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3. Gang Busting: Criminals and Citizens in a Professional World
- University of Minnesota Press
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Reformers found public attitudes toward criminals particularly troubling. They marveled at public interest, sympathy, admiration, and seeming desire for criminality. The public devoured newspapers with famous gangsters and desperados on their covers or paid hard-earned money for a glimpse into the glamorous world of the screen gangster. Citizens seemed far more attracted and reverent toward criminals than toward police. Clyde Barrow, boyfriend of and partner in crime with Bonnie Parker, was certainly one of the most romantic of these criminal figures. Newspapers and magazines treated the couple’s life of crime as resulting more from romantic desperation than from any inborn tendency toward violence. The grisly murder of the couple at the hands of Texas police, who riddled the pair’s car with machine-gun fire, only furthered popular interpretations of Bonnie and Clyde as romantic desperados. Dramatizing the tale of such popular icons would require an almost total reversal of public understanding of and sympathy for the criminal stars of the Depression era. Representing the activities of criminals, including some of the most famous Depression-era celebrity bandits, necessitated a direct encounter with a range of negotiations regarding gender, ethnicity, class, social mobility , consumerism, and institutional authority. Stories about crime during 105 chapte r 3 Gang Busting Criminals and Citizens in a Professional World very anxious to state captain hamer in line of duty facing outlaws beat them all to the draw and killed sixty three stop this is very picturesque and shows him far superior to barrow stop am very anxious to make this statement so that all boys listening will idealie frank hamer instead of barrow stop —Telegram from phillips h. lord to the Superintendent of Texas Prisons 106 gang busting this period are notable for the ways they critiqued power institutions of big business and government, calling into question the presumed fairness and equality of the American dream.1 On the one hand, in the world of the police-centered radio crime docudrama, such social critique did not have a place. On the other hand, as discussed in chapter 1, the people who made these programs understood that criminals had a tremendous appeal for audiences. No matter how carefully they were presented, populist interpretations of criminal activity might not only inform listeners’ enjoyment but also attract listeners to the programs. Given the complex reasons that citizens were attracted to figures like Bonnie and Clyde, simply stating that they were bad would not suffice. If populist fascination with and sympathy for criminals represented a more generalized dissatisfaction with social and state institutions, and if, on the opposite side, fear of crime led to a strong criticism of the police, reformers and radio professionals had to find somewhere else to place the blame. The docudramas relentlessly insisted that while blame certainly lay with criminals themselves, it even more so lay with the public that valorized criminals and failed to support the police. The programs worked in four key ways to redefine criminality and shift blame for the “crime problem” from the police to criminals and, most surprisingly, to citizens themselves. First, the programs went head to head with populist interpretations of gangsters and bandits in order to deglamorize them. Dramatizing the eventual deaths of Bonnie and Clyde and John Dillinger, the programs were relentless in their attempts to shift blame for their criminal careers from social institutions and police incompetence to citizens themselves. Second, in the intersection of shifting definitions of crime and the needs of radio producers to produce recognizable character types in an anthology drama, the programs created a recognizable criminal type. Just as the programs worked to make police officers instantly recognizable to audiences, so they worked to achieve the same with representations of criminals. No matter the particulars of any individual criminal career, criminals were increasingly made to fit a set of generic categories that spoke more to reform definitions of crime than populist understandings. Third, the programs negotiated the complex social debates over the meaning of crime. If the FBI attributed crime to individual pathology, local police and the makers of the crime dramas themselves were more receptive to Progressive theories of delinquency that posited [52.55.214.236] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 10:18 GMT) gang busting 107 environmental factors as a cause of crime. Finally, the programs worked to not only blame the public for crime but also to directly suggest the ways that they could properly support the police. The programs railed against vigilantism , instead...