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

Neil Harris's term "operational aesthetics" covers much, if not all, of my interests in cinema. Harris develops the term in his book Humbug on P.T. Barnum. Noting that audiences flocked to Barnum's productions, even though they were known to be hoaxes and the ways Barnum's advertising invited audiences to "decide for themselves" - Harris elaborates a particularly American attitude, skeptical and information-seeking, that seeks to know how things look and how they work. It refers to the capacity of productions to appeal to the analystic,investigative, and problem-solving faculties. To elucidate his point, Harris even discusses Poe's invention of the detective story and its popularity. Yet operational aesthetics in cinema perhaps stretch beyond American borders. Early documentary forms, especially something like Basil Wright's Night Mail can be seen to be constructed around a desire to show --just as much as poeticize -- Britain's rail mail. Additionally, Eisenstein discusses something very much like the operational aesthetic (in a quote contained in Annette Michelson's essay "Dr. Crase and Mr. Clair") when he talks about the school film, and the ability of cinema to show pupils "how a power station, a newspaper, a book, a glass factory, a colored illustration is produced.."(paraphrase - from Conversations with Eisenstein trans. harry brose, 1970) . Urban cinema -- film which shows "how a city works" is one mode of operational aesthetics (and Eisenstein alludes to the urban nature of the school film earlier in this quote.)

Robert Zecker's book Metropolis covers urban representations in American mass culture. His chapter on the 1960s and 1970s covers various cop programs including The Streets of San Francisco, NYPD, Mannix, and some others.

What happened to Juanita Neilsen? A Sydney journalist who, in the 1970s opposed a real estate development and was then murdered. Two films document these events Heatwave (1982) and The Killing of Angel Street (1981) -- the latter especially is supposed to be worth watching. A genre film about real estate and society a la Over the Edge?