Cop Knowledge: Police Power and Cultural Narrative in Twentieth Century America
By Christopher Wilson
(University of Chicago Press, 2000 — 281 pages)
Reviewed by Ina R. Bort
From the New York Law Journal
July 13, 2001
If you happen to be in the market for something deadly dull and of zero relevance, congratulations! Your search is over.
At best, Christopher Wilson's analysis of police power and its portrayal in the newspapers and books of last century is nearly unreadable. Every chapter begins with some degree of promise, but quickly devolves into impenetrable academic jargon. Of course there is something to be said for consistency.
Wilson is a professor of English and director of American Studies at Boston College. One can safely assume that Cop Knowledge was written only after he'd won the approval of that institution's tenure committee.
According to Wilson, this, his third book, is a "book about a series of literary, journalistic, and mass-cultural encounters with everyday police authority in urban America, as that authority has changed over the course of the twentieth century."
If that doesn't grab you, try muddling through Wilson's muddled prose. Nary a phrase goes by without choking on words like "Foucaultian," "feminized," "panoptical," and "hybridized." Not even impressionable undergraduates should be subjected to this kind of thing.
In fact, other than those poor creatures required to purchase this book for their seminar syllabus, it's not clear who — on this planet, anyway — would read Cop Knowledge.
The prologue portends the problems to come. One knows that trouble lies ahead when an author requires a full 18 pages to explain what he aims to show in the remaining 200. That those 18 pages take approximately three days to read doesn't bode well either. Throughout the book, Wilson is similarly prone to discuss at length what he plans to discuss, via convoluted introductions to each chapter that add nothing to the ultimate discussion, when it finally comes. If this is Wilson's idea of creating suspense, let's hope that his next project doesn't involve a movie camera.
To be fair, one of the five chapters had the potential, had it been translated into English, to be interesting. This is the first chapter, entitled: "'The Machinery of a Finished Society:' Stephen Crane, Theodore Roosevelt, and the Police."
The chapter is (I think) an analysis of newspaper articles written by Stephen Crane, journalist and author of The Red Badge of Courage, about what Wilson refers to as "The Dora Clark Affair." Clark was a "chorus girl" with an arrest record for soliciting. In 1896, while visiting a house of "ill-repute" in connection with an article he was writing (or so he told his wife, perhaps), Crane witnessed Clark get arrested by an undercover policeman for soliciting, once again. Clark was so convinced that Clark had done nothing wrong that he testified at her criminal trial, which ended in a dismissal, and at the disciplinary hearing of the undercover policeman who had arrested her. For Wilson, the episode provides "an intriguing encounter between one of our most elusive yet important cultural interpreters and the politics of policing at the dawn of the twentieth century."
Policing, at the dawn of the 20th century, was Teddy Roosevelt's target of reform. As a member of the city's police commission, Roosevelt spearheaded an effort to rid the force of extensive corruption and political partisanship. He aimed to professionalize the force by introducing entrance exams, disciplinary procedures, and paramilitary training of officers. He stressed military discipline as a means of "closing loopholes of corruption, instituting better morals and assuring equal enforcement."
Crane's written sketches of this police force and, specifically, the Tenderloin District (not an actual area of the city, but a "juicy cut of police duty, full of exposure to temptation and . . . opportunity to fatten one's pay"), including his articles about the Dora Clark Affair, appeared in Hearst's New York Journal. The articles focused on the police's power of arrest. Crane "seemed especially concerned with the threat to mobility and passage of individuals, and, with that, the power of an arrest to inaugurate a legal proceeding without a judicial finding . . ." Nevertheless - and here, if I'm not mistaken, is the point of Wilson's chapter - "even as Crane's writings lament the subduing of pleasure, his depictions of the police themselves cannot . . . be categorized as conveying simple distrust of police power. On the contrary, . . . Crane was fascinated with the fortitude, presence, and courage that the cope often embodied in presiding over small dramas of every day social ordination. Crane's patrolmen . . . double both as every day workmen who arrive an at outbreak of disorder . . . and as peremptory judges whose decision seems preordained."
In other words, Crane, despite his distrust of police power, as exemplified by the Dora Clark Affair, also portrayed policemen, on occasion, in a favorable light and, in so doing, actually helped "to supplement[ the very powers of policing he once seemed to resist." But could this vaguely interesting observation not have been made in fewer than 56 pages? Only the colorfulness of Crane's writings and Roosevelt's "paramilitary" agenda keep the chapter afloat, despite Wilson's diligent attempts to sink it with lengthy digressions.
The same cannot be said of the four remaining chapters. The point of those chapters, if there is one, is so deeply buried within them that one might consider acquiring some "Archeology knowledge" before taking them on.
