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Orthodoxy and Advocacy in Criminology

In his belated riposte to my critique of the `critical consensus' (P.A.J. Waddington, 1991), David Waddington (1998) seeks to defend the conceptual adequacy and methodological integrity of that position, and especially his own `flashpoints' model (D. Waddington et al., 1987, 1989). In this reply, I demonstrate that not only is his defence unconvincing, but my original critique can be further developed. Conceptually, the notion of `precipitating incidents' is inevitably applied ex post facto, but also compresses complex patterns of interaction into a single, arbitrary incident and, furthermore, relies upon an impoverished notion of the crowd. Methodologically, lack of equivocation and hesitancy are no substitute for careful and systematic recording of what occurs. The `critical consensus' remains not only value-ladened, but advocacy. Moreover, it illustrates a characteristic feature of social movements/moral entrepreneurs: the attempt to `frame' events so as to cast claimants as `victims'. Indeed, there seem to be good grounds for regarding the `critical consensus' as simply part of a wider social movement that received political impetus from the riots of the early 1980s.