Calling All Cars: Radio Dragnets and the Technology of Policing

5. The Shadow of Doubt and the Menace of Surveillance

As argued up to this point, the radio crime docudrama was developed as an entertainment formula that was largely complicit in naturalizing a progressive definition of policing as a profession producing, and thus possessing , its own body of expert knowledge about criminality, policing, and the proper role of citizens. This was achieved both through the narrative content of the programs, which continually worked to construct the police as professional laborers, and in the formal elements that were particular to the production of meaning in the radio medium. The narrative content constructed the police as self-assured authorities in matters of policing and criminality who never erred in their efforts at criminal apprehension. As the quote from “The Chicago Kid” suggests, these programs deployed selfconfident , boastful claims to authority in order to improve the public image of the police; their methods of identification were infallible, their methods of apprehension inescapable. The use of sound effects and articulation of police radio with the industrial organization of commercial broadcasting fostered the imaginative possibility of an inescapable dragnet under which criminal apprehension was inevitable. While the meanings of the crime dramas were not always so read, especially in regard to the representation of criminality, the representation of police authority was largely conservative in its aim to bolster the social standing of the police during a time of social upheaval. The growth of police power was tied to the overall adoption of post-Progressive reform measures by both the government and professional organizations in a move that rendered citizen involvement 187 chapte r 5 The Shadow of Doubt and the Menace of Surveillance lord: Then Manovitz was really the murderer of the old Russian couple, Chief Coglin? coglin: Beyond the shadow of a doubt. —“The Chicago Kid” episode of Gang Busters 188 the shadow of doubt in the definition of social problems, and hence the kinds of solutions required, increasingly unwelcome. While policing was defined as a public service through the development of practices such as call-and-response, the struggle over defining what constituted the activities of the police and definitions of criminality would now be a matter for professional police forces to decide rather than be the object of public debate. Yet, the pro-police discourse that celebrated proceduralism and apprehension was both contradictory and incomplete in nature. This chapter focuses on the ways in which the strongly pro-police ideology of the radio crime docudrama was challenged. First, the docudramas sometimes produced counterdiscourses that called into question the very model they were constructing. Such moments were rare but no less significant. Counterdiscourses most often took the form of reversing one of the consistent elements of the program either by creating sympathy for the criminal or by calling police proceduralism into question. Other times, the claims made by the producers of the programs to define situations in a particular way were challenged by the police or by the criminals themselves. What constituted the correct narrative was often less clear than the strongly didactic tone these series suggested. Second, another kind of crime drama, rooted in pulp and hard-boiled detective fiction, found loyal radio audiences. Programs such as The Green Hornet and The Shadow, like their docudrama cousins, drove home the strong moral message that crime never pays, but they did so in a way that replaced Progressive reform claims to professional expertise and attempts to use reform as a way to control social mobility with a more ambivalent take on the growth of police and state power. This ambivalence was expressed through character, plot, sound effects, and other elements specific to the radio medium. In all these instances, a shadow of doubt was cast over the police and their claims to being the professional keepers and makers of knowledge about crime and policing. CRACKS IN THE ARMOR As has been argued, there was a remarkable consistency to the radio crime docudramas’ representations of policing, criminality, and citizenship. As their definitions became reified in the formula of the programs, the constant reproduction of these categories became a matter of course. The writers, the shadow of doubt 189 producers, and audiences knew what to expect, if not in terms of the actual action that would ensue, at least in terms of the characterization of the police and criminals. Yet, occasionally, these programs disrupted their own flow in a way that called into question the very model of policing they...