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157 The Moroccan “serial Killer” and csi: casablanca between the mid-1990s and the mid-2000s, fictional narratives of the police spread through Moroccan society. They first appeared in the form of a novel, The Blind Whale, and then moved to the country’s first independent newspaper, Moroccan Events, which appropriated the novel’s narrative strategies to invent true-crime reporting in the press. This new form of cultural production not only bolstered the newspaper’s circulation but also disseminated a groundbreaking depiction of the police through the law-bound detective who represented a complete break from the Years of lead. The main innovation of Moroccan true crime, however, was the fusion of fact and fiction in presenting the public with a new image of the real-world police in a highly credible nonstate media source. This new format gave the real-world police an image that corresponded to the state’s aspirations for a new era characterized by democratic principles, the rule of law, civil liberties, and human rights, encouraging the public to resituate their relationship with state authority. The process of fusing fact and fiction continued to escalate when rtM and 2M began producing police television films in early 2001. Just as true-crime narratives served as an important vehicle for transforming the press, police téléfilms launched the local television industry on a process of radical change. These films brought the new image of crime and punishment from the novels and newspaper narratives to the small screen, demonstrating to the public that television was finally becoming responsive to a mass audience. at the same time, the films took the innovation of fusing fact and fiction to new levels: directors used well-known police stations and morgues as movie sets and actual cop cars, uniforms, and tools as props. Thanks to this combination of the real world of the police with fictional scripts and well-known actors, television disseminated the new image of the police that was established in the true crime articles on a scale much wider than the press. for the first time in the country’s history, the real world of the police was opened up for the public, gaining widespread visibility throughout the country. in the process, the films sought to indoctrinate the public in wellknown police stations, transforming them from locations of abuse and torture during the Years of lead to sets for exciting television movies celebrating the new era. They also fabricated new kinds of detectives—like ahlam in White Nights— who allowed the films to improve on reality in presenting the public with images 5 158 | Moroccan Noir of the real-world police, suggesting that the flesh-and-blood cop on the street matched the simulated police on the small screen. new transformations in crime after 2002 challenged state officials and forced them to reevaluate their strategies for manufacturing the image of the police. The first of these was the emergence of a Moroccan “serial killer.” The second, which the next chapter will discuss, was the terrorist attacks in casablanca on May 16, 2003. both events presented the state with completely unexpected new crime challenges for which the police suddenly appeared to the public as utterly unprepared . both disrupted the carefully constructed image of the police in the mass media and necessitated that the police change once again in order to demonstrate that they were able to face the terrifying new reality of crime in the country. as part of their response to these unforeseen threats, the state became significantly more proactive in constructing and disseminating the image of the police for the public. This chapter, which, like chapter 2, is deeply indebted to the work of social construction theorists like stuart hall and stephen Jenkins, traces the emergence of the Moroccan “serial killer” and the way this new type of criminality both terrified the public and represented a deep crisis for state authority. starting in May 2002, mutilated bodies began turning up on the streets of casablanca. The sensational press—both independent and party newspapers alike—quickly linked the victims to a single murderer, proclaiming that Morocco now lived in the age of the serial killer, a type of criminality that was presumed to exist only in the united states and europe. The emergence of this new criminal demonstrated to the public that embodying democratic values—the rule of law, individual rights, and freedom of expression—also meant embodying its deviance. The press used the body count and gruesome...

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