3-4 paper

Write a 3-4 page paper discussing how mass shooting is an example of a Moral Panic.

Make specific reference to: The media sources(See the file uploaded on the documents), the Hall et al reading (See the file uploaded on the documents), and Moral Panic Theory.

Make sure to clearly CONNECT the media coverage to Moral Panic theory  

TheSocial History of a ‘Moral Panic’

A MUGGING GONE WRONG

On 15 August 1972 an elderly widower, Mr Arthur Hills, was stabbed to death near Waterloo

Station as he was returning home from a visit to the theatre. The motive was, apparently,

robbery. Although the event occurred too late for the following morning’s papers, the national

press reported it on 17 August. They labelled it – borrowing a description proffered by a police

officer – ‘a mugging gone wrong’. Thus the word ‘mugging’, hitherto used almost exclusively

in an American context, or to refer in very general terms to the general growth of crime in

Britain, was affixed to a particular case, and entered the crime reporter’s vocabulary. Some

reporters seemed to think the ‘new’ word also heralded the coming of a new crime. All these

notions were neatly encapsulated in the Daily Mirror headline of 17 August: ‘As Crimes of

Violence Escalate, a Word Common In The United States Enters the British Headlines:

Mugging. To our Police, it’s a frightening new strain of crime.’

The Daily Mirror offered a further development of this theme. It described the event itself,

provided a definition of the word, and added supporting statistical information about ‘mugging’

and the escalation in crimes of violence. Since there had been no eye witnesses to the event, the

description of what happened must have been imaginatively reconstructed by the reporters.

Apparently, they said, Mr Hills was attacked by three young men in their early twenties. They

attempted to rob him, but he fought back only to be stabbed in the ensuing struggle. So far

as definitions were concerned, the paper commented that the word was American and derived

from such phrases as ‘attacking a mug: an easy victim’. American police, the Mirror added,

‘describe it as an assault by crushing the victim’s head or throat in an armlock or to rob with any

degree of force, with or without weapons’. Then followed the statistics: (1) an increase in

muggings in the United States by 229 per cent in ten years; and (2) the reporting of about 150

‘muggings’ a year, during the previous three years, on the London underground. The Mirror

spelled out the implications of these statistics: ‘slowly mugging is coming to Britain’.

Was ‘mugging’ a new strain of crime? The question is not as simple as it appears. In an article

in The Times a few weeks later (20 October 1972) Louis Blom-Cooper, Q.C. expressed the view

that ‘There is nothing new in this world: and mugging, apart from its omission from the Oxford

English Dictionary, is not a new phenomenon. Little more than 100 years ago there occurred in

the streets of London an outcrop of robbery with violence. It was called “garrotting”, which was

an attempt to choke or strangle the victim of a robbery.’ (Mugging differs from garrotting only

in its use of offensive weapons.) Blom-Cooper’s stress on the traditional nature of the crime

seems to be the correct one; although his attempt to distinguish ‘mugging’ from ‘garrotting’ in

terms of the use of offensive weapons does not square with the definition of mugging offered by

the American police chief who said: ‘with or without weapons’. More significant than the

question of weapons is what the American definition of ‘mugging’ shares with the

British phenomenon of ‘garrotting’: both refer to ‘choking’, ‘strangling’, ‘an assault

by crushing the victim’s head or throat in an armlock’. In the effort to get a clear definition of

‘mugging’, the British press referred to the United States, but the similarities suggest that when

Americans first defined ‘mugging’ they had at least one eye on Britain.

In fact the more one looks at the historical parallels, the more striking are the similarities

between a number of earlier crimes and mugging. Street crimes were of course a familiar part of

the general pattern of urban crime throughout the nineteenth century. Well-off travellers passing

through the lonely streets of London after dark sometimes had their luggage pinched off carts by

skilful ‘dragsmen’. Solitary strangers might be subject to sudden attack and robbery by

footpads, occasionally lured to their fate by an accomplice, a professional street-walker.

Chesney reminds us of forms of robbery with violence, known variously as ‘propping’ or

‘swinging the stick’, practised by ‘rampsmen’. There were outbreaks of ‘garrotting’ in both

Manchester and London in the 1850s, and the famous outbreak of ‘garrotting’ in London in

1862–3 triggered off a reaction of epidemic proportions.1 Even so, ‘garrotting’ itself was not

new: ‘Chokee Bill, the rampsman who grabbed his prey by the neck, was already a well-

established underworld type.’ It was the boldness and brutality of the ‘garrotting’ attacks in

the summer of 1862, however, which triggered off a new alarm. What is striking, in terms of

the parallel with ‘mugging’, is not just the sudden rash of garrotting cases but the nature and

character of the public response. The Cornhill Magazine stated, in 1863, in terms which could

have been transposed, without a single change, to 1972: ‘Once more the streets of London are

unsafe by day or night. The public dread has almost become a panic’. The outbreak in London

was followed by reports of similar events in Lancashire, Yorkshire, Nottingham, Chester:

‘Credulity became a social obligation’ as ‘the garrotters, lurking in the shadow of the wall,

quickening step behind one on the lonely footpath, became something like a national bogey…

Men of coarse appearance but blameless intentions were attacked… under suspicion of being

garrotters.’ Anti-garrotting societies flourished. Then the reaction began. More people were

hanged in 1863 ‘than in any year since the end of the bloody code’; in July, when the epidemic

had ebbed somewhat, the Garrotting Act was passed, providing for flogging of offenders.

Several of these punishments were in fact brutally administered. Finally, the epidemic began to

die away as mysteriously as it had appeared; and, though the Act and the extremity of the

punishments may have had something to do with its decline, Chesney remarks that this ‘remains

an open question…. The real significance of the garrotting scare is that the excitement and

publicity it provoked made citizens readier to accept the need (and expense) of efficient, nation

wide law enforcement and so speeded the general improvement of public order.’2

Before the ‘mugging’ label took its own kind of stranglehold on the public and official

imagination, the police themselves seemed alert to the traditional nature of the crime concealed

behind its many labels. The Metropolitan Police Commissioner, in his Annual Report of 1964,

commenting on the 30 per cent increase in ‘robberies or assaults with intent to rob’, explicitly

referred to the fact that ‘London has always been the scene of robberies from further back than

the days of highwaymen and footpads.’ Were the rising numbers of robberies in 1964 the same

as (or different from) ‘garrotting’ in the 1860s and ‘mugging’ in the 1970s? In Britain, there has

always been a legal distinction between ‘robbery’ and ‘larceny from the person’: and the

distinction turns on the fact that, in robbery, an individual is deprived of his property, in a face-

to-face situation, by force or threat of force. ‘Larceny from the person’, in the period before the

Theft Act of 1968, was defined as ‘Pickpocketing’ or ‘stealing from shopping baskets’, i.e. a

situation involving stealth, not force or threats. Even after the Theft Act, when larcenies were

reclassified, robbery remained as a separate category, a ‘major’ offence because of the use or

threat of force to deprive another of his property.3 Though, at the height of the ‘mugging’ scare,

the police lost their sense of history, it is worth recalling that, to the end, no legal category of

‘mugging’ as a crime exists (though the Metropolitan Police Commissioner was able, in his

1972 Annual Report, to reconstruct statistics for its incidence back to 1968). The Home

Secretary did, indeed, offer his own definition for clarity’s sake (thereby tacitly admitting

the ambiguity of the situation) when he asked police chiefs to collect statistics for the incidence

of ‘muggings’,4 but it never achieved proper legal status. ‘Muggings’ were in fact always

charged as ‘robberies’ or ‘assaults with intent to rob’, or other similar and conventional charges.

It is important to remember that, though the Metropolitan Police Commissioner did not have the

convenient label, ‘mugging’, to hand when he drafted his 1964 Annual Report, something out of

the ordinary had indeed alerted him to this area of crime and called out his comment on its

historical antecedents. What disturbed the Commissioner was the fact that in 1964 many more

young people, often ‘without records’ – i.e. unknown to the police – were taking to robberies of

this kind. Further, the Commissioner remarked, this trend was accompanied by an increasing

tendency to resort to violence – a fact not borne out by his own statistics, which he admitted to

finding puzzling. It was this coupling of young offenders and crime which had triggered his

concern.

When, in 1972, Robert Carr, the Home Secretary, requested more statistical information from

his police chiefs on the new wave of ‘muggings’, a senior county police officer of the

Southampton force, in reply, once again remarked on the conventional nature of the crime to

which the new title had been attached. He said he found it ‘very difficult to differentiate

mugging with [sic] the old traditional crime of a seaman getting “rolled” ’.5 Interestingly, in the

most publicised British ‘mugging’ case of all – that of the three Handsworth boys in March 1973

– the accused spoke of their intention, not to ‘mug’ but to ‘roll’ their drunk victim.6 As the

‘mugging’ scare progressed, the press, which had seized on its novelty, gradually began to

rediscover the historical antecedents. In response to the Handsworth case, the Daily Mail

editorial of 20 March 1973 lifted the crime altogether outside of history and deposited it in the

realms of Nature: ‘a crime as old as sin itself’.

The fact is that it is extremely difficult to discover exactly what was new in ‘mugging’ – except

the label itself. The matter is of the greatest significance for our enquiry. Let us compare the

‘mugging’ of Mr Hills with the following incidents. A Conservative M.P. is assaulted and

kicked in the face and ribs in Hyde Park by four youths. The attackers escape with £9 and a gold

watch. Has the M.P. been ‘mugged’? The word ‘mugged’ was of course not used in this

case. The date was 12 December 1968, the report from the Daily Mirror. Let us take a second

example. In its report of the killing of Mr Hills – a ‘mugging gone wrong’ – the Daily Telegraph

made a direct comparison with the street shooting and killing, four years earlier, of a Mr Shaw

by two unemployed men in their early twenties. They chose Mr Shaw, the accused men had

said, because they were in a ‘poor position’ and he was ‘well dressed’.7 The shot-gun they

carried to threaten the victim accidentally went off. Although the prosecution accepted the plea

that murder had not been intended, the judge gave the man who pulled the trigger ‘life’, his

partner twelve years. Except for the choice of weapon the Shaw incident is identical with the

Hills murder: amateur robbery, bungled, with unintended fatal consequences. The Shaw case,

however, was not called a ‘mugging’. To all intents and purposes, it was not seen at the time as

a ‘new strain of crime’. Perhaps it became a ‘new strain of crime’ when the Daily

Telegraph resurrected it for comparison with the Hills case? Perhaps it was counted

amongst the ‘rising mugging statistics’ when, in 1973, the Metropolitan Police produced for Mr

Carr retrospective figures for ‘mugging’ going back to 1968? Was the Shaw case a ‘mugging’ in

1972 but not a ‘mugging’ in 1969? Just to make matters more complicated, the Guardian in

1969 quoted the two unfortunate attackers as saying that they had attempted ‘to roll’ Mr Shaw….

What evidence we have suggests that, though the label ‘mugging’, as applied in a British

context, was new in August 1972, the crime it purported to describe was not. Its incidence may

or may not have increased (we examine the statistical evidence in a moment). Its social content

may have changed, but there is nothing to support the view that it was a ‘new strain of crime’.

No doubt the press had some interest in stressing its ‘novelty’. No doubt the use of the term with

reference to American experience may have fostered the belief that something quite new

to Britain had turned up from across the Atlantic. It may have been only a coincidence that the

police officer who called the Hills case a ‘mugging gone wrong’ had just returned from a study

visit to the United States. Contingency, after all, does play a role in the unfolding of history, and

we must allow for it. We will try to show, however, that the facts about the ‘mugging’ scare,

like the ‘garrotting panic’ of 1862 and many other ‘great fears’ about crime and the ‘dangerous

classes’ before that, are both less contingent and more significant than that.

A CHRONOLOGY

During the thirteen months between August 1972 and the end of August 1973, ‘mugging’

received a great deal of coverage in the press in the form of crime reports, features, editorials,

statements by representatives of the police, judges, the Home Secretary, politicians and various

prominent public spokesmen. Before looking at this coverage in detail we want to provide a

brief chronological synopsis of how public concern with this crime developed throughout those

thirteen months.

The labelling of the killing of Mr Hills as ‘a mugging gone wrong’ in August 1972 was

followed by a brief lull. This calm before the storm was broken by massive press coverage

during late September, October and early November. This period provided the ‘peak’ of press

coverage, not only for 1972, but for the whole thirteen-month period. The feature which not

only precipitated this, but also sustained much of the press commentary, was the use of

‘exemplary’ sentences. Almost without exception, young people charged with robberies

involving some degree of force (not always referred to as ‘muggings’) were given

‘deterrent’ sentences. Three years’ imprisonment became the ‘norm’, even for

teenage offenders. Traditional treatment centres for young offenders (i.e. Borstals and detention

centres) were bypassed. The justifications for these severe sentences – and many judges

admitted that they were unprecedented – were commonly made in the name of ‘the public

interest’, or the need to ‘keep our streets safe’, or, more simply, to ‘deter’. Rehabilitation was a

secondary consideration to the need to preserve public safety.

In short, the judiciary declared ‘war’ on the muggers. Editorials quickly followed. Most of these

dealt with the question of the fairness of ‘exemplary’ sentences. This often led on to an

examination of sentencing policy in general, where the considerations affecting such policy

(deterrence, retribution, public safety and rehabilitation) were variously correlated, the

arguments being conducted with varying degrees of skill and subtlety. All the editorials, in the

final analysis, supported the judges. Statistics also appeared to vindicate both the judiciary and

the editors, since reports of the criminal statistics in the period were all headlined in terms

of the rise in violent crime, especially muggings.

Feature articles also appeared during this period, written either by staff reporters or freelance

writers. These attempted to provide background information on ‘The making of a mugger’ or

‘Why they go out mugging’, to quote two examples.8 Most of these were factually well-

informed and relatively informative, though the explanations they offered, with perhaps two

notable exceptions,9 neither of which appeared in the national daily press, were less than

convincing. One further exception, from a different perspective, was the feature article (already

quoted) by Mr Louis Blom-Cooper, Q.C., the one lone ‘voice in the wilderness’ raised against a

harsh reaction by the judiciary.10

The police and the politicians took their lead from the Bench. In London the police instigated a

‘clean-up-the-Royal-Parks’ campaign designed to keep drug users, prostitutes and muggers out

of London’s parks.11 Local councils followed suit by setting up ‘high-speed, anti-mugging

patrols, equipped with vehicles, walkie talkie radios and sometimes guard dogs’ to replace

conventional park-keepers.12 Special squads were also set up by the police to ‘crackdown’ on

mugging; patrols at London Transport underground stations were increased.13

As early as 22 October 1972, the Sunday Mirror estimated that Britain was winning its ‘war’

against muggers; but this did not lead to any let-up. Four days later, the new Chief Inspector of

Constabulary promised an all-out drive to stamp out ‘mugging’ and other violent crime; he

spoke of ‘mugging’ as his ‘highest priority’.14 Six days later, the Home Secretary was reported

as having written to all Chief Constables in England and Wales for details of recent

muggings. His definition of mugging – ‘robberies by gangs of 2 or more youths on

people walking alone in the open’ – was also made public at this time.l5 This definition caused

some immediate queries: terms like ‘youths’ and ‘in the open’ were, at the very least, ambiguous

and the ‘gang’ notion seemed to rule out the possibility of an individual ‘mugger’.

The Duke of Edinburgh, addressing the Royal College of General Practitioners, referred to

‘mugging’ as a disease of the community, for which a cure had to be found.16 Throughout the

rest of the year media coverage of ‘mugging’ declined considerably. However in the courts three

year sentences remained fairly standard practice. There were some occasional articles on the

effectiveness of various anti-mugging devices.17 But perhaps the most significant report during

this period was the publication of the results of an opinion poll in the Daily Mail (10 November

1972). Mugging had apparently touched a very delicate nerve in public consciousness since 90

per cent of those interviewed wanted tougher punishments and 70 per cent greater government

urgency; and this despite the severe reaction already taking place.

In January 1973, the level of press coverage was higher than in December, but not significantly

so. The Home Secretary, in a written Commons reply, said that the state of the ‘war’ was not

‘deteriorating further’ and might be ‘improving in some areas’:18 cautiously optimistic.

However the March headline – ‘London muggings up by 129% over four years’ – carried by

many national papers,19 seemed to shatter that optimism. The Special Squads, according to

black community leaders, were harassing and intimidating black youngsters suspected as

potential ‘muggers’.20 Then came the event which set the seal on Mr Carr’s optimism: the

sentencing of three Handsworth youths, one to twenty years’ detention and the others to

ten years, on 19 March 1973. This event revived interest in arguments about

‘deterrent’ sentences and feature articles reappeared; but the terms of reference had

changed little, if at all. Security forces on London’s underground stations were to

be strengthened still further.21 The same statistics, concerning London muggings, were

resurrected and used again in April, with headlines like: ‘Muggings reach four a day in London’

and ‘London mugging – police demand “action now” ’.22 The Old Aged Pensioners’

Conference in May carried a resolution urging more drastic action be taken against hooligans.

Inevitably Mr Carrr was forced to renounce his earlier optimism when he issued a special

directive to police chiefs to ‘hot-up’ their war on teenage muggers.23

Five days later the Wandsworth police division was reported as having ‘turned the tide’ on

muggers; apparently its ‘plain clothes anti-mugging squads’ were winning the war.24 But four

days after that on 15 May, Sir Robert Mark, then London’s police chief, was reported to be

‘getting every available man back on the beat to crack down on crime – particularly mugging’.25

London had obviously not ‘turned the tide’ to Sir Robert’s satisfaction. On 23 May, some

seventeen days later, Robert Carr was again reported as ‘optimistic’. He told 1200 women at

the Conservative Women’s Conference that Britain’s police were ‘winning’.26 Despite these

‘shifts’ in the tides of the anti-mugging war, ‘mugging’ was beginning to wane as a news item.

July and August produced only one ‘mugging’ report. This decline in media visibility was

accompanied by the settling of the debate about the state of the war: it had at last been ‘won’.

On 29 July the Prime Minister congratulated himself on the country’s progress and referred to

the decline in mugging and crime in general as examples of that ‘progress’.27 On 1 October

1973 fraud replaced ‘mugging’ as ‘Public Crime Enemy – No. 1’: Britain’s ‘Biggest

criminal headache’.28 The ‘mugging’ epidemic was temporarily over.

So much for the fluctuations in the mugging phenomenon. Crucially underpinning the various

shifts in concern was the notion of massive increases in crimes of violence throughout the

period, especially ‘muggings’. Less visible, but present, if only implicitly in certain instances,

were two other key themes: the notion that criminals were getting off lightly, that courts were

becoming ‘soft’; and the notion (really the corollary of ‘soft’ sentences) that the only strategy

was to ‘get tough’. Expressed as an equation, the argument ran: rapid increase in crimes

of violence plus ‘soft’ sentencing policy equals need to return to traditional ‘tough’ (or

deterrent) measures. We wish now to examine these elements in the ‘rising crime rate’

equation.

THE ‘RISING CRIME RATE’ EQUATION

This is what we might call the ‘equation of concern’ into which ‘mugging’ was inserted. It

rested on an implied chain of argument: the rate of violent crime was on the increase, a trend

encouraged by a ‘soft-on-the-criminal’ policy in the courts (as well as in the country at large, the

result of ‘permissive’ attitudes); the only way to deal with this was to revert to traditional ‘get-

tough’ policies which were guaranteed to have the required deterring effect on those attracted to

violent crime. We want to examine each element in the argument in turn; but we start with a

word of warning about statistics. Statistics – whether crime rates or opinion polls – have an

ideological function: they appear to ground free floating and controversial impressions in the

hard, incontrovertible soil of numbers. Both the media and the public have enormous respect for

‘the facts’ – hard facts. And there is no fact so ‘hard’ as a number – unless it is the percentage

difference between two numbers. With regard to criminal statistics, these are not – as one might

suppose – sure indicators of the volume of crime committed, or very meaningful ones. This has

long been recognised even by those who make most use of them, the police themselves. The

reasons are not difficult to understand: (1) crime statistics refer only to reported crime: they

cannot quantify the ‘dark figure’; (2) different areas collate their statistics differently; (3) police

sensitisation to, and mobilisation to deal with, selected, ‘targeted’ crimes increase both the

number the police turn up, and the number the public report; (4) public anxiety about particular

‘highlighted’ offences also leads to ‘over-reporting’; (5) crime statistics are based on legal (not

sociological) categories and are, thus, arbitrary. This remains the case despite the

deliberations of the official Perks Committee,29 and the efforts of the Cambridge Institute

of Criminology30 to provide more meaningful indicators; (6) changes in the law (e.g. the 1968

Theft Act) make strict comparisons over time difficult.31

In general it must also be remembered that everything depends on how the crime statistics are

interpreted (by the police), and then on how these interpretations are reported (in the media).

However accurate or inaccurate the statistics quoted earlier, they were used to identify the

existence of a mugging crime wave and to justify public reaction to it. W. I. Thomas once

remarked: ‘Those things which men believe to be true, are true in their consequences.’32 The

statistics about mugging therefore had real enough consequences in terms of official and

public reactions. Hence we need to look at the figures ‘straight’ as if they were accurate before

questioning their basis in reality. But first we ought to reiterate our purpose in making this

statistical detour, i.e. we wish to look at the statistical basis to the first ‘mugging panic’ in 1972.

For this reason we present here only statistical information up until 1972–3. For those readers

interested in the years since then we survey these briefly at the end of this particular section.

When we look at the criminal statistics and the trends that they reveal, some interesting facts

emerge. The first is that crime, as a whole, has been increasing (though not uniformly) year by

year for most of this century: since 1915 in fact (only 1949–54 showing a net reduction, as a

period, during this time). The period which saw the greatest increase in crime generally was the

period 1955–65, where the average annual increase was about 10 per cent.33 The seven years

from 1966 to 1972 saw a decreased rate of increase, the average increase being of the order of 5

per cent.34 Statistically speaking, then, the period of the greatest crime increase had passed by

1972. We were then in a rather mixed and indeterminate period – not at the crest of a ‘crime

wave’, as certain public spokesmen would have had us believe. The rise, in short, was neither

particularly new in 1972, nor sudden; it was nearly as old as this century. In statistical terms, it

was, temporarily anyway, past its peak. Nor, when compared with earlier trends, was it

especially alarming.

But public spokesmen usually have not meant crime generally when they have spoken of the

‘crime wave’. They have meant, specifically, the growth of ‘serious’ crimes, and especially the

growth of ‘crimes of violence’. Was this new? Statistically speaking, no. Reginald Maudling,

during his period as Home Secretary, spoke, with concern, of ‘crimes of violence’ having risen

by 61.9 per cent between 1967 and 1971.35 The figures for the years 1957–61 (i.e. a

decade earlier) reveal an even greater increase, one of 68 per cent.36 (We are aware of the

problem of using statistics quoted by public figures and the press without revealing their

sources. However, this somewhat cavalier attitude is not without intent since it is precisely such

public statements – the popularisation of official statistics – which provide the statistical ‘back-

up’ for subsequent action. In point of fact we have checked both these statements with the

official statistics, and though there are slight discrepancies due to the fact that the former appear

to be taken from the Reports of Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Constabulary, which only

include figures for England and Wales (excepting those for the Metropolitan Police District),

and the latter from the Annual Abstract of Statistics (1969), which combines figures for England

and Wales with those for Northern Ireland and Scotland, the overall point, that the two periods

are substantially similar statistically, remains valid.) So the increase, even in the specific area of

‘crimes of violence’, was not dramatically new.

Let us look specifically at the category, ‘robbery or assault with intent to rob’, the criminal

statistical category nearest to ‘mugging’, and certainly the charge to which most ‘muggers’ were

subject. Was the increase in this category as dramatic as the reaction to mugging suggested? The

answer must again be no. During the ten years between 1955 and 1965 ‘robberies’ increased by

354 per cent.37 Between 1965 and 1972, however, they increased by only 98½ per

cent.38 Expressed as a percentage, the average annual increase between 1955 and 1965 was

35.4 per cent but during the seven years between 1965 and 1972 it was only 14 per cent. Even if

we only use statistics for ‘mugging’, basing ourselves on the one universally quoted, namely the

rise in London muggings by 129 per cent over four years 1968–72,39 we still find the average

annual increase (32 per cent) is less than that (35 per cent) for robberies generally over the ten

years 1955–65. So even the statistics most closely related to the reaction to mugging, i.e.

statistics of robberies and mugging, were far from being without precedent in the post-war

period. The situation with relation to crimes roughly categorisable as ‘muggings’ was certainly

no worse in 1972 than it was between 1955–65 and, it could be argued statistically that it was, if

anything, slightly better. Thus, whatever statistics are used, whether the over-all ‘crimes of

violence’ figures, or, more specifically those referring to ‘robberies’ or ‘muggings’, it is not

possible to demonstrate that the situation was dramatically worse in 1972 than it was in

the period 1955–65. In other words, it is impossible to ‘explain’ the severity of the reaction to

mugging by using arguments based solely on the objective, quantifiable, statistical facts. A final

word of caution. We have based much of our statistical evidence on McClintock and Avison40

since it is a large-scale, prestigious, quasi-official study, and certainly the most exhaustive

survey of its kind ever undertaken in this country. Since then, McDonald has taken the authors

to task on methodological grounds and especially for confining most of the analysis to

the period 1955–65.41 McDonald demonstrates, convincingly, that taking a slightly longer time

span (1948–68) reduces substantially the increases that McClintock and Avison found. Anybody

seriously interested in the problem of criminal statistics should undoubtedly consult McDonald’s

important text. However, since our purpose is not to develop more adequate ways of computing

increases in crime but simply to examine the kinds of simple statistics used to justify

the reaction to mugging, we feel that our use of short time spans is justified. In fact, it is

precisely the annual statistical increase in certain crimes, dramatically presented in the media,

which fuel and legitimate the concern about crime.

What about the second element in our equation: the ‘softness’ of the courts? How well was this

grounded, statistically? There are two strands involved here: the ‘acquittal versus conviction

rate’; and sentencing policy. A major assumption behind some of the proposals of the Criminal

Law Revision Committee, and the remarks of vociferous supporters of it, like Sir Robert Mark,

was that professional criminals are being found ‘not guilty’ too easily. Sir Robert Mark’s

contention was based on the assumption that about half of the defendants who plead ‘not

guilty’ are acquitted by juries.42 The evidence concerning ‘acquittal rates’ is not nearly so easy

to come by as the evidence relating to criminal statistics, but what little there is tends not to

support this judgement.

McCabe and Purves, of the Oxford Penal Research Unit, found that in one-third of the acquittals

they examined (fifty-three out of 173), the prosecution evidence was so thin that the judge

directed an acquittal without leaving it to the jury;43 and second, that most acquittals in higher

courts, even where the accused had previous convictions, involved relatively minor offences.

Elgrod and Lew re-examined the records of a firm of London solicitors for the period 1964–73

and found that the proportion of acquittals brought in by juries had remained stable and

averaged out at about 31 per cent.44 In other words, it lent support to the view of

many practising lawyers of an acquittal rate of one in three of those people pleading

‘not guilty’, a finding which did not support Sir Robert Mark’s case.

Acquittal rates appear, then, to have altered little in recent years, to affect chiefly ‘minor’

criminals, and to be much less than the 50 per cent claimed. But probably more pivotal to the

perception of ‘softness’ to ‘toughness’ in the courtroom is sentencing policy.

Sentences for violent offences have actually been getting longer. Sparks found, using the ‘year-

end’ figures, that those serving fixed-term sentences of seven years or more (the majority of

whom were convicted for crimes of violence) had ‘roughly doubled’ in number between 1960

and 1967, while the numbers of those serving ten years or more had ‘tripled’.45 This finding is

very different from those of the H.M.S.O. Report, People in Prisons.46 One essential difference

between the two documents is that the H.M.S.O. Report largely deals with admissions in any

one year. On this basis it argues that apart from the increase in numbers serving fixed-term

sentences of over fourteen years, largely consequent upon the abolition of capital punishment,

there has been little change in ‘intermediate’ sentences. Sparks, on the other hand, using the

statistics in a more complex way (and berating People in Prisons for its ‘simple’ use of the

statistics), finds a very different picture: one of an increasing build-up of ‘long-stay’ prisoners

(those serving seven-plus, ten-plus, fourteen-plus and ‘life’) throughout the period 1960–7,

practically all of whom, by 1967, were convicted of ‘violent’ offences. Post-abolition, the

number of ‘lifers’ has increased, as has the average length of such sentences.47 Furthermore, it

has been argued that 1950–7 was a period of ‘lenient’ sentencing which saw a twofold increase

in robberies, whereas 1957–66 witnessed a reversal in sentencing policy – and a threefold

increase in robberies. Professor Radzinowicz also notes the change, in 1960, from the lenience

of the years 1950–7:

Recently the courts seem to have been taking a sterner view, and in 1960 the standards reverted

to those of 1950… The trend towards increased severity is also reflected in much sharper

sentences for younger and for first offenders.

These are hardly indexes of a growing ‘soft policy’ by the courts.

Whether these policies have been deterring – the third element in our equation – is another

matter. McClintock and Avison,49 reviewing the 1955–65 period in their chapter on ‘The

Recidivist’, argue for a percentage increase of 160 per cent in the numbers coming back before

the courts; with an even higher rate for the younger recidivists (aged 14–21). The reconviction

rate for ‘serious’ recidivists (five or more proved indictable offences) was higher than that for

other recidivists; a third of young robbers had ‘high’ rates of recidivism (two or more previous

proved indictable offences); and ‘offences of robbery and breaking showed the

greatest proportion of “high” recidivism’.

As it happens, there is important evidence about the relation between tough sentencing and

deterrence drawn specifically from ‘mugging’. Baxter and Nuttall, Home Office research

officers, examined the long and severe sentences passed on the three boys in the Handsworth

‘mugging’ case for subsequent ‘deterrent’ effect.50 They experienced the same difficulty the

present authors did in finding an acceptable statistical basis for ‘mugging’. But, taking the

‘robbery and assault with intent to rob’ as their statistical base-line (and acknowledging that this

figure would include ‘crimes other than mugging’), the authors had to conclude: ‘In none of the

police areas studied did the sentence have the anticipated impact on the number of reported

robberies.’ In Birmingham, where the initial offence was committed, the robbery offence rate

continued uninterrupted (i.e. ‘relatively low throughout the two relevant years’).

In short, the statistics such as we have do not support the ‘rising crime rate’ equation. An

‘unprecedented’ rise in robberies with violence was not new in 1972. Sentences for serious

offences were growing longer rather than shorter, and more people were receiving them;

acquittal rates seemed not to have changed. And these tough policies were not deterring. In fact,

if we regard the ‘toughness’ in the courts throughout the 1960s as an ‘experiment in deterrence’,

the rising rate of crime and recidivism demonstrates just how bad is the record of deterrence

as an instrument of penal policy. This general picture – true for serious crime as a whole – was

also true for ‘mugging’.

However, in the specific case of the mugging statistics, we can go further still. We have just

alluded to the difficulties that Baxter and Nuttall found in isolating a statistical base in their

work on the ‘mugging’ figures, and we also mentioned we had similar difficulties. This point

bears amplification. The much publicised 1973 headlines that London ‘muggings’ were 129 per

cent up over the four years 1968–72 seem to have their base in Robbery and Kindred Offences

In the Metropolitan Police District, 1968–72.51 Their precise origin remains a deep mystery to

us. Our efforts to ‘crack’ them have been in vain. Since there is no legal offence called

‘mugging’, the figures cannot be derived direct from the Annual Reports. Some Chief

Constables expressed doubt as to what to include under ‘mugging’ when the Home Secretary

asked for figures for 1968 (though there is evidence that, since the 1972–3 period, regional

figures for crimes descriptively arranged under the ‘mugging’ category, together with some

figures, however loose, on the ethnic identity of assailants, have been kept). The graph in the

1973 Report must therefore be a back-projection; but based on what? Since none of the existing

‘robbery’ figures for 1968, or the other years, square with the reconstructed ‘mugging’ figures,

these must be a selective conflation of proportions of a number of different sub-categories

within the over-all ‘robbery’ figures. But how much of which? (We have tried as many

permutations as ingenuity allows, though without success.) And what statistical checks were

there on this selective clustering under the ‘mugging’ label, performed in 1973 (when the

‘mugging’ panic was at its peak), for a year – 1968 – when the label was not in use?

We mentioned earlier that we would end with some general updating on statistics. We offer

them for completeness, rather than in the hope that they will clarify much. 1973 saw practically

no change in the over-all crime figures, substantial percentage reductions in the robbery figures,

substantial percentage increases in ‘crimes of violence’ generally, and a mixed set of figures for

thefts from the person (a large percentage increase (12.5 per cent) in London and a largish

percentage reduction in the provinces (8.4 per cent)). 1974 saw larger percentage increases in

crime generally and robbery, massive percentage increases in theft from the person (42 per cent

in the provinces, 71 per cent in London), but small percentage increases in ‘crimes of violence’

generally. 1975 saw smaller percentage increases in crime generally but even larger percentage

increases in robbery (24 per cent in the provinces, 41.2 per cent in London). The percentage

increases in theft from the person, still large, were less dramatic than in 1974, while the

‘crimes of violence’ category showed far larger percentage increases. Over all, then, the period

seems ‘mixed’, but, for those interested in trends in statistically recorded crimes, it may be of

interest that, except for sexual offences, every crime category recorded an increase in both the

provinces and London during 1974 and 1975 – quite an unusual occurrence.

We have left the mugging statistics until last; these are, as usual, the most complicated. After

the London figures produced in 1973 by the Statistical Unit for the years 1968–72, which were

also reproduced in the Metropolitan Police Commissioner’s Report for 1972, a separate

‘mugging’ statistic does not appear again in any of the Annual Reports until the publication of

the Metropolitan Police Commissioner’s Report for 1975. This report carries an identical table

to the 1972 Report, i.e. a table of robberies sub-divided into smaller categories based on the

circumstances of the crime. One of these categories – robbery following an attack in the open –

is clearly the mugging statistic since both the category and the figures for 1971 and 1972 tally

with those in the 1972 Report, where it was announced that this particular category was

popularly known as ‘mugging’. So, despite a certain coyness on the Commissioner’s part about

using the label (and this despite the fact that the original decision to sub-categorise the

robbery statistics undoubtedly stemmed from, or was sanctioned by, him), we can at least be

certain that the figures collected for 1975 were based on the same criteria, whatever these were,

as those collected in 1972. Analysing these figures, it would appear that after the dramatic 32

per cent increase in 1972, muggings decreased during 1973 (by 20.7 per cent), only to increase

by 18.7 per cent in 1974 and by 35.9 per cent in 1975. Whatever the reason for the 1973

decrease, what is certain is that the drop was only temporary. And as sentences in the courts

have certainly not been getting any lighter for these offences, and police activity – in the light

of much high-level concern – is unlikely to have diminished, we can only see these figures as

further confirmation of the bankruptcy of policies of containment and deterrence.

However, the statistical situation regarding these figures becomes more interesting, if more

confusing, during this period. In the Metropolitan Commissioner’s 1972 Report we see the

beginnings of a development which was to culminate in the production of a completely new set

of crime categories in the 1974 Report. We have already mentioned the sub-division of the

‘robbery’ category which produced, as one outcome, the mugging statistics. ‘Theft from the

person’ was similarly sub-divided, and one particular category – ‘snatchings’ – was included in

a table showing the increases in ‘selected crimes of violence, 1968–72’. We were told that

‘snatchings’ appear there since there was little distinction between such offences and robbery.

The implication, since both were included in the table, is that the element common to both

categories is that of ‘violence’. But, then, in the 1973 Report we were told that ‘snatches’ were

‘similar to robberies differing only in that the victim is neither threatened nor injured by the

assailant’ (our emphasis). In view of the fact that snatchings had appeared in a table of

selected crimes of violence the previous year, and that it is precisely the element of

violence which distinguishes robbery from theft, this is a very strange statement

indeed. However, there is yet a further ‘mystery’ in the 1973 figures. We have

already mentioned that this was the year which showed a dramatic drop in the numbers of

robberies and muggings. ‘Snatchings’ followed this pattern. But ‘thefts from the person’ (e.g.

‘pickpocketing’) showed a large increase. How do we explain these divergent trends? Given the

ambiguity surrounding all these categories and the failure to specify publicly the criteria for

differentiating the categories, is it not at least plausible to mull over the possibility – without

necessarily suggesting a conspiracy – that what were perceived and classified as ‘muggings’ in

1972 were differently perceived and classified in 1973 – as more routine examples

of pickpocketing for example? Such selective perception, and the accompanying decline in the

mugging statistics, would certainly retrospectively justify the control measures taken.

In the 1974 and 1975 Reports, the incipient unhappiness with the official legal, Home Office

classifications found full expression in the production of a completely new set of

‘circumstantial’ categories (i.e. ones reflecting the circumstances of the crime) which appeared

in addition to the Home Office classifications. Of principal interest to us was the production of a

‘robbery and other violent thefts’ category; though, again, the criteria for adjudging a theft

‘violent’ were not stated. In the light of the Commissioner’s earlier sub-division of ‘thefts from

the person’, it would appear that ‘snatchings’ had finally become so similar to robberies

(despite being ‘non-violent’!) as to warrant the production of a joint statistic. In 1975 there were

7959 such ‘robberies and other violent thefts’ (up 43 per cent), 4452 official robberies (up 41.2

per cent) and 1977 ‘muggings’ (up 35.9 per cent); though the official ‘theft from the person’

category had no equivalent category in the Commissioner’s classification. What are we to make

of the new category ‘robbery and other violent thefts’? Violent thefts were obviously similar to

robberies; hence the joint statistic: yet official robberies were then further sub-divided without

any reference to the joint statistic. This means that the mugging statistic was produced without

reference to the ‘violent theft’ category. Yet it seems hard to believe that the introduction of

these new categories – first ‘snatches’ and then ‘violent thefts’ – were entirely unrelated to the

original breakdown of the robbery figures which had, as one outcome, the production of a set of

figures for ‘mugging’; particularly since the very reason given for the sub-division of ‘thefts

from the person’ was to differentiate the more ‘robbery-like’ from the rest. Given this line of

reasoning, the current publicity and concern aroused by the London mugging statistics is very

difficult to understand, on purely statistical grounds, since the 1975 figures reveal that, of the

‘robberies and violent thefts’, only 25 per cent were actually ‘muggings’. Finally, it should be

emphasised that none of these statistical convolutions have ever affected the Chief Inspector of

Constabulary’s Reports, which have always stuck to the official classifications. One important

result of this is that, despite the grave concern expressed in these reports about mugging

(c.f. the 1973 Report), we have never had any figures at all concerning the scale, and rate of

increase, of provincial muggings. If the reaction to mugging cannot then be explained by a

straightforward reference to the statistics, how can it be explained? When the official reaction

to a person, groups of persons or series of events is out of all proportion to the actual threat

offered, when ‘experts’, in the form of police chiefs, the judiciary, politicians and editors

perceive the threat in all but identical terms, and appear to talk ‘with one voice’ of rates,

diagnoses, prognoses and solutions, when the media representations universally stress ‘sudden

and dramatic’ increases (in numbers involved or events) and ‘novelty’, above and beyond that

which a sober, realistic appraisal could sustain, then we believe it is appropriate to speak of the

beginnings of a moral panic.

A moral panic has been defined as follows by Stan Cohen in his study of the ‘mods and

rockers’, Folk Devils and Moral Panic:

Societies appear to be subject, every now and then, to periods of moral panic. A condition,

episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values

and interests; its nature is presented in a stylized and stereotypical fashion by the mass media;

the moral barricades are manned by editors, bishops, politicians and other right-thinking

people; socially accredited experts pronounce their diagnoses and solutions; ways of coping are

evolved or (more often) resorted to; the condition then disappears, submerges or deteriorates

and becomes more visible. Sometimes the object of the panic is quite novel and at other times it

is something which has been in existence long enough, but suddenly appears in the limelight.

Sometimes the panic is passed over and is forgotten, except in folklore and collective memory;

at other times it has more serious and long-lasting repercussions and might produce such

changes as those in legal and social policy or even in the way society conceives itself.52

In this study we argue that there was a moral panic about ‘mugging’ in 1972–3; a panic which

fits in almost every detail the process described by Cohen in the passage above. This is not to

deny that, on occasions during the past few years (but also, almost certainly, for at least a

century), individual men and women have been suddenly attacked, rough-handled and robbed in

the street. We think, however, that it requires explanation how and why a version of this rather

traditional street crime was perceived, at a certain point in the early 1970s, as a ‘new strain of

crime’. The number of such incidents may indeed have gone up – it is virtually impossible to tell

from the statistical evidence which has been made publicly available. In the light of that, we

think it requires to be explained why and how the weak and confused statistical evidence came to

be converted into such hard and massively publicised facts and figures. It also needs to be

explained how and why these ‘facts’ came to be identified as part and parcel – indeed, as some

of the strongest evidence for – a general belief in the dramatic rise in the rate of ‘violent crime’.

The impression that ‘violent crime’, particularly ‘mugging’, was increasing produced a massive

and intense coverage by the press, official and semi-official spokesmen, and sentences of an

increasing severity in court. In short ‘mugging’ had consequences in the real world, quite apart

from the number of people mugged on the streets; and these consequences appear to have less

to do with what actually was known to be happening, than with the character, scale and

intensity of this reaction. All these other aspects are part of the ‘mugging’ phenomenon, too.

They, too, require explanation.

This represents a major shift of focus from conventional studies of crime. Cohen defines this in

terms of a shift of attention from the deviant act (i.e. ‘mugging’), treated in isolation to the

relation between the deviant act and the reaction of the public and the control agencies to the

act.53 This shift of focus alters the nature of the ‘object’ or phenomenon which needs to be

explained. In what we might call the common-sense view, sometime in the early 1970s British

cities were visited by a dramatic and unexpected epidemic of ‘mugging’. The police, reacting to

these events, spurred on by a vigilant press, by public anxiety and professional duty, took rapid

steps to isolate the ‘virus’ and bring the fever under control. The courts administered a strong

inoculating dose of medicine. It disappeared within twelve months, as swiftly and suddenly as it

had appeared. It departed as mysteriously as it had arrived. In the ‘common-sense’ view, this

little sequence of events was ‘mugging’, at least in its primary phase. We argue, on the other

hand, that there was also a massive blaze of publicity in the press, the use of a new ‘label’,

widespread public comment and anxiety, a strong and vigorous official reaction. Moreover, the

scale and intensity of this reaction is quite at odds with the scale of the threat to which it was a

response. Thus there is strong evidence of a ‘moral panic’ about mugging. We insist that this

‘moral panic’ is also crucial to the meaning of the ‘mugging’ phenomenon itself. It is this whole

complex – action and reaction – as well as what produced it and what its consequences were,

which requires to be explained. We suggest that there is no simple ‘event’ here to be

understood, apart from the social processes by which such events are produced,

perceived, classified, explained and responded to. The more we examine this whole complex in

detail, the more it seems that it is the ‘moral panic’ about ‘mugging’ rather than the appearance

of ‘mugging’ itself, to which we must first give our attention.

In the following chapter, then, we bring into focus some of these so far neglected aspects of

‘mugging’: the way the ‘moral panic’ was articulated in the courts, and the reaction to it of the

police – in short, the growth to visibility and subsidence, between August 1972 and the latter

months of 1973, of a ‘moral panic’ about ‘mugging’ and its passage through the judicial and

control apparatus.

However, before we turn to that we must make a detour back to the point from which we started:

the appearance of the label which identified ‘a new strain of crime’. It was the use of this label

which provided the stimulus for the take-off of a moral panic about ‘mugging’. But what was

the birth and subsequent career of the ‘mugging’ label?

CAREER OF A LABEL

NEW YORK CITY… the science fiction metropolis of the future… the cancer capital, a

laboratory where all the splendours and miseries of the new age are being tried out in

experimental form….

Professor Nathan Glazer. the sociologist, remarks: ‘We’re threatened with the destruction of the

entire social fabric.’ America is where our weather comes from – the prevailing cultural winds

are carrying the same challenges and threats across the Atlantic to Europe….

The forecast does not seem very favourable… when I last investigated New York in 1966, half a

million of its citizens were living on welfare doles. Now the figure has reached a million…. Only

last week, massive cuts, the first since the second world war, were made by the state legislature

in aid to the poor…. New York’s major problem is this widespread poverty with the

inevitable aftermath of growing crime, vandalism, rioting and drug-addiction. Already more

than 70 per cent of the serious crimes are committed by youngsters under twenty-one. And

crime means crime here – with a murder every twelve hours – many of them motiveless acts of

violence with no thought of gain….

… the New York City Handbook [has]… an entire section on how to deal with burglars, double-

lock and protect doors and windows and the general warning: ‘ON THE STREET walk where it

is well-lighted and where there are people’

… one symptom [of New York’s ‘ills’] is the deepening bankruptcy of the city’s public

finances.

THE WORST RESULTS… [are] the hatred and contempt engendered in one section of the

population for another… friends… accept the hazards of New York rather as Londoners accepted

the Blitz. (Alan Brien, ‘New York Nightmare’, Sunday Times, 6 April 1969.)

Is it a lack of courage to think big? Could not the country that thought up the Marshall plan do

the same for its own good? Is it because the prejudices against race and welfare programmes are

no obstacles to a grand rescue operation abroad but they assert themselves stubbornly against

such a vision at home? And why is a small nation such as North Vietnam capable of resisting a

superpower, despite the technical superiority of American weapons, firepower and mobility?

Such are the questions on the lips of Americans today. They are all symptoms of the doubts and

anxieties that assail a large majority of the people about the trust in the America they believe

in. They are appalled by the massive confrontation at home between black and white, hawks

and doves, intellectuals and non-intellectuals, between young and old, the law and the

protestors. I doubt whether so many segments of American society have ever been as divided as

they are today. It is more than a malaise; somehow the American spirit is temporarily

unhinged.

They are afraid of walking in the streets at night and being attacked. This fear is greater than

ever before. Crime in the street, unless the republican candidate for President is able to offer an

alternative to President Johnson’s policies in Vietnam, will be the big issue of this election

campaign. (Henry Brandon, ‘The Disunited States’, Sunday Times, 10 March 1968.)

Lejeune and Alex note that ‘The term mugging assumed its present meaning [in America] in the

1940s. Derived from criminal and police parlance, it refers to a certain manner of robbing and/or

beating of a victim by petty professional operators or thieves who often work in touring packs of

three or more.’54 This is the classic meaning of the term ‘mugging’. Its American location is, of

course, crucial. Whatever its earlier usages.55 it is in the United States that the term achieves

its decisive contemporary definition. It was from this American context that the term was

‘reimported’ into British usage in the later 1960s and the 1970s.

Labels are important, especially when applied to dramatic public events. They not only place

and identify those events; they assign events to a context. Thereafter the use of the label is likely

to mobilise this whole referential context, with all its associated meanings and connotations. It is

this wider, more connotative usage which was ‘borrowed’ when the British press picked up the

term and began to apply it to the British setting. It is crucial to bear in mind, therefore, what this

wider, contextual field of reference of the term was or had become in the United States. By the

1960s, ‘mugging’ was no longer being used in the United States simply as a descriptive and

identifying term for a specific kind of urban crime. It not only dominated the whole public

discussion of crime and public disorder – it had become a central symbol for the many

tensions and problems besetting American social and political life in general.

‘Mugging’ achieved this status because of its ability to connote a whole complex of

social themes in which the ‘crisis of American society’ was reflected. These themes included:

the involvement of blacks and drug addicts in crime; the expansion of the black ghettoes,

coupled with the growth of black social and political militancy; the threatened crisis and

collapse of the cities; the crime panic and the appeal to ‘law and order’; the sharpening political

tensions and protest movements of the 1960s leading into and out from the Nixon–Agnew

mobilisation of ‘the silent majority’ and their presidential victory in 1968. These topics and

themes were not as clearly separated as these headings imply. They tended, in public discussion,

to come together into a general scenario of conflict and crisis. In an important sense the image

of ‘mugging’ came ultimately to contain and express them all.

During the 1960s, the principal venue of muggings in the United States was the black ghetto.

Such areas in most of the large cities have traditionally been areas associated with high rates of

crime. Following the black ‘ghetto rebellions’ of the mid-1960s, and against the background of

an extended debate about the nature of social and family ‘disorganisation’ amongst ghetto

blacks, the issue of black crime surfaced as a major and continuing topic of concern. Crime

was taken as an index of the permanent state of tension among urban blacks: perhaps, also, as a

means through which racial tension was worked out and expressed – a preoccupation no doubt

supported by the fact that, of all violent offences in the United States, only robbery involves a

high inter-racial element.56 This equation of violent robbery with blacks was compounded by

the spread of the ghettoes in most of the large cities through the 1950s and 1960s. Black crime

was troubling enough when confined within the clearly demarcated zones of the ghettoes; but it

became the central concern of a far more diffused and generalised threat when coupled with the

spread of the ghettoes ‘up-town’, and the spill over of black populations into formerly white

residential areas. The effects of this ‘spill over’ (which, in any event, compounded the many

other serious problems of the large cities in the United States) was differently experienced and

perceived by different sectors of the white population. Working-class whites – often of

distinctive ethnic origin – perceived the ‘black invasion’ as a major intrusion from an even

more disadvantaged group into their limited economic, social and geographical space. The

tensions between these two groups have been considerably sharpened, ‘white ethnics’ often

providing the spearhead for a white backlash against blacks and the poverty programmes (which

seemed to be giving blacks an unfair advantage). This was undoubtedly one of the key sectors to

which the Nixon ‘silent-majority’ appeal was directed, and provided active recruits into the ‘law

and order’ campaigns. White middle-class residents were protected for longer from the black

incursion; but gradually the spread of the ghettoes (and all that was associated with it)

also began to make its impact here, as sectors of the cities hitherto thought ‘safe’ became

redefined as dangerous or unsafe territory. The changing class and ethnic composition of the

cities, and a shift in the whole flavour and ambience of ‘urban living’ for the white middle

classes, precipitated not only a sense of panic but also the steady movement of whites out of the

city (the so-called accelerated ‘flight to the suburbs’) and the adoption of a whole series of

protective and defensive moves. The actual incidence of violent inter-racial crime was

outstripped by the general sense of fear and anxiety on the part of the white urban dwellers; even

if not actual victims, more people came to see themselves as potential victims, and undoubtedly

a sense of ‘trust’ and security had been undermined. Lejeune and Alex very sensitively describe

what they call the growth of a ‘defensive mentality’ amongst whites;57 and the image of the

‘mugger’ erupting out of the urban dark in a violent and wholly unexpected attack or penetrating

right into apartment blocks became, in many ways, the precipitate for what were in fact much

larger fears and anxieties about the racial issue in general. By the end of the 1960s, then, the

term ‘mugging’ had come to stand as a referential symbol for this whole complex of attitudes

and anxieties about the general drift of American society – a cause for concern made more

urgent by the rising political conflicts relating to the Vietnam War, and the growth of student

militancy and black power.

Now this ‘crisis’ of American society in the 1960s was widely and vividly covered in the British

press.58 It fitted well into a whole ‘structure of attention’ in the British media. American

reportage has always played an important part in foreign news coverage in the British media,

since, for both historical and contemporary reasons, the United States is taken as a sort of

paradigm case for future trends and tendencies in the Western world, especially in Britain. In the

1950s the United States stood, and was reported, as the symbol of affluent success; in the 1960s

it became the symbol of a modern industrial capitalist society ‘in crisis’. In both cases, the

British media presentation of ‘the United States’ suffered from selective exaggeration. The

United States seems always to be presented in ‘largerthan-life’ terms: more extravagant, more

quirky, more bizarre, more sensational than anything comparable in Britain. And when

American society began to run into serious difficulties, these too were presented in an

exaggerated fashion. What is more, the British coverage of American social problems, like race

and crime, reproduced the definitions of those problems which had been already generated in the

United States. When the British press reported on American cities, the already forged

connections between black unrest, inter-racial tension, the spreading ghettoes and crime tended

to be reproduced in that form (though there is no doubt that ‘selective exaggerations’ solidified

some of the looser connections). Thus, long before British ‘muggings’ appeared in the British

media, the British presentation of ‘mugging’ as an American crime reproduced the whole

context of ‘mugging’ as it had already been defined in the American setting. It reproduced the

idea of American mugging for British consumption (c.f. the extracts at the beginning of the

section). The graphic stories by Henry Fairlie – who was himself twice ‘mugged’ – in the

Sunday Express in this period offer further highly specific examples of this type of coverage of

American problems for British readers.59 Similar kinds of reports can be found at both ends of

the press spectrum in Britain in this period – for example, in Henry Brandon’s pieces for the

Sunday Times and in Mileva Ross’s ‘I Live With Crime In The Fun City’ in the Sunday

Express:

MY HOUSEKEEPER arrived one morning shaken by the experience of witnessing the mugging

and robbing of a man in front of her own house which is just inside Washington’s Negro

ghetto. It seems almost as if crime in Washington has become a sport, as if robbing for money

is as easy as shopping for bread…. In 80 percent of the cases [of armed robberies in one day]

Negroes were both assailants and victims. For the rest, whites were the victims of

Negroes. President Kennedy… worried about Washington’s reputation as

culturally underdeveloped; Mr Nixon will be worrying about crime and how to live up to his

election campaign promise ‘to restore freedom from fear in the capital’…. Hair-raising accounts

of escape from purse-snatchers or hold-up men and their easy getaways have stimulated fear, if

not panic…. But many Washingtonians have become accustomed to living with crime almost in

the way that Londoners learned to live with the blitz. You carry only sufficient money to keep

the hold-up men satisfied…. You acquire a burglar alarm or watchdog; you don’t stay out late…

you acquire your own gun…. Whites are afraid that they will be increasingly unsafe in this city

where 67 percent of the population is Negro…. In the past, newspapers here have avoided racial

identification of criminals…. The fact that this is now done so conspicuously… is also an

indication of how old liberal principles are being swept away by the crime wave. (Henry

Brandon, ‘Living round the Crime-Clock’, Sunday Times, 26 January 1969.)

SUCH IS the amount of crime in America today that… President Nixon… ordered that the lights

in the grounds of the White House should be kept on all night… to stop the recent wave of

attacks on Washington citizens – at least on his new doorstep. So far… [this] pledge of his

presidential campaign – has been a notable failure…. To the harried police forces of Washington

and New York, incidents [of robbery]… are now almost as routine as parking offences…. My

own experience in New York… was a classic case of what Americans call ‘a mugging’. This

means that I was robbed by an unarmed attacker who jumped on me from behind…. It has

happened to many of my friends.

My first-hand experience… came early one evening…. I whirled round [upon being attacked] and

looked straight… [at] a hefty Negro youth. Within days we seemed to be living right on top of a

crime explosion…. After a few weeks the superintendent of our building… pinned up a

notice… saying that… a porter would be on duty… every evening. I took all

important documents… out of my handbag. I carried the minimum of money in my purse … One

night we were awakened by a terrible noise outside… we learned that the victim was an elderly

doctor… he was seriously hurt…. The theory was that the attackers were drug addicts…. The next

morning we went out flat hunting … we found what we were looking for… Two doormen are on

duty round the clock. And at night there is also an armed guard in the lobby. Everyone

entering the building is stopped. The doorman rings me on the intercom before any visitor is

allowed up…. I accept all this security as normal living now. (Mileva Ross, ‘I Live With Crime

In The “Fun City”: spotlighting the rising tide of violence in America’, Sunday Express, 23

February 1969.)

We offer substantial sections of these two crime reports, one from Washington, one from New

York. They range from the highly personalised and dramatised account of the Sunday Express

reporter to the more general Sunday Times one. Yet, despite obvious differences in style, the

same images and associations are evoked; the total ‘message’ is all but identical, and

unequivocal, ‘multifaceted’, but unambiguous. The crime problem referred to here is not the

problem of ‘white-collar’ frauds and tax evasion, nor even the problem of professional

organised crime, and the legendary Mafia. What crime ‘means’, in these reports, is something

completely different: the sudden attack, the brutal assault, the brazen threat; the

‘amateur’, uncouth and arrogant ‘face-to-face’ street and apartment encounters with

young blacks/drugtakers desperate either for cash or a quick fix – in a word, the crime problem,

in these reports, means mugging. It is this which is contextualised in both reports as being the

‘primary’ cause of the other elements mentioned: the escalation in crime; the ‘resigned’

acceptance of this state of affairs by both law-enforcement agencies and citizens; the fear,

defensiveness and ‘securityconsciousness’ of ordinary citizens; and, with the mention of

President Nixon’s electoral pledge, the notion of all this constituting a national political issue

to which liberal responses have proved inadequate.

The kind of reporting exemplified in these early articles, and in a good deal of the American

coverage of a similar kind in the British press in this period, acted as ‘scene-setters’ for the later

English usage. It made ‘mugging’ familiar to English readers; and it did so, not by the coinage

of a simple term but by transmitting ‘mugging’ as part of a whole context of troubling themes

and images – it delivered something like a whole image of ‘mugging’ to the English reader.

It presented American ‘mugging’ as in some ways at the centre of this complex of connected

themes, drawn together with them into a single, rather terrifying scenario. Subsequent reports in

the British press then employ the term ‘mugging’ unproblematically: the crime it indexes is

already familiar to British readers, and so are its contexts. It is this whole composite image

which was positively translated. And this helps to explain an oddity. So far as we can discover,

the term ‘mugging’ is not applied to a specifically English crime until midway through 1972;

but even as early as 1970, the term is generally and unspecifically applied to describe a sort of

incipient breakdown in ‘law and order’ and general rise in violent crime and lawlessness in

Britain.60 Normally such a label would be applied in specific instances first, before gaining a

wider, more generalised application. Here we find the reverse – the label is applied to Britain

first in its wider, connotative sense; only then, subsequently, are concrete instances

discovered. This can only be because the term was already appropriated from the United States

in its more inclusive sense – signifying such general themes as crime in the streets, breakdown

in law and order, race and poverty, a general rise in lawlessness and violence. To put it simply,

if paradoxically: ‘mugging’ for British readers meant ‘general social crisis and rising crime’

first, a particular kind of robbery occurring on British streets second, and later. It is this paradox

which accounts for the particular way in which the ‘mugging’ label is first applied to a

specific British ‘event’ – the Hills killing near Waterloo Station. Although ‘mugging’ had been

made thoroughly familiar to British readers – as we have seen, in the popular as well as the

‘serious’ press – the specific application of the ‘mugging’ label to a specific incident on a

London street is problematic for the newspapers which first employ it, and seems to require

some new definitional ‘work’ on the journalists’ part. The policeman who used it first, qualifies

it – ‘a mugging gone wrong’ (our emphasis). Many of the papers use quotation marks around the

term – ‘mugging’. Some papers (e.g. the Daily Mirror) offer a definition. This marks the second

significant moment in the British appropriation of the ‘mugging’ label. The translation of

‘mugging’ and its context to British audiences, through the representation of American themes

in the British coverage, is the first stage. But the application of the label to British events, and

not in a general way but in a specific way to describe a concrete case of crime, is a shift in

application and requires a new explanatory and contextualising move. This is the moment,

not of the referencing of the ‘mugging’ idea in the American experience, but of the specific

transfer of the label from one social setting to another: the moment of the naturalisation of the

label on British soil.

The culmination of the English reporting of American mugging did not come until 4 March

1973 (ironically only two weeks before the Handsworth case). This was the long Sunday Times

feature by George Feiffer on, ‘New York: a Lesson for the World’. The article was in the colour

supplement, and the front page of the magazine was a reproduction of a New York Daily News

front page headed ‘Thugs, Mugs, Drugs: City in Terror’, which went some way towards

encapsulating the article’s extensive documentation of the violent decline and decay of New

York. The article, which ran for eighteen pages, is too long to fully document here. It was

graphically illustrated. It carried an extensive analysis, which brought together all the major

themes of ‘mugging’ in the United States: the influx of Southern blacks, the spread of the

ghettoes, the reactions of various sections of the white population, the failure of welfare

programmes, the drug problem, the collapse of the education system, police corruption and

ineffectiveness in dealing with growing crime, and, crucially, the major threat of violence on the

streets. As the following extract demonstrates, the threat of violence on the streets

was perceived as undoubtedly New York’s most damaging problem. Here, more clearly than

anywhere, the equation of the crime problem with the problem of ‘mugging’ reaches its

apotheosis:

By virtually unanimous agreement, the most damaging of New York’s seemingly insoluble crises

is crime. Not crime in general, not even the Mafia’s illegal operations and hydra-headed

leeching of former legitimate businesses. Headlines notwithstanding, most observers feel that

the Mafia’s great spoils are trivial in the context of New York’s total lawlessness, just as gang

rub-outs comprised a trifling percentage of its 1346 murders – roughly ten times the total for

the whole of Britain – in the first nine months of last year. It is a new kind of crime which

beleaguers the city – more accurately, an ancient, crudely simple kind: an atavism perceived as

a return to the dark ages. ‘What disturbs New Yorkers’, said Roger Starr, a widely read

specialist, ‘is not cheating on income tax or even embezzling from firms. Millions are steadily

swindled, often with official participation – but that’s middle-class crime, which scares no-one.

What haunts us is being mugged on your own street or in your own elevator. The poor and

desperate simply push, slash or kick the nearest victim for his purse – which is terrifying. No-

one is ever fully free of that fear.’

It might be useful here to say how in general this slow translation of ‘mugging’ from its

American setting to British ground was shaped and structured by what we might call ‘the special

relationship’ which exists between the media in Britain and the United States. In general this

coverage is sustained by the continual search for parallels and prophecies: will what is

happening in the United States happen here? In the words of one famous headline, ‘Will Harlem

Come to Handsworth’? This is often offset by a notion of time lag: yes, Britain generally

follows the United States but later, more slowly. There is also what we might call a ‘reservation

on traditions’. Britain is, it is assumed, a more stable and traditional society, and this might

provide some buttress or defence against American experiences being reproduced here –

provided we take immediate and urgent steps. We must learn the lessons – if necessary, in

anticipation. The notion that the United States provides the ‘laboratory of democracy’, a preview

of ‘the problems of Western democracy’, can be clearly seen in Henry Fairlie’s Sunday Express

article of 22 September 1968: ‘In America this year one can see the politics of the future:

in Britain as much as anywhere else.’ There is a fuller view about how Britain might then ‘learn

the lessons’ in Angus Maude’s long article on ‘The Enemy Within’:

Every observer of the American scene had wondered what would become of a generation of

spoiled children with too much money to spend, encouraged to behave like adults in the insecure

years of immature adolescence. The spread of violence, vandalism, drugs, sexual promiscuity –

in short, the growing rejection of civilized social standards – has provided the answer. Two

things have contributed to this trend. First, the commercial exploitation of the

prosperous teenage market, seeking to inculcate a totally material standard of

values. Secondly, the propaganda of ‘liberal’ intellectuals who have preached the desirability

and inevitability of the emancipation of the young. These are the siren voices we have been

hearing, ever more brazen, in this country. As we try to grapple with our major imports from

America – violence, drug-taking, student unrest, the hippy cult and pornography – our own

permissive leftists have been hailing them as signs of progress. We might as well begin to learn

the lessons of America now, [our emphasis] for our own traditional standards are under

the same kind of attack. Here too, parents are becoming bemused and uncertain of their

responsibilities, as authority and discipline are derided and diminished. The American radical

intellectuals, who have done more than anyone to set the American people at odds with itself,

have preached the rejection of patriotism, of pride in their country and its history, of all the

traditions, and heritage of the past. The same gospel of anarchy is being promulgated here. We

in Britain have certain advantages. We have a longer tradition of civilized living, a greater

heritage of beauty and history from the past. We must treasure it and be prepared to defend it.

At the same time we are going to have to fight for our future prosperity, to work harder and

meet our challenges with more spirit and enterprise than are now necessary in America. This

may yet be our salvation, for we have the ability to triumph if we have the will. If we fail, it will

be because we have been destroyed from within – by the same kind of people who have done

their best to destroy the richest and most powerful nation on earth. (Angus Maude, ‘The Enemy

Within’, Sunday Express, 2 May 1971.)

Here the picture of the ‘special relationship’ is marginally, but significantly, redrawn. The

United States is not solely a source of models and patterns (‘the same kind of people’, etc.), but

seems to play a more active role, ‘exporting’ a variety of social ills to us. This indeed might

stand on its own as another distinctive element of the relationship – one which comes more into

play after 1968, which stresses that, because of the status of the United States as the ‘richest and

most powerful nation on earth’, it does not simply set the pattern which Britain, like all other

‘modernising societies’, will follow, but may actively impose aspects of that pattern on our

society by force of imitation and example, if not by direct cultural influence.

The underlying image of the United States, and its ‘special relationship’ to the British case, is

central to our understanding of the way the campaign against ‘mugging’ developed in Britain,

for it played a major part in the three stages of the transfer of the ‘mugging’ label from the

United States to Britain. First, the idea of a ‘special relationship’ legitimated the transfer of an

American term to the British situation. Second, this transfer allowed the designation of British

events as incipiently ‘American’ in character. Third, the vision of the United States as

‘potential future’ could then be used to legitimate the measures being demanded and taken to

control ‘mugging’.

In the public debate following the extremely heavy sentences in the ‘Handsworth’ mugging

case, the image of the United States was explicitly summoned once again in support of a policy

of deterrent sentencing. A Birmingham Evening Mail editorial of 20 March 1973 on the

sentence commented: ‘Of course the innocent must be protected from assault in the streets. The

more so at a time when Britain seems to be edging too close for comfort to the American

pattern of urban violence’ [our emphasis]. The American threat appeared in a more fully

developed form, and made more explicitly about mugging and the safety of the streets, in a

statement by Birmingham M.P., Mrs Jill Knight (quoted in the Birmingham Evening Mail on the

same day):

In my view it is absolutely essential to stop this rising tide of mugging in our cities. I have seen

what happens in America where muggings are rife. It is absolutely horrifying to know that in all

the big American cities, coast to coast, there are areas where people dare not go after dark. I

am extremely anxious that such a situation should never come to Britain.

The ultimate effectiveness of the American imagery is the almost routine way in which it came

to provide a basis for the justification of extreme reaction (social, judicial, political) to the crime

problem. The language in this final example is almost classic, in its down-beat way, of the

rhetoric of the law-and-order lobby: the cliché sensationalism of the ‘rising tide of mugging’ and

the modest exaggeration of ‘coast to coast’ providing just that common touch that mobilises a

silent majority and provokes it into speech. It is not at all uncharacteristic that this final use of

the label – to start a crusade – should be accompanied by the mildest trace of anti-

Americanism.

The ‘mugging’ label played a key role in the development of the moral panic about ‘mugging’

and the United States effectively provided both the label itself and its field of associations and

references, which lent meaning and substance to the term. The mass media here was the key

apparatus which formed the link and framed the passage of the term from one context to the

other. This is no simple coupling. First, there is the whole American experience of ‘mugging’;

then there is the way an already fully elaborated and troubling theme in the United States is

picked up and represented in the British press. This representation familiarises the British

audience not only with the term but also with what it has come to mean, to signify, to stand for

in the American context. ‘Mugging’ comes to Britain first as an American phenomenon, but

fully thematised and contextualised. It is embedded in a number of linked frames: the race

conflict; the urban crisis; rising crime; the breakdown of ‘law and order’; the liberal conspiracy;

the white blacklash. It is no mere fact about crime in the United States which is reported. It

connotes a whole historical construction about the nature and dilemmas of American society.

The British media pick up American ‘mugging’ within this cluster of connotative references.

The term is indexical: simply by using the label, a whole social history of the contemporary

United States can be immediately and graphically mapped into place. Then the label is

appropriated and applied to the British situation. Significantly, it is applied in Britain, first,

precisely in its connotative dimensions. It is used in a loose and unspecified way, to

indicate rising street crime, a general breakdown of ‘law and order’ in certain parts of London.

Only then, finally, is it applied to a particular form of crime. But this later more precise usage

also carries with it the already powerful and threatening social themes. And gradually

throughout the peak of the wave of British ‘muggings’ these themes, already latent in the

American use of the label, re-emerge as part and parcel of the meaning of ‘mugging’ in Britain

too. The ‘mugging’ label thus has a career: American ‘mugging’/the image of American

‘mugging’ in the British media/British ‘mugging’. This is a process, not of sudden

transplantation but of progressive naturalisation. And this process is framed by a more

general relationship – a ‘special relationship’, we have called it – between the United States and

Britain, common to the media in many areas other than that of crime, which supports the

passage of the label.

This export-import trade in social labels has consequences for how ‘mugging’ was understood in

Britain, and for how the media treated it when it arrived, and for how and why the reaction to it

was so rapid, intense and far-reaching. It may have helped to establish an anticipation in the

minds of the British public and in official circles that ‘mugging’ was on its way here; and that, if

and when it arrived, it would relate to other issues – such as race, poverty, urban

deprivation, lawlessness, violence and the crime wave – just as it had in the United States.

It may thus have helped to sensitise the British public to its troubling social features, as well as

to create an expectancy that it would become an everyday occurrence on British streets, and an

unstoppable one at that – just as it was said to be in the United States. It may also have had an

effect on the speed and direction of the official reaction, both in the ‘closed’ season before

August 1972, when principally the police and the special Transport Anti-Mugging squads were

at the forefront of containment; and subsequently, when open warfare against ‘mugging’ was in

full spate, in the courts, the media, among the police, politicians and moral guardians. Further,

it may have helped to set ‘mugging’ going in the public mind at a very high pitch. Given the

American scene-setting, British ‘mugging’ had no career as a descriptive term referring to a

version of street robbery with which, in any event, most British cities have long been familiar.

The label had no unsensational origins in Britain. It was a complex, social theme from its

inception. It arrived in Britain already established in its most sensational and sensationalised

form. It is hardly surprising, given this pre-history, that it triggered off at once its own

sensational spiral. What is more, the American representation in the British press may

have helped to shape the nature of the unofficial reaction to ‘mugging’; for if

American ‘mugging’ arrived entrammelled in the whole American panic about race, crime, riot

and lawlessness, it was also fully entrammelled in the anti-crime, anti-black, anti-riot, anti-

liberal, ‘law-and-order’ backlash. Thus, via the American transplant, Britain adopted, not only

‘mugging’, but the fear and panic about ‘mugging’ and the backlash reaction into which those

fears and anxieties issued. If ‘mugging’, by mid-1972, in Britain meant slums and cities and

innocent folk and daylight robbery, it also meant liberal politicians versus decent white folks,

the Nixon– Agnew coalition, the 1968 Crime Control Act, the politics of ‘law and order’ and

‘silent majorities’. If the career of the label made a certain kind of social knowledge widely

available in Britain, it also made a certain kind of response thoroughly predictable. No wonder

police patrols jumped in anticipation, and judges delivered themselves of homilies as if they

already knew what ‘mugging’ meant, and had only been waiting for its appearance; no wonder

silent majorities spoke up demanding swift action, tough sentences and better protection. The

soil of judicial and social reaction was already well tilled in preparation for its timely and long-

prepared advent.

Hall, Stuart. Policing the Crisis (p. 7-31). Macmillan Education UK. Kindle Edition.

Mass Shooting

In the past two years, mass shootings around the country have resulted in widespread fear and

panic among the people of America. The interactions between the media, politicians, and the

public regarding the mass shootings resulted in calls for strengthened control measures such as

Walmart no longer sell ammunition for military-style weapons.

Three media stories of mass shooting in 2019

1. El Paso Mass Shooting

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-texas-shooting/death-toll-reaches-23-from-last-years-

mass-shooting-in-el-paso-texas-idUSKCN22901V

2. 2019 Virginia Beach shooting

3. Midland–Odessa shooting

https://www.texastribune.org/2019/08/31/odessa-and-midland-shooting-30-victims-

reports-say/