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Donald S. Leonard, a key figure in supporting radio in police work during the 1930s, was justifiably proud of the accomplishments of his force, the Michigan State Police. In this short description of a “spectacular example” of the power of police radio is condensed many of the issues key in the adaptation of two-way radio to police work. Few crimes better symbolized the hard times of the Depression and public distrust of its capitalist institutions than bank robbery. Yet, in this statement, there is no populist celebration of a modern-day Robin Hood. Instead, there is a bold endorsement and celebration of the Michigan State Police as a modernized agency of social control. Here is a coordinated police force complete with a centralized location from which to organize its operations. This instantaneous dispatch of cars speaks to the ways that radio could be used to swiftly deploy resources over large geographical areas. That the state police used their radio to call not only their own officers but also officers of other Michigan police forces speaks to what many felt was a necessary cooperation between forces to deal with criminal mobility. The use of radio to ensure the robbers’ apprehension speaks to the general shift in the definition of policing, to an endeavor largely centered on speed and efficiency in the goal of criminal arrest. As police reformers sought to close off policing and criminality as 147 c h a p t e r 4 The Dragnet Effect Space, Time, and Police Presence The Kalava Michigan State Bank was robbed, the cashier murdered by four men on Jan. 5, 1933. The headquarters of the Michigan State Police was immediately notified and WRDS was put into operation. Cars were dispatched to the vicinity of the crime, and a blockade laid down along the Muskegon River. City police, sheriffs departments and State police cars were all directed by use of radio. . . . The hunt was successfully concluded on the evening of the 6th of January when the robbers were apprehended, bringing to close the most spectacular example of radio effectiveness. —Records of donald s. leonard 148 the dragnet effect sources of upward mobility, control of social mobility was connected to the control of physical mobility. The quick movement from call to capture speaks to the increasing speed with which a properly equipped police force could act. Finally, the very act of extolling police success speaks to the ways that police forces used their radio sets as a form of public relations to effectively gain citizen support for police reform efforts. From today’s perspective of a technologically enhanced police force, such an endeavor might seem mundane. In the 1930s, the spectacle of technological prowess spoke to the most fantastic possibilities of the application of modern technologies to police work. Here was the raison d’être of this most “spectacular” organization : the successful control of criminal mobility. In an array of publications aimed at police, city managers, and middle and working classes, police radio was universally heralded as a modern miracle. However, there was no guarantee that the excitement generated by this sort of “spectacular” use of police radio would make its way into the radio crime docudramas. In a medium suited to intimacy and the conveyance of meaning through speech and dialogue, the management and coordination of resources across vast tracts of physical space might have seemed an odd fit. Yet these radio crime dramas drew on the chase as one of the key elements of drama and excitement. As much as the voices of police and criminals filled these dramas, equally important “characters” in the crime dramas were the increasingly sophisticated police technologies of communication and transportation, especially the police radio and automobile . As police reformers worked to redefine policing, attempts to conquer social mobility became increasingly intertwined with the growing problem of controlling physical mobility. The American landscape was reformed to make room for the automobile, and as mobility became a key feature of modern life, broadcasting, as Williams (1974) argues, emerged as a key solution to the gap between increasing mobilization and privatization that marked the development of twentieth-century life in the United States. While bridging the gap between public and private spaces allowed for the construction of a form of intimate authority, the radio’s properties of simultaneous address across space further allowed for imagining the meaning of police radio and its relationship to control of mobility. As police forces...

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