Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order

How and why did an activity familiar in London streets as long ago as the 1860s come to be described by the British press and police in August 1972 as ‘a frightening new strain of crime’? And if mugging—for this is the crime in question—was new in 1972, how could comparative statistics be produced for its incidence going back to 1968?

The authors of this highly acclaimed study argue that mugging is first and foremost a socially constructed phenomenon. It was introduced into public consciousness by media coverage of muggings in the United States and police anticipation of its appearance in Britain. Its ‘discovery’ in 1972 was followed by a crime control explosion. It received massive media coverage. Judges, politicians, and moralists presented it as an index of the growing tide of violence, of the breakdown of public morality, and of the collapse of law and order. Sentences for petty street crime jumped from six months to twenty years.

This book examines the political, economic, and ideological dimensions of mugging—setting the problem of ‘crime’ in its wider historical context. It shows how the particular social definition of mugging constructed by the media and crime control agencies was able to connect with existing social anxieties in the population at large and argues that this has helped to legitimate a more coercive state role in a period of growing political, economic and racial conflict.