In her book on the Erotic Thriller, Linda Ruth Williams interviews William Friedkin about the production of Cruising. Among other things, Friedkin claims that the main inspiration for the film was not the book with the same name by Gerald Walker, but a series of columns by Village Voice writer Arthur Bell, who apparently covered homicides taking place at the clubs Friedkin would later shoot in. Bell later joined others in vehemently denouncing the film.

To start, look at "Looking for Mr. Gaybar," Village Voice, 24 January 1977, p19, 20.

From July 25, 1977. With articles on the emergent "underclass." Referred to in the introduction to Virtues of the Vicious: Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane and the Spectacle of Slums.

A dreaded moment: Another scholar has succinctly captured what I want to say about 1970s urban cinema.

"In the end, Scorcese's films translate a city in crisis into a geography of desire, a fascinatingly undetermined social space with as yet illegible rules."

That's Sabine Haenni in her article "Geographies of Desire: Post-social urban space in the films of Martin Scorsese."

I'm hoping she doesn't tread too far into my territory and I'm sure that this will complement rather than eclipse my own research. Anyway, I'm glad she says it, it means I'm not wrong. And there's many more films with which this case can be made and complicated.

The Jack Bigel Archive at Baruch College holds a copy of a pamphlet titled "Welcome to Fear City" published by the "Council on Public Safety" in 1975. The CPS was an amalgam of Fire and Police Unions who, facing massive layoffs by the city, joined to publicize to tourists the dangers of New York. The contents and impact of this stunt is documented in Miriam Greenberg's Branding New York: How a City in Crisis Was Sold to the World.

Image from Slave-Unit, a series called "Welcome to Fear City." Inredible series of photos updating Atget's style for the urban paranoia set.

(http://www.slave-unit.co.uk/gallery/main.php?g2_itemId=166&g2_page=2)

It's difficult to track how many times an anecdote emerges about real-life law enforcement / crime fighting draws on fictional sources. Below (somewhere) is a story (from Mark Seltzer's book, I believe) about the emergence of FBI profiling and how it drew on classic detective fiction, such as Poe and Doyle. The mind-melding of the Purloined Letter is, of course, FBI profiling avant la lettre, and was later taken up by Michael Mann's Manhunter.

SO - the tag is "fictions of law enforcement," okay? Remember that.

Here's another one, recounted by Christopher Wilson in Cop Knowledge: Lincoln Steffens, author of The Shame of the Cities, a classic muckraking tale of urban corruption in a number of US cities in 1904, tells (in his memoir, and with Jakob Riis as an interloctuor no less!) of being regaled by a Chief Inspector of the true tales of his own heroism, but realizing that this detective was in fact drawing his material from popular detective fictions of the time (which Steffen's knew the detective read and enjoyed -- he surreptiously borrowed them from him from time to time). Writes Steffens "Thus I discovered that instead of detective's posing for and inspiring the writers of detective fiction, it was the authors who inspired the detectives."

(qtd in Wilson, Cop Knowledge, 26)

The best source on the the cultural understandings of cops in America is in the work of Christopher P. Wilson, particularly his book Cop Knowledge and an article on Serpico and Prince of the City called "Undercover: White Ethnicity and Police Expose in the 1970s."

The Brookings Institution has released a new report, based on 2000-2008 census data, indicates that the suburbs are now the most likely location of the poor, and low-income ethno-racial minorities -- what an AP press story concludes is "white flight" in reverse.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hvFjjAiva42zBzRC8o2-s7zHD6IwD9FJ37800

http://www.brookings.edu/metro/MetroAmericaChapters/report_overview.aspx