Cop Knowledge: Police Power and Cultural Narrative in Twentieth-Century America

Abstract

In Cop Knowledge, Christopher P. Wilson takes on the job of linking cultural theory to the history of policing in the twentiethcentury United States. A professor of English and American studies, Wilson has reached across academic disciplines to understand how postindustrial Americans have understood the role of police in society, how police articulate professionalism and ethics, and how stories about policing create a cultural apparatus that shapes judicial outcomes. These stories, which constitute “cop knowledge,” circulate among the cultural producers, subjects, and audiences Wilson examines: policy makers, beat cops, journalists and other mass culture producers, and social scientists. Stories police tell about themselves, he arg ues, “play off of and feed back from media formations, becom[ing] not separate from the everyday routines of police work, but actually encoded in them.” Following newer scholarship on crime that links cultural production to political knowledge, Wilson explores most closely the genres that make the greatest claims to truth: social science, journalism, police procedural fiction, and true crime nonfiction. Police stories express, he argues, a residual populism in which a white, ethnic, workingclass hero is both the engine of reform and the victim of reformers. After an excellent introduction that surveys the different academic approaches that have been authoritative in explaining police power, individual chapters skip to suggestive moments of police reform in which new genres emerge to tell the story: Stephen Crane's public defense of a woman accused of prostitution; the emergence of the police procedural as a literary and film genre; the former cop Joseph Wambaugh's fiction; latetwentiethcentury “true crime” journalism; and the role of newspaper coverage of gang violence in creating an authoritative “community voice” that lends legitimacy to what might otherwise be arbitrary choices about guilt and innocence.

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