ABSTRACT
Since the 1980s, several researchers have found that, aided by local media, police in various US cities have taken the lead in provoking moral panics over youth gangs, thus building support for additional funding or new laws and policies. For example, in “Chicano Youth Gangs and Crime: The Creation of a Moral Panic” (1987), criminologist Marjorie S. Zatz argues that in the late 1970s and early 1980s, police and media in Phoenix, Arizona together stirred up a moral panic over Chicano youth gangs that was of enormous social and economic consequence to the area. She writes,
Zatz emphasizes that the moral panic was not triggered by any actual increased threat from youth gangs. The police and the media treated barrio youth as “social dynamite,” fostering a moral panic over Chicano youth gangs that, far from being the reasonable response to an actual threat that it may have seemed, both expressed and encouraged Anglos’ anxieties about gangs and Latinos. Moral panic over Chicano youth gangs benefited Phoenix police by justifying grants from the federal Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) for a new anti-gang unit and profited local media by providing material for news stories.
