Culture within and culture about crime: The case of the “Rodney King Riots”

Level 1: Culture in crime and culture about crime, analyzed independently

In the most elementary understanding of cultural criminology, researchers study representations about crime that are made by the institutions of popular culture, i.e. in journalism, in policy making and political rhetoric, and in entertainment products. The study of culture in crime focuses on crime stories that criminals tell in situ as a casually critical means for committing crime. For example, robbers, in order to get victims to cooperate in helping effectuate the offense, must signal to their would-be victims something along the order of “a crime is in progress.” When Woody Allen made Take the Money and Run, he not only made a comedy, he also conveyed something real about the minimal cultural competency for committing robbery. Playing the role of a robber, he handed a bank teller a demand note written with poor penmanship and then confronted a confused yet sympathetic teller who read “gub” for “gun.” In order to commit robbery, it is not sufficient to have a weapon, intend to use it to compel a victim to hand over money, and find a victim with money. The offender also must perform as the director of a situational drama, effectively defining the situation as a crime by casting and guiding others to play the complementary roles that the successful production of a robbery requires.

Generally, to commit personal contact crimes and crimes involving collaborating partners, people must bring into social interaction a popularly understood folk sociology describing how crimes are done. Like all behavior, but as an extreme case because of its brief and pressured enactment, violent crime usually is, to use the phrase of the ethnomethodologists, highly indexical. Gestures are made, brief phrases are uttered, and robbers go into action on the understanding that the course of conduct they project will be intersubjectively understood by co-offenders, victims, and bystanders, such that all parties can coordinate their conduct to fit and to create the scenario of an unfolding crime. Crimes generally cannot occur without the people involved using narratives about crime—an understanding of the phases and transitions among phases—to make the crimes happen. In the history of criminology, the focus has been so overwhelmingly on background factors that might explain differences in crime patterns, and the ethnomethodological perspective has remained so elusive, that the rich potential in the narrative constitution of crime has barely been tapped (For some exceptions, see: Collins, 2007; Jackson-Jacobs, 2013; Katz, 1988).

Studies of culture about crime make up a great bulk of cultural criminology. This perspective appreciates that, as a cultural resource, crime is far too valuable to be left to criminals. Whether the area of research be the news media, political debate, or entertainment products ranging from mystery novels, murders in Shakespeare’s plays, or Hollywood movies, the researcher here has the easiest task, at least with respect to data gathering. Without any methodological reflection, any undergraduate student can assemble a set of stories and analyze their content. Increasingly, students use search engines to locate, count, and find associations with representations of crime. Common questions are: What tropes are used? How does the representation of crime in one or another area of popular culture compare to (bias, distort) the reality of crime as indicated by data on crime patterns? If patterns in the commission of crime do not explain patterns in the representation of crime, what does? (On crime in the daily news, see Katz, 1987.)

In a more complex research design, the researcher studies historical changes in how crimes are represented by different institutions of popular culture or by the same institution over time. One might compare crime and criminals in Dragnet, a TV police show of the 1950s that was written from a police perspective; with The Naked City, a TV police show that ran about 10 years later and was written from a social work perspective; with crime and criminals in more recent police dramas, which use crime to avoid issues of race relations (casting villains as white), highlight social inequalities (Columbo, Monk: shabby or psychologically defective detectives bringing down the powerful), dramatize bureaucratic constraints on creative freedom (Kojak and virtually all police and detective heroes since), and celebrate state power as enhanced by technological sophistication (Crime Scene Investigation). Because crime will always be a major focus of popular culture, documenting change in the representation of crime in entertainment vehicles is a strategic focus for documenting changes in popular culture in general.

In a much more challenging research design, the researcher tries to explain how the content of stories is related to the social process of producing culture. A sociologist might link patterns in the culture about crime that an organization produces to how news rooms operate, to the dynamics of political campaigns, or to the patterns of collective action through which movies are made. And at an even more complex level, the researcher explains changes in the way crime is represented by linking them to changes in how the culture of crime is produced. Has the decline of the Studio system for making movies, and the rise of independent filmmakers, been responsible for making film portrayals of crime more realistic? Or has the cinematic representation of crime just become distorted in new ways? Given the rapidly diminished role of metropolitan newspapers in how people learn about society, there are new challenges for the cultural criminology community. By what mechanisms is the popular understanding of crime currently formed? Internet sites and postings of information describe crimes and criminals at arrest; facilitate the production of ongoing, crowd-sourced portraits of individuals; and make convictions stick to individuals, for example, by offering employers easily searchable criminal records and offering anyone access to the mapped locations of adjudicated sex offenders. Digital crime news is creating a new world of social interaction among readers, alleged offenders, and social researchers of the lay and the professional sort. (And raising a host of new moral and policy issues: Lageson, 2015).

We can label studies as at Level 1 when they treat only the culture in crime or only the culture about crime, because they are relatively simple in their analytic character, even if, especially in the former case, acquiring and processing relevant data may be challenging. It is common for researchers of crime causation to neglect the literature on how crime is represented in journalism or law enforcement policy, except as a foil highlighting their own contributions. Likewise, researchers who address the institutional representation of crime can remain agnostic about issues of crime causation, even while contrasting patterns of criminal behavior with patterns of crime as implied by what is shown to news readers, political constituencies, and entertainment audiences. But even as Level 1 studies continue to dominate cultural criminology, it will be helpful for the research community to become more self-conscious when making presumptions of independence. From the start, the distinction has not been maintained systematically, although this may be changing. (Cf. the treatment of offenders’ accounts as evidence about crime causation versus as a distinct culture about crime in Shaw and Burgess (1930) and Presser and Sandberg (2015)).

Level 2: Asymmetrical interactions between culture in and culture about crime

That people, when they are doing crime, take into account aspects of culture about crime is a familiar observation. The general point is captured by the irony of life imitating art. Young men adopt movie names to label their own gangs. (For examples from Congo-origin gang members in Brussels, an area new to gang research, see Hellemont, 2015). Offenders play off of movie and music video scenes when they hold guns sideways, which may look cool but is a poor choice if the primary consideration is accuracy. Yet if the theatrical gesture increases the chances of not having to shoot at all, the method has a logic: being successfully intimidating requires expressing oneself in a form that will terrify victims.

In a complementary way, the production of culture about crime increasingly uses as a resource the culture actually used in crime. Movie depictions of crime are today much more naturalistic than they were in the heyday of the big Hollywood Studios in the 1930s and 1940s. This change is part of a larger transformation. Actors now are likely to be known to the public with names they were given by their parents at birth; movie executives no longer insist on the Studios’ standard policy of conferring de-ethnicized names on contract players. The contrast between the melodramatic gangster portrayals by Edward G Robinson (né Emanuel Goldberg) in Little Caesar and Key Largo and the contra-stereotype, self-conflicted portrayals of gangsters in the movie Goodfellas and in the TV series The Sopranos and The Wire, is striking. Contemporary entertainment production plays off of long term journalistic documentation (in the case of Goodfellas); New Yorker-style, detailed prose writing (In Cold Blood); and ethnographic investigation, which introduces movie and TV audiences to local dialects, references, and styles.

Level 3: Symmetrical, iterative interactions between culture in and culture about crime

Cultural criminology has emphasized the loopy relationships between culture in crime and culture about crime: the “moral panics,” the essentialist labeling, and the biased selectivity by which mass culture represents crime. The problem is that the comparison is too easy. Comparing crime as represented by the media and patterns of crime as described in empirical research, researchers are virtually guaranteed to produce an informative and critical perspective.

Researchers face a longer and more obstacle-ridden research path when they try to investigate the looping relationship between how culture creators and criminals see and respond to each other. (The concept of “loops” was introduced in Ferrell, 2015: 154–156). Sometimes actors on each side—those engaged in shaping what they understand to be criminal activity and those shaping public understandings of criminal activity—form their behavior through taking into account how the other side takes account of them.

The tendency in cultural criminology to emphasize loopy relationships suggests that crime causation and the recognition of crime by media and law enforcement proceed on independent tracks. But this perspective, however productive, risks ignoring patterns of empirical interaction. For an initial example, I recall an informal writing in which Gerald Suttles (1978) observed that Chicago’s street gangs shaped their geographic claims and geography-based names in response to the organization of gang control units in the Chicago police department, which had organized gang control units by imagining that it was reflecting a pre-existing geographic reality. In a way, the attempted remedy produced the problem, or at least its social organization.

As of this writing, which was developed during the waves of protest that created a wake (in both senses of the word) following “Ferguson,” the culture about crime is rife with a burgeoning set of claims about interactive effects with the culture used in crime formation. The Ferguson event, and several subsequent killings characterized as a “white” policeman shooting a “black” man or boy, were widely denounced by protestors, media reporters, and academic commentators as evidence of the harmful results of “zero tolerance” or “broken windows” policing. ¹ This policing policy was based on a criminological theory about how culture enters into the formation of criminal behavior. The presumption of “broken windows” theory is that would-be offenders are reading culture in public space (graffiti, trash, loitering, open contraband marketing) for signs of official indifference. Rigorous enforcement of laws against minor infractions, it follows, would change would-be offenders’ readings of street scenes, interrupting their criminal calculations.

After “Ferguson,” in a social movement that picked up the banner “Black Lives Matter,” the mass media became filled with images of intense protests against police violence, which often were triggered by zero tolerance policing, such as arrests for walking on a roadway or selling cigarettes one-by-one. Prominent law enforcement officials have claimed that, in response to the culture about crime and criminal justice projected by the protest movement, the police have become less willing to intervene aggressively and, as a result, the culture in crime has changed, such that offenders have increased their willingness to commit crime. This ongoing, swirling controversy is based on ideas of an evolving, looping relationship between the causation of crime and the culture of mass protests, which attack not just police action in particular cases but the “zero tolerance” culture about crime.

One way that the research community can respond is to investigate independently each step of the claimed causal chain. Are police officers changing their behavior based on a change in the culture about crime and law enforcement? Are offenders changing their behavior in committing crimes based on a perception of the police as wary of becoming part of an episode in the mass narrative on crime and criminal justice? An alternative but not mutually exclusive approach is to preserve the natural integrity of the interaction process and trace its development as a coherent case. The looping relationships between the culture in and the culture about crime develop over stages, forming discrete historical episodes. If data sets of such episodes were created, they might be analyzed for developing and testing hypotheses on regularities in their natural histories. (Cf. Spector and Kitsuse, 2001).

In order to illustrate the research agenda that would follow, I will review the history of the “Rodney King Riots”. This case, which I characterize as an episode of anarchy, is unrepresentative of everyday crime in ways that make it strategically useful. The interaction between the causation of crime and the representation of crime was compact in time and space. Media representations were being read or viewed not only by the general public but by people who were contemplating committing crimes of arson, theft, and vandalism. And unlike most street crime, about which what is readily available is little more than the binary fact of occurrence or non-occurrence, we can make use of a variety of contemporaneous descriptions to trace the patterns of criminality in episodes of anarchy as they emerged, transformed, and disappeared, which enables us to isolate the stage-specific impact of news coverage on crime and of crime on news coverage. The concentration of episodes of anarchy in time and space, and the dramatic nature of the events, means that many people—journalists, social researchers, commissions investigating causes—can focus descriptive energies to a degree unmatched by any other form of criminal conduct. Almost by definition, riots or collective efforts at rebellion are especially likely to generate a recorded history.

In reviewing the “Rodney King” episode, I will focus only on those aspects which indicate interactions between the culture in and the culture about crime. Overall, two patterns will be emphasized. As to the culture in crime, those on the street shaped their participation in anarchic behavior, depending on their sense of their visibility to law enforcement and the media. But not in the usual way. Usually, we would expect would-be offenders to desist when they are aware that they have become visible to law enforcement. But at critical turning points within episodes of anarchy, would-be participants understand that the more visible they will be as a mass, the less vulnerable they will be to punishment as individuals, even though each is otherwise undisguised. An ironic “epiphany of invisibility” is at the causal heart of anarchy as collective behavior. (See Katz, 2015).

The second pattern is that law enforcement, media, and politicians shaped their depiction of participants based on their estimation of how participants were and would be perceiving them. The institutions that produce the culture of crime take account, in the investigative interventions they make, in the profiles they assume, and in the narratives they put out for public consumption, of how those participating in the anarchy are likely to perceive and respond to whether and how their anarchic behavior is socially constructed. The upshot of this looping relationship is that the very definition of criminality becomes a moving line.

The dynamic interaction between the anarchic actors on the streets and the culture creators in the news media, in politics, and in law enforcement, is at the unspoken heart of “riot management.” Within episodes of anarchy, law enforcement cannot acknowledge the negotiated character of what will be treated as crime. While characterizing the events as a “riot,” police and military forces adjust their techniques of control so as not to exacerbate the anarchy, but without announcing that they are deciding to let criminals off. The moving line only recently has been appreciated by academics. Usually the response of university researchers is to abjure describing participants as arsonists, looters, and vandals and to jump onto the side of the debate that defines the phenomenon wishfully as a “rebellion,” typically by pointing to background factors (poverty, discrimination, unemployment, neo-liberal government policies), which cast the event as a crypto-protest. In a stroke, sociologists lose contact with the sociological nature of the phenomenon.

Considered as a distinct form of collective behavior, the political meaning of anarchy is inherently ambiguous, open ended, negotiated. An episode of anarchy is a duel between two competing efforts to interrelate the culture of and the culture about crime. On the anarchist side, the phenomenon is one in which, at Time 1, people self-consciously participate in criminal conduct on the understanding that, at Time 2, institutions of law enforcement will as a practical matter be blinded to crimes that are happening in plain sight; in the aspiration that, at Time 3, the volume of illegality that will have been enacted will be so great that the prospect of any individual offender being prosecuted will be miniscule. On the law enforcement side, anarchy is an event in which, at Time 1, those in power back off from treating behavior as criminal, in the aspiration of getting control over the streets at Time 2, such that at Time 3 some of those now committing crimes and some of those not previously apprehended as criminal can be caught and punished.

The critical moment sometimes comes in a shift from a “cat and mouse” game, when looters, arsonists, and vandals probe police capacities, disappearing from the reach of police positioned to isolate them, to the moment when a “crowd” is acting. That shift is often glossed by media accounts, which may describe the back-and-forth stage but then unreflectively pass over to describing the behavior of a collective noun. On the 2011 English riots:

Some of the group of around 200 young people “knocked down walls, and were smashing bricks into smaller pieces … to make them easier to throw at police” (Guardian, 9/8/11: 4). What followed was a cat and mouse game with small groups roaming the streets ‘looking for unguarded shops’ (ibid). These groups “simply melted into the back streets at the first sign of police, only to regroup minutes later”. This ‘waiting’ game continued until around 9 pm when “the crowd started moving on mass” (ibid), shops began to be broken into and looted, and rocks were thrown at the police. (Jefferson, 2015:7)

News coverage, and most sociological writing, passes without pause from descriptions of individual action to descriptions of a “crowd” acting, jumping over the most important interaction moments, which are those in which participants come to know they have become a crowd because they see their perception as a crowd incapacitating police responsiveness.

If we analyze participants as interacting with how they are seen, and if we appreciate the challenge on the side of the police as one of understanding how their perceptions of participants will be seen, we need not stray into a 21st century version of the 19th century analysis of crowd behavior as irrational or non-rational. Nor do we need Stanley Cohen’s 20th century “moral panic,” which bitingly and ironically transferred irrationality to the media and its citizen readers. Nor must we commit to the 20th century’s psychological portrait of rioters as “rational actors,” as implied by the language used by economists and game theorists (See, for example, DiPasquale and Glaeser, 1998).

What happens in a flash takes many words to spell out, but in no instance does lightning strike interaction sensibilities dead. At the critical turning point, participants on the street understand that law enforcement officials will gloss their individual identities for their potential status as a crowd, and they are often right in the way that self-fulfilling prophecies become true. Police or military forces are constantly assessing whether participants on the street understand that they will be hidden under the posture of a crowd. Riot control is inherently a business of interaction guessing. No protocol can be used to train law enforcement personnel so that they do not make either the passive error of retreating before the participants have reached a widespread and irrevocable self-conception as a crowd, or the active error of charging to arrest individuals who have already come to understand that they are part of an irresistible collectivity.

I use the term “anarchy” in an attempt at precise sociological description. “Anarchy” keeps the analytic focus away from a final political labeling of the event at “riot” or “rebellion” and on the quickly evolving, hierarchically undisciplined, anti-Authority/anti-Establishment thrust of actions which are distinctive in being premised on an understanding by participants that the forces of order have suddenly vanished. The sort of event that clarifies that an episode of anarchy is in process is not a background of oppression, injustice, or group tension—which is neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition of anarchy—and not just looting mixed with slogan shouting, but indications that the aura of formally ruled social life has disappeared, giving way to an extraordinary freedom to innovate action. The analyst need not investigate or make claims about background injustices but knows that anarchy is going on when he or she sees cars driving on sidewalks to get around concentrations of people on the street, neighbors trading weapons for food, and the police standing aside as looters openly carry away goods.

A social history of the “Rodney King” anarchy

Granularity, temporality, and interactions among narrative processes

The warrant for research in cultural criminology is that the narratives about crime that traditionally have been and for the most part continue to be proposed for explaining crime point to background factors, either ecological or biographical, and they do not work. Whether it is the failure to explain variations in the occurrence of “riots” or the dramatic ups and downs that street crime has shown over the last 50 years, the social research community’s reliance on demographics and neighborhood characteristics as constituting “the” story for understanding crime has been unsuccessful, and, given the expansion of academic research resources and government funding over this period, the failure has been on a grand scale. It is long overdue to refashion the approach to explaining crime by attending to the narratives created in the commission of crime itself. A criminology rooted in the culture used to commit crime inevitably becomes critical of the culture of crime that is created by the descriptors provided by government agencies.

The narrative criminology community will be happy to reject “positivist” explanations that rely on background factors, especially if background factors are measured quantitatively. But the more specific challenge for those who would understand the relationship of crime and culture is to appreciate that there is not just one meaning of a crime, and not just one meaning for each person studied. This is especially clear when we consider episodes of anarchy. It is not a question of whether a given event should be called a “riot” or a “rebellion,” but a question of appreciating the distinctive interaction challenges that participants face in recognizing what the events mean to others and how, in the course of a few days, that challenge rapidly changes.

Granovetter (1978) facilitated a turn from correlational/synchronic approaches that rely on background factors to diachronic analysis that recognizes the changing meanings/motivations of collective events, including specifically riots, as the situation changes for interpreting what others-in-general will do. His model is now some 40 years old. Perhaps because it was delivered in the rhetoric of “game theory” and “rational choice,” perhaps because it was offered as an anti-normative/cultural values explanation, Granovetter’s approach has not been appreciated for the encouragement it offers to narrative criminology. (For an example of economists fantasizing a cost/benefit weighing actor, thus remaining blind to the phenomenology of behavior, in turn blocking the possibility for developing narrative criminology, see DiPasquale and Glaeser 1998). For those on the rioting streets, figuring out “what is going on” depends on reading indications of what “others” in a collective sense, “the crowd” and “the police,” are doing and are likely to do. In other words, the progress of episodes of anarchy depends on the cultural criminology that participants develop in situ, as they interpret what others are trying to do and as they perceive the narrative understanding of events that is being used by law enforcement officials, who may see individuals committing crime or who, remaining in barracks or maintaining a military gaze into the middle distance, may blind themselves from effectively seeing individual participants.

“Narrative criminology” may be seen as more comprehensive than “cultural criminology” or the former may be seen as a sub-type of the latter, depending on how phenomenological one is inclined to go. Narratives are understandings of sequentially related phases of behavior with beginnings, endings, and turning points between phases. Offenders invoke narratives in order to commit crimes. Offenders also draw on and are taken by cultural tropes, images and aesthetic styles that are pregnant with meanings not necessarily spelled out as sequences. For example, on the way to a mass shooting, an adolescent may equip himself with various means of committing violence without having worked out how they will be used in tandem. Even if assembled chaotically, cultural fragments are often essential resources to individuals as they develop and sustain motivations to commit crimes. But cultural fragments are not necessarily separable from narratives. They may be appreciated as proto, inchoate, or indexical gestures to full blown narratives. A range of thinkers, including Kenneth Burke, Paul Ricoeur, and Harold Garfinkel, may be read for the argument that any subjectively meaningful act is part of a narrative, even if many meaningful acts are only narrative gestures, i.e. incipient narratives that are quickly abandoned.

To systematize the knowledge that narrative criminology can produce, we may wish to distinguish levels of granularity, temporalities, and interactions. As to the different scale of the phenomena involved, at the most micro level there is the narrative used by participants to commit crime. For crimes committed during episodes of anarchy, the distinctive, critical contingency in members’ narrative construction is the epiphany of invisibility, which is an inherently fragile understanding that, because so many others are so visibly engaging in criminality, one’s own participation will be effectively invisible.

In application to isolated individual crimes, at a meso level there is the antecedent biography of the event, which includes streams of social life from which a given criminal project emerges. In episodes of anarchy, the subjectively relevant pre-stages can stretch over months or even years. In the case of the “Rodney King Riots,” the year between the revealing of the videotaped beating and the trial verdict became a period that can, without exaggeration, be analogized to the plague that came over Thebes after Oedipus was unwittingly but inexorably led to committing a primordial transgression in the royal house. It is not just that both were, in different senses, attacks on Kings. In the Greek myth and in the myth-infused development of the 1992 Los Angeles episode of anarchy, there was a background of transgression (patricide and incest; police brutality), then a moment of revelation (when the mystery of the Sphinx was solved; when the video of King’s beating was repeatedly played); then a period of dread, as an eerie awareness grew that corruption at the center of Authority had to bring disaster; then overt social chaos and communal destruction. In the viewing of the beating of King, and even more so in the revelation of the jury’s verdict, there was a widespread sense of a shameless violation that would stir irresistible destructive forces. Nothing could better recommend the necessity of narrative criminology than a detailed, social interaction sensitive history of the making of the “Rodney King Riots”, or perhaps of any episode of anarchy.

At a macro level, narrative analysis is equally essential, but in the nature of the case, more elusive. After a crime, or to continue with the example of this essay, an episode of anarchy, the meaning of the event enters multiple different narratives. What are the effects for offenders, and for others who only get involved after the fact, when gun violence transforms in biographies from a crime into multiple medical cases? (See Lee, 2012). What is the meaning of an episode of anarchy after the streets return to tranquility and popular culture picks up the events in a series of entertainment products and political events, each with its own narrative. In a movie or a political campaign, a historic episode of anarchy will often play a background or supporting role for a focus on personal character. Yet, as elusive as it may be, that is how an episode of anarchy most often lives an extended life: in a subterranean stream of images that play a diffuse and opaque role in setting the mood for understanding some other narrative on the front stage that is demanding an immediate emotional response. After the event, the crime is no longer important as a narrative project; but it will often be significant as a narrative resource for a larger project, such as a crime victim’s struggle to work out a way to live life as disabled or a geographically bounded population’s encounter with the challenge of figuring out what the event means for the nature of the community. Mass culture enters the creation of anarchy long before it breaks out, and mass cultural coverage of episodes continues to be used in the shaping of popular opinion for years after.

At each of these three levels—and three is arbitrary, a matter of convention—there are interactions between the culture used in committing crime and the culture used in generating interpretations about crime. At the extreme, the interactions become symmetric and recursive. People shape their conduct in committing crimes through taking account of how the mass media and law enforcement will see them, while law enforcement officials strategize on interventions by taking account of how their actions will be covered by the media and regarded by potential offenders. The two way interactions continue in a looping relationship.

The critical causal contingency in episodes of anarchy is the emergence and decline of an epiphany of invisibility. The work of news media and of law enforcement or military agencies in describing and responding to crime is itself perceived by masses of individuals on public streets, and powerfully affects how they in turn initiate, develop, pause, re-create, and abort anarchic behavior. The media and the judicial system can inadvertently help people on the street solve the prisoner’s dilemma that usually deters anarchy. Watching in real time as media organizations contemporaneously show events occurring on public streets to mass audiences, would-be participants can gain confidence that if they engage in behavior that usually would be treated as criminal, not only will they not be acting alone, they will be acting in a mass so large that they are unlikely to be singled out as criminals.

For their part, law enforcement agencies are increasingly sensitive to how their actions in response to anarchy are being picked up by media and responded to by people on the street. Research indicates that in the “riots” in the US in recent decades, a kind of negotiating process has informally developed. People on the street literally and metaphorically push against and through barriers of order. Many are keenly aware of the media images they are creating; indeed, their motivation to participate may be specifically to create such images. Some bystanders watch TV coverage and respond by intervening to protect their property, while others intervene to restrain involvement by people they know. ³ The police surge and retreat in the boundaries of order they will enforce, based on their sense of how their actions will be seen and taken up by the people on the street who will determine the next phase of the anarchy’s evolution. ⁴

The looping relationship between the culture in and the culture about crime is at its extreme in episodes of anarchy. In the wake of “Ferguson” and its progeny in mass media stories, there has emerged in the US a widespread controversy over police/criminal interactions, especially in jurisdictions where arrests have declined and crime has risen. Some critics of the police argue that they are now restraining their intervention in street encounters with people they see as offenders, in protest against the public damnation of recorded and disseminated police actions in prior encounters. Some law enforcement officials have suggested that would-be offenders, perceiving or imagining a change in how police will respond, are becoming less concerned about apprehension and more aggressive. Cultural criminology has suddenly moved onto the front page. It is a good time to reflect on the analytical tools necessary to take advantage not only of this moment but of the ongoing dynamic interaction between the culture in and the culture about crime.