Ethnicity and Crime Flashcards
Reiner - canteen culture
Reiner (2000): Canteen culture amongst the police, including: suspicion, macho values and racism, which encourages racist stereotypes and a mistrust of those from non-white backgrounds.
Bowling and Philips - robbery higher amongst Black people
Bowling and Phillips (2002): Higher levels of robbery among black people could be the product of labelling that arises from the use of regular stop and search procedures, which in turn leads to the self fulfilling prophecy.
Hall - black muggers
Policing The Crisis (Hall et al, 1978) – Hall examined the moral panic over “mugging” in the early 1970s, using Marxist insights. Selective and stereotypical reporting represented young black men as potential muggers and given the role of folk devils. In fact, mugging (not an official category of crime in any case) was not increasing dramatically. Hall explained the moral panic in terms of a crisis of British capitalism: the state deflected attention on to a small group who could be scapegoated and on whom the state could be portrayed as cracking down firmly, using new repressive policing which would be useful in tackling future unrest. Young blacks were suitable for this role because of their visibility and powerlessness in the sense of lacking organisations or representatives to speak on their behalf.
Lea and Young - inner-city area
Lea and Young (1984): High levels of crime really do exist in inner city areas where there are often high numbers of members of ethnic minorities, and draw attention to the fact that those who live here are the main victims of crime as well.
Shaw and McKay - ‘broken window thesis’
Broken Window thesis Shaw and McKay suggest that inner city areas are transient communities that don’t develop social solidarity and where new migrants don’t put down roots. It is therefore likely that such communities are less likely to self-regulate than suburban or rural communities, and are therefore more likely to have broken windows.
Gilroy - political nature of Black crime
The political nature of black crime (Gilroy) – Gilroy, a Neo-Marxist, agrees that young blacks are targeted by the media and the police, but argues that black crime is different in that it is a conscious continuation of anti-colonial struggles in the West Indies, just in a new context. It is therefore black crime is political and potentially revolutionary, a political response to inequality and discrimination.
Rastafarianism, for example, is not just a religion; it contains a set of revolutionary political ideas about overthrowing white authority (“Babylon”), and tends to bring its followers into confrontation with the police over, for example, marijuana use.
