Crime: everything old is new again

Abstract

Author Willetts claims there is nothing new about either the recent wave of gun-crime and gangsterism in Britain or the reporting of it. Strong echoes of both the phenomenon itself and the media’s treatment of it can be found during the aftermath of the Second World War. Willetts recounts the story of a particularly emotive shooting in North Soho in 1947 and the media frenzy it occasioned. “Had the North Soho shooting occurred today,” he writes, “the police would have had to contend with jostling camera crews from numerous television stations. In the era before most homes had been invaded by television, however, so-called ‘newsreels’ provided a comparable source of coverage... Such was the significance of the…murder that the Pathé company, one of the foremost producers of newsreels in Britain, despatched a cameraman to the scene of the crime. By then, the Metropolitan Police had initiated what would turn into its biggest murder investigation so far that century.”