POLICING THE CRISIS 30 YEARS ON Street crime: Interpretation and legacy in Policing the Crisis

Policing the Crisis (PTC) (Hall et al., 1978) is a book written ostensibly about a crime or, more specifi cally, a crime wave. The crime in question is what the police would come to refer to as ‘street crime ’ but which everyone else at the time would come to label ‘mugging’. This is also a book about how and why young black men were singled out for labelling as the archetypical muggers behind this crime wave during the early 1970s, when the research was conducted. The book begins in a traditional criminological vein. The authors review the empirical evidence that had been mobilized to support the contention that there was indeed a street crime pandemic and one in which black males were over-represented. The evi-dence is examined and the authors are not impressed by what they fi nd. There is, they argue, little evidence to support either conjecture. Street crime, they argue, is not new; it is a perennial feature of urban life in British society. Nor was this the fi rst time a moral panic around it had occurred. As there was, consequently, no prima facie evidence of a crime wave, they see no reason to adopt the path of conventional criminology and study street robbers. Drawing on Stan Cohen’s work in Folk Devils and Moral Panic