ABSTRACT
Policing the crisis is a highly influential Marxist analysis of state power, the politicisation of law and order, the racialisation of crime, and the criminalisation of youth. The backdrop is a context of deepening economic recession and rising social and cultural tension across Britain’s inner cities in the 1970s. One aspect of the structure of selection can be seen in the routine organisation of newspapers with respect to regular types or areas of news. Since newspapers are committed to the regular production of news, these organisational factors will, in turn, affect what is selected. Events, as news, then, are regularly interpreted within frameworks which derive, in part, from this notion of the consensus as a basic feature of everyday life. They are elaborated through a variety of ‘explanations’, images and discourses which articulate what the audience is assumed to think and know about the society.
