in which the news media collect, sort, and contextualize crime reports help to shape public consciousness regarding which conditions need to be seen as urgent problems, what kinds of problems they represent, and, by implication, how they should be resolved. While much attention has been focused on the ways in which media attention to crime influences the fear of crime, it is likely that the most significant effects of media reporting are broadly ideological rather than narrowly attitudinal. By restricting the terms of discussion, the news media facilitate the marginalization of competing views regarding crime and its solution.
Over the past two decades police media units have played an ever-increasing role in managing the dissemination of information between the police and media organisations. Using the example of the New South Wales Police Media Unit in Australia (hereafter NSW PMU) this article assesses the journalistic deployment of PMU information and develops a broader sociopolitical argument explaining the growth of PMUs more generally. We analyse qualitative research data, in the form of interviews with journalists and NSW PMU staff (n = 29), and quantitative data from an analysis of two Sydney-based daily newspapers. We suggest that the growth of PMUs can be explained with reference to new programs of governing crime that developed throughout the last quarter of the 20th century as well as significant changes to the global media landscape.
The popular image of youth gangs is largely dependent on law enforcement data and subsequent media reinforcement of these data in the popular press. Recent research on youth gangs, however, calls into question the accuracy of these portrayals. In spite of an ever-increasing body of research that contradicts the popular stereotype of gangs, the media perpetuates this inaccuracy. In a review of all gang-related articles appearing in the nation's "big three" newsweeklies (Newsweek, Time, and U.S. News and World Report) between 1980 and May 2006, we conclude that there was a strong tendency to provide stereotypical depiction of gangs and gang members that promote misperceptions about youth gangs, their members, and their group characteristics. Youth gangs are problematic enough in reality without the media contributing to exaggerations of their attributes that are associated with violence and organizational capacity.
This article examines how the news production process affects the presentation of crime in the news media. Content analysis and ethnographic methods were used to determine the types of crime presented. The media rely heavily on criminal justice sources for crime story information; this reliance influences the type of stories selected and how they are presented to the public. The news media and the sources are motivated to cooperate because cooperation allows each party to accomplish organizational objectives. The media presents a distorted picture of the types of crime known to the police because sources define what is important about crime in a way that furthers organizational needs. News media select and produce those stories which they think are of most interest to the public. This research finds that violent crime predominates in print and electronic media. The presentation of crime, however, varies somewhat, depending on the need for news media to satisfy format requirements and on their degree of access to serious crime.
In 1980, Phoenix, Arizona, experienced a "crime wave." A structural equation model based on a two-wave survey of the population shows that the crime wave had a powerful impact that was almost a mirror image of what the fear of crime literature would predict. Demographic groups thought to be most fearful (e.g., women and the elderly) were least affected while groups thought to be least fearful (e.g., well-educated whites) were affected most. In addition to demographic factors, our analysis demonstrates that crime rate perceptions and confidence in the police are integral components of fear, especially in the context of a crime wave. These findings have important implications for crime policy specifically and for criminological research generally.
This article examines the news media's role in federal criminal justice policy-making. Specifically, we examine how news coverage of cele brated events affected the gun control policy-agenda over a twenty-five year period by linking the presentation of gun issues in the New York Times to corresponding changes in the number of congressional hearings on gun control. Moreover, we examine the implementation of two pieces of federal gun legislation as case studies to more clearly identify the role of the media in federal criminal justice policy-making. Our results indi cate that the media affect the federal policy process in three ways: first, the media can open a window of opportunity to consider policy change; second, the media can promote a limited range of policy alternatives; and third, the media can promote the interests of policy entrepreneurs.
Interpersonal attraction of “men seeking men” in personal advertisements is investigated by using an electronic telephone advertisement system. One hundred and sixty-seven phone advertisements from men seeking men in Ottawa, Canada, were used in this study. Content analysis reveals themes and patterns in regard to inclusion of genital language, sexual roles, sexual acts, body language, race, and age. Results reveal a strong emphasis in advertisements' content on physical appearance and sexual relationships. Physical appearance and comments related to sex were mentioned in most ads, suggesting the importance of these two issues as strategies for securing responses when placing personal advertisements seeking men.
The rise of Chinese youth gangs in urban centers in North America is a social phenomenon that has gained prominence in the past decade and a half. This study examines the characteristics and processes of four gangs operating in the Chinatown of Vancouver, Canada, over a three-year period (1975-1978). The gangs were composed entirely of teenaged immigrants recently arrived from Hong Kong who were engaged in a wide variety of antisocial and criminal behaviors. Three sociocultural antecendents are identified as important in the development of Chinese youth gangs: (1) the weakening among many Hong Kong immigrants of the traditional Chinese pattern of close parental guidance and supervision; (2) the resultant emergence of youth peer-groups who challenge parental authority and Chinese values; (3) the strong attraction of North American success symbols for gang members, and their perceived inability to achieve success through legitimate means because of difficulties in learning English.
The relationship between Chicano gangs, crime, the police, and the Chicano community is complex. Neither the problem of youth gangs nor the specialized police units created to cope with this problem arises in a social vacuum. Rather, both emerge from a particular historical structuring of social, economic, and political relations. This paper investigates how and why a moral panic arose concerning Chicano youth gangs in Phoenix in the late 1970s and early 1980s. A variety of qualitative and quantitative data from media reports, interviews, and juvenile court records are used to assess whether it was the actual behavior of Chicano youths or the social imagery surrounding them that formed the basis for the gang problem in Phoenix. I suggest that the image of gangs, and especially of Chicano gangs, as violent converged with that of Mexicans and Chicanos as different to create the threat of disorder. In addition, it was in the interests of the police department to discover the gang problem and build an even greater sense of threat so as to acquire federal funding of a specialized unit.
Police organizations must strategically control their external environment in order to maintain organizational legitimacy. Exploiting their relationship with the news media is one way to accomplish this goal effectively. Despite the documented importance of crime, justice, and social control as a news topic, there is a limited understanding of the variables driving how police and media evaluate this relationship. This study used data collected from a national sample of police media personnel to fill this gap, and concluded that the police and media valued their interdependent relationship, but for different reasons. Police public information officers recognize the power of the media and attempt to use this power to promote the organization. News personnel are satisfied because the police provide data so they can easily produce crime stories. The implications for understanding how police organizations control their external organization are discussed.
The past 30 years have seen vast changes in our attitudes toward crime. More and more of us live in gated communities; prison populations have skyrocketed; and issues such as racial profiling, community policing, and "zero-tolerance" policies dominate the headlines. How is it that our response to crime and our sense of criminal justice has come to be so dramatically reconfigured? David Garland charts the changes in crime and criminal justice in America and Britain over the past twenty-five years, showing how they have been shaped by two underlying social forces: the distinctive social organization of late modernity and the neoconservative politics that came to dominate the United States and the United Kingdom in the 1980s. Garland explains how the new policies of crime and punishment, welfare and securityâand the changing class, race, and gender relations that underpin themâare linked to the fundamental problems of governing contemporary societies, as states, corporations, and private citizens grapple with a volatile economy and a culture that combines expanded personal freedom with relaxed social controls. It is the risky, unfixed character of modern life that underlies our accelerating concern with control and crime control in particular. It is not just crime that has changed; society has changed as well, and this transformation has reshaped criminological thought, public policy, and the cultural meaning of crime and criminals. David Garland's The Culture of Control offers a brilliant guide to this process and its still-reverberating consequences.
Mods and Rockers, skinheads, video nasties, designer drugs, bogus asylum seeks and hoodies. Every era has its own moral panics. It was Stanley Cohen’s classic account, first published in the early 1970s and regularly revised, that brought the term ‘moral panic’ into widespread discussion. It is an outstanding investigation of the way in which the media and often those in a position of political power define a condition, or group, as a threat to societal values and interests. Fanned by screaming media headlines, Cohen brilliantly demonstrates how this leads to such groups being marginalised and vilified in the popular imagination, inhibiting rational debate about solutions to the social problems such groups represent. Furthermore, he argues that moral panics go even further by identifying the very fault lines of power in society.
La Couverture Médiatique aux États-Unis, au Canada et au Québec: La Construction d'un Discours
- Patricia Brosseau
- Jean-Pierre Guay
- Chantal Fredette
Brosseau, Patricia, Jean-Pierre Guay and Chantal Fredette. 2014. "La Couverture Médiatique aux États-Unis, au
Canada et au Québec: La Construction d'un Discours." Pp. 137-150 in Le Phénomène des Gangs de Rue:
Théories, Évaluations, Interventions, edited by Jean-Pierre Guay, and Claudette Fredette. Montréal: Les Presses de
l'Université de Montréal.
Gang-Style Slayings: Two Dead, Six Wounded, Police Call for More Officers to Battle Gangs
- Jeff Lee
- Linda Nguyen
- Sunny Freeman
Lee, Jeff, Linda Nguyen, and Sunny Freeman. 2007. "Gang-Style Slayings: Two Dead, Six Wounded, Police Call for
More Officers to Battle Gangs," The Vancouver Sun, August 10.
Metro Cops Join to Fight Gangs; 45 Officers will be 'Getting in the Faces' of Known Gangsters
- Neal Hall
- Kim Bolan
Hall, Neal and Kim Bolan. 2007. "Metro Cops Join to Fight Gangs; 45 Officers will be 'Getting in the Faces' of Known
Gangsters," The Vancouver Sun, November 7.
Representations of Gangs and Delinquency: Wild in the Streets?
- Paul A Perrone
- Meda Chesney-Lind
Perrone, Paul A. and Meda Chesney-Lind. 1997. "Representations of Gangs and Delinquency: Wild in the Streets?"
Social Justice 24(4):96-116.
People and Folks. Chicago: Lake View
- John M Hagedorn
Hagedorn, John M. 1988. People and Folks. Chicago: Lake View.
From Getting In to Getting Out: The Role of Pre-Gang Context and Group Processes in Analyzing Turning Points in Gang Trajectories
- Karine Descormiers
Descormiers, Karine. 2013. "From Getting In to Getting Out: The Role of Pre-Gang Context and Group Processes in
Analyzing Turning Points in Gang Trajectories." Ph.D. dissertation, School of Criminology, Simon Fraser
University, Burnaby.
Un État Francophone des Connaissances sur le Phénomène des Gangs de Rue
- Jean-Pierre Guay
- Chantal Fredette
Guay, Jean-Pierre and Chantal Fredette. 2014. "Un État Francophone des Connaissances sur le Phénomène des Gangs
de Rue." Pp. 7-16 in Le Phénomène des Gangs de Rue: Théories, Évaluations, Interventions, edited by Jean-Pierre
Guay, and Chantal Fredette. Montréal: Les Presses de l'Université de Montréal.
The History of Vancouver Youth Gangs: 1900–1985 Master's thesis, School of Criminology
- Michael G Young
Young, Michael G. 1993. " The History of Vancouver Youth Gangs: 1900–1985. " Master's thesis, School of
Criminology, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC.
Chibnall Revisited: Crime Reporters, the Police, and 'Law-and-Order News
---. 2010. "Chibnall Revisited: Crime Reporters, the Police, and 'Law-and-Order News.'" British Journal of
Criminology 56(4):1-17.
Hell to Pay: Hells Angels vs. the Million-Dollar Rat
- Neal Hall
Hall, Neal. 2011. Hell to Pay: Hells Angels vs. the Million-Dollar Rat. Mississauga: John Wiley and Sons.
The History of Vancouver Youth Gangs: 1900-1985
- Michael G Young
Young, Michael G. 1993. "The History of Vancouver Youth Gangs: 1900-1985." Master's thesis, School of
Criminology, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC.