Last Updated on September 7, 2026 by Karl Thompson
Policing the Crisis (1978) is the classic neo-Marxist study of crime in British sociology. Its argument in four points:
- A moral panic developed over “mugging” in Britain in the early 1970s, focused on young black men in London.
- The panic was not driven by a real increase in street robbery — the rate was rising more slowly than in the previous decade.
- It served a political function: it gave the state a scapegoat at a moment when capitalism was in visible difficulty.
- The response then produced the thing it claimed to find — more policing produced more arrests, which produced more headlines, which confirmed the panic.
This is the key study for the neo-Marxist perspective within the crime and deviance module, AQA Paper 3 (7192/3). It comes up in questions on ethnicity and crime, on the media and crime, and on Marxist explanations of crime — which is unusual, and makes it one of the highest-value studies on the whole topic.
Get the reference right. The book is by Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke and Brian Roberts, published in 1978. It is conventionally cited as Hall et al. (1978). It is not by Hall alone, and it is not 1979 — a date that circulates widely, including in earlier versions of this post.
The theoretical background
Policing the Crisis is the most sustained attempt anyone has made to apply the fully social theory of deviance — the framework set out by Taylor, Walton and Young in The New Criminology (1973). That framework asks for an explanation working at seven levels at once, from the economic structure down to how the labelled person responds. Read that post for the framework itself; this one is about what happened when it was applied.
The approach draws on Marxism for the economic analysis and on interactionism for the analysis of labelling and societal reaction, which is why it is classed as neo-Marxist rather than Marxist.
What Hall et al. actually argued
The crisis of hegemony
The starting point is the state of Britain in the early 1970s: rising unemployment, an oil shock, industrial conflict on a scale not seen for decades, and a government that had lost a general election over the question of who governed the country.
Hall et al. described this as a crisis of hegemony. Hegemony, a concept taken from Gramsci, means rule by consent rather than by force — the ruling class governs because most people accept the arrangement as broadly legitimate. In the early 1970s that consent was visibly breaking down. The system appeared not to be working, and it could no longer rely on being taken for granted.
This is the concept students most often miss, and it is the one that earns the marks. Without it, the argument reduces to “the media picked on black people”, which is a much weaker claim and not what the book says.
The invention of the mugger
“Mugging” was not a legal category in England and Wales. There was no offence of mugging, which meant there was no way to count it — and therefore no reliable way to say whether it was rising.
That did not stop the figure being produced. Hall et al. document the widely reported claim of a 129% rise in muggings in London over four years, a number assembled from a category that had no legal definition and no consistent recording practice. Their point is not simply that the figure was wrong; it is that the figure could not have been right, because the thing it counted did not exist as a countable object.
Meanwhile the underlying rate of street robbery, on the measures that did exist, was rising more slowly than in the preceding decade.
The word itself was imported from the United States, arriving with American associations of urban disorder and race already attached. A new label was applied to an old offence, and the label carried its own explanation.
The amplification spiral
Hall et al. traced how the reaction produced the evidence for itself:
- Recession increased unemployment and produced civil unrest, including large-scale strikes.
- The state faced a legitimation crisis and needed a way of explaining public anxiety that did not point at the economy.
- The same recession deepened the marginalisation of young black men, and street robbery did rise somewhat.
- The media picked this up and constructed the figure of the black mugger — a folk devil.
- The state responded with heavier policing of the areas where the folk devil was said to live.
- More policing produced more arrests, which the media reported as confirmation.
- Public attention settled firmly on black criminality rather than on the economic system producing both the crime and the criminalisation.
The result was that the racialised policing of the 1970s could be presented as a proportionate response to a problem that the policing itself had substantially manufactured.
For the concept of moral panic in general, including Cohen’s original study of the mods and rockers and the deviancy amplification spiral, see moral panics.
Criticisms of Policing the Crisis
Hall et al. appear to contradict themselves. This is the strongest criticism and the one to lead with. They argue that black criminality was exaggerated, but they also argue that unemployment and marginalisation were bound to increase street crime among young black men. If crime really was rising, then the reaction was not a moral panic — it was a response to a real event. The book cannot comfortably hold both claims.
Hall et al. would reply that the reaction was disproportionate rather than baseless, and that the exaggeration was in the racialised framing rather than in the existence of the crime. That is a defensible position, but it is a retreat from the stronger claim the book seems to make.
Lea and Young’s objection. Left realists argue that most crime is reported to the police by the public rather than uncovered by the police, so police racism alone cannot explain the pattern of recorded offending. If the public are reporting the offences, the selectivity has to come in somewhere other than at the point of detection.
No evidence of intent. The argument requires the state to have needed a scapegoat and the media to have supplied one. Hall et al. do not demonstrate that anybody decided to do this. The mechanism is presented as functional rather than intentional, which makes it very difficult to test — and a theory that cannot be disproved is a weak theory.
The panic outlived the crisis. The association between black youth and street crime persisted long after the economic crisis of the 1970s ended. If the crisis of hegemony was the cause, the effect should have faded with it.
It offers no practical response. If capitalism produces both the crime and the criminalisation, the only remedy is to change capitalism. That leaves nothing to say to a community being over-policed this year.
It says nothing about gender. Like most of the critical criminology of the period, the analysis is about class and race and has almost nothing to say about women as offenders or victims.
Evaluation summary
| Strengths | Limitations |
|---|---|
| The most complete application of the fully social theory of deviance ever attempted | Even it only really covers three of the seven levels |
| Correctly identifies that “mugging” was not a legal category and could not be reliably counted | Appears to contradict itself on whether street crime was actually rising |
| Explains why the panic emerged when it did, rather than treating it as random | The association persisted long after the crisis it was supposed to explain |
| The concept of a crisis of hegemony connects crime to politics and economics in one move | No evidence that anyone intended the scapegoating; the mechanism is functional and untestable |
| Anticipated the debates about institutional racism in policing by twenty years | Left realists note most crime is reported by the public, not uncovered by the police |
| Still the reference point for work on race, media and policing | Silent on gender; no practical policy response |
Does the argument still hold? (2026 update)
Students get analysis marks for testing a 1978 study against current evidence. Two things are worth knowing.
On institutional racism, the argument has been substantially vindicated. The Macpherson Report (1999) found the Metropolitan Police institutionally racist after the investigation into Stephen Lawrence’s murder. The Casey Review (2023) found the Met institutionally racist, sexist and homophobic — a finding delivered forty-five years after Policing the Crisis and reaching a conclusion the book had argued for. The Lammy Review (2017) reached similar conclusions about the criminal justice system as a whole.
On the scale of the disparity, the picture has changed and you should say so. Black people in England and Wales are currently around 3.8 times more likely to be stopped and searched than white people. That is a serious disparity and it supports the argument. But it is down sharply from around 9.7 times in 2018/19, and any textbook quoting “six times” or “nine times” is describing the situation before 2020. Using a superseded figure is an easy way to lose credibility in an answer.
The honest conclusion is that Hall et al. were right about the pattern and about the direction of the institutional analysis, and that the mechanism they proposed — a deliberate-seeming diversion serving a specific economic crisis — is harder to sustain than the pattern itself.
Exam application
Policing the Crisis appears in three different topics, which makes it unusually good value for revision time.
Ethnicity and crime. The neo-Marxist explanation of over-representation, contrasted with Gilroy’s anti-racist theory, left realism and cultural explanations.
The media and crime. The best British example of a media-generated moral panic with a specified political function, as against Cohen’s mods and rockers, which is the better example of the amplification process itself.
Marxist theories of crime. The neo-Marxist development of the traditional Marxist account, and the answer to the charge that Marxism is economically deterministic.
A note on how to use it. In a 30-mark essay, the contradiction criticism is worth more than a description of the study. Any candidate can outline the seven stages; showing that the argument struggles to hold “the crime was exaggerated” and “the crime was rising” together at the same time is analysis, and analysis is where the marks are.
References
Hall, S., Critcher, C., Jefferson, T., Clarke, J. and Roberts, B. (1978) Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order. London: Macmillan. Second edition, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
Taylor, I., Walton, P. and Young, J. (1973) The New Criminology: For a Social Theory of Deviance. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Lea, J. and Young, J. (1984) What Is To Be Done About Law and Order? Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Casey, L. (2023) An Independent Review into the Standards of Behaviour and Internal Culture of the Metropolitan Police Service.
Signposting and Related Posts
This post has been written for students studying crime and deviance as part of the AQA A-Level Sociology course, where it appears on Paper 3 (7192/3).
For the theoretical framework this study applies, see The New Criminology: Taylor, Walton and Young.
For the traditional Marxist account this develops, see the Marxist theory of crime.
For moral panic as a concept, see moral panics.
Within the ethnicity and crime topic, this is usually studied alongside Paul Gilroy’s anti-racist theory and criticised using left realist explanations for ethnic differences in crime.
For the current statistical picture, see criminal justice, ethnicity and racism.
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