GOOD COP/BAD COP: MASS MEDIA AND THE CYCLE OF POLICE REFORM

Vol. 14 No. 4 (April 2004)

GOOD COP/BAD COP: MASS MEDIA AND THE CYCLE OF POLICE REFORM, by Jarret S. Lovell. Monsey, NY: Willow Tree Press, 2003. 189 pp. Paper $26.50. ISBN: 1-881798-45-3.

Reviewed by Michael Musheno, Center for Urban Inquiry, Arizona State University. Email: m.musheno@asu.edu.

“Crimes against the elderly” became a crime category in the mid-1970s. In his classic study of crime wave construction, Mark Fishman (1978) showed how the public relations office of the New York City Police Department interacted with the local news media to constitute crimes against the elderly as a national concern and subsequently, generate a web of policy reforms intended to protect the elderly against predatory street criminals. Never mind that predatory street crime against the elderly was of low incidence, even in New York City in the 1970s. Law enforcement agencies throughout the country developed new programs, national conferences were convened and legislatures promulgated new laws, ushering in a wave of reforms to serve and protect the elderly.

Jarret Lovell’s GOOD COP/BAD COP is, in part, an update of Mark Fishman’s early treatment of police-media relations, particularly the growth of police information officers (PIOs) and units in contemporary municipal U.S. law enforcement agencies. Professor Lovell reports on the results of a National Institute of Justice grant in which he combined survey and ethnographic research to study how PIOs shape and are shaped by media relations. He contextualizes his field work in what he calls “reflexive policing” in which the media “…create a massive feedback loop, allowing for police officials and civic leaders to reflect upon the successes and failures of various police practices and reform their strategies based upon the mediated information they receive” (p.50).

Lovell’s notion of reflexive policing acknowledges Fishman’s point that law enforcement is a party to the making of mass-mediated imagery of policing. But he is more interested in the “blow-back” of this interactive process, particularly how law enforcement adapts to mass mediated constructions of the police. Surprisingly, his thematic message is very upbeat. In the hyperrealist twist of the police coming to know about policing through mass-mediated imagery that they, in part, construct, Lovell sees the seeds of positive change or “movements toward image, organizational and even strategic reform” (p.4), or what he refers to as “corrective reflexive policing” (p.152, emphasis added).

This cultural framing of police reform excites the reader to learn how the author’s interpretation is revealed in his field research. Lovell uses surveys to identify four police departments that he studied intensively, including interviews with police managers, PIOs, local news reporters and approximately 100 hours of “first-hand observation of police-media interaction obtained during ‘on-the-scene’ live remote broadcasts, press conferences, and patrol ride-alongs” (p.16). With these data, one sees the potential of learning how individual law enforcement officers and their agencies adapt to locally generated media constructions of policing. Unfortunately, these data and what they reveal are scarcely evident in the book. When the data are interpreted in Chapter 7, we learn that the police may be more adept at spinning policing, as Fishman noted in his study, than they are in corrective policing.

While not by way of the field research, the theme of corrective reflexive policing is advanced through a general history of the mass media’s evolution in the United States in relation to changing styles of policing - political machine, professional and community policing. Lovell’s historical account dominates the book and covers a good deal of familiar ground to students of policing. For example, the media artistry of J. Edgar Hoover is fully documented. Lovell is comfortable moving through time and across genres of media to provide interesting observations of how good cop/bad cop imagery is continuously reinvented.

Through his historical rendering, Lovell does have a perspective on how law enforcement can be routinely a party to the construction of the police imagery and occasionally adept at reforming itself in response to mass-mediated messages about policing. Drawing on the view of others that new media technologies are “always potentially subversive” (p.60), Lovell argues that law enforcement, like other powerful forces in society, are most susceptible to crises of legitimacy when new modes of mass communication are first circulating in society. It is during these occasional periods of “cultural lag” when the powerful have least control of a new medium, that “corrective policing” transpires. Lovell summarizes these moments as when: “advances in printing technology disseminated information about police involvement in political machines, motion pictures took artistic license with the very real problem of organized crime, when television brought racism and domestic unrest directly into the living room and when video and now the Internet promise to make every citizen a keeper of the police” (p.13).

These are historical moments in which new media technologies coincide roughly with shifts in styles of policing. However, the connections between new media technologies, the messages conveyed through them, and shifts in policing are not firmly established. Nor is the notion of “cultural lag” fully articulated with the reflexive model introduced to frame the book. In that model, the police are active agents in the communication process while they are on the sidelines under conditions of cultural lag.

Lovell is interested in an intriguing issue in investigating whether and how information flow generates critical self-reflection sufficient to alter the social conduct of law enforcement personnel and their organizations (pp.33-35). A good test of these issues is likely to lie in Lovell’s ethnographic data. The historical treatment is simply too imprecise and insufficiently contextualized to know how information intersects with the consciousness of law enforcement personnel and the culture of police organizations.

Still the historical treatments of media technologies and shifts in styles of policing are well presented. Professor Lovell is comfortable with these historical renderings and writes with ease. These qualities, coupled with the intriguing questions he raises, make this book a good adoption for undergraduate courses on media and justice, as well as policing courses, particularly for instructors with an historical orientation.

REFERENCE:

Fishman, Mark. 1978. “Crime Waves as Ideology.” 25 SOCIAL PROBLEMS 531-43.

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