Law, order, cinema: cities and crime

“there developed a ‘literature of criminality,’ and I use this word in its largest sense, including miscellaneous news items (and, even more, popular newspapers) as well as detective novels and all the romanticized writings which developed around crime – the transformation of the criminal into a hero, perhaps, but, equally, the affirmation that ever-present criminality is a constant menace to the social body as a whole. The collective fear of crime, the obsession with this danger which seems to be an inseparable part of society itself, are thus perpetually inscribed in each individual consciousness.” Michel Foucault, “The Dangerous Individual,” in Lawrence D. Kritzman ed., Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture (London: Routledge, 1988), 142.

gemeinschaft to gesellschaft: from a community organically evolved and bound together in particular by personal contact to an impersonalized society of interchangeable and contractual relationships. Ferdinand Tönnies,

Community and Association, trans. Charles P. Loomis, 1887 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1955).

“a vast army of idle, vicious, and impecunious people lodge nightly” in transient places that were “training school of vice and crime” leading to the formation of criminal gangs:

“The various ‘gangs’ that have infested the city and given the police force no end of trouble for many years are found in the densely populated districts. The tenement houses afford them excellent hiding places and from them gangs are recruited … It is deemed commendable by these gangs to assault the police, to molest and rob citizens, to fight, steal and murder.”

Helen Campbell, Thomas Knox, Thomas Byrnes, Darkness and Daylight, or Lights and Shadows of New York Life (Hartford, Conn.: A.D. Worthington, 1892), 443, 481, 246.

underworld

labyrinthine underground of cities, covering literal spaces – sewers, mines, railroads, dive bars – alongside a metaphoric sense of how underground spaces in large cities were inhabited by criminals like “rats” who threaten moral order in “undermining the works and lives of others.”Thomas Knox, Underground, or Life Below the Surface; Incidents and Accidents Beyond the Light of Day (London: Sampson, Low and Co., 1878), 269, 257.

other half

photographers seeking “living material … in underground resorts and stale beer dives, in haunts of criminals and training schools of crimes and nooks and corners known only to the police.”Campbell, Knox, Byrnes, Darkness and Daylight, ix.

Riis: Black and Tan Dive

Riis: Basement Pub

Riis: Bandit’s Roost

“the irruption of the low class criminal from the territory of cheap dissipation … morning after morning the vigorous beggars move out over the boundaries of savagery and limp and crawl and wriggle down the Chicago streets.”George Kibbe Turner, “The City of Chicago: A Study of the Great Immoralities,” McClure’s, 28 (April 1907), repr. in The Muckrakers, eds. Arthur and Lila Weinberg (New York: Capricorn Books, 1964), 404.

Robert Ezra Park: the “social problem is fundamentally a city problem,” that is always a “problem of social control,” of controlling conduct in accord with the needs of society.Robert Ezra Park, “The City as a Social Laboratory,” in Chicago: An Experiment in Social Science Research, eds. T.V. Smith and Leonard D. White (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929), 2; Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess, Introduction to the Science of Sociology (1921; Chicago: The University of Chicago, 1969), 785.

Weakening moral bonds, cities led to the enactment of “suppressed desires” and to “man” thus becoming “a problem to himself and to society in a way and to an extent that he never was before.Park, “The City as Social Laboratory,” 2