Christopher P. Wilson is an English professor and director of American Studies at Boston College. His book, Cop Knowledge: Police Power and Cultural Narrative in Twentieth Century America, reflects an academic training in narrative analysis, cultural theory, and history. For criminologists and police scholars, therefore, this book is problematic for those attempting to read it as a scholarly work on policing. Wilson’s own caveat on page 8 that his book is meant for “citizen‐readers”, “cultural historians”, and “literary critics”, and does not attempt to “register within contemporary criminological debates” should be heeded. Although the back cover suggests this book is “approachable” and “engaging,” Wilson’s style of writing is so dense and jargon‐filled that it really seems to be meant for an eclectic, upper‐level group of literary and/or media‐studies scholars. That said, this book does contain some interesting historical features that could be of interest to police scholars, albeit it is difficult to view them as part of a larger, coherent argument the reader can trace from beginning to end.
Wilson’s book is organized into five chapters (not including an introduction and epilogue) that chronologically trace certain periods of policing during the twentieth century. Wilson uses films, fictional books, crime media, and some well‐known scholarly works to illustrate these periods. The overall premise of the book is to “reintroduce the specific context of police history to the interpretation of literary and mass‐cultural genres, where it is long overdue” (p. 9). Wilson deemed this necessary after his “startling paradox” that societal knowledge of policing, and related issues like crime and disorder, originate from the “agents of disorder” themselves – the police (see p. 5). His book, then, aims to provide a revisionist history of policing during the twentieth century without sipping from this tainted well of knowledge. Three areas of concern guide his work: historical policing issues; the cultural representation of policing; and theoretical issues related to the reciprocal relationship between police power and the cultural interpretation of that power (i.e. the “ethnographic predicament” of writing about the police without contributing to their power) (see p. 7).
The first chapter, “‘The machinery of a finished society’: Stephen Crane, Theodore Roosevelt, and the police”, provides the reader with a lengthy account of the Dora Clark affair. For readers unfamiliar with this episode in police history, the author Stephen Crane (Red Badge of Courage), during the early 1900s, was working on some sketches of the seedy “tenderloin” district of New York City. Dora Clark was an alleged prostitute working in the area who Crane saw arrested, evidently unfairly. He eventually championed her case, consequently tarnishing his own reputation. At this time, the New York City Police Department was under the leadership of Teddy Roosevelt, whose aim was to clean up corruption (especially in areas like the tenderloin district) and professionalize the department. The point of this chapter is to show how there were many interpretations of the Dora Clark affair (NYPD/Tammany Hall/liberal versus conservative newspapers, etc.), and each interpretation led to a different conceptualization of police power (fair/unfair, class‐biased/egalitarian, etc.).
Chapter two, “‘And the human cop’: professionalism and the procedural at mid‐century,” explores the era of police history exemplified by Joe Friday’s “just the facts, ma’am” phrase. Wilson critiques what he calls “this ‘narrative of police professionalism”’ that he considers appalling because police were not really acting as professionals. Here is where having a background in policing can be a drawback, as his criticisms of the professional movement always seem to be just left of center. In other words, it is unclear as to whether Wilson thinks the professional movement did not occur, or that it did not achieve its intended results. In either case, police scholars know that a shift did occur in police practices during this – time technology, patrol cars, O.W. Wilson, J. Edgar Hoover, and so on did profoundly change policing. What no one disputes, and which Wilson seems to think he uncovered himself, is that this movement did not lead to true professionalism among police, and that these reforms actually served to further strain already poor police‐community relations. This chapter, however, does offer an interesting analysis of the procedural genre, with the film The Naked City used as a colorful example.
The third chapter, “Blue knights and brown jackets: beat, badge, and ‘civility’ in the 1960s”, is written as an exposé of how academic research served to bolster the power of the police, with Albert J. Reiss’s Police Services Study as the prime culprit. No, your eyes are not deceiving you. According to Wison, the sole contribution of Reiss’s “supposedly empirical criminological study” (p. 9) was to blame uncivil civilians for bringing police incivility on themselves, reinforcing “the police’s own lament about a hypocritical, dependent citizenry, in need of the police to solve its most private matters, yet often leaving the scene before police arrive” (p. 106). Wilson seems outraged at the idea substantiated by Reiss’s study and immortalized by Egon Bittner’s famous quote, that police work is responding to citizen’s concerns that “something that ought not to be happening and about which someone had better do something now!” Wilson’s underlying point that all sources of knowledge (academic research/media/fiction) are biased to some degree, and cannot claim to represent truth, is correct. What is incorrect is to compare the work of scholars like Albert Reiss and Jerome Skolnick to that of the novelist Joseph Wambaugh, as if they all make similar contributions to “cop knowledge” (i.e. that “literary studies” make equally refined and defensible methodological contributions as “observational data”, or “statistical evidence”). Wilson’s belief that, against the backdrop of Reiss’s self‐proposed “sociological expose of what ‘real’ police work really is” (p. 213), Wambaugh’s novels are not “fictionalizations” but rather more correctly read as “street‐level (antiacademic) ethnographies” (p. 111) does a disservice to novice readers who might come to believe Reiss to be the ivory tower anti‐Christ that must be slain by the blue‐collar common sense of Wambaugh. The polemical stance taken by Wilson on this issue overshadows his more interesting, and accurate, analysis of Luis Rodriguez’s memoir of Chicano street gangs in Always Running.
The title of chapter four, “Hardcovering ‘true’ crime: cop shops and crime scenes in the 1980s” describes the “blurred line between cop and pop” (p. 132) for which the genre of true crime is famous. Wilson looks at how urban conditions during this era (high crime, urban decline, “white flight” to the suburbs, etc.) affected the news media and metropolitan police departments in a similar way, summed up by the word “stagnation”. This chapter is interesting for revealing the ways in which police work and crime reporting are similar, and the reciprocal relationship between reporters and cops that ironically lead to this genre’s empathetic, understanding views of police during “what was arguably, since Prohibition, its nadir in terms of effectiveness and public esteem” (p. 135). This contradiction is illuminated by his analysis of such books as Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, Cop Shop: True Crime on the Streets of Chicago, and Crime Scene: On the Streets with a Rookie Police Reporter. This chapter, therefore, is an interesting read about the era of “nothing works” that preceded the community policing reform movement, the subject of his final chapter.
In chapter five, “Framing the shooter: the Globe, the police, and the streets”, Wilson aptly describes community policing as a “cultural narrative, an essentially aphoristic, even folkloric reconstruction of the streets that weaves together the cultural turn against permissiveness, a resurgence of urban populism, and a revived realism that, as I have tried to show, so often suffuses urban journalism in our time” (p. 170). He explores this reform movement in the context of a juvenile shooting that occurred in Boston, and the subsequent aftermath of this event in the news media. Unlike his earlier chapter that derailed Reiss as an academic ideologue, this chapter more accurately reflects Wilson’s idea that even academic work can become part of the cultural narrative that shapes police power. In this chapter he frames his argument using the “broken windows” idea put forth by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling in various books/essays/articles. In short, some academic works are better than others to successfully illuminate the difference between ideology and reality. Furthermore, instead of contrasting their work with a popular novelist, he uses the Globe newspaper, considered the “civic voice” of Boston, and a less distasteful counterpoint by virtue of its being concerned with fact rather than fiction. Although this chapter correctly points out the political rhetoric inherent in the community policing movement, what is original about this chapter is the natural history approach he takes, using one event in one city as an example. After all, in the academic community these same criticisms of community policing (and “broken windows”, for that matter) have been going on for more than 15 years.
In conclusion, then, this book provides some interesting insight into the role that various forms of media (books, films, newspapers) play in how we construct police power during a particular point in time. His in‐depth analyses of various well‐known popular works on the police (The Naked City, The New Centurions, Homicide) allow us to re‐evaluate these non‐academic works for the important role they play in cultural interpretations and debates regarding the police. His analyses of various well‐known academic works on the police (Reiss’s The Police and the Public, in particular) can remind us of how results of research can be interpreted in myriad ways. Probably the most important point that Wilson reminds us of, as researchers, is “that any account is necessarily partial and contingent” (p. 207) and to reflect on how the cultural narrative currently surrounding us can influence the questions we ask about the police and how we go about answering them.
