2: STATE

Conversation analysis of the calls afforded “a view of the citizens’ own

formulations of their problems and how these formulations are con-
stituted and negotiated by operators and citizens as a ‘gang’ problem”
(Meehan 2000: 341). It further showed

how police operators encode such problems, a process that is

sensitive to the interactional organization of the call, the politi-
cal context to which the operator/dispatcher and the police are
accountable, and the organization’s current solution: namely, the
availability of a ‘gang’ car to handle such problems.
(Meehan 2000: 341)

The gang cars had been introduced into Bigcity by the mayor during
an election year to deal with the perceived gang problem. Through
his analysis, Meehan is able to show, in interactional detail, “how
groups of ordinary young people were constituted as gangs at vari-
ous points in the course of citizen complaints and police responses to
incidents during a time when gangs [had] been publicly designated
as a problem” (2000: 340). Moreover, his analysis demonstrates “that
police recordkeeping is geared toward external accountability and
is only a gloss for ‘what happened’” (2000: 342). That is, entirely in
keeping with Stamp’s epigraph,

the officers’ organization and use of the category “gang” [was]

responsive not only to the immediate problems of achieving the
police relevance of a citizen’s complaint (i.e., within a call for ser-
vice) but also to the organization’s work relevancies (i.e., generating
“activity”) and the larger political framework to which the police
are held accountable (e.g., “solving” a problem in an election year
to make the incumbent mayor look good). In this fashion, “solu-
tions” to problems may in fact produce the records that are used
to constitute the statistical existence of a problem in the first place.
(Meehan 2000: 342)

Further references to studies aligned with that of Meehan are pro-

vided in the section of Chapter 6 surveying themes and studies of
ethnomethodology and crime.
The whole of the preceding account of the meaning and use of
official crime statistics and the two sociologies built on them may well

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