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40 Years On: Police Still in Crisis?

Professor Joe Sim

Policing the Crisis, first published in 1978, remains one of the most thorough, powerful and persuasive accounts of how ‘public consent’ for new forms state control is manufactured. Collectively written by Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke and Brian Roberts it remains one of the most influential and important books in the history of social science. Forty years on, Professor Joe Sim of Liverpool John Moore’s University, and longstanding member of Inquest, explores whether police-community relations have improved since the 1970s.

With exclusive film footage of Joe Sim and Stuart Hall discuss the criminalisation and demonization of young black men in the early 1970s, this event will examine the book’s main contention that media-constructed moral panics serve to deflect attention away the failings of the state and consider its continuing relevance today.