Criminological Ethnography: An IntroductionJ.Treadwell. London: SAGE (2019) 240pp. £85.00hb, £29.99pb ISBN 9781473975712

Abstract

In her groundbreaking work, Shots in the Mirror, Rafter (2006) argues that 'whatever the basis of their stories, crime films reflect the power relations of the context in which they are made, [including] attitudes towards gender, ethnicity, race and class relations' (p.21). This is the terrain of Ben Lamb's first book, You're Nicked. Arguing that television scholarship on the British police series 'primarily analyses the representation of police characters as a measure of a programme's ideology' (p.7), he sets out to 'change the academic landscape' (p.7) in two key ways. First, in addition to analysing representation of police characters, he also explores depiction of the civilian characters in each series and their reasons for committing crime; and, where appropriate, he links these representations to key criminological theories. Second, he notes that many existing academic studies tend to focus on how police officers are portrayed in their working lives as part of the public world of work. Lamb suggests that academics have not always considered 'the extent to which the depiction of private domestic spaces can make an ideological contribution to the genre' (p.3) and his aim is to explore how representations of gender and social class, within both public and private spaces, are articulated visually according to production practices of the day. In his study, Lamb analyses 16 popular British television police series from 1955 to the present day. These series include