Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order: Summary & Key Insights

As observers of British public life in the early 1970s, we watched the idea of a ‘law and order crisis’ take shape almost overnight. What had once been framed as discrete questions of crime control began to be narrated as evidence of a general breakdown in social discipline. Speeches by leading politicians warned that ordinary citizens were no longer safe on their own streets, and that permissiveness—supposedly born of the 1960s—had eroded traditional respect for authority. The media echoed and amplified this refrain, producing daily stories that merged acts of vandalism, student unrest, industrial strikes, and violent crime into a unified image of chaos.

But behind this construction lay a deeper political logic. Britain was experiencing an economic downturn, deepening inflation, and mounting industrial conflict. The promise of postwar prosperity was evaporating, and with it the social compromises that had underpinned the welfare state. By dramatizing a ‘crisis of law and order,’ the political establishment could rally public support around the restoration of state authority. The anxiety about crime was, in this sense, an index of a larger legitimacy crisis. The language of moral decline—of streets taken over by delinquents and immigrants—became a vocabulary for talking about the erosion of confidence in the old political order.

The term ‘mugging’ was imported almost wholesale from the United States, where it described a particularly violent form of street robbery. British police statistics had never used the term; they had long relied on categories such as robbery and assault with intent to rob. Yet beginning in the early 1970s, newspapers and politicians began speaking of ‘muggings’ as if they were a distinct and menacing new phenomenon. In this linguistic shift lay a profound act of cultural translation. ‘Mugging’ became a symbol of a new kind of urban danger, one that drew upon images of American ghettoes and racialized violence.

Our research showed that the numerical evidence for a ‘mugging wave’ simply did not exist. The crime data revealed fluctuations typical for urban settings, but not the epidemic that public discourse described. The power of ‘mugging’ resided not in its empirical grounding, but in its ideological resonance. It combined fear of violent disorder with anxiety about social difference. Borrowing an American word allowed Britain to project its own tensions about race and inequality onto a supposedly foreign menace, even as those tensions were in fact rooted in domestic transformations.