Calling All Cars: Radio Dragnets and the Technology of Policing (review)

In Calling All Cars, Kathleen Battles uses radio crime dramas of the 1930s to examine the medium as a representational technology and as a tool for maintaining social order. For Battles, radio was “not simply a space for circulating discourses about police professionalizing but also a technology through which to imagine the meaning of policing and the stories produced about them” (p. 6). This book argues that radio, in both point-to-point and broadcasting modes, was a site for implementing modern police tactics and improving their public image. These efforts were mirrored in the network radio dramas that appealed to audiences by depicting efficient police battling deviant, psychotic criminals.

Battles’s argument is developed through five tightly argued chapters that combine archival sources with close textual readings. The book begins by examining the problem of policing in the interwar era, in which authorities faced challenges from a public lacking faith in their competence and criminals who embraced new forms of mobility associated with the automobile. In response, the police reform movement sought to develop new strategies of centralized dispatch via two-way radio. At the same time, police wanted to improve their public image. Program producers and sponsors also sought to reach the public and saw the crime genre as a means of simultaneously providing entertainment and public interest programming.

The following chapters explore different dynamics in these programs, such as the ways that radio docudramas represented police as professional voices of authority, in contrast to criminals, who were often portrayed as mentally unstable. These representations sought to convince audiences that police work was rational and that criminals deserved little sympathy. In so doing, they attempted to redefine the public’s relationship to both outlaws and state authority. Another chapter explores the idea of the “dragnet,” which used radio’s cultural form, the network, to place the listener within the process of criminal apprehension (p. 237). This feeling of rapid movement and omnipresence of forces of law and order, Battles argues, existed beyond the manifest content of the programs themselves. In addition, representations of police authority were not wholly one-sided. Several shows, such as Gangbusters, The Shadow, and The Green Hornet, critiqued and generally revealed ambivalences about the model of state authority chronicled in the prior changes. The book concludes by considering the legacy of tropes established in radio crime drama on contemporary television programs and conceptions of police work.

This is a well-defined and clearly argued book. Its chief advantage is its attention to radio specificity. In her analysis of radio programming, Battles pays close attention to the ways in which radio, as an aural medium, constructs and conveys meaning. Thus, her readings of specific shows address the intersection of conditions of cultural and technological possibility. Voices, sound effects, and filters played essential and often overlooked roles in conveying meaning beyond the manifest narrative content. Battles makes a compelling case by foregrounding these program elements. However, because the “dragnet effect” would seem to rely not just on the possibility of radio’s aural representations but also on an array of social meanings for that technology, how and why radio technologies were imbued with that power and meaning needs more attention. In this regard and in discussion of how discourses about radio technologies were understood by police reformers and audiences, Battles, an able cultural historian, would have benefited from adding social history of technology or STS perspectives to her analytic repertoire.

This book will be valuable to scholars interested in how meanings about technologies filter into popular culture or in the interplay between the social practices of policing and the cultural representations of state authority.