British Journal of Criminology 52(2)

British Journal of Criminology, March 2012: Volume 52, Issue 2

How Mafias Take Advantage of Globalization: The Russian Mafia in Italy
Federico Varese

How do mafias operate across territories? The paper is an in-depth study of the foreign operations of a Russian mafia group. It relies on a unique set of data manually extracted from an extensive police investigation that lasted several years, including a set of phone intercepts over nine months. Using quantitative content analysis and multiple correspondence analyses (homals), the study reconstructs the activities of the group and its organizational structure in Italy. The paper shows that the core activity of the group––protecting racketeering––remains located in the territory of origin, while the Italian branch was monitoring investments in the legal economy. The structure of the group abroad indicates that a division of labour developed, alongside extensive contacts with local criminals and entrepreneurs. The paper contributes to broader debates on globalization and organized crime, moral panics, the structure of informal groups and the role of women in organized crime.

Cheap Capitalism: A Sociological Study of Food Crime in China
Hongming Cheng

This article reports on an archival analysis of cases and policy documents in China and a survey and oral interviews with food safety regulators, food industry members, consumer organization representatives, food safety observers and scholars in Zhejiang province of China, on the nature and extent of food crime, the composition of offenders and factors associated with food crime. Results indicate that the prevalence of food crime occurs in the context of ‘cheap capitalism’, which is characterized by low price, inferior quality of products and degraded social morality and business ethics. A closer interaction among government, industry and academia, forming a triple helix, is playing an increasingly significant role in causing food crime.

‘This is not Justice’: Ian Tomlinson, Institutional Failure and the Press Politics of Outrage
Chris Greer and Eugene McLaughlin

This article contributes to research on the sociology of scandal and the role of national newspapers and, more particularly, newspaper editorials in setting the agenda for public debate around police accountability and miscarriages of justice. In previous work, we analysed how citizen journalism framed news coverage of the policing of the G20 Summit, London 2009, and the death of Ian Tomlinson (Greer and McLaughlin 2010). In this article, we consider the next stage of the Ian Tomlinson case. Our empirical focus is the controversy surrounding the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) decision not to prosecute the police officer filmed striking Tomlinson shortly before he collapsed and died. We illustrate how the press's relentless agenda-setting around ‘institutional failure’, initially targeted at the Metropolitan Police Service, expanded to implicate a network of criminal justice institutions. The Tomlinson case offers insights into the shifting nature of contemporary relations between the British press and institutional power. It is a paradigmatic example of a politically ambitious form of ‘attack journalism’, the scope of which extends beyond the criminal justice system. In a volatile information-communications marketplace, journalistic distrust of institutional power is generating a ‘press politics of outrage’, characterized by ‘scandal amplification’.

The Legitimization of Cctv as a Policy Tool: Genesis and Stabilization of a Socio-Technical Device in Three French Cities
Séverine Germain, Anne-Cécile Douillet, and Laurence Dumoulin

This article deals with the widespread use of open-street close-circuit television (CCTV) systems as a safety policy tool in French cities. To investigate this diffusion, we suggest tackling CCTV as a socio-technical device able to enrol allies beyond the initial circle of technology promoters, including former opponents. Through an empirical analysis of three case studies, we show that a device can spread on a site provided that the actors in charge of the device appropriate it and discover new practical uses. As appropriation practices give CCTV supporters new arguments to justify its use, CCTV is therefore more legitimized by the possible combinations of different arguments and uses than by its strictly speaking effectiveness to fight against crime.

Violence and Carceral Masculinities in Felony Fights
Michael Salter and Stephen Tomsen

Contemporary culture is replete with carnivalesque representations of violence and this has accelerated with the development of online technology. Felony Fights is a website and set of DVDs depicting real combat between male former convicts and other men. Viewer responses to these clips reflect a complexity of meaning and symbolic associations between violence, power and masculine identities. Nevertheless, profoundly unequal relations of power shape their production and viewing appeal. The embodied and affective dimensions of marginality and poverty are presented in Felony Fights as evidence of the animal brutality and carceral character of the fighters. This resonates with populist explanations for criminal violence and mainstream portrayals of male masochism in which white men are depicted as a victimized social group.

The Sonics of Crimmigration in Australia: Wall of Noise and Quiet Manoeuvring
Michael Welch

Further exploring moral panic, Cohen points out that claims-making can range from loud to quiet. That phenomenon is particularly evident within the merging of crime and immigration control (or crimmigration). This project focuses on Australia, where claims-making on asylum seekers contains both loud panic as well as quiet manoeuvring by the state, including such tactics as stonewalling, privatization and offshore detention. In pursuit of a nuanced interpretation of crimmigration, the analysis sorts out key legal and human rights alongside a recent High Court ruling on the processing of asylum seekers.

Security and Disappointment: Policing, Freedom and Xenophobia in South Africa
Jonny Steinberg

In May 2008, 62 people, most of them foreign nationals, were killed during episodes of public violence in South Africa's major cities. This article accounts for the relationship between the mob violence and policing practices that emerged after apartheid. I argue policing practice has recast much of urban life, in this instance, the disappointments of the poor, into matters of security. Struggling to maintain its bond with the poor, the government signalled, through police practices, that a quotient of South Africans’ freedom was being stolen and that the perpetrators should be punished. It is this that led mobs into the streets, for it gave purchase to the idea that the business of making the city secure was forever unfinished.

Civil Disputes and Crime Recording: Refusals, Disinterest And Power In Police Witcraft
Nick Lynn and Susan J. Lea

This paper explores the rhetorical skills or witcraft of police officers as they adjudicate on disputes and crimes reported to them. The first author accompanied officers ‘on the beat’ to record these interactions with members of the public. A discourse analysis of the data revealed officers regularly use a discursive strategy that we term the that’s civil device. Exploiting an epistemological imbalance that exists in police/public interactions, the device not only allows officers to externalize their judgments as matters of law; it also assists them to manage the conversationally and operationally difficult task of refusing. Moreover, it allows officers to resist claims of disinterestedness or neglect of duty as they limit or disbar their involvement in potentially insoluble disputes.

‘Keeping the Peace’: Social Identity, Procedural Justice and the Policing of Football Crowds
Clifford Stott, James Hoggett, and Geoff Pearson

This paper explores the relevance of the Elaborated Social Identity Model of Crowd Behaviour and Procedural Justice Theory to an understanding of both the presence and absence of collective conflict during football (soccer) crowd events. It provides an analysis of data gathered during longitudinal ethnographic study of fans of Cardiff City Football Club—a group of supporters with a notorious history of involvement in ‘hooliganism’ within the English domestic Football Leagues. The analysis suggests that the perceived legitimacy among fans of the way they were policed affected the internal dynamics, patterns of collective action and overall levels of ‘compliance’ among the fan group. On this basis, we contend that these processes mediated both a long-term decline but also the sporadic re-emergence of collective conflict during crowd events involving the fans. The paper concludes by exploring the implications of our analysis for informing policy, practice and theory, particularly with respect to the importance of policing with consent as a route to conflict reduction in domestic football.

What is an ‘Ethics Committee’?: Academic Governance in an Epoch of Belief and Incredulity
Simon Winlow and Steve Hall

We want to make one very simple claim that we hope might contribute to the developing discourse on the disciplinary and institutional governance of academic criminology: the Ethics Committee is one of a growing number of little others that attempt to compensate for the loss of the traditional symbolic order. While our focus is on the Ethics Committee and criminology, we believe that much of what we have to say is also applicable to other forms of academic governance that characterize the social sciences in the contemporary university. We will take a rather circuitous route to this conclusion in the hope that we might encourage criminological researchers to think seriously about the ways in which Slavoj Žižek’s philosophical framework can be used to theorize criminology’s position in the current post-political social order.