Intersection Of Crime Research Articles

Criminal populism: crime as political capital in the Philippines and the United States

ABSTRACT This study examines the phenomenon of transforming crime into political capital, drawing on cases from the Philippines, then Donald Trump in the United States. It introduces three archetypes of politicians who use crime as political capital: the Criminal Politician, the Political Criminal, and the Fascist Criminal Politician. Additionally, the concept of criminal populism is introduced, highlighting how a politician’s criminal acts can become political assets by enhancing their appeal in electoral processes. The focus here is on intersections of crime and electoral processes, on how criminals use public performance and narrative construction within criminal justice institutions and political arenas to strengthen their support as populist leaders among the electorate. Furthermore, the concept of penal populism, 1 defined as the advocacy for anti-crime policies and legislation , is juxtaposed with criminal populism to offer a comprehensive understanding of the three new archetypes and their impacts on the intersection of crime and politics.

Entrepreneurs as prime targets: Insights from Mexican ventures on the link between venture visibility and crime of varying severity

This study addresses entrepreneurs as targets of crime. Leveraging insights from strategic responses to institutional pressures as the main theoretical frame, coupled with supporting insights from routine activities theory and interview data from 14 entrepreneurs who have been victims of crime, we introduce entrepreneur-led ventures becoming targets of crime via their engagement in routine activities that increase venture visibility. We then conceptualize that crime severity pushes entrepreneurs toward venture visibility-reduction responses, such as truncating growth, relocating, or discontinuing the venture. Survey data from 87,486 legally registered entrepreneur-led ventures in Mexico provide strong support for the relationships in our theoretical model. We find that as routine venture activities increase, entrepreneurs encounter crime of increasing severity, with the routine venture activity of making transactions at a bank serving as the strongest attractor of crime. Building on these findings, we observe an indirect effect through crime severity such that the choice to relocate the venture is the most likely response to being targeted by criminals. Our results advance the literature at the intersection of crime and entrepreneurship, especially in developing economies, and offers venture visibility as a mechanism that shapes both criminals' targeting of ventures and entrepreneurs' attempts to reduce being targeted.

Police Tactics and Their Effects on Democracy

Scholars have long wondered whether the intersection of crime, justice, and local elections are correlated. Recently, multiple deaths of African-American citizens during encounters with police have become highly-publicized and have consequently catalyzed discussions around police misconduct and police reform. Based on the increased exposure of police misconduct, this study explores how contact with the criminal justice system and perceptions of police legitimacy shape political behavior in the modern era, with specific emphasis on the aggressiveness of police tactics and voting behavior in local elections. This study has attempted to control for neighborhood context by using the municipalities with similar ecological factors to highlight the correlation between specific police tactics and voting behavior in local elections. This study also will look at how specific police tactics either promote or obstruct the requirements of a participatory democracy set forth by Robert Dahl. Those requirements are as follows: meaningful and extensive competition, sufficient inclusiveness in national and local elections, and a high level of civil and political liberties. Due to this study’s focus on voting behavior in local election, the analysis will concentrate on the second requirement of participatory democracy. The results of this study show that perceptions of police legitimacy through the use of specific policing tactics are likely to be highly influential in the prediction of candidate selection as well as the likelihood of a citizen’s participation in local elections. Municipalities that have less aggressive police tactics turn out to have a higher voter turnout, as well are to be more likely to vote for a Democratic candidate, while those municipalities that institute more aggressive police tactics will have a lower voter turnout and will also more likely vote for a Democratic candidate but will have larger amount or residents vote for a Republican or Independent candidate.

What Has Place Got to Do With It? Hot Spots Policing to Address Physical and Mental Health

In the last few decades of criminological research, the contextual concept of place has become a widely discussed and studied topic. Currently, one of the most studied and discussed place-based strategies is hot spots policing, the study of crime patterns at micro-geographic places. Since the 1980s, hot spots policing has become an important and empirically validated law enforcement intervention. One of the most novel questions about hot spots policing is whether it can be used to address other issues such as the intersection of crime, place, and health. Do concentrated patterns of physical and mental health issues mirror the patterns of crime at places? If so, can hot spots policing guide police interventions? This article reviews the current state of public health and place-based crime patterns to synthesize the concept of place-based interventions for health and crime. The article concludes with implications for the scholars and practitioners.

The Effect of Serious Offending on Health: A Marginal Structural Model

In this study, we contribute to the emerging scholarship at the intersection of crime and health by estimating the effect of serious offending on offenders’ health. By building on sociological stress research, we identify and adjust for the key life course processes that may intervene on the pathway from offending to health using a rich set of measures available in the panel data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health. Because offending and health share many causes and consequences, a critical challenge is accounting for confounding and mediation that unfold over time. We adjust for these time-varying processes by estimating repeated measures marginal structural models with inverse probability of treatment weights. The results show that offending over the life course is adversely linked to health but not uniformly across race and gender.

The Multiscalar Nature of Urban Security and Public Safety: Crime Prevention from Local Policy to Policing in Lisbon (Portugal) and Memphis (the United States)

The article contributes to recent discussions on convergence/divergence of local policies for urban security and public safety amid globalization, exploring comparatively local approaches to crime prevention and explaining differences/similarities through multilevel connections. I analyze situational prevention, social policy, and proximity/community policing in two “not-so-global” metropolises: Lisbon, where security is the goal of a wide set of policies in many fields, and Memphis, where social problems have become security issues and policing the only game in town. Differing approaches are explained on the grounds of political traditions, neoliberalization of policy, and multilevel relations among polities. I discuss implications for the relation between policy and policing: Police attempts at social outreach amid coupling/decoupling of security with/from urban policy, and the “mission creep” of policing when it is expected to lead prevention. Conclusions advocate that policy reform is necessary at many levels to deal with the intersection of crime, retrenching welfare, and aggressive policing in U.S. cities such as Memphis.

Oppositional Politics in Criminal Law and Procedure

There is a democracy deficit at the intersection of crime, race, and poverty. The causes and consequences of hyperincarceration disproportionately affect those least likely to mount an effective oppositional politics: poor people and people of color. This Article breaks new ground by arguing that the democracy deficit calls for a democracy-enhancing theory of criminal law and procedure that modifies traditional justifications of retributivism, deterrence, and rehabilitation by prioritizing self-governance. Part I contextualizes the argument within cyclical retrenchments across movements for racial and economic justice. Part II sketches the contours of a democracy-enhancing theory. Part III turns that theoretical lens on a single jurisdiction to map a previously unnoticed constellation of cutting-edge criminal justice reforms. Part IV explains why those reforms were improbable and identifies some conditions that allowed them to occur and occasionally survive counterattack. The Article concludes that those conditions privilege grasstops over grassroots advocacy, and highlights examples of direct action by low-income people and people of color as a vital component of a more broadly democratic foundation for criminal law and procedure.

Investigating the crisis of the present

As we begin Crime, Media, Culture’s fourth volume, the need for serious and sustained scholarly engagement with the intersections of crime, media and culture has never been greater. Around the world, genocidal criminality competes with global warming and a Spice Girls reunion for media attention. The United States gears up for a presidential election sure to be decided by distorted images of terrorism, gender, and crime. The Guardian declares that, with some 138 journalists now killed, Iraq has become a war ‘no longer . . . accessible to public scrutiny or to democratic engagement’, and so evidences ‘the end of the media as a major actor in war’ (Bunting, 2007: 17). In the heartland of the United States, a distraught young man murders eight people at a mega-shopping mall and then kills himself, all in the hope that ‘now I’ll be famous’. Meanwhile, a little girl goes missing – and the media are mobilized. Madeleine McCann’s disappearance in Portugal has generated a torrent of international media coverage – coverage that may in fact be ushering in a dangerous extension in the hyper-mediatization of crime and control. Images of Madeleine are ubiquitous, and can be spotted not only in the media, but in airports and other public venues around the world. Two points arising from this story are worth briefl y dwelling on here. First, in November 2007, charities released fi gures indicating that more than 600 children have been missing in the UK for as long as Madeleine McCann, and are still unaccounted for (Woolf, 2007). Among them, dozens have disappeared from local authority care, and many more have been identifi ed by police and immigration offi cers as traffi cking victims: 40 are considered to be at particularly ‘high risk’ of harm. Many of these children have no parents to launch an appeal and few have achieved any kind of media visibility. None has attracted the levels of attention devoted to the McCann case. Secondly, the intensity and relentlessness of the media focus on the McCanns becomes all the more interesting when we consider the dearth of verifi able facts in the case. Indeed, all we ‘know’ at the time of writing is that a little girl has gone missing. No body has been found, no clear information regarding Madeleine’s whereabouts has been uncovered, and no one has been offi cially charged with an offence. Yet Madeleine’s parents – Kate and Gerry McCann – have been subjected to nothing short

It’s the image that matters: Style, substance and critical scholarship

Much has happened at Crime, Media, Culture since our last editorial at the beginning of Volume 2. As we launch Volume 3, we can report that CMC has recently been awarded a major international publishing prize and has continued, we hope, to promote the best in critical scholarship at the intersections of crime, media and culture. As is to be expected after two years, our Associate and International Editorial Boards have undergone some restructuring. While the changes to the latter are too numerous to list in detail here, we would like to extend our sincerest thanks to all the Editorial Board members who have worked with us over the past two volumes, and to offer a warm welcome to those new members who have come on board. It is also a pleasure to welcome Katja Franko Aas, Mark Hamm, Maggy Lee, Meda Chesney-Lind and Russell Smith as Associate Editors, and to confi rm that Alexandra Campbell and Majid Yar have joined us as Review Editors. In addition, we have created a new editorial position – Visual Arts Editor – which will be fi lled by Cecile Van de Voorde. Refl ecting our scholarly interest in the visual, we believe this new role will further cement CMC’s distinctive and innovative approach to visual issues. In this context it is the visual, and its signifi cance for explorations of crime, media and culture, that we wish to address briefl y in this editorial. Today, the visual constitutes perhaps the central medium through which the meanings and emotions of crime are captured and conveyed to audiences. Indeed, we would suggest that it is the visual that increasingly shapes our engagement with, and understanding of, key issues of crime, control and social order. The proliferation of news and entertainment media has generated growing competition for audience attention, a sort of infl ationary spiral of shock and enticement. Producing a visually arresting product which can ‘feed the mind and move the heart’, as Rupert Murdoch (2006) recently put it, has become one of the major challenges for media practitioners seeking to maintain their commercial buoyancy. In the midst of rapidly developing production technologies across a 24/7 mediascape, and multiplying screens and surfaces, the visual becomes paramount. However, while there is no escaping the ‘politics of representation’ (Hall, 1993), a scholarly engagement

Editor's Introduction

Major work on the biopic begins with Carolyn Anderson's 1988 bibliographical essay, which treats the genre chronologically as a reflection of the ideologies of the times from the 1930s onward. George F. Custen's landmark 1992 Bio/Pics: How Hollywood Constructed Public History surveys the Hollywood biopic up to 1960. Dennis Bingham's anticipated study of post-studio era film biography is currently under contract with Rutgers University Press, and as Alana Bell's annotated bibliography in this issue makes clear, important individual essays and dissertations have appeared from time to time. But this rich and various genre deserves more textual and contextual analysis than it has hitherto received, and this special issue of Biography is a contribution to the development of this discourse. Perhaps one reason why this genre has lagged behind other genres in film studies is that biopics have been so much a part of other film genres that they inevitably serve more as illustrations for those other kinds of movies. Though pervasive within the industry, the biopic is often seen first as a western, a musical, a war film, a gangster film, a woman's film, a melodrama, an historical epic, or film noir. Treating the biopic as a genre in itself therefore becomes as problematic as treating the biopic as depicting the life itself. Just as it is not real life but reel life--a representation, a fictionalized or interpretive treatment--so too it is often a film about film, as the life gets folded into, repeats, and transforms the narrative patterns and conventions of other genres and larger schools of narrative such as classical Hollywood cinema. A biopic's production will often take its cue from the cultural/political attitudes of the time, from the philosophy and hallmarks of a particular studio or filmmaker, or even from the personae of its stars. In other words, a biopic is a mythic expression in which several textual and contextual factors often play a part. If, for example, we look at Bonnie and Clyde (1967), we see that it is not only a biopic, but a gangster film as [End Page v] well, and that the majority of the general public viewed it and remember it as a gangster film. The film also incorporates the standard Hollywood plot patterns of work and romance by playing up the intersection of crime and love in the relationship between Bonnie and Clyde. Furthermore, the film turned out to be a star vehicle for Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, to say nothing about its inspired co-stars Gene Hackman, Estelle Parsons, and Michael J. Pollard; and Bonnie and Clyde mirrors the Zeitgeist of its time by depicting its protagonists as heroes rebelling against the system, coming as it did at the height of the counterculture movement, the Vietnam war protests, and the Civil Rights agitation. And finally, the film comments on the mythmaking influence of the media in its references to photographs, newspaper headlines and articles, and Hollywood movies and stars of the 1930s. It should not be surprising, then, that director Arthur Penn would say in an interview after the film was made, that "I don't think the original Bonnie and Clyde are very important except insofar as they motivated the writing of a script and our making of the movie" (7). A biopic then is not so much a film about a life as it is a film about competing and intersecting discourses, with the life itself being simply one of those discourses that is transformed by the work of the others. A film about Wyatt Earp, for example, is tangentially about the historical Earp, but it is really about the western genre. Certain patterns of this genre dictate departures from historical accuracy. One such pattern is that of the individual versus the community, which contrasts the western hero's rugged individualism and relation to the wilderness to community, marriage, and civilization. The conflict is between the integrity of the individual and the pull toward integration into the community, and both sides are empowered...

The favelados in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Jorge da Silva, a researcher with the Faculdade Latina‐Americana de Ciencias Sociais, examines the intersections of crime, police violence, and race in Rio de Janeiro. In The Favelados in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; de Silva critiques what he calls Brazil's ‘myth of racial democracy,’ exposing Rio's economic and racial divisions. Most proposals for police reform, he argues, are insufficient because of their failure to take these crucial issues into account. He goes on to question the centralization and militarization of the police force, and concludes by identifying opportunities for reform.