Calling All Cars: Radio Dragnets and the Technology of Policing

Conclusion: Hearing the Echoes

In this remarkable statement, Colonel H. Norman Schwarzkopf, head of New Jersey State Militia and host of Gang Busters, made clear the lofty expectation that radio might somehow revolutionize the relationship between police and citizens.1 His faith in the ability of radio to transform this relationship seems at once hopelessly naïve and eerily prescient. In his hope that radio might foster “a respect for law and order” among the “enfranchised citizenry” and those “youth” who so many feared had easily “succumbed to the lure of crime,” Schwarzkopf certainly seems naïve. Yet, replace the word radio with telecommunications in additional statements, such as his hope that “through the radio, intelligence can be brought to all our people as to who the criminals are, their method of operation, their description, whereabouts, probable field of other endeavor, and their rendezvous and havens of security,” and he might just as well be talking about any of the other “wars” in the more than seventy years since this statement was recorded. If radio was heralded as a way to achieve social control during the Depression, new technologies today are adapted to and heralded as 229 c o n c l u s i o n Hearing the Echoes Through the radio the comprehensive assistance of all law-abiding citizens can be coordinated and directed in augmentation of the activities of the enforcement agencies. Through the radio the public can be informed of the effective, exhaustive and scientific approach which organized authority is making to the solution of the crime problem. Through the radio a respect for law and order, a respect for organized authority, a respect for the courts and judicial procedure, and a respect for heroes of peace, who have sacrificed so much in the service of security, can be developed, not only in our enfranchised citizenry, but also in our very important youth, to whom we must pass the burden of the future and of whom so many have unfortunately succumbed to the lure of crime, vice and depredation. —colonel norman schwarkopf, 1937 230 conclusion ways to achieve control in the war on drugs or the war on terror. This statement does not seem that far removed from a pronouncement by any state police force or the Department of Homeland Security. Schwarzkopf makes clear what police saw as the advantages of radio in marshaling public support for crime fighting. Police reformers broadcast this sentiment across the nation as they began to envision the possibility of radio as a way to reach citizens directly. While radio as a technology capable of two-way and broadcast communication offered a technical solution to the problem of criminal mobility, as a commercialized broadcast medium it offered more. Commercial broadcasting was organized around a model of centralized transmission and privatized reception that relied on the diffusion of radio sets into American homes. In cooperating with the makers of commercial entertainment programs, police found a way to reach citizens in the private spaces of their homes. As populations became more dispersed and transportation technologies facilitated greater mobility, and as police forces replaced the more personal foot patrol with the impersonal automobile patrol, the reach of radio became increasingly important. Through police radio broadcasts and commercial entertainment broadcasts structured around the authority of the police, police worked to forge a more direct link between themselves and the citizens they served. This was especially important, as at the same time, the discourse of police professionalization demanded the removal of citizen input through the trope of depoliticization. Police professionalism was rooted in the fetishization of scientific methods and organizational perfection that promised to arrest forms of social and physical mobility. Commenting on police efforts some thirty years after the beginning of the second wave of police reform, sociologists Bordua and Reiss (1966) argue that “bureaucratization can be regarded as an organizational technique whereby civic pressures are neutralized from the standpoint of the governing regime” (68). Using the developed terminology of sociology of the time, they point to the realization of the professional reform movement’s goal of removing policing from the realm of politics: “In the development of the modern police, bureaucratization has been a major device to commit members to the occupational community, and to its norms of subordination and service to a degree where these commitments take precedence over extra-occupational ones to family and community” conclusion 231 (68...