Football's Crime Stats

There have been some recent think pieces in the media about the 'fall in crime' around the world.  Here the Guardian (25 April 2013 'Crime rate keeps falling despite austerity') finds criminologists 'surprised' but willing to offer a variety of  potential solutions.

This article from the Wall Street Journal runs through some: no lead in petrol, improved policing and use of prison.  Other suggestions are that the rise in legalised abortion to falls in crime (the Freakonomics argument) and more recently some suggest that playing video games leads to fall sin crime.  This blog post emphasises the empathic possibilities and my own work suggests the preferability of people stealing cars online in VL rather than in RL.  Others suggest games players are simply 'too busy' to commit crime.

But is crime falling?  As a criminologist Marion Fitzgerald is less sure that crime is falling; and, for other reasons, neither is the right, with accusations (Daily Telegraph, 12 May 2013) that the police have been keeping figures down for political reasons.  I too place little confidence in the accuracy of the figures, not because of cock-ups or conspiracies - though there have been examples of both - but because crime is a malleable social construct.

So it is with some interest that the 'fall' in crime appears to have been mirrored by fouls in football.  As the BBC say, 'The number of fouls committed by Premier League players has dropped by 22% since 2006, according to figures released for the first time'.  Obviously some suggestions are made for why this might be.  Since the definition of a foul is a very subjective matter I can't agree with Mark Riley of the Professional Game Match Officials Limited (BBC 8 March 2013 'Can football learn from rugby union's attitude to referees?')
that "The referees at Premier League level get 95% of their decisions right, the assistant referees get 99% of their decisions right".

Interestingly just as fouls have fallen so has punishment.

Referees issued 52 red cards, the same as in 2006-07 and the joint lowest since 1996-97 when there were 44 dismissals. In 2011-12 there were 66 sending-offs, with a record 73 being shown in 2005-06.

And, again this should be of interest to criminologists and penal reformers education and self-policing seem to be cited as reasons!  What next restorative cautions? Are players routinely tested for lead?  We know many play soccer video games.  Has this made them less aggressive?

We’ll gesticulate how we want to: semiotics for cops

Not sure this sports criminology but involves sport and crime and policing!

When reading Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style I was never entirely convinced of the links he saw between punk and reggae though I listened to a bit of both and still enjoy the Clash.  I think he was correct in arguing that Punk’s use of the swastika was meant to shock or to imply ‘Berlin’ (and therefore Bowie etc) but feel he and his respondents were too naive in thinking they had succeeded.

For instance, Wallach notes (in Duncombe and Tremblay (eds) White Riot: Punk Rock and the Politics of Race) how the transposition of punk to Indonesia meant that its earliest adherents didn’t even know these shock or hip references.  It just meant punk.  But quite quickly a more political punk (he cites, for instance, the Dead Kennedy’s ‘Nazi Punks Fuck Off’) is seen to chime with their own position under Suharto’s dictatorship.

And Hamm (in American Skinheads: The Criminology and Control of Hate Crime) notes the outgrowth of skinhead Oi music from some of the same roots which did fully embrace the Nazi regalia and ideology without robbing Wagner’s music box.  And Thompson (Punk Productions: unfinished business) is right to argue that punk may have attempted to empty Nazi symbols (and bondage gear for that matter) of their signifying power but failed to do so.  Yet whenever I happened across any punk wearing a swastika the bricolage of their clothing (see also Punk & the Swastika) and other accessories (Malcolm and Vivien’s Accessories franchise anyone) meant I never felt I was dealing with a Nazi.  Though I have felt that when dealing with others more conventionally dressed.

So am I easily reassured by a torn neon jumper and multi-dyed hair as counters to the message of the swastika?  Or is it too much cultural studies and semiotics and knowledge of Hindu (mention of Prince Harry in this BBC story) and Roman (was hoping to find a Mary Beard ref but here Hull Museum pitch in) uses of the swastika.  Or would anyone easily recognise that however offensive, they were not Nazis?

megan ruminates on “Can you accidentally do a Nazi salute?”, the case of Giorgos Katidis a 20 year old Greek footballer now banned for life for celebrating a goal with a nazi salute.  He claimed not to know its significance.  He may want to know about Basil Fawlty’s knack of not ‘mentioning the war’.  Not that this was much assistance to Mark Bosnich, the Aston Villa goalkeeper, who in 1996 was fined £1,000 for what he said was a Basil Fawlty impression in front of Spurs fans.

And talking of my team.  Whilst I don’t chant ‘Yids’ or ‘Yiddo’ on my rare visits I’d happily admit to being one, particularly to a non-threatening Arsenal fan in a solidaristic Spartacus sort of way.  Been known to let people think I’m gay (and certainly sung along with Tom Robinson Glad to be Gay) in the same spirit.  But I know full well that some do find the chanting offensive.  We’ll ignore the ironic potential of David Baddiel using the Daily Mail to argue it sustains anti-semitism.  And apparently the club has defended supporters against similar complaints from the Society of Black Lawyers.

Just as I know that no offense is meant to the jewish supporters of Spurs by the chants I suspect little support for them or wider Jewry either which is why I decline to join in.  Which brings me to the upcoming NE derby between Newcastle and Sunderland.  Northumbria Police have apparently decided that this is no Twitterjoke and intends to use CCTV to collect evidence should any Newcastle fans seek to mock the Sunderland manager’s alleged fascism with nazi salutes.  The BBC says, ‘Northumbria Police said such gestures would not be treated "as a joke".  Spurs fans sensitive to the criticisms and proud defenders of free speech now chant ‘We’ll sing what we want to’.  Will the Toon Army now chant ‘We’ll gesticulate what we want to’?  Or all turn up in Hitler moustaches or chant ‘Yiddos’ perhaps?

recommending ‘Fighting is the Most Real and Honest Thing’ by Brent and Kraska

You could see this as cultural criminology, sport sociology, part of the sociology of masculinity; here I'm claiming it for sports criminology.


‘Fighting is the Most Real and Honest Thing’ Violence and the Civilization/Barbarism Dialectic

1. John J. Brent^* and

1. Peter B. Kraska

* Doctoral Fellow, University of Delaware, Department of Criminology/Sociology, Center for Drug and Alcohol Studies, Newark, DE 19716, USA; JBrent@udel.edu; P.B. Kraska, School of Justice Studies, Eastern Kentucky University, Richmond, KY, USA, Peter.Kraska@eku.edu.

Abstract

Over the past two decades, the activity of ‘cage-fighting’ has attracted massive audiences and significant attention from media and political outlets. Underlying the spectacle of these mass-consumed events is a growing world of underground sport fighting. By offering more brutal and less regulated forms of violence, this hidden variant of fighting lies at the blurry and shifting intersection between licit and illicit forms of recreation. This paper offers a theoretical and ethnographic exploration of the motivations and emotive frameworks of these unsanctioned fighters. We find that buried within the long-term process towards greater civility rest the seeds for social unrest, individual rebellion and ontological upheaval. By revealing the dialectical relationship between contemporary mechanisms of control and these uncivil performances, we argue these transgressions are a visceral reaction to today’s highly rationalized modes of state and social governance. More broadly, we attempt to understand the interrelationship between contemporary controls and sport fighting as a microcosm of the long-running struggle between civility and barbarism.                   

Diving, some thoughts on Lance Armstrong and Jimmy Saville and what may or not be Sport Criminology

Feeling guilty that I’ve not updated recently so this a bit of an omnibus posting.

Rosie Meek argues persuasively of the possibilities of sport in encouraging desistance amongst prisoners.  In a personal anecdote to me she recalled that outside teams found prison teams to be the least dirty.  I’m still not sure her work, excellent though it is, fits into my idea of sport criminology.  I see it as top quality criminological evaluation of prison projects in which sport is the variable under study.  The variable could be art, comedy, opera, cold showers or the treadmill and crank.  So my interest would not be whether sport could prevent crime or encourage desistance from crime but the extent and depth of crime within that sport.

That is my emphasis here is on crimes as understood in the wider world or within the world of that sport.  Obviously the current case of Lance Armstrong offers much opportunity for discussion under both or any definition of crime, but it is already widely covered and has yet to come to a conclusion.  One ignored area in this tale is the power of money - the business of cycle racing.  I will return to this in a future post.

Less ignored has been a claim that ‘things were different then’ in cycling or that the atmosphere of pop music - in which young women could be sexually exploited - was also ‘different then’.  And some link the cases of failure to spot the crimes of Armstrong and Savile.  That hyperlink is to an explicitly christian website which fails to note the many equivalent scandals of the church. They even quote Thomas Cranmer saying, ‘What the heart loves, the will chooses and the mind justifies.’ Quite.

But enough bashing of bible-bashers and back to sport, crime and the business of football.  You might see ‘diving’ or ‘going down easily’ as cheating, a form of positive deviance (usually use of performance enhancing drugs or debilitating over-training) or Mertonian innovation (I often use cheating in sport to illustrate this - the acceptance of the legitimate ‘ends’ of the game but not the ‘means’) but here I’m going to try and step into the game.

A football spectator who has paid enough for an opera ticket may be made so cross by the cheating of the opposition that he finds himself arrested for his reaction.  If you’ve paid ‘good money’ to bribe a player or official you may also be pretty cross and vow to have someone’s legs broken.  These too may be ancillary to sport criminology.  So finally to crime in sport.  The crime of diving for a foul or preferably a penalty.

In the real, rather than the sportsworld, crime is usually dealt with by attacking it (the war on ...’) or redefining it; or just handwringing or even resort to biological or medical metaphor - cancer in this instance.  Another tactic to is to blame the crime on foreigners, so step forward Luis Suarez.  Since the crime of diving is now thought to be at record levels - have we the stats? are we being nostalgic? - how about some realworld solutions?

Should we return to football’s earlier rougher incarnations and decriminalise the foul and reinstate ‘hacking’ (kicks on the shin not checking the phones of celebrities for signs of sex offending).  Or, like the crime techno-fix of CCTV, insist the players have gyroscopes fitted with real time telemetry judging how easily they went down and the identity of the nearest players from their embedded RFIDs.  Or, given the epistemological problems of being sure between the foul and the dive might we be less punitive.  Not a penalty shot or free kick but 10 minutes in the sin bin, perhaps?  Or given changes in boot and ball technology move the penalty spot back.

Wonga

And another thing that might not be sport criminology but does involve ‘harm’ within sport business, so a concern for zemiology, is the sponsorship of Newcastle United by Wonga.  This causes specific offence to the Muslim players and a more generalised offence to me.  My sports sponsorship Catch 22 is that no company with the cash or desire to sponsor your team could ever be morally fit to do so.

British Society of Criminology South Branch and the Mannheim Centre for Criminology – LSE 2012/13 Seminar Series

British Society of Criminology South Branch and the Mannheim Centre for Criminology – LSE

2012/13 Seminar Series

10 Oct Professor Rosie Meek, University of Teesside

The role of sport in rehabilitation and desistance from crime

LSE: New Academic Building, Room 1.07

7 Nov Matthew Bacon, University of Sheffield

Taking care of the drug business: A study of police detectives, drug law enforcement and proactive investigation

LSE: Connaught House, Room 1.05

5 Dec Professor Jon Silverman, University of Bedfordshire and former Home Affairs Editor BBC 

Crime policy and the media

LSE: New Academic Building, Room 1.07

16 Jan Professor Wayne Morrison, Queen Mary University of London Lessons for the study of state crime from the Nazi era

LSE: New Academic Building, Room 1.07

13 Feb David Scott, University of Central Lancashire 

Ghosts beyond our realm: prison officer occupational culture and less eligibility

LSE: New Academic Building, Room 1.07

13 Mar Ros Burnett, University of Oxford

False allegations of abuse in positions of trust

LSE: New Academic Building, Room 1.07

15 May Professor Mike Nash, University of Portsmouth 

Co-operating or Coerced? The 'others' in public protection.

LSE: Connaught House, Room 1.05

12 Jun Professor David Wilson Birmingham City University

What we can learn from the history of British serial killing

LSE: Connaught House, Room 1.05

The seminars will begin at 6.30pm, with wine from 6.15pm, and we recommend arriving early to be sure of a seat.  We hope you will also be able to stay for drinks with the speaker afterwards.

Map:http://www.lse.ac.uk/resources/mapsAndDirections/findingYourWayAroundLSE.htm  

Directions:http://www.lse.ac.uk/resources/mapsAndDirections/travellingToLSE.htm

Olympic Claims

In Criminal Justice Matters No 88 (June 2012) ‘(In)security and the re-ordered Olympic city’ Pete Fussey explored issues around Olympic-related security and insecurity in advance of the Games.  Writing between the Games and the Paralympics I hope to assess some of those same issues.

First though some ‘conflict-of-interests’ confessions.  I was the external examiner on Peter’s PhD on CCTV and am very pleased to see the extent to which he has been able expand upon that work.  Also I’m a sports fan and have spent much of the past few weeks watching - live and recorded - the Olympics.  I agree with much that Peter says though I will be picking away at some aspects.  But, I’m not going to assert an ‘I-was-there’ standpointism where my experience of attending trumps his prospective theoretical position.  I went to the Olympic Park 6 times (3 Athletics, 1 Women’s Hockey, 1 Men’s Water Polo, 1 Women’s Basketball and 1 Track Cycling after another event) and the Lea Valley White Water Centre for Canoe Slalom.

Fussey picks out ‘a number of specific strategies [which] are consistently applied’: Militarisation, Privatisation, Technology and Surveillance, Physical Design and Behavioural regulation.  Whilst all might have been expected from his studies of other mega-events but the first two had a particular inconsistency in their application that might not have been anticipated.

Leading up to the Games much was made of the ‘missiles on rooftops’ but the experience of imilitarisation was in the form of actual serving members of the armed forces in the wake of the G4S security shortfall.  This even lead some commentators to eulogise them.  I can vouch for their friendly efficiency (and, like the policing of the torch relay a massive PR coup for them).  So actual militarisation trumped privatisation to the extent that 2 Govt Ministers were said to have had second thoughts about the limits of privatisation.  We shall see.

The technology and surveillance was less obvious but behind all such friendliness we find that Disney are using military strength face-recognition.  And again the physical and behavioural issues remind us of Disney.  Not only did the Olympic Park remind me of Disney but so did people’s appreciation of it.  But most had not read Clifford D. Shearing and Phillip C. Stenning’s ‘From the Panopticon to Disney World: the Development of Discipline’.  More hopeful though, are Warren’s conclusions in ‘Popular Cultural Practices in the “Postmodern City”’ that even:

Disneyland, demonstrates that contemporary urban landscapes are complicated and contradictory sites that hegemonically embed both dominant cultural and economic relations and creative resistance to them.

My derives around Stratford attempted some resistance, as does this.  But, and scandalously under-reported save on Twitter, were some more active complaints.  Thus Femen demonstrated outside City Hall against the inclusion of Islamic countries at the Olympics.  Yet I joined in the cheers for a Saudi and Palestinian woman athlete sporting ‘racing Hijabs’.

There is a dreadful irony in the success of the cycling team and the kettling of cycle born protestors on the night of the Opening Ceremony.  And further ironies in the on-screen lauding of the protests of Tommie Smith and John Carlos.  Past protests - on the right side - are seen to be acceptable.

But perhaps the best news is an unexpected Olympic legacy, of life imitating art as the suffragettes from the opening ceremony discover their feminism.

The Drugs don't work - but keep taking the tablets

The Guardian has Bradley Wiggins saying: ‘I can never dope because it would cost me everything if I took drugs I would stand to lose my reputation, my livelihood, my marriage, my family, my house, my titles …’

Such statements remind me of the social bonds discussed in the self/control theories of Hirschi. Those are keeping Bradley in line. 

But the Tour de France is famous for its doping and the performance of the Sky team, for which Wiggins rides, has been compared to that of Lance Armstrong’s (leading to a rant by Wiggins).  Armstrong continues to show that even being shown to be clean brings no peace; to the doubters you must also have cheated the tests.  Franck Schleck and Remy di Gregorio (at the time of writing) are the only two riders to fail this year.

Yet I continue to watch the Tour with enjoyment: the sights, the tactics, the sheer spectacle.  Similarly I don’t think what drugs have aided the performance of the actors, singers, writers or dancers I enjoy.  My main worry for Wiggins is not that he will be tempted to dope but that given the high stakes others may seek to spike his food or drink as Schleck claims his was. 

Amongst the plethora of Olympic stories are the bold claims of LOCOG and WADA.

London 2012 will carry out an unprecedented number of tests to ensure the health and rights of the athletes, and that the integrity of the Games is upheld.

The drug testing facility to be run by GlaxoSmithKline and its associated regime is backed up by this video.  The video seeks to deny drugs yet stylistically evokes them and concludes, which is interesting for a drug company.

But let’s examine those claims: athletes health, rights and the integrity of the games.

athletes health

The occasional transgressions of professional footballers often affords us an insight into their training regimes.  They are scant compared to far-less-well-rewarded swimmers, cyclists and other athletes.  And yet all are unlikely to enjoy good health while practising their sport and retirement brings further problems.  Fitness may be good for your health but professional sport is likely to be bad.  Liz Pike notes that athletes normalize illness and injury and her two-year ethnographic study of female rowers showed that medical support for these athletes was both insufficient and inadequate.  Moreover the demands of capitalism mean that the Olympic ‘ideal’ is paid for by corporate sponsors, many in the obesity business.  Neville Rigby and Amandine Garde argue that in:

concluding long-term exclusivity agreements with iconic junk food brands, the International Olympic Committee has failed to support public health policy.

Turning to rights 

It is my experience of talking to athletes that they whole-heartedly embrace the drug and other testing regimes foisted on them.  They subscribe to the ideology of the ‘drug cheat’, perhaps for fear that, as with politicians and the ‘war on drugs’, any questioning of the policy leads to embarrassing questions about youthful ingestion/inhalation.  The Church of WADA/IOC punishes heretics.

And yet, some dare speak out.  For instance EU Athletes and UNI Global Union use a rights-based discourse to raise some challenge:

The lack of effectiveness of the present system is deeply worrying and does not justify the violation of athletes’ fundamental rights [...] Athletes need anti-doping rules that are effective and fair. The WADA Code fails on both counts and that is why we are launching our legal challenges today.

Speaking more personally and with some fervour Andy Murray complains, “I just want to enjoy a normal life without people bashing on your door at four in the morning.”  And some doctors, with the protection of the white coat of science have argued, “Far from being unfair, drugs that enhance performance actually promote equality”

As a criminologist with an interest in human rights I’m taken by the comparison with Sex Offenders Register which requires registration and notification within 3 days whereas the elite athletes have to predict months in advance where they will be and risk ‘failing’ a test if not there.

I would suggest that the compromises to athletes health and rights combined with the IOC’s supine relations with big business and corruption scandals (similar for FIFA) means that it also fails the integrity test.

and back to drugs

But just as athletes loathe the 'drug cheat' they show the same motivation and will do anything ‘legal’ to achieve an advantage, as this advert for vitamins shows. And this website on such ergogenic aids.

But fans of Ben Goldacre’s blog Bad Science will not be surprised to discover the 'Lack of evidence' that popular sports products work.  Dr Carl Heneghan of the Oxford University Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine asked the manufacturer’s of Lucozade Sport for their evidence that the drink was an "an isotonic performance fuel to take you faster, stronger, for longer"  He said the mountain of data included 101 trials that the Oxford team were able to examine before concluding: "In this case, the quality of the evidence is poor, the size of the effect is often minuscule and it certainly doesn't apply to the population at large who are buying these products.”  So in seeking to gain a legal advantage we may have been cheated.  The best cons work on our greed and gullibility.

Oh, and a final irony.  The manufacturers of Lucozade are GlaxoSmithKline who will be running the drugs lab.

However I have two weeks blocked out for the Games and will attend 3 athletics sessions, one men’s hockey, one women’s basketball, a canoe slalom (I’ve already white-water rafted the course), some water polo plus hours of TV.  The paralympics brings swimming and cycling into the frame.  I’m not even sure the games are a ‘unifying force’ but they are ‘tarnished’.  But what Spectacle isn’t?

Let’s see if I can smuggle my opinions past security.