Vol. 10 No. 8 (August 2000) pp. 484-488.

COP KNOWLEDGE: POLICE POWER AND CULTURAL NARRATIVE IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICA by Christopher P. Wilson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. 281 pp. Cloth $42.00. Paper $16.00.

Reviewed by Stuart A. Scheingold, Department of Political Science, University of Washington, Seattle.

This is a complex book that will be of interest to political scientists who appreciate the role of popular culture in constructing the social meaning of law, crime, and punishment. What I found most intriguing about Wilson's project was a counter intuitive message that gains in force and persuasiveness as the analysis proceeds. Wilson claims that cultural narratives about the police have, with increasing effectiveness and consistency over the course of the 20th Century, privileged a populist
policing narrative -- that is, a narrative associating police and policing with responsive grassroots democracy. Wilson's claim takes on meaning as he uncovers the sharp discontinuity between the BOTTOM-UP, populist cultural narrative and the internal bureaucratic narrative of managerial professionalism that expressed the aspirations of 20th Century police reformers from Theodore Roosevelt, through Orlando Wilson and Daryl Gates to William Bratton. However, to further complicate an already elusive message, Wilson reports that, despite the ostensible authority of the managers, the culturally produced knowledge fed back into "the everyday routines of police work [becoming] . . . actually encoded in them" (p. 12).

What emerges from Wilson's analysis, then, is an intricate, contingent and politically inflected picture of the production and influence of cultural knowledge about policing. On the one hand, the cultural narrative provides democratic political cover for the introduction of top down, impersonal policing practices. On the other hand, the narrative feeds back into the department and is internalized by rank and file officers in ways that tend to subvert both managerial authority and, paradoxically, the prospects for democratic policing. In an effort to make all this a little more concrete I will summarize the five chronologically ordered, substantive chapters that comprise the core of the book. These chapters are preceded by an Introduction, in which Wilson locates his inquiry intellectually and presents
its basic arguments, and are followed by a recapitulative Epilogue.

Before getting more deeply into the book a few caveats are in order. This may not be an easy book for political scientists to appreciate. True, it is set in readily accessible terrain. The cultural contexts are familiar: including, for example, the novels of Joseph Wambaugh, the photos of Weegee, and the reportage of Stephen Crane and other journalists. Moreover, Wilson draws heavily on the research of well-known social scientists such as Jerome Skolnick, James Q. Wilson and others. Finally, political scientists often incorporate one of Wilson's principal organizing themes, the

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development of democratic populism over the course of the 20th Century, into their own analysis of American politics.

On the other hand, Wilson is a professor of English and American studies and, as such, he writes for "cultural historians and literary critics, for news analysts and newsreaders, for fans of popular culture and its critics -- and if at all possible, for citizen-readers among all of the above" (p. 8). Accordingly, he eschews the language and explanatory models of the social sciences and deploys instead the unfamiliar idioms of cultural studies. He does so in the service of constructing an indeterminate and mutually constitutive understanding of the interactions among policing practices, politics, and the production of cultural knowledge about policing.
For every observation there are counter examples, each continuity is qualified by an element of discontinuity. As a consequence, the reader (at least this reader) frequently feels cast adrift in a sea of uncertainty. It may also be more than a little off-putting that Wilson, in part, treats the work of social scientists as cultural texts -- interrogating their research and finding it revealing of cultural truths but wanting as scientific knowledge. In so doing, he, in effect transforms the "anthropologists" into the "natives."

Still, I believe this kind of study can make a valuable contribution to the growing body of interdisciplinary research that comprises POLITICAL CRIMINOLOGY (Scheingold 1998). Let me try to explain why -- first by a chapter-by-chapter account of Wilson's principal themes and findings and, then, by a concluding paragraph that indicates how Wilson's work articulates with an important body of work in political science.

Chapter One is set in the context of the turn of the 20th Century struggle between machine and progressive politics in New York City, as that struggle
played out in newspaper coverage of Police Commissioner Teddy Roosevelt's police reform efforts. Reform in this era meant neutral, impersonal and
hence professional law enforcement -- without fear or favor, as the saying goes. As such, reform was in conflict with both the machine politics of the Democratic Party and the grass roots populism with which it identified. It might have been expected that coverage would break down along party lines, given the overt and partisan nature of newspapers in this era. In particular, it might have been expected that those newspapers identified with the Democratic Party would have objected to the police crackdown for being in conflict with the working class interests and values as represented both by the prostitutes themselves and by grassroots street life. To some extent this was true, but the coverage (illustrated primarily by Steven Crane's reporting) also revealed the beginnings of populist policing narrative. That narrative endorsed police action against prostitutes in the name of the ostensibly middle-class value of civility but that presented civility as intrinsic to the well being of society as a whole.

Chapter Two moves to the mid-20th Century terrain of consensus politics, scientific policing, and the popular culture of "police procedurals" embodied
in the "semi-fiction" (p. 77) of the NAKED CITY (first as film and then as TV), the crime novels of Ed McBain, and the photographs of Weegee. In this
iteration, professional reform transcends the neutral and impersonal law enforcement of the previous era -- incorporating in addition scientific expertise to detect and deter crime and to identify and successfully prosecute

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criminals. Insofar as the "police procedurals" highlighted scientific crime fighting techniques, the cultural and managerial narratives were consonant with one another -- not , however, with police populism. However, the procedurals also represented the police as fallible human beings struggling against the law-breakers on behalf of the law abiding. This depiction was rooted in an acknowledgement of the insufficiency of scientific crime fighting - thus underscoring the sense of futility that police officers found so vexing. At the same time, the police procedurals frequently featured clever criminals who were portrayed with a certain grudging admiration as
formidable, if unsavory, adversaries -- further underscoring the heavy burdens policing. The cultural narrative, thus, humanized police officers, who were represented as working stiffs and who were largely indistinguishable from others in the working class. Of course, this populist vision of policing was sharply at odds with the efforts of police managers to build reform on a foundation of scientific methods and bureaucratic efficiency.

Chapter Three shifts to the centrifugal political terrain of the 1960s during which the paramilitary policing of swat teams became increasingly widely accepted among police managers. These were the police that James Baldwin famously, and it would seem appropriately, referred to as a "hostile army of occupation." Nonetheless, Wilson tells us that Joseph Wambaugh, not James Baldwin, was the spokesperson for this era's "cop knowledge." In his popular novels and television spin-offs, Wambaugh wove an explicitly political narrative of policing that aligned the police with the so-called silent majority and with the then ascendant law and order conservatism. In Wambaugh's telling, the police comprised a multi-racial, multi-ethnic "pluralistic fraternity" in an ever more unpredictably violent society that
was coming apart at the seams. This hostile setting, a society grievously divided against itself, in effect imposed paramilitarism on police departments. Old style policing simply did not and could not work, or so the narrative claims. It is interesting to note that social scientists play a significant role in this chapter with Albert Reiss' (1971) survey research seen as making a largely specious contribution to the populist narrative by exaggerating the incivility confronted by rank and file officers (pp. 105-107). Wilson counterpoises Reiss against Jerome Skolnick's (1967) more authentic but marginalized narrative in which the rank and file police
officer was portrayed as doubly, and dangerously, alienated from "everyday citizens" AND FROM "the ruling forces he often served" (p. 109).

Chapter Four and Chapter Five offer distinct but related takes on the 1980s. In combination, however, they reveal powerful synergies among a conservative political reading of white flight from the cities, a tragic reading of the policing predicament, and the emergence, ascendance, and colonization of COMMUNITY POLICING. In the first of these two chapters, Wilson locates this 1980s cop knowledge in the "true crime" genre -- principally cop shows on TV as well as books about the police and about serial killers. In "true crime" the reporters, he claims, cast their lot with the rank and file police officers and, in effect, make common cause with them against bumbling police managers and the hostile cities that they police. This does not mean that the reporters ignored issues like police corruption and racism. Instead, they contextualized and thus valorized (warts and all) the police response to the corrosive impact of the city which "looms as an ominous bestial antagonist" (p. 157) and to police managers who have "sold out the rank

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and file with stupidity and greed" (p. 155; the second quotation is taken from Blau 1993). Similarly, Wilson fails to find within "true crime" any vestiges of the "romanticizing of the gangster" that characterized the mid-century cop knowledge of "The Naked City" (p. 155). In other words, while contextualizing the plight of police officers, the "true crime" narratives provides no context for criminal acts or the criminal other -- and not even a glimpse of the structural correlates of crime.

Chapter Five uses turns to BOSTON GLOBE crime reporting that has a distinct true crime flavor as a way of putting some meat on the abstract claims of Chapter Four. Wilson's account links a tragic reading of the police mission with the "broken windows" criminology of James Q. Wilson and George Kelling -- here offered as a companion cultural narrative -- and traces the convergence with the dominant neo-liberal politics of 1980s. This convergence led to increasing support for community policing while at the same time working at cross-purposes with its manifest objectives. That is to say, under pressure from a newspaper generated juvenile "crime wave" and the ensuing moral panic (see Hall, Critcher, Jefferson, Clarke, and Roberts 1978), community policing was transformed from a project for the co-production of order by the department working together with the community into top-down zero tolerance policing (see Lyons 1999). "At the moment when
Boston police forces were supposedly implementing a caring, personal, neighborhood-oriented community policing strategy -- feeling as it were our pain -- juvenile street crime was being subjected to ever-harsher police and judicial treatment" (p. 174). Journalistic complicity in this subversion of community policing is traced to reporting that lent credence to the belief that juvenile crime posed a dire threat to the social order. Newspaper accounts further fueled the fire by a condemnation of the juvenile justice system, which was vilified for failing to treat dangerous juveniles as adults. At the heart of all this was "individuating the defendants, thus
reinforcing the neoconservative mainframe's theme of individual moral choice" (p. 192). Crime reporters also tended to ignore the extent to which non-
violent offenders were being swept up and imprisoned by get tough policing strategies.

Wilson recounts all of this (and more) in a dense, open textured tale replete with qualifying detail, which, in his own terms, "invite[d] many readings" (p. 215). Consequently, as has already been mentioned, there is reason to believe that Wilson's approach might prove off-putting to political scientists. Nonetheless, I believe that it is important to persevere and to welcome further such studies by Wilson and others. Although there may well be no undergraduate political science courses, for which this book would be appropriate, there could and PERHAPS SHOULD be such courses. Surely, there is already a vein of research conducted by prominent and well-respected political scientists -- Murray Edelman (1988), Lance Bennett (1996), Austin Sarat (in press), Jonathan Simon and Malcolm Feeley (1995), and others -- that incorporates popular culture into persuasive and revealing work. This work can be seen as constituting our side of a bridge between political science and literary and cultural studies while Wilson's book arguably is a bridge from them to us. Note in particular that that Wilson's book incorporates social science -- albeit in a not always flattering fashion. In any case, I see this as a promising connection and I hope that my review has indicated how and why I came to this conclusion.

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REFERENCES:

Bennett, W. Lance. 1996. NEWS: THE POLITICS OF ILLUSION. New York: Longman.

Blau, Robert. 1993. THE COP SHOP: TRUE CRIME ON THE STREETS OF CHICAGO.
Reading, Ma.: Addison-Wesley Pub. Co.

Edelman, Murray. 1988. CONSTRUCTING THE POLITICAL SPECTACLE. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.

Hall, Stuart, Charles Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian
Roberts. 1978. POLICING THE CRISIS: MUGGING, THE STATE, AND LAW AND ORDER.
London: Macmillan.

Lyons, William. 1999. THE POLITICS OF COMMUNITY POLICING: REARRANGING THE
POWER TO PUNISH. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Reiss, Albert, Jr. 1971. THE POLICE AND THE PUBLIC. New Haven: Yale
University Press.

Sarat, Austin. In press. WHEN THE STATE KILLS: CAPITAL PUNISHMENT AND THE
AMERICAN CONDITION. New York: Oxford University Press.

Scheingold, Stuart A. 1998. "Constructing the New Political Criminology:
Power, Authority, and the Post-liberal State" LAW AND SOCIAL INQUIRY, 23:
857-895.

Simon, Jonathan and Malcolm Feeley. 1995. "True Crime: The New Penology and
Public Discourse on Crime." In PUNISHMENT AND SOCIAL CONTROL: ESSAYS IN
HONOR OF SHELDON MESSINGER. Ed. Thomas G. Blomberg and Stanley Cohen. New
York: Aldine De Gruyter.

Skolnick, Jerome H. 1967. JUSTICE WITHOUT TRIAL: LAW ENFORCEMENT IN
DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY. New York: John Wiley.