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The Case for the Prosecution: Police Suspects and the Construction of Criminality, Mike McConville, Andrew Sanders and Roger Leng, London: Routledge, 1991, 227 pp.

This book examines the role of the police as agents in the British criminal justice system. The central idea is that the police play an active role in deciding who gets charged, what they get charged with, and how their cases proceed. Rather than simply acting as enforcers of the law, they actively interpret the way in which the law is applied. Contrary to conservative legal rhetoric, the police are not impartial. The standard literature on policing makes them seem like mere rule-followers, whereas this text portrays them as creative agents. The authors lead us through various ways that the police construct criminality. They reject the common sense view that there are a group of criminals "out there", of whom few are caught. They also reject the simplistic idea that criminals are those who break the law, and suspects are those who come to the attention of the police. Rather, they say that the criminal population is a subset of the suspect population. In this sense, criminality is a category constructed from those whom the police suspect, a reflection of official, bureaucratic work. The police work with constructs of types of people who cause trouble, or matters that warrants their trouble, and thus criminals are those who have been successfully suspected. Evidence is not discovered, but produced: witnesses are selected, cases are built, and so on. Suspicion is the foundation of criminality. The official accounts of crimes that the police create are simplified versions of complex events. The authors use many excerpts from police interviews to show how official accounts structure but do not simply reflect "reality." The police simplify events to correspond to criminal categories, excluding alternate interpretation of events. The authors do not use the concept of reality as an objective standpoint to evaluate what police do. Instead, they point to how there are competing points of view: official versus unofficial, police versus lay, and so on. As they say so much better: "The police have, at a most fundamental level, the ability to select facts, to reject facts, to not seek facts, to evaluate facts, and to generate facts. Facts, in this sense, are not objective entities which exist independently of the social actors but are created by them" (p. 56). The police, of course, have considerable power to decide what will count as the official version of criminal events. Treated legalistically, whenever