Mean Streets Research Articles

A105 The Meaning of “Mean Streets” for Sustainable & Active Travel: Crime, (Pedestrian/Bike) Casualties and Mode Choice

While travel is an inherently linear activity, most studies of the influence of the urban environment on active travel oftentimes attribute coarse, zonal averages to unique individuals, likely missing key details important to pedestrians and bicyclists. This research fills a key knowledge gap by examining: 1) The influence of different types of criminal activity (e.g., property vs violent crime) along different segments of a person’s travel route; 2) The influence of bicycle and pedestrian collision data in combination with criminal activity on sustainable and active travel choices. Finally, this is one first studies to align urban environmental quality measures along an individual’s path, from origin to destination, as well as provide a detailed examination of the choice to bicycle in lieu of other, available modes. This study employs unique methods and metrics through an innovative application of individualized linear spatial units of analyses in combination with detailed geospatial data (on crime, pedestrian and bicycle collisions, and urban design factors) - in sum, disaggregated data for disaggregated research. Many unique datasets were gathered and innovatively applied in this study, including: Geo-located point data on criminal activity, categorized as per the U.S. Department of Justice (major and minor property crimes, major and minor violent crimes, and instances of vandalism), and tested for their varying influence around the respondents’ home, route, and destination. Geo-located point data on pedestrian and bicycle collisions along the respondents’ routes. Many other data on the built environment, socio-demographics, and other important factors (parking availability). Finally, this study analyses these data through various multinomial logit (MNL) predictive models of the choices to walk, bicycle, ride bus, drive-alone, or be dropped-off. The predictive, MNL model results find that different crimes appear to have different effects on different modes: property crimes deter people who may wish to avoid placing personal property at risk—such as parking a vehicle or a bicycle. Violent crimes along-the-route appear to have a significant deterrent to modes where travelers are more exposed to personal risk, such as walking, bicycling and transit ridership. People who may have the option to avoid certain stations with high threats to personal safety, appear to exercise that option, such as people being dropped-off, carpooling or driving alone. Finally, when pedestrian and bicycle casualties are entered into the model, there are changes to the associations with criminal activity. By improving our understanding of the connection between the experiential quality of street ecology (as influenced by crime, pedestrian/bike casualties, and urban design) on people’s choice to engage in sustainable and active travel, This study provides important policy guidance on such efforts as creating safer, more livable streets, CPTED, and the allocation of police resources.

Street-level noise in an urban setting: assessment and contribution to personal exposure.

BackgroundThe urban soundscape, which represents the totality of noise in the urban setting, is formed from a wide range of sources. One of the most ubiquitous and least studied of these is street-level (i.e., sidewalk) noise. Mainly associated with vehicular traffic, street level noise is hard to ignore and hard to escape. It is also potentially dangerous, as excessive noise from any source is an important risk factor for adverse health effects. This study was conducted to better characterize the urban soundscape and the role of street level noise on overall personal noise exposure in an urban setting.MethodsStreet-level noise measures were obtained at 99 street sites located throughout New York City (NYC), along with data on time, location, and sources of environmental noise. The relationship between street-level noise measures and potential predictors of noise was analyzed using linear and logistic regression models, and geospatial modeling was used to evaluate spatial trends in noise. Daily durations of street-level activities (time spent standing, sitting, walking and running on streets) were estimated via survey from a sample of NYC community members recruited at NYC street fairs. Street-level noise measurements were then combined with daily exposure durations for each member of the sample to estimate exposure to street noise, as well as exposure to other sources of noise.ResultsThe mean street noise level was 73.4 dBA, with substantial spatial variation (range 55.8-95.0 dBA). Density of vehicular (road) traffic was significantly associated with excessive street level noise levels. Exposure duration data for street-level noise and other common sources of noise were collected from 1894 NYC community members. Based on individual street-level exposure estimates, and in consideration of all other sources of noise exposure in an urban population, we estimated that street noise exposure contributes approximately 4% to an average individual’s annual noise dose.ConclusionsStreet-level noise exposure is a potentially important source of overall noise exposure, and the reduction of environmental sources of excessive street- level noise should be a priority for public health and urban planning.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12940-015-0006-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

“A man may drink many pots therein”: Drink and disorder in Arthur Morrison’s “To Bow Bridge” (1893)

AbstractThis paper is a detailed investigation into one of Arthur Morrison’s Tales of Mean Streets (1893/1894). “To Bow Bridge” describes a short tram journey late at night as drinkers move from the closing pubs of metropolitan Essex to fit in a last hour’s drinking “over the border” in the County of London. The story shows not only the disorder of the drinkers heading towards town to squeeze in the extra drinking, but also the shift workers and families heading westwards towards home at the end of a long day. Morrison is painting a picture of more than one type of suburbanite inhabiting the public space. In just five pages the story raises questions of gender, class, respectability and local identity, without apparent judgement on one side of a moral argument or another, all situated in a real – and recognisable – part of east London. This sort of realist fiction had an ambiguous place in the contemporary debates about alcohol consumption, and exists within the broader journalistic, medical and local aut...

‘The screaming streets’: Voice and the Spaces of Gossip in Tales of Mean Streets (1894) and Liza of Lambeth (1897)

In the proliferation of periodical literature in the 1890s, gossip columns carried positive, masculine connotations and worked across male class boundaries. Oral gossip in this period was defined as negative and female, and had a critical role in regulating behaviour. This article discusses late-Victorian narratives which represent urban places defined and managed by gossip. These sites use the power of gossip to assert their communality and their separation from the world of the printed word. Arthur Morrison’s Tales of Mean Streets (1894) and W. Somerset Maugham’s Liza of Lambeth (1897) are set in London streets characterized by homogeneity and monotony. Their inhabitants exist in ‘the nightmare of a world that is all streets’. Gossip plays an essential role in these spaces. Residents demonstrate anxiety about living at the borders of slum spaces, and manage their separation from slums by using gossip to attack those who threaten the narrowly defined boundaries of these places. In these works, gossip is not idle chatter but a formidable mode of speech which has serious effects. In representing sites governed by this ostensibly everyday form of speech, Maugham and Morrison simultaneously disenchanted previous romanticized visions of the working-class streets, and represented them as other places, with a lack of written culture. In their representations of the determination of place by gossiping voices, Maugham and Morrison concomitantly convey the impossibility of the absorption of such places into mainstream culture, and assert the privileged position of the late-Victorian realist who can access the otherwise inaccessible.

A Taste for Murder: The Curious Case of Crime Fiction

A Taste for Murder: The Curious Case of Crime Fiction

‘A suitable job for a woman’: women, work and the television crime drama

The first series of the Channel Nine crime drama series, Underbelly, is the starting point for a reflection on the relationship between women, work, crime and feminism. Following a brief description of the episode ‘Wise Monkeys’ written by Felicity \\Packard which features three of the ‘real’ women involved in Melbourne's gangland murders, the essay considers the significant role women have played in the depiction of crime on television as creators, writers and actors. In the end, it all comes down to power and control, who wins and who loses in what Gregg and Wilson (2010) have identified as the ‘cultural economy of infamy’ where the playing field is still far from level, either in the television industry or on the ‘mean streets’ of crime.

What She Laughingly Calls Her Career: Susan Moody on Thirty Years of Writing (and Almost as Many Books)

January–February 2014 • 9 S usan Moody is among the most respected crime writers of England . She has published nearly thirty novels since her first, Penny Black (1984), which the Crime Writers Association voted in 1990 as one of the top one hundred crime novels of all time. She has been chair of the Crime Writers Association, world president of the International Association of Crime Writers, and has even been elected to that most exclusive and august body, the Detection Club, whose members have included legends Agatha Christie , G. K. Chesterton, Dorothy L. Sayers , and Simon Brett. It is a record to envy, and she continues to shine in a very unpredictable vocation. Her last four novels (three written under the pseudonym of Susan Madison) have received very positive reviews, and her newest, the recently released A Final Reckoning, was called “spine-tingling” by Publishers Weekly. Susan agreed to discuss her work from her home in Dordogne, France. J. Madison Davis: How did you begin in this crazy business? Susan Moody: I knew I was going to be a writer from my earliest years. I was always passionate about words, about literature, about reading and books: there really was no other career I could have gone into. I went into crime writing after having two historical novels published in the US—and no, you don’t want to know their titles! I grew up in tall, dark houses in Oxford, peopled by tall, dark academics for whom reading crime fiction was an allowable indulgence, so I had a rich store of those lovely Penguin greenbacks to devour. Those were the days, in any case, when children were supposed to be seen, not heard, so nobody ever talked to me, which What She Laughingly Calls Her Career Susan Moody on Thirty Years of Writing (and Almost as Many Books) Crime&Mystery international j. madison davis 10 worldliteraturetoday.org meant I could hide behind sofas and read while the clever grown-ups discussed the finer points of the Oxford comma or the abstruse subtexts of Shakespeare’s sonnets. I had access to any number of books, no censorship of what I read, and massive encouragement to read. Plus the fact that among the Oxbridge academics, it was considered respectable not only to read detective stories but also to write them. Years later, one of the national Sunday papers launched a competition to find a new and memorable female sleuth on the grounds that very few people recognized fictional female detectives. I was married, divorced, and had two children by then, and I thought, Yeah, that’s interesting . . . how many female sleuths could I name? Miss Marple and . . . erm. There are dozens of female sleuths now, but when I started what I laughingly call my career, there weren’t. So when Penny Wanawake, the daughter of an African diplomat and an English aristocrat—tall, black, sassy, rich—burst onto the crime scene, she was a breath of fresh air, a female equivalent of James Bond walking down the mean streets, taking no lip from anyone, considering herself the complete equal or superior of any man she met. JMD: Penny’s adventures lasted through seven novels. What inspired her creation? SM: In the 1960s, I moved from France with my husband to Oak Ridge, Tennessee. A huge eyeopener for a gently bred Oxford High School girl! I was astounded at the manner in which black people were still being treated: forced to live in ghettos away from the white folks, not allowed to swim in the same part of the municipal pool, addressed as “boy” by redneck twelve-year-olds. We found it deeply shocking. I can honestly say I had never seen any sign of such prejudice, growing up in liberal Oxford, nor working in both London and Paris after I left school. It must have been there, but I wasn’t aware. Perhaps I was too blind or too stupid! Oak Ridge was a National Laboratory: you can imagine how embarrassing it was when distinguished nonwhite scientists came to deliver lectures or take up positions and found themselves treated like third-class citizens. We worked for the NAACP; we saw the Klan come...

What She Laughingly Calls Her Career: Susan Moody on Thirty Years of Writing (and Almost as Many Books)

January–February 2014 • 9 S usan Moody is among the most respected crime writers of England . She has published nearly thirty novels since her first, Penny Black (1984), which the Crime Writers Association voted in 1990 as one of the top one hundred crime novels of all time. She has been chair of the Crime Writers Association, world president of the International Association of Crime Writers, and has even been elected to that most exclusive and august body, the Detection Club, whose members have included legends Agatha Christie , G. K. Chesterton, Dorothy L. Sayers , and Simon Brett. It is a record to envy, and she continues to shine in a very unpredictable vocation. Her last four novels (three written under the pseudonym of Susan Madison) have received very positive reviews, and her newest, the recently released A Final Reckoning, was called “spine-tingling” by Publishers Weekly. Susan agreed to discuss her work from her home in Dordogne, France. J. Madison Davis: How did you begin in this crazy business? Susan Moody: I knew I was going to be a writer from my earliest years. I was always passionate about words, about literature, about reading and books: there really was no other career I could have gone into. I went into crime writing after having two historical novels published in the US—and no, you don’t want to know their titles! I grew up in tall, dark houses in Oxford, peopled by tall, dark academics for whom reading crime fiction was an allowable indulgence, so I had a rich store of those lovely Penguin greenbacks to devour. Those were the days, in any case, when children were supposed to be seen, not heard, so nobody ever talked to me, which What She Laughingly Calls Her Career Susan Moody on Thirty Years of Writing (and Almost as Many Books) Crime&Mystery international j. madison davis 10 worldliteraturetoday.org meant I could hide behind sofas and read while the clever grown-ups discussed the finer points of the Oxford comma or the abstruse subtexts of Shakespeare’s sonnets. I had access to any number of books, no censorship of what I read, and massive encouragement to read. Plus the fact that among the Oxbridge academics, it was considered respectable not only to read detective stories but also to write them. Years later, one of the national Sunday papers launched a competition to find a new and memorable female sleuth on the grounds that very few people recognized fictional female detectives. I was married, divorced, and had two children by then, and I thought, Yeah, that’s interesting . . . how many female sleuths could I name? Miss Marple and . . . erm. There are dozens of female sleuths now, but when I started what I laughingly call my career, there weren’t. So when Penny Wanawake, the daughter of an African diplomat and an English aristocrat—tall, black, sassy, rich—burst onto the crime scene, she was a breath of fresh air, a female equivalent of James Bond walking down the mean streets, taking no lip from anyone, considering herself the complete equal or superior of any man she met. JMD: Penny’s adventures lasted through seven novels. What inspired her creation? SM: In the 1960s, I moved from France with my husband to Oak Ridge, Tennessee. A huge eyeopener for a gently bred Oxford High School girl! I was astounded at the manner in which black people were still being treated: forced to live in ghettos away from the white folks, not allowed to swim in the same part of the municipal pool, addressed as “boy” by redneck twelve-year-olds. We found it deeply shocking. I can honestly say I had never seen any sign of such prejudice, growing up in liberal Oxford, nor working in both London and Paris after I left school. It must have been there, but I wasn’t aware. Perhaps I was too blind or too stupid! Oak Ridge was a National Laboratory: you can imagine how embarrassing it was when distinguished nonwhite scientists came to deliver lectures or take up positions and found themselves treated like third-class citizens. We worked for the NAACP; we saw the Klan come...

The Filth and the Purity: Policing Dirt in Late-Victorian Detective Fiction

Down the ‘mean streets’ of detective fiction, Raymond Chandler wrote, ‘a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid’.1 Such a (for Chandler, inevitably, male) detectiv...

The sound of Broadway’s mean streets: Setting New York City’s ‘edge’ in show songs

Abstract Broadway has historically played directly to its home crowd of New Yorkers and suburbanites, providing musical stylizations that would gratify or (sometimes) challenge that audience. Thus, even for its more remote or exotic settings, Broadway has honoured audience expectations more than historical or ethnographic accuracy. But Broadway has also provided local audiences with a different kind of mirror, reflecting their native city more directly and often aiming more to disquiet than to gratify. This study considers some of these more troubling musical cityscapes across the end of the ‘golden age’ and beyond, including the comic underworld of Guys and Dolls (1950), the upbeat cynicism of Wonderful Town (1953), the playful angst of Saturday Night (1954), the incipient violence of West Side Story (1957), the sleazy underside of Gypsy (1959), the street-savvy innocence of Sweet Charity (1965), and the alienated sophistications of Company (1970) and Follies (1971). After sketching the trajectory of these diverse representations, involving five composers and an array of perspectives and moods, I focus particularly on the scores of West Side Story and Company to show how their edgy critiques inspired their composers, Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim, to explore similarly edgy musical idioms that blend familiar Broadway musical practices with an assortment of musical modernisms.

Down These Mean Streets: An Analysis of the Local Public Discourse on Antisocial Behaviour in Disadvantaged Urban Neighbourhoods in the Netherlands

Dutch politicians claim that disorder and nuisance in the public domain have grown out of hand in deprived areas and that local inhabitants call for more repression. Recently, new administrative measures were introduced to tackle these issues more effectively, some of which were almost exact copies of British measures like the ASBO. Studies on ASB have usually focused on general views among the population. The present qualitative research studies the assumptions that the situation with respect to ASB has got out of hand and that the call for repression is dominant amongst local inhabitants. It is based on intensive fieldwork including observations and over 300 qualitative interviews with social workers, policemen, troublemakers themselves, and residents of 11 so-called problem neighbourhoods in four major Dutch cities. The study shows a more nuanced and mixed local public discourse on this policy landscape than politicians would like us to believe.

The “Nazi Detective” as Provider of Justice in Post-1990 British and German Crime Fiction: Philip Kerr's The Pale Criminal, Robert Harris's Fatherland, and Richard Birkefeld and Göran Hachmeister's Wer übrig bleibt, hat recht

The “Nazi Detective” as Provider of Justice in Post-1990 British and German Crime Fiction: Philip Kerr's <i>The Pale Criminal</i>, Robert Harris's <i>Fatherland</i>, and Richard Birkefeld and Göran Hachmeister's <i>Wer übrig bleibt, hat recht</i>

When We Wuz Famous by Greg Takoudes (review)

Reviewed by: When We Wuz Famous by Greg Takoudes Kate Quealy-Gainer Takoudes, Greg . When We Wuz Famous. Ottaviano/Holt, 2013. [320p]. ISBN 978-0-8050-9452-7 $16.99 Reviewed from galleys Ad Gr. 8-12 Basketball ace and honor-roll student Francisco is thrilled when a scholarship opportunity takes him out of his Spanish Harlem high school and lands him in an elite boarding school in upstate New York for his senior year. His girlfriend, Reignbow, and childhood pal Vincent, however, are understandably less pleased: though Reign tries to be supportive, she doubts that their relationship will survive the distance, while impulsive, hot-tempered Vincent decides the best way to get Fran back home is to get into some trouble so Fran is forced to revive his role as V's protector. Defaulting on a payout from the hood's most lethal loan shark, however, is no simple game, and soon Vincent, Fran, and Reign find themselves in circumstances increasingly out of their control until a final attempt to repay the loan leaves one of them dead. Filmmaker Takoudes adapts his independent film Up with Me with mixed results. With its uneven pacing, the book races through swaths of time only to linger too long over insignificant moments; the rapid-fire dialogue is quick-witted and emotionally authentic, but the prose in between is sometimes clunky ("There was an uncomfortable pause between the two old friends"). Despite these flaws, the story remains compelling as its characters face up to some heartbreaking truths: that the friendships they were certain were lifelong may not survive the transition to adulthood, and that, sometimes, bad luck and bad choices simply trump love [End Page 395] and loyalty. Teens who have been exposed to the hard side of life will more easily relate to these lessons, but even readers who know the mean streets only through pop culture will appreciate this closer look at friendship in crisis. Copyright © 2013 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Mean Streets: Chicago Youths and the Everyday Struggle for Empowerment in the Multiracial City, 1908–1969

Book Review| July 01 2012 Mean Streets: Chicago Youths and the Everyday Struggle for Empowerment in the Multiracial City, 1908–1969 Mean Streets: Chicago Youths and the Everyday Struggle for Empowerment in the Multiracial City, 1908–1969. By Andrew J. Diamond. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. xii + 396 pp. Maps, graphs, photos, illustrations, notes, and index. $60 (cloth); $24.95 (paper). Perry R. Duis Perry R. Duis Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of American Ethnic History (2012) 31 (4): 94–95. https://doi.org/10.5406/jamerethnhist.31.4.0094 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Perry R. Duis; Mean Streets: Chicago Youths and the Everyday Struggle for Empowerment in the Multiracial City, 1908–1969. Journal of American Ethnic History 1 January 2012; 31 (4): 94–95. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/jamerethnhist.31.4.0094 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressJournal of American Ethnic History Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2012 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

An Academic Curriculum Will Close the Academic Achievement Gap

America's unyielding academic achievement gap has been a national priority for a long time; yet, some schools have succeeded with academically disadvantaged youth. Usually, these institutions embrace a culture of success and follow an academic curriculum that is grounded in core knowledge and scholastic vocabulary. Academically disadvantaged students need school-wide programs that meet their distinct needs. These programs emphasize basic knowledge, grounded in contextual references. Students are taught to decode and comprehend domain specific and academic vocabulary. They learn skills and content that will help them achieve as successful adults. These schools are the antithesis of “mean streets.” They welcome disadvantaged students and provide the intellectual and emotional tools they need to thrive, while instilling self-discipline and hope in their pupils.

Book Review: Hard Lives, Mean Streets: Violence in the Lives of Homeless Women

Book Review: Hard Lives, Mean Streets: Violence in the Lives of Homeless Women

Book Review: Hard Lives, Mean Streets: Violence in the Lives of Homeless Women

Book Review: Hard Lives, Mean Streets: Violence in the Lives of Homeless Women

He Do the Police in Different Voices: The Rise of the Police Procedural

January–February 2012 | 9 F ilms, novels, and television episodes featuring realistic policemen and women as main characters are so common today that it is odd to consider how relatively uncommon they were in the first century of modern crime writing. As is usual with these “who’s on first” discussions, one can argue endlessly about who created the police procedural and propose various candidates, but 1948—107 years after the publication of Edgar Allan Poe’s “Murders in the Rue Morgue”—is the year in which a definite tipping point was reached. In March of that year, director Jules Dassin’s The Naked City was released. Filmed in a documentary style on location in New York City, the film begins with the narrator (producer Mark Hellinger) almost apologizing for its unusualness. This seems odd today, now that we are blasé to location shooting and the subsequent convention of unsteady, handheld cameras to simulate documentary realism, but the style of Naked City, perhaps realism in movies in general, was very edgy in 1948. Inrapidsuccessioninothermedia, successful police procedurals appeared. In March 1949 the drama Detective Story opened on Broadway. Written by Sidney Kingsley, the play centers on detective Jim McLeod and his ruthless attempts to bring down an abortionist. Italltakesplaceinthedetectives’squad room and is less focused on the crimes than on the price McLeod pays in his marriage and soul for being a detective. In June of the same year, the legendary Dragnet presented its first episode on radio, shaping all forms of fictional law enforcement to this day. Two years later in December, Dragnet debuted on He Do the Police in Different Voices: The Rise of the Police Procedural The cast of the BBC’s Prime Suspect, with Helen Mirren as Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennyson. Crime&Mystery international j. madison davis NBC television and by 1954 was in a battle with ILoveLucy for the top-rated TV show. One Nielsen rating indicated that 16,332,000 out of 27,000,000 TV sets in the United States were tuned to the show on Thursday nights.1 An initial look at the differences between what is often called the hardboiled or noir detective story and the police procedural doesn’t reveal much. The police hero is a man moving down the mean streets, as Raymond Chandler puts it. He is a man of common background in quest of justice, but can only exact a small portion of it out of the unfragrant world we live in. Usually , the police hero is also as scarred as the hard-boiled private eye in his battles to make something, anything, right. Sam Spade pays an emotional price for turning Brigid O’Shaughnessy over to the police. There’s an ongoing ruefulness in Philip Marlowe’s loneliness . All this is in contrast to the joyful revelations that characterize the traditional puzzle-solving detectives of Agatha Christie, S. S. Van Dine, and Arthur Conan Doyle. Chandler points out how unrealistic the traditional mystery is, but by the late 1940s it was also obvious how unrealistic the hard-boiled private eye had become. By focusing on the police, creators hoped to reveal the real work of solving crimes. Naked City showed the police examining the crime scene methodically, reprimanding citizens and cops for moving the body or otherwise altering the crime scene. We see police taking photos, dusting for fingerprints, and doing the footwork to locate suspects. Dragnet adapted true stories from the Los Angeles police department. Creator Jack Webb rode with the police and listened to their language and professional terminology. “As director, story editor, casting chief, and star of the show, [Webb] purposely refrains from dramatic artifice,” Time wrote, “and thus achieves a different kind of dramatic effect.” Many of the stories Webb used were very slight; one episode involves the apparent theft of a baby Jesus from a crèche. There was little shooting and onscreen violence by private-eye standards. The usual definition of the police procedural is a crime story in which the ordinary processes and limitations of the police force are used to resolve the story question. Note that I did not say, “discover the criminal.” Many police procedurals hinge not...

He Do the Police in Different Voices: The Rise of the Police Procedural

January–February 2012 | 9 F ilms, novels, and television episodes featuring realistic policemen and women as main characters are so common today that it is odd to consider how relatively uncommon they were in the first century of modern crime writing. As is usual with these “who’s on first” discussions, one can argue endlessly about who created the police procedural and propose various candidates, but 1948—107 years after the publication of Edgar Allan Poe’s “Murders in the Rue Morgue”—is the year in which a definite tipping point was reached. In March of that year, director Jules Dassin’s The Naked City was released. Filmed in a documentary style on location in New York City, the film begins with the narrator (producer Mark Hellinger) almost apologizing for its unusualness. This seems odd today, now that we are blasé to location shooting and the subsequent convention of unsteady, handheld cameras to simulate documentary realism, but the style of Naked City, perhaps realism in movies in general, was very edgy in 1948. Inrapidsuccessioninothermedia, successful police procedurals appeared. In March 1949 the drama Detective Story opened on Broadway. Written by Sidney Kingsley, the play centers on detective Jim McLeod and his ruthless attempts to bring down an abortionist. Italltakesplaceinthedetectives’squad room and is less focused on the crimes than on the price McLeod pays in his marriage and soul for being a detective. In June of the same year, the legendary Dragnet presented its first episode on radio, shaping all forms of fictional law enforcement to this day. Two years later in December, Dragnet debuted on He Do the Police in Different Voices: The Rise of the Police Procedural The cast of the BBC’s Prime Suspect, with Helen Mirren as Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennyson. Crime&Mystery international j. madison davis NBC television and by 1954 was in a battle with ILoveLucy for the top-rated TV show. One Nielsen rating indicated that 16,332,000 out of 27,000,000 TV sets in the United States were tuned to the show on Thursday nights.1 An initial look at the differences between what is often called the hardboiled or noir detective story and the police procedural doesn’t reveal much. The police hero is a man moving down the mean streets, as Raymond Chandler puts it. He is a man of common background in quest of justice, but can only exact a small portion of it out of the unfragrant world we live in. Usually , the police hero is also as scarred as the hard-boiled private eye in his battles to make something, anything, right. Sam Spade pays an emotional price for turning Brigid O’Shaughnessy over to the police. There’s an ongoing ruefulness in Philip Marlowe’s loneliness . All this is in contrast to the joyful revelations that characterize the traditional puzzle-solving detectives of Agatha Christie, S. S. Van Dine, and Arthur Conan Doyle. Chandler points out how unrealistic the traditional mystery is, but by the late 1940s it was also obvious how unrealistic the hard-boiled private eye had become. By focusing on the police, creators hoped to reveal the real work of solving crimes. Naked City showed the police examining the crime scene methodically, reprimanding citizens and cops for moving the body or otherwise altering the crime scene. We see police taking photos, dusting for fingerprints, and doing the footwork to locate suspects. Dragnet adapted true stories from the Los Angeles police department. Creator Jack Webb rode with the police and listened to their language and professional terminology. “As director, story editor, casting chief, and star of the show, [Webb] purposely refrains from dramatic artifice,” Time wrote, “and thus achieves a different kind of dramatic effect.” Many of the stories Webb used were very slight; one episode involves the apparent theft of a baby Jesus from a crèche. There was little shooting and onscreen violence by private-eye standards. The usual definition of the police procedural is a crime story in which the ordinary processes and limitations of the police force are used to resolve the story question. Note that I did not say, “discover the criminal.” Many police procedurals hinge not...

The Young Lords, Puerto Rican Liberation, and the Black Freedom Struggle

José “Cha Cha” Jiménez was born into a peasant family in Caguas, Puerto Rico in 1948. After father Antonio Jiménez Rodríguez had worked for two years as a tomatero, or migrant tomato picker, in Concord, Massachusetts, José and his mother, Eugenia Rodríguez Flores, joined Antonio in Boston, and they moved to Chicago in 1950. At that time, most Puerto Ricans in the Windy City lived in run-down neighborhoods just north and west of downtown. As José came of age on the mean streets of Chicago, working-class turf gangs—black, white, Mexican, and Puerto Rican—defended their neighborhood territories against perceived outsiders. At the same time, a growing movement for “urban renewal” pushed working-class Puerto Rican families northward to Lincoln Park, and in the 1960s, further northwest to the Humboldt Park and Wicker Park neighborhoods. Colonized by the U.S. in 1898, Puerto Rico became a “commonwealth” of the U.S. in 1952, but as an “unincorporated territory” its residents had limited rights. The 1950s saw a burst of activism among Puerto Ricans on the island and mainland in support of full independence. Yet Jiménez and a handful of friends were more concerned with developments in their new neighborhood of Lincoln Park. In the late 1950s, they formed their own turf gang to defend against racist harassment by area whites. By 1962, they were calling themselves the Young Lords.