Crime: Hobbs’ Doing the Business

Abstract

This chapter focuses on an ethnographic study involving participant observation of the policed (petty criminals) and the police (the local CID) in the East End of London. The central argument of Dick Hobbs’ book, Doing the Business, is that a unique working-class culture has developed in the East End of London and, contrary to police practice elsewhere, this distinctive culture also characterises the forms of social control in the locality. The book, Hobbs (1988: 1) argues, is ‘about both formal and informal control strategies and the coercive regulatory power of the market place’. Although it may be shelved alongside the growing number of studies on the police, Hobbs is anxious to point out that it is not an analysis of policing in itself. It is not about the ordinary bobby on the beat but on detectives working in the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) of the Metropolitan Police. More importantly, he does not study them from within an organisation. Rather, the activities of the CID are studied from ‘within the urban milieu’ which Hobbs (1988: 2) describes as ‘a view of policing largely from the point of view of the policed: policing from below’. The research, therefore, is simultaneously a study of the policed (petty criminals) and the police (CID detectives), both of whom are firmly located in the East End and its culture.