Editor's Choice: We Need to Talk About Mohammad: Criminology, Theistic Violence and the Murder of Theo Van Gogh
Simon Cottee
On 2 November 2004, Mohammad Bouyeri murdered the Dutch film-maker Theo Van Gogh. At his trial, Bouyeri proclaimed that he acted out of a religious duty. Van Gogh’s killing provoked fierce debate in the Netherlands over its meaning and significance and once again the question of violent religious fundamentalism came to dominate public discourse across Europe and beyond, just as it had in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Criminologists, however, have largely neglected the issue of jihadi violence and the broader question it raises of the relationship between religion and violent activism. This article critiques this neglect. It also offers an account of Van Gogh’s murder, using Jock Young’s later work as a starting point for an interdisciplinary analysis of its possible meanings and motivations.
Post-crisis Policing and Public–Private Partnerships: The Case of Lincolnshire Police and G4S
Adam White
The post-financial crisis ‘politics of austerity’ have prompted many police forces to explore a range of radical new budget-reducing policies, including outsourcing key service areas to the private sector on an unprecedented scale. This article analyses the largest outsourcing contract to date: the £229 million Lincolnshire Police–G4S strategic partnership. It addresses the question: to what extent has the outsourcing process engendered a shift from the logic of the public good to the logic of the market in the delivery of those frontline operations covered in the contract? In arguing that these operations are characterized more by a complex blurring of logics than a straightforward unidirectional shift, the article contributes towards both explanatory and normative dimensions of the ‘transformation of policing’ debate.
Self-legitimacy, Police Culture and Support for Democratic Policing in an English Constabulary
Ben Bradford and Paul Quinton
When do police officers feel confident in their own authority? What factors influence their sense of their own legitimacy? What is the effect of such ‘self-legitimacy’ on the way they think about policing? This article addresses these questions using a survey of police officers working in an English Constabulary. We find that the most powerful predictor of officers’ confidence in their own authority is identification with their organization, itself something strongly associated with perceptions of the procedural justice of senior management. A greater sense of self-legitimacy is in turn linked to greater commitment to democratic modes of policing. Finally, we find that this sense of legitimacy is embedded in a matrix of identities and cultural adaptations within the police organization.
A Shared Narrative?: A Case Study of the Contested Legacy of Policing in the North of Ireland
Kevin Hearty
This article critically examines the difficulty with creating a shared narrative in post-conflict Northern Ireland. Using the legacy of policing as a case study for drawing more general conclusions about creating a shared narrative, the article interrogates how disagreement over where to start and end the discussion and exclusivist approaches to victimhood are obstructing attainment of a shared narrative. The article analyses competing policing narratives as constructed from the lived reality of opposing ethno-nationalist collectives with different experiences in a heated ‘memory politics’ domain. Concluding with the argument that the prerequisite to successfully building a shared narrative is departure from competing ‘memory politics’ understandings of the past, the article suggests a new understanding of victimhood and perpetratorship in Northern Ireland.
Corruption and Police Legitimacy in Lahore, Pakistan
Jonathan Jackson, Muhammad Asif, Ben Bradford, and Muhammad Zakria Zakar
Police legitimacy is an important topic of criminological research, yet it has received only sporadic study in societies where there is widespread police corruption, where the position of the police is less secure, and where social order is more tenuous. Analysing data from a probability sample survey of adults in Lahore, Pakistan, we examine the empirical links between people’s experience of police corruption, their perceptions of the fairness and effectiveness of the police, and their beliefs about the legitimacy of the police. Our findings suggest that in a context in which minimal effectiveness and integrity is yet to be established, police legitimacy may rest not just on the procedural fairness of officers, but also on their demonstrated ability to control crime and avoid corruption.
‘My Life Is Separated’: An Examination Of The Challenges And Barriers To Parenting For Indigenous Fathers In Prison
Susan Dennison, Holly Smallbone, Anna Stewart, Kate Freiberg, and Rosie Teague
Paternal imprisonment creates a significant risk for the intergenerational transmission of offending. However, there is little research on the mechanisms underpinning this risk, including how paternal imprisonment interrupts parenting and father–child relationships. Culturally relevant research is also essential in the context of high imprisonment rates of Indigenous Australian men. We conducted interviews with 41 Indigenous Australian fathers from two prisons in North Queensland to examine their identities as fathers in prison and the barriers associated with maintaining relationships with their children. Findings are discussed in relation to contact and distance; intergenerational absence of fathers; paternal involvement through play, care and culture; and diminished opportunities for men’s parental and cultural generativity. We consider the implications of the findings for children’s well-being.
Civilised Communities: Reconsidering the ‘Gloomy Tale’ of Immigration and Social Order in a Changing Town
Clare E. Griffiths
Immigration and its effects on crime, social disorder and community tensions remains a pervasive feature of public, government and academic discourse. This discourse often considers immigration, and immigrants themselves, as a threat to the community’s existing moral and social order. This article presents the findings of a case study that used quantitative and qualitative methods to explore the experiences of social order following a recent wave of Polish migration in a small working class town in the North West of England. The key findings show that the assumed association of migration with a disruption to social order receives little support. Rather, the social order in the studied locale is predominantly managed and maintained through ‘civilised relationships’ between migrants and established residents, thus failing to culminate into conflict between the two groups. This situation of ‘civility’ provides an alternative to the preponderance of previous research telling a ‘gloomy tale’ of immigration and its impact on local communities.
Are All Cases Treated Equal?: Using Goffman’s Frame Analysis to Understand How Homicide Detectives Orient to Their Work
Shila R. Hawk and Dean A. Dabney
Drawing upon ethnographic data from one US metropolitan police department’s homicide unit, this study employs Goffman’s frame analysis to explore two questions: (1) What types of cases are prioritized in homicide investigations? and (2) How are those prioritizations operationalized and justified? Themes within the data suggest that although detectives struggle to ‘work every case the same’, their approach and effort on cases is nonetheless influenced largely by unit culture and perceptions of victim deservedness. Furthermore, we demonstrate that framing techniques enable investigators to compartmentalize and manage the emotional strain of deprioritizing some homicides while rigorously investigating other cases. These findings add to our understanding of the administration of homicide work, theorize the moral complexities of said work and point to frame analysis as a potentially useful framework for crime researchers.
Criminologizing Wrongful Convictions
Michael Naughton
This article considers the apparent lack of serious engagement with issues pertaining to wrongful convictions by criminology at present. It seeks to address this by criminologizing wrongful convictions in two senses: firstly, by highlighting a variety of forms of intentional law or rule breaking by police officers and prosecutors in the causation of wrongful convictions that in other circumstances would likely be treated as crime and dealt with as such; and, secondly, to reveal the extent to which such powerful criminal justice system agents can cause profound and wide-ranging forms of harm to victims of wrongful convictions, their families and society as a whole with almost total impunity. In so doing, the relevance of the study of the intentional forms of crime and deviance committed by criminal justice system agents in the manufacture of wrongful convictions to both arms of the criminological divide is emphasized: mainstream and critical criminology. The overall aim is to show that the study of wrongful convictions can further extend and enrich existing criminological epistemology in vital and important ways and can even contribute to the prevention and possible elimination of those that are caused deliberately.
Is the ‘Shadow of Sexual Assault’ Responsible for Women’s Higher Fear of Burglary?
Helmut Hirtenlehner and Stephen Farrall
This article examines the ‘shadow of sexual assault hypothesis’ which posits that women’s higher fear of crime, compared to males, can be attributed to their elevated fear of sexual victimization. We argue that the previous, overwhelmingly supportive, research on this issue is incomplete in three ways: (1) the thesis has not yet been extensively tested outside of North America, (2) competing, possibly overlaying, shadow effects of physical violence have widely been ignored and (3) perceptually contemporaneous offences have always been measured in an indirect manner. Drawing on the example of fear of burglary, this work tackles the afore-mentioned deficiencies. Results from a crime survey conducted in the United Kingdom indicate that, when relying on a rather traditional test strategy, the ‘shadow of sexual assault hypothesis’ is supported. However, the findings are highly contingent on the employed methodology. When utilizing direct measures of perceptually contemporaneous offences, only physical, not sexual, assault turns out to cast a shadow over fear of burglary. The impact of fear of rape would appear to be reduced considerably once fear of broader physical harm is taken into account. We conclude that much of the existing evidence for the shadow thesis can be challenged on the grounds of failing to control for the effects of non-sexual physical assault and drawing on an inadequate operationalization of perceptually contemporaneous offences.
Internet Adoption and Online Behaviour Among American Street Gangs: Integrating Gangs and Organizational Theory
Richard K. Moule, Jr, David C. Pyrooz, and Scott H. Decker
The globalization of street gangs has drawn attention to the mechanisms associated with the diffusion of gang culture. One mechanism, the Internet, is of growing interest to gang researchers. Yet, research on the online behaviours of street gangs remains descriptive, failing to elaborate on the factors that distinguish gangs that adopt, or do not adopt, technology and engage in online behaviours. The present study integrates insights from organizational theory to examine whether and to what extent gang organization influences the online presence and behaviour of gangs. Using data collected from gang members in five US cities, the results from a series of logistic and Poisson regression models indicate that higher levels of gang organization increase the likelihood that gangs have a website, post videos and recruit members online. Results support integrating research on gang behaviour with organizational theory. Directions for future research on the relationship between gang organization and offending are discussed.
The Dynamic Risk of Heavy Episodic Drinking on Interpersonal Assault in Young Adolescence and Early Adulthood
Carly Lightowlers, Mark Elliot, and Mark Tranmer
This study examines the extent to which variation in violent behaviour can be explained by variation in drinking patterns in late adolescence and early adulthood using panel data of regular drinkers aged between 16 and 29 in England and Wales. Multilevel models explore individuals’ propensity to commit assault controlling for their drinking behaviour. Results suggest that males and younger people are more likely to commit assault offences and that around 60 per cent of the variation in assault is between people, the remainder being within people between occasions. Heavy episodic drinking is a significant predictor of assault in all models. Collectively, the findings point to a periodic association between drinking patterns and violent outcomes, supporting evidence of other forms of contemporaneous association.
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