Chapter Three

“Fear Stalks the Streets”

Home Security, Kidnapping, and the Making of the Carceral Suburb

In the late 1970s, suburbia’s reputation as a safe haven from crime began to erode. By October 1980, U.S. News & World Report journalist William L. Chaze signaled the visibility of this shift to a national audience. In his article “Fear Stalks the Streets,” he wrote that “serious crime—on the rise again—is casting a pall over the lives of millions of Americans, not only in the nation’s big cities but in the suburbs as well.”¹ In this new formulation, a crisis of criminal endangerment in the suburbs nearly matched its familiar urban counterpart. Yet, as this chapter demonstrates, those conditions resulted in vastly different outcomes for inner cities and suburbs as suburbanites leveraged their seeming victimization to regulate local space and privatize police power, while urban dwellers were subject to the overwhelming power of the state.

Chaze was not alone in recognizing this change from safe to criminally endangered suburban space. In the pages of newspapers and magazines in the early 1980s, journalists and even homeowners themselves described a “bucolic burglary wave.” These narratives made clear that the later waves of suburbanites had inherited not the peaceful suburban existence promised by their forebears but one pervaded by fear. Further, these experiences with and narratives of home invasion shattered notions of a secure suburban home by highlighting the sense of unease brought on not just by a rise in the number of break-ins but the personal sense of violation by strangers in private family space.² As Consumer Reports warned its readers in its August 1981 review of security systems, “You’re away from home only a half-hour—a quick trip to the grocery store, say—but when you return, you find the house ransacked. You notice right away that the TV and stereo are gone. You search for the jewelry, the silverware, the camera. Gone. And, gone, too, is the feeling of safety that your home provided.”³

Figure 3.1. On April 7, 1978, the Washington Post raised the alarm about suburban home invasions in Judith Valente’s article “A Bucolic Burglary Wave.” From The Washington Post. © 1978 The Washington Post. All rights reserved. Used under license.

Concurrently, the kidnapping of children by strangers emerged as a visible suburban threat via the well-publicized abduction and murder of Adam Walsh in 1981. News media breathlessly reported on Adam’s disappearance from a Hollywood, Florida, mall and the subsequent discovery of his remains in a creek one hundred miles away. The prominence of Adam’s story was enhanced by a highly rated television movie, Adam, first aired on NBC in 1983 and rebroadcast in 1984 and 1985 with dozens of pictures of missing children shown at the movie’s conclusion. Adam, beyond depicting a family torn apart by unexpected violence, led to a flood of news stories, television docudramas, educational videos, and novels about a kidnapping “epidemic,” which only bolstered the sense of danger on suburban streets. Together, these suburban crimes and their iterations in the media added to the sense of endemic suburban criminal danger emanating not from an “urban” outsider coded as nonwhite but from an insidious, local threat that moved effortlessly through suburban space and that made itself known only through the crime itself.

This is not to say that race did not matter in the era’s suburban crime culture. As seen in the senseless murder of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman in 2012, racial otherness did and still does represent threat to suburbanites. However, by the late 1970s, something changed in the active policing of racial boundaries carried out by white citizen’s councils and individual homeowners in the immediate postwar period. While maintaining their suspicion of people of color, suburbanites could also imagine, fear, and be victimized by white criminals moving seamlessly through largely white spaces. Indeed, news media and popular culture presented crimes like kidnapping and burglary as committed by raceless actors moving undetected through these spaces. In this way, the actual crimes and their cultural reproductions often did not fit neatly the racist notions of the era as to who was a criminal or who committed crimes. In fact, their ability to fit in and move freely is what made suburban kidnappers and burglars so threatening. They could be insiders committing local crime who could not easily be identified or regulated. Racial outsiders of that period, then, were not the focus of suburban crime culture. Instead, they were caught up in the broader security practices of the era to devastating effect. One on hand, suburban protocols that sought to protect against insidious and apparently ubiquitous threats to streets, homes, and schools still assiduously identified and policed people of color. On the other, suburban ideas and practices premised on a rising tide of crime further sustained the wars on crime and drugs that largely focused on urban populations and had calamitous outcomes for those communities.

Popular culture both reflected and produced this change in the perceptions of suburban crime and the solutions to it. In the early 1980s, two popular pillars of the urban vigilante film genre, Death Wish and Sudden Impact, moved the settings of their latest iterations to the suburbs. As protagonists Paul Kersey and “Dirty Harry” Callahan search for serenity in the safe confines of quiet bedroom communities, they find crime there as pervasive and violent as in New York City or San Francisco, and traditional law enforcement methods just as incapable of fighting it. In depicting retribution for corruption, drug trafficking, murder, and rape, these films enacted vigilante fantasies of both preemptive power to stop crimes before they happen and righteous revenge through morally justified, extralegal responses to unrelenting menace. Not long after, John Walsh, the father of kidnapped and murdered child Adam Walsh, presented another vision of suburban vigilantism on Fox’s America’s Most Wanted. Though more grounded in the realities of law enforcement, the show also imagined a suburban landscape filled with dangerous criminals but with the homeowner as an “armchair vigilante.” These illusions proved powerful in buttressing the notion that the individual suburbanite and not the state was the moral center of American life, capable of dispensing justice, and empowered to do so, on a newly embattled landscape.

To protect themselves, suburbanites made their perceived criminal victimization productive by creating new, private defensive measures to keep themselves safe when law enforcement could not or would not do so.4 In increasing numbers, homeowners embraced neighborhood watch programs originally created to combat urban crime, installed alarm systems to secure families inside the home, and eventually, many moved into gated communities with private security forces.⁵ In tandem with those initiatives, schools and parents implemented new security programs like Stranger Danger and bought educational board games such as Safely Home to prepare children for the dangers that strangers and family constantly presented in suburban spaces. Through these tactics adopted in response to the pervasive fear of crime, suburbanites reasserted and expanded their control of local spaces in ways that also buttressed the expansion of the carceral state by making material a continued fear of crime.

Suburban residents were empowered to control space through private means and advantageous relationships with the state that allowed and even facilitated suburban security practices. Homeowners safeguarded their houses, patrolled their streets, and regulated entry into their neighborhoods largely with the help of local law enforcement, while city police profiled, harassed, and brutalized city dwellers of color and generated historic rates of incarceration for those populations.⁶ Yet the state served not only as a facilitator of homeowner action but also as a foil whose failures necessitated the privatization of security practices. Indeed, many municipal police forces, often with low numbers of officers, were caught between austerity politics and the increasing demands of local residents whose fear of crime was heightened despite declining crime statistics.⁷ Meanwhile, urban residents had a fundamentally different relationship with massively funded and militarized city police departments.⁸ Ultimately, this shift in both beliefs and practices lead to an increasingly privatized world of suburban security that provided a sense of safety while also reminding this otherwise privileged group of their daily imperilment.⁹

From alarm systems and Stranger Danger, suburbanites moved toward gated communities with private security forces (more than twenty thousand of them by 1998) and acted as the new suburban vigilantes, like the easy-chair crusaders among America’s Most Wanted’s audience. Soon after, these cultural changes not only made way for the passage of the 1994 federal crime bill but also facilitated the creation of Stand Your Ground laws and expansions in the Castle Doctrine that made possible new vigilantes, such as George Zimmerman, empowered to kill while on neighborhood watch as a “color-blind” defender of property rights.¹⁰

Together, these co-constitutive changes in media, popular culture, and everyday practice transformed the central associations of the suburban landscape from the safe cul-de-sacs mythologized in 1950s and ’60s sitcoms to an environment presumed to be under sustained attack from violent criminals. In this way, the cultural shifts created the carceral suburb, where homeowners functioned as both warden and inmate in a jail of their own design. This condition resulted from calling forth protections against crime that provided a feeling of safety and enabled local spatial dominion while simultaneously reminding suburbanites of pervasive criminal hazards limiting both their physical freedom and undermining the suburban liberation that the flight from urban crisis was supposed to have secured them.¹¹ Safety from crime was assumed to be an implicit benefit of suburban living in the postwar world. The city in crisis, marked by burglary, rape, robbery, racial discord, and general unrest, was not a particularly palatable option for whites who could move and were being enticed to do so by banks, developers, government, and real estate agents. As one Chicago resident said in 1983, “My suburban friends can no longer ask me, ‘Aren’t you afraid to live in the city?’ Child-snatching, guns, robberies—these things give suburbanites an urban mentality.”¹² Indeed, those who left for suburban housing developments like Levittown did so to create a new, more manageable world through racial segregation and local control and avoid the risks of danger and disorder in the city.

Yet, by the mid-1970s, suburbanites found that crime was not only more visible but local. This failure to inherit safe streets and secure homes, along with the ongoing fear that accompanied it, was the suburban crime crisis that emerged toward the end of the twentieth century. This crisis and suburbanites’ responses to it allowed them to powerfully reshape their landscape and privatize police power. Their productive victimization was facilitated by the “tough on crime” culture in the era of mass incarceration, which encouraged seeing the world as endangered by crime that required an overwhelming response. In turn, the cultural reproduction of fear and suburban actions to address it gave evidence to lawmakers of the need for stricter laws, more police on the streets, and an expansion of the carceral state.

Our homes have become our castles under siege

In the late 1970s, suburbanites who had once left doors unlocked and windows open were feeling compelled by news reports and neighbors’ tales of victimization to turn to security systems to protect themselves against home invasions because, as the New York Times reported in 1982, “the sanctity of suburban neighborhoods has long since been violated by crime.”¹³ These stories in the early 1980s depicted “brazen thieves” committing “a wave of home burglaries that has engulfed suburban areas nationwide,” even though federal crime statistics from 1982 showed burglaries reaching a low since record keeping began in 1973.¹⁴ This perceived wave encouraged suburbanites to see their environment as endangered and act to reverse a clear loss of what was best about suburban living. Suzanne Sprawel, a resident of a Connecticut suburb, summed up the changing view of suburban life in this moment: “You used to think that because you lived in a suburb you would be O.K.… Now you have to be alert no matter where you live.”¹⁵ News stories like these portrayed a real, persistent threat from home invasion that justified action by homeowners and, by the mid-1980s, seemed to require it.

According to homeowners and security experts, this new hazard could best be dealt with through private means like installing a home security system, because expecting prophylactic police protection was not reasonable.¹⁶ As U.S. News & World Report observed, “People from coast to coast are acting on their own to obtain better security, no longer content to rely on law-enforcement officials alone for protection”; or, as alarm system owner Ginny Tyzzer said, “It’s a great comfort knowing you won’t be surprised coming home.”¹⁷ Similarly, a resident of a Greenwich, Connecticut, suburb confessed in 1980, “You can’t live here anymore without a burglar alarm system.… It’s a way of life. Just about everyone I know has been robbed.”¹⁸ In a 1981 Chicago Tribune article, “Here’s How—Short of a Moat—to Protect Your Castle,” author Patricia Yoxall echoed these concerns. She emphasized the primacy of a burglar alarm in protecting one’s home: “Alarms are about your only defense unless you have someone sitting in the house all day.”¹⁹ Even sunny home improvement guru Bob Vila recommended homeowners look beyond strong locks and doors to home security systems to protect themselves against the alleged one-in-fourteen chance of a home invasion.²⁰

These stories and many others like them demonstrated two powerful beliefs that suburbanites held about where they lived in the 1980s. First, actual incidents and the news media narratives of rising crime undermined suburbanites’ views of their neighborhoods as the safe, quiet alternative to urban living where “you didn’t need to worry about dark streets or menacing strangers.”²¹ Second, they explicitly advised suburban readers that they needed a security system as a crucial defensive measure to restore a sense of safety and control—guidance that both reflected and produced the sense that law enforcement could not be counted on. As retired detective James Motherway admitted in 1983, “Police don’t have the manpower to respond quickly—if they can respond at all.”²² An Associated Press article put it more bluntly in 1980, “You may have no one but yourself to blame if your house is robbed.”²³ In 1982, James K. Stewart, the Reagan-appointed director of the National Institute of Justice, summed up this moment of transition when, rather than rely on ineffective state action, individuals must protect themselves, as businesses already had, by exercising their power in the marketplace: “Individual citizens, too, have turned to substitutes for the kind of watchman services that public agencies can no longer offer. They have voted with their dollars to supplement publicly provided protection systems and to achieve a greater sense of safety. The unmet security needs perceived by many are increasingly being filled by private enterprise.”²⁴

This trend was in direct contrast to urban crime policies, particularly the surveillance and policing of public housing. The use of security technologies, ranging from controlled access to closed-circuit television surveillance, was implemented and controlled by the government, not by building residents. Even when residents instituted their own programs, they had to be approved by federal authorities before implementation. Instead of fostering a semblance of safety and control, such measures and devices reinforced the idea of public housing as chaotic, its residents as criminal and in need of constant policing by a supposedly effective security force.²⁵ Conversely, the emerging sense of the suburb as criminally endangered because of police failures there helped justify the privatization of suburban security that expanded suburbanite’s local sovereignty. Through their perceived victimization, suburbanites continued to fuel the broader notion of rampant crime supporting punitive urban policing policies and reductions in urban aid for social programs.²⁶

First-person narratives of suburban homeowners violated by home invasions recounted the personal horror of having the sanctity of one’s households disturbed and articulated an ongoing belief that since police could not protect them, homeowners had to take personal action. As part of a series in the New York Times entitled “Once upon a Time in the Safety of the Suburbs,” homeowner Linda Saslow wrote, “We followed the promise of security, and one by one our plans were thwarted; our dreams were shattered. And we have sadly been forced to compromise on our ideals, as slowly we began to contradict our original plans.”²⁷ The suburbs that she remembered from her youth had turned into dangerous landscapes where “burglar alarms and panic buttons have been installed in more homes than ever before.” The suburb was now a place where she and her husband “fear the consequences of allowing our children to play unsupervised in the neighborhood”—a marked contrast from the family-friendly suburban vision sold to the first generation of postwar suburbanites and their children.²⁸

Just as burglaries were on the rise and people like Linda Saslow were looking for ways to protect their homes, the burglar alarm industry made systems a viable and affordable defensive option for middle-class suburbanites. In the 1970s, smaller and cheaper electronic parts allowed the industry to expand its services from a traditional focus on protecting banks and other large commercial enterprises to the home market, just as homeowners were feeling unsafe.²⁹ With little maintenance or expertise on the homeowner’s part, the systems provided instant notification of a breach to the owner, a private security force, local police, or all three. Although these systems still relied on police to apprehend a burglar, by equipping homeowners with an alarm they could arm, security companies provided suburbanites with a greater sense of control over the borders of their homes. This was a privilege for those who could afford an alarm system and could still rely on local police as an on-call security force that would eventually show up to help them, rather than a presence to be feared in their neighborhood.

In the debate over the 1983 federal crime bill, some members of Congress echoed this concern about security as a luxury only for the privileged. They feared that without more funding for law enforcement, only the most affluent Americans would be protected because only they could afford to protect themselves. Indeed, a representative of the National Burglar and Fire Alarm Association had already noted in 1977 that the fastest-growing segment of his business was residential home alarm systems, which, at a cost between $350 and $1,500 were relatively expensive.³⁰

Alarm systems’ visibility in public discussion indicates that homeowners installed alarms at a significantly higher rate starting in the late 1970s.³¹ An industry survey of 75 million homes with an alarm system showed a rise from just 1.9 percent in 1978 to 8.6 percent in 1983, when the aggregate US residential security business was worth $1.13 billion.³² “I’ve been in business for 20 years and I’ve never been so busy,” one alarm company owner commented in 1980.³³ Some municipalities saw alarm systems as essential to creating a modern suburb. New cable TV operators that wished to provide service to residents in the planned community of The Woodlands, Texas, for example, were required to provide home security monitoring.³⁴ Suburban police found themselves responding to a growing number of false alarms as a result of the dramatic increase in the number of homes with security systems. Rather than an intruder opening a door or climbing through a window, pets, kids, or forgetful spouses were the ones triggering the alarm nearly every time, suggesting crime statistics that showed a decrease in home invasions accurately portrayed the true threat of home invasion.³⁵ False alarms became so numerous—as many as eighty times a month in Weston, Connecticut, in 1983—that many jurisdictions moved to a fee system whereby homeowners paid local police when they responded to a false alarm.³⁶ Yet, by 1983, alarm systems had become as much a suburban fixture “as the lawn mower,” as the New York Times quipped.³⁷ Just as mowers appeared necessary to maintaining the picturesque lawns thought essential to the American suburb, alarms were becoming necessary to maintain safe homes.

As home security systems seemingly became a suburban necessity, alarm companies played to ongoing fears of home invasions in selling their systems. From the late 1980s to the late 1990s, the security company ADT reproduced the sense of continuing danger of a burglary and the solution of an alarm system through its television advertising. Some of these ads echoed the feelings expressed by Linda Saslow in her essay on experiencing a home invasion. In one example, the viewer sees a first-person camera shot of a homeowner walking through their ransacked home as a narrator says: “No matter where you’ve been, there is nothing like the feeling of coming home. Unless you have been the victim of a burglary. It’s traumatizing to lose sentimental objects, as well as your valuables. You feel violated, vulnerable. You’ve lost your piece of mind.”³⁸ The commercial connects the fear of losing possessions with the broader loss of a feeling of safety, an assurance that can be restored only by buying an ADT home security system. Another commercial goes further by portraying a burglar entering the home when the owner is home alone, once again promoting the feeling of ongoing endangerment in the suburban home. The ad shows a black screen and various typewritten quotes such as “Did you hear that?” “Was that from outside?” “There it is again,” as the viewer hears a window breaking, a door creak, and a long bang mixed with a menacing synthesizer-produced tone.³⁹

In addition to showing the perspective of the homeowner dealing with home invasion, a different ad features actors playing burglars. Shot on grainy black-and-white film, the criminals explain all the ways they can break into a house without a security system. One of them advises, “If I had a family, I would want to protect them from guys like me.”⁴⁰ In this advertisement, ADT argues that the fear of burglary is not a myth but a real and persistent threat because of men like the ones portrayed, criminals who will probe for every weakness in your home’s defense. That ad built to another in 1993, showing a police officer returning home from work to a home protected by ADT. The threat was so severe that the narrator reminds the viewer that law enforcement personnel use it to protect their own “prized possessions,” their wives and children.⁴¹

Even as crime rates plummeted in the 1990s, a 1999 ad reminded homeowners that they needed an ADT system. This commercial showed families holding signs touting the success of their ADT systems; for example, “Burglary free 9½ years.” Those testimonials were posed as tenuous successes, however. As the danger from a burglar is continuous, the ad told viewers, they now need “security for life.”⁴² Although the ads mentioned that systems can help in the case of a fire or other emergencies, the campaign focused on stoking fear of a home invasion in order to sell ADT security systems. Using stark imagery and dramatic music, the ads were another reminder to homeowners that they were constantly being targeted by burglars. In that world of constant danger, an ADT system would give homeowners the feeling of security and control they longed for in the neighborhood of fear.

In addition to installing security systems, suburbanites also initiated neighborhood watch programs, appropriating an urban scheme and adapting it to their own needs.⁴³ These programs varied in levels of organization and community involvement, but their very premise revealed the culture of the carceral suburb. According to the basic design of the neighborhood watch program, citizens would serve as adjuncts to the local police department by working closely with officers to observe neighborhoods, report crimes, and spot fugitives whose mugshots were shown on local “crime-stopper” television shows.⁴⁴ In this way, the programs articulated the new facilitator-foil relationship with police in which law enforcement couldn’t possibly do the job alone but was still required for the watch to be effective. Beyond demonstrating the suburbs’ changing affiliations with the state, these programs also revealed the dialectic of the carceral suburb. The essential tasks of the neighborhood watch, the patrolling of streets and marking of territory, functioned as affective practices that aroused and affirmed feelings of fear and safety. That suburban neighborhoods needed to be watched at all, let alone bear the material reminders of signs, stickers, and patrols, continually produced fear in residents. At the same time, the knowledge that residents were on guard and that police were on call inspired a sense of safety that bound together potential victimization with the power to regulate space.

Figure 3.2. The Chicago Tribune’s visualization of the carceral suburban home on March 7, 1986. Article by Terry Osborne; image courtesy of Rick Tuma

In practice, the street patrol functioned as a mostly passive system of surveillance that sought to identify “outsiders” or other potential threats, from the strange man luring children into the mythical white van to the African American teen simply visiting a friend. A Washington Post article described the watch shift that a McLean, Virginia, couple performed in 1981: “They cruise along silent streets, glimpsing suburban life through open curtains. A cocktail party at one house, the kids glued to the television at another. A woman sitting behind a baby grand piano in the picture window across the way. And then there are the empty houses, the ones cloaked in inky blackness. The car slows to a creep. They peer into the shadows. They strain to see around the shrubbery. No one in sight. They move on.”45 The volunteers, it seems, stared into windows and snooped around yards as much for a sense of “active” crime prevention and a voyeuristic thrill as for actually catching a criminal or stopping any lawbreaking, particularly in the era before legislatures emboldened citizens to confront “threats” through Stand Your Ground laws. Richard M. Titus, writing in 1984 for a Department of Justice study on the community response to residential burglaries in the United States, noted that these programs in suburbs “give citizens some training and a lot of crime watch paraphernalia—stickers, signs, buttons, jackets—everything they need to watch crime except the popcorn and soda pop. They give people a feeling of false satisfaction that they are actually doing something constructive to reduce a problem that seems beyond everyone’s control.”⁴⁶ Instead of fighting crime, neighborhood patrolling was largely an affective practice that afforded participants the chance to revel in possibly seeing something beyond mundane suburban activities but, simultaneously, reminded residents they had the power to surveil and police and could avoid being regulated themselves.

The most common feature of neighborhood watch programs was the posting of signs and stickers to mark an area under “active” watch.⁴⁷ These markers encapsulated the culture of the carceral suburb, a territory under surveillance where signs reminded residents of the possibility of crime in their neighborhood but suggested that someone was watching who would help. Yet the posting of signs likely undermined actual efforts to stop lawbreaking, showing the limits of passive surveillance. As Titus observed in his study of neighborhood watch programs, “For a criminal, seeing the THIS IS A CRIME WATCH NEIGHBORHOOD sign is like giving him carte blanche to take whatever he wants without fear of being stopped. He knows he can go wherever he wants to, that no one will stop him, and that no one will dare to come out into the streets from behind their peepholes.”⁴⁸ In its most effective incarnation, then, neighborhood watch was a program that mirrored the dominant mode of home security in that it worked as “a large alarm system” premised on the failure of law enforcement but needing the state to actually catch criminals.⁴⁹ These signs symbolized the values of the carceral suburb. Residents marked territory, regulated it, and, to some degree, acted in their own defense. Yet, in doing so, they likely did not prevent crime but produced a sense of their ongoing imperilment.

Narratives of suburban home invasion like these also surfaced in popular culture, most notably in a 1982 episode of the highly rated TV sitcom Family Ties, “Have Gun Will Unravel.” Upon returning home from a movie, the Keatons find that burglars have ransacked their home and stolen valuables and mementos. As the episode progresses, we see members of the family move with trepidation through the home at night. When father Steven Keaton is startled by a broom falling to the floor, he tells the family, “We can’t let fear take over our lives.” Rather than install a security system, they decide to join their local neighborhood watch program, and after a local cop tells them that crime is rising and nothing really stops a persistent burglar, they buy a gun for protection. The first night with the gun, Alex (Michael J. Fox) noisily arrives home late at night, prompting his father to head downstairs to investigate. Startled by Alex’s presence, Steven is thankful he left the gun upstairs; otherwise he might have shot his own son. They return the gun and choose to live with the fear of home invasion. This episode encapsulated suburban crime culture of the 1980s, in which privileged suburban families suddenly felt endangered by crime and called up to act in their own defense, only to find themselves trapped in their own homes and still in danger.

The need for neighborhood watch and the widespread installation of alarm systems symbolized the loss of what the suburb had once meant—the privilege of not thinking about safety. As Clark Mulford, who worked in the home alarm business, reasoned, “People hate to buy these systems.… It’s admitting defeat. It’s admitting that this is the way things are.” And a Washington Post headline opined, “It’s Time to Stop Letting the Criminals Imprison Us.”⁵⁰ Homeowner Linda Saslow ended her “Speaking Personally” narrative of suburban crime with the hope that suburbs might yet return to the condition she had known in her youth: “Disillusioned and frustrated, we continue to hope for the day when once again we can enjoy suburban living for all the qualities that allured us, once upon a time.”⁵¹ She longed for a suburban world where she wouldn’t have “to think, before turning a door knob or cranking a window, whether the alarm is on or off.”⁵² Although crimes like burglary and kidnapping surely happened in those earlier suburbs, an average homeowner was unlikely to know about or experience them firsthand. By the 1980s, however, crime was visible and sometimes real and, therefore, legitimately threatening. And, rather than denying the threat, suburban families took security measures that produced and even enhanced the sense of danger, creating the carceral suburb where families more heavily regulated their own homes and neighborhoods to feel safe.

Homeowner Susan Ladov lamented this daily reminder of her unwilling incarceration. In her essay for “Speaking Personally,” she captured the essence of the carceral suburb—the continuing sense of fear and powerlessness that led to empowerment through private solutions to suburban crime, solutions that provided some security at the price of losing physical freedom and a sense of emancipation.⁵³ Following the burglary of her home in 1981, she wrote, “Each time I return home, … there is a moment when I imagine somebody retreating at the sound of the garage door opening. Walking into my bedroom, I remember my icy fear when two embroidered handkerchiefs lying on the floor told me that someone had been through my dresser drawers. I feel violated by strange hands that felt their way through piles of nightgowns and underwear.” Ladov took that violation, and its implications of breached privacy and sexual assault, as visceral evidence that the suburbs were not as safe or secure as she remembered or hoped they still were. The ongoing trepidation about entering her own home lest a sexual predator lay in wait led Ladov and her husband to reluctantly install an alarm system. Their story reflected the tradeoff involved in having a security system in the new era of suburban life. Though ostensibly “safer,” she felt “angry and saddened … when I recall the vanishing pleasure of wide-open windows” in the days before having to adopt her new, “secure” lifestyle.

As warden and inmate, many suburbanites enjoyed the privilege of security and experienced the restrictions of incarceration. However, that compromise, and the security crisis it represented, justified continued reinforcement of suburban security with walls, gates, and police forces, with private power being the ultimate manifestation of productive criminal victimization.⁵⁴ Still, it was not just home invasions that shifted the association of the suburb from safe haven to criminally endangered space. Kidnappings also contributed to the sense of fear and lack of belief in law enforcement that led to new expressions of suburban vulnerability, power, and privilege into the twenty-first century.

I thought crime happened somewhere in the inner city

On July 27, 1981, six-year-old Adam Walsh accompanied his mother, Revè, to the Hollywood Mall in Hollywood, Florida. While shopping for lamps at Sears, Revè left her son in the store with other boys playing video games. Moments later, she returned and could not find him. Adam’s parents searched frantically for their son. Having not found him at the mall, they posted flyers, called other parents, and even appeared on local and national television to urge others to be on the lookout. Two weeks later, following the largest search for a child to that point in Florida history, police found Adam’s remains in a canal in Vero Beach, Florida, a little over 130 miles from where he was abducted.⁵⁵

Following Adam’s death, John and Revè doggedly lobbied Congress to enact new kidnapping laws to empower the FBI and local authorities to move more quickly in the case of a missing child. Although the Walshes succeeded in this effort, Adam’s story and its various elaborations in news media and popular culture profoundly changed how suburbanites understood and regulated their local spaces in the 1980s. His case, and the so-called kidnapping epidemic it represented, worked with narratives of home invasion to associate suburban space with criminal danger while spurring new educational and regulatory regimes to control that space with and beyond state assistance.

Before Adam, there had been few national news stories about a kidnapping committed in a public space by a stranger. One exception was the story of Etan Patz, a New York City child kidnapped on his way to school in 1978. His case garnered attention in the New York area when his parents created a private organization to find missing children, the Etan Patz Action Committee. The story, however, did not significantly disrupt Americans’ ideas about the location and character of crime, as Etan Patz was abducted from a Brooklyn street during some of the city’s darkest days in terms of crime. In addition, since he was never found, Etan’s story did not have the narrative closure that might have helped his case transcend the New York City media market and fuel a greater fear about abductions.⁵⁶

Three months before Adam Walsh’s abduction and murder, dozens of abductions and murders of black children and teenagers, known collectively as the Atlanta child murders, came to light, but they also functioned differently in 1980s crime discourse. The series of twenty-nine murders beginning in 1979 initially prompted an overwhelming response from local, state, and federal law enforcement, including the intervention of Vice President George H. W. Bush. Once suspect Wayne Williams was arrested and convicted in 1982 of murdering two men not on the list of abducted children, law enforcement stopped pursuing leads despite the fact that Williams was not prosecuted for any of the child murders. Nor did police forces begin to approach urban kidnapping as an epidemic, in part because the parents, relatives, and friends of the murdered children fared much differently than the Walshes and their allies did later. Mothers who rallied for justice came under scrutiny for allowing their children to be abducted, a reaction that built on the broad pathologizing of “dysfunctional” urban black families in postwar America.⁵⁷ In response to these crimes, black Atlantans, like suburbanites, also took to the streets to protect their families. With squads of men and teenagers roaming the streets with baseball bats, these communities sought to step in where the police had failed.⁵⁸ Unlike suburban neighborhood watch programs, these patrols were viewed skeptically by police. Not surprisingly, either, the affected communities did not welcome increased police presence in their neighborhoods, for what came was not protection but suspicion and often arrests. As in Adam’s story, the Atlanta child murders did generate news coverage and a television movie. However, those media portrayals did not valorize the efforts of parents or lead to a broader cultural shift in notions of urban kidnapping, as Adam did for suburban communities.⁵⁹ Rather, these images and narratives reinforced the “ghettoization” of the inner city and policymakers’ racist view that its residents had failed to successfully self-regulate, necessitating the intensified policing of urban spaces.

Adam’s story, in contrast, struck a nerve and exposed parents’ nascent fears of suburban crime, concerns already heightened by narratives of burglary and home invasion. Further, accounts that appeared about Adam Walsh built on the notion of the essential innocence of white suburban children embedded in American culture, an idea that amplified fear of stranger kidnappings.⁶⁰ According to reports, the boy had led a “very sheltered life” and had been “a well-behaved youth who never talked to strangers.”⁶¹ His tragic fate set the stakes for protecting children and established a frame for understanding stranger kidnappings as white and suburban in the 1980s. In calling for action on missing and abducted children in 1981, for example, the New York Times juxtaposed Adam’s story to the announcement that over fifty thousand children were abducted each year and were, the story implied, likely to meet an end like Adam’s.⁶² Similarly, Newsweek, in a cover story titled “Stolen Children,” held up Adam’s story to claim that thousands of children were abducted every year in “a crime of predatory cruelty usually committed by pedophiles, pornographers, black-market baby peddlers or childless psychotics bidding desperately for parenthood.”⁶³ Using the frame of Adam’s abduction, news media raised the profile of child abductions by strangers to the level of an “epidemic.”⁶⁴

As it turned out, these accounts greatly exaggerated the number of stranger kidnappings per year. The oft-quoted numbers of fifty thousand to two million stranger abductions a year in the 1980s was closer to seventy-five per year according to federal statistics.⁶⁵ Though many children went missing, most were runaways who returned home within forty-eight hours. In nearly all the other cases, a parent or family member abducted the child as part of a custody dispute. Yet Adam’s atypical story of being taken in a public place by a stranger became the symbol of the supposedly widespread threat of stranger abductions, a threat that forged the link between a kidnapping “epidemic” and suburban streets. Despite some backlash against the hysteria over child abductions, the overwhelming trend inaugurated by the Walsh story was a new mindfulness about children’s vulnerability to this high-stakes threat and the state’s failure to protect its children or even find those already missing. This awareness spurred many families to protect themselves.

The 1983 television movie Adam, aired nationally on NBC, connected the problem of stranger abductions to the need for preventive private action before police or the FBI would be called in to locate an already-missing child. Through the television dramatization of this story, “the nation was galvanized to stop child snatching and find other missing ‘Adams.’ ”⁶⁶ Broadcast two years after the kidnapping, the film refreshed the public’s memory of Adam’s gruesome murder, and transformed that memory as well, as audiences did not just see grieving parents on television asking for help but a fair-haired child heading off to certain doom at the most quotidian of suburban locations, the mall. Adam effectively consolidated the story of the boy’s abduction and murder, covering in less than two hours the sad saga: the kidnapping, the murder, the failures of law enforcement, and the aftermath, when his parents lobbied for stronger kidnapping laws and better law enforcement response to child abductions. Bringing the problem of missing children directly into American living rooms, Adam established that child abduction was a real, high-stakes threat, with stranger abductions supposedly in the tens of thousands each year, and it could happen in the safest of locales, even ones like the Walshes’ sunny suburban town, if proper precautions were not taken.⁶⁷

Adam accomplished all this by showing the Walshes as an average suburban family and their story as one that could happen to any household. The film opens with an exterior shot of the Walsh home on a sunny, tree-lined Florida street. Inside, the family is eating breakfast before John Walsh (played by Daniel J. Travanti) heads to work and Revè Walsh (JoBeth Williams) takes their son, Adam, with her to the mall. The shots of blue skies and a cheery family breakfast are quickly and ominously contrasted with the scene as Revè and Adam enter the mall. She leaves him with some other boys to play video games while she goes to the lamp store. When she returns after only a few minutes, Adam and the other boys are gone. The soundtrack kicks in with distorted, disorienting synthesizer tones, not unlike the score to the urban dystopian movie Taxi Driver, to emphasize her surprise and confusion at her son’s disappearance. As reality sets in, Revè searches feverishly for Adam. He is paged by mall security while Revè and her mother-in-law comb the shopping center to no avail. Shortly thereafter, John arrives at the mall and joins the search. From this point forward, the filmmakers assumed the audience had some familiarity with Adam’s demise. Rather than focusing on the mystery of Adam’s whereabouts, the film centers on the Walshes’ travails with law enforcement and the media in order to highlight suburban police departments’ general ignorance about kidnappings, and to jolt the audience into action using the emotional fallout from the discovery of Adam’s remains.

One of the film’s central themes is the inability of the police to help the Walshes. Although Adam portrays law enforcement officers as well intentioned, it also shows them to be ill-equipped to deal with child abduction. The police officers in the film remain calm—too calm, it seems, given the enormity of the situation. They form search parties, call in help from other jurisdictions, and put out word to local television stations. Yet no one manages to read the notices sent between local police departments advising them to be on the lookout for stolen cars, let alone missing children. In a pivotal scene, John Walsh happens upon a long computer printout in a corner of the Hollywood Police Department. He and the audience realize that the word about Adam’s abduction is not getting out effectively. That failure is compounded by the revelation that the FBI’s hands are tied unless Adam has been transported across state lines or a ransom request has been made. John exclaims that the FBI has a database of missing cars but not missing kids.

With the terrible outcome of the kidnapping already known, the failures of the local police and the FBI in the film served as a visceral and damning reminder to viewers of the grave failures of law enforcement in dealing with child abduction, a threat that the educational segments run before and after the film posited as widespread.

These educational bookends to the program framed Adam’s tragic story in terms of parental responsibility. They argued strongly that individual families had to protect against this epidemic with education and action. The film began with a public service message about kidnapping presented by Facts of Life star Nancy McKeon and her brother Phil, who appeared on the television show Alice. They recited startling facts about kidnappings in the United States and reminded the audience to stay tuned at the end of the movie for tips to help prevent their own son or daughter from becoming a statistic. When they returned, they gave viewers a set of “life-saving” instructions. The list included maintaining up-to-date photos and dental records, knowing the outfit your child wears every day, and following safe practices when parents were not around. With kidnappings on the rise, the McKeons reiterated, these bits of information, no matter how small, could save a child’s life. These segments reflected a contemporary educational impulse that put the onus on parents and children to stop abductions—even going so far as to have the hosts suggest that if parents did not institute these new measures, their children would be in grave danger from kidnapping, molestation, and murder.

In the same vein, Home Box Office (HBO) produced and aired How to Raise a Street Smart Child in 1987.⁶⁸ That program, also available for purchase on VHS, went even further by portraying suburban kids actively being stalked and harassed by strangers in three different scenarios. The program opened with a blonde-haired child of five or six named Josh answering a phone. As the stranger talks to Josh, the camera pulls back from a close-up of the phone all the way across the street where, presumably, the stranger, asking about the boy’s parents and offering ice cream, is surreptitiously watching him like a predator stalking his prey. This entire conversation is scored with a discordant, piano-and-synthesizer horror movie soundtrack that foreshadows the inevitable crime to come. Two vignettes follow in which a stranger approaches a boy fixing his bike on a suburban sidewalk, and another walks up to a young girl sitting on a diving board alone in her backyard. Host Daniel J. Travanti, who played John Walsh in Adam, then appears to explain that faces on milk cartons are not enough, because “the statistics are staggering.” The threat of child abduction and molestation is too real and too pervasive for such passive action. “The time has come,” he says, articulating the logic of productive victimization, “to replace fear with power.” With murder and kidnapping as real threats, so the logic went, suburbanites must be proactive in protecting children and policing streets; otherwise they will be left searching for a missing son or daughter or burying a dead child.

This attitude is demonstrated by John Walsh in his memoir, Tears of Rage. “The cops meant well,” Walsh argues, but were not up to the task.⁶⁹ He reiterated the failure of law enforcement in his testimony before Congress in 1984: “What have I learned in 2½ years? That every parent’s nightmare is a reality in America. That most laws are medieval, or nonexistent, as they relate to child safety and protection.… This is 1984 not 1954. No matter how protective your environment is, or you think it is, tomorrow’s victim could be your child or grandchild.”⁷⁰ In essence, he argued times have changed, as homeowners violated by burglary also acknowledged. For this generation of homeowners, the expectations of postwar suburbia as safe and peaceful were illusions with tragic consequences. In confronting these dangers, they recognized no one will help you but yourself, a recognition leading to new practices to secure families, homes, and neighborhoods.

In a moment of profound anxiety about a supposed kidnapping epidemic in which the state had failed to protect children, nonprofit organizations worked with toy manufacturers and publishers to create new educational games and books designed to help children survive dangerous suburban streets. Like the educational segments of Adam, board games, flashcards, handbooks, and lovable cartoon characters taught children how to avoid criminal hazards, all the while reminding them that local schools, homes, and streets were unsafe.

Emblazoned with an image based on Adam Walsh’s iconic Little League uniform photo, The Child Awareness Game, developed by the Adam Walsh Child Resource Center in 1986, was created “to educate adults and children about how to avoid dangers that exist for children in our society.”⁷¹ In the game, players move along the board through a number of dangerous scenarios in everyday suburban locations, getting rewards for safely evading a threatening situation. In the game’s scenarios, the home itself is often the site of danger. One card reads, “You are staying overnight at a friend’s house. The father comes into the bedroom to tuck you in, and he has no clothes on. Should you: Tell your parents nothing about what happened? [wrong] Tell your parents about what happened when you arrive home?”⁷² Another card instructs a child home alone to lock all doors and never answer the phone.⁷³ According to this game and the educational game genre it represented, not even a sleepover at a friend’s house or being in your own home was considered safe.

The games and books of this kind all involved similar scenarios and game play that mapped crime onto familiar spaces. By having players move across a game board of common suburban locations, they communicated to their audience that these places were potentially dangerous and young people needed special knowledge to have a chance to survive. Games like Pressman Toys’ Safely Home (1985) helped children learn how to deal with an abduction or an encounter with a stranger. Players wended their way through a game board full of familiar, presumably secure locations, such as single-family, detached homes, schoolyards, sidewalks, and playgrounds. In Strangers Dangers, players “negotiate a route from school to home that is filled with potential hazards: sinister-looking strangers offering candy or a ride, vacant houses, railroad tracks. The winner is the first player to arrive home safely, no easy task.”⁷⁴ Similarly, No Thanks, Stranger flashcards presented everyday scenarios rife with danger.⁷⁵ The cards depict strangers, who otherwise appear harmless, constantly trolling suburban streets for kids not prepared to defend themselves. These flashcards, along with safety handbooks like Safe Kids, attempted to cover every possible threat and included worksheets for keeping key information on hand, such as fingerprints.⁷⁶ These materials allowed children to “experience actual situations in an entertaining fictional setting.”⁷⁷ However, they were part of a new regime that reinforced the constant sense of danger to children while inculcating the belief that children were responsible for their own safety on suburban streets.

Figure 3.3. The Child Awareness Game, endorsed in 1986 by the Adam Walsh Resource Center, helped kids navigate the newly dangerous spaces of the suburb. Author’s collection

By the late 1980s, the Adam Walsh case had already cast a long shadow on suburban life. Having brought to light a supposed epidemic of strangers abducting children in broad daylight and inaugurating a series of educational endeavors and defensive practices, Adam’s story also created a new authority on crime and victimization: his father, John Walsh. Walsh parlayed his public role as aggrieved parent and spokesman for victims’ rights into a job hosting a new reality show dedicated to catching fugitives, America’s Most Wanted. On the program, he delivered a weekly reminder of the real dangers to middle-class families and what they could do to stop them as they sought to relax in front of the television.

Figure 3.4. The Child Awareness Game’s board literally maps danger onto such familiar spaces as school, the baseball field, and the shopping center. Author’s collection

A Nightmare of Reality

In 1988, Fox Television, languishing in fourth place among the big-four television networks, debuted a show dedicated to catching fugitives and preventing crime. Unlike many locally produced shows and news broadcast segments featuring “crimestoppers,” America’s Most Wanted was a slickly produced, nationally broadcast program determined to motivate viewers to help find the most dangerous criminals on the loose in their towns. This show—along with two others that premiered in 1987, Fox’s Cops and NBC’s Unsolved Mysteries—ushered in a new era of reality television programming that blurred the lines between news and entertainment and drew high ratings by making viewers a key part of the surveillance state.78 America’s Most Wanted was successful at doing both. The show was a hit, and viewer tips did lead to the capture of criminals.⁷⁹ Unlike Cops, which was largely a voyeuristic journey into working-class and impoverished neighborhoods, America’s Most Wanted not only flogged its audience for information but also reminded them to be vigilant in the face of pervasive criminal dangers right outside their doors in middle-class neighborhoods.⁸⁰

Figure 3.5. The flash card game No Thanks, Stranger presented children with various threatening scenarios to help them escape unharmed when confronted with a stranger, whom the game posed as a likely predator. Author’s collection

The casting of John Walsh as host gave the show credibility in urging its audience to be wary, inoculated the show against many critical reviews of its exploitive tendencies, and provided an important connection between the crimes depicted on the show and crime as part of suburban life.81 In casting the program, Thomas Herwitz, a vice president at Fox Television, rejected the idea of hiring a professional to host the show, insisting the network hire a real person. It eventually settled on Walsh because he “bridges the gap, since his own life has been affected by crime.”⁸² As both the father of a murdered child and a well-respected advocate for missing and exploited children, producers chose Walsh because he could speak with authenticity and power on issues of victimization and crime.⁸³ An early review of the show in the Portland Oregonian identified the compelling mix that Walsh brought to the show. He was “the unabashed outraged citizen whose passion and zealotry bristle through.… He is the crusading aggrieved parent.”⁸⁴ Thanks to his advocacy work, the show could present Walsh not as exploiting his victim status to become host of the show but as a genuinely concerned, tough crime fighter who “looks like J. Edgar Hoover’s dream of a G-man.”⁸⁵ Walsh was also a figure that the average viewer could relate to—a suburban dad whose life had been destroyed by senseless violence—and a larger-than-life crusader for justice whom audiences could admire, respect, and welcome into their homes weekly despite the fact that what he brought was news about violent criminals on the loose in America.⁸⁶

During promotion of the show, especially during its inaugural season, critics and reviewers used Adam Walsh’s murder to frame the mission of America’s Most Wanted and thus forge the link between suburban crime and the job of viewers to protect themselves. Bob Niedt, in a review of the show for the Syracuse Post-Standard, characteristically referenced John Walsh’s past: “John Walsh is alive and driven and hopeful there will never again be a son who is taken away from his father and family and friends in such a swift, brutal way.”⁸⁷ In interviews, Walsh often invoked his family’s story. In talking with Niedt, Walsh prefaced his thoughts on law enforcement by saying, “I’m speaking as the victim, the father of a murdered child.” In a New York Times Magazine piece on the show, Walsh described the impetus for his transformation from suburban dad to television crime fighter. “At 35, I thought I had the American dream … [a] good job, a great family and a home in sunny Florida. Then, one morning my wife went to the store, and Adam was abducted. The killer was never found.”⁸⁸ Even four years into the show’s run, the news media still invoked Adam’s story. In an article about the show’s two hundredth capture, Donna Gable in USA Today identified Walsh as the show’s unique ingredient: “They have something no one else has: John Walsh, the show’s host.… Walsh’s 6-year-old son, Adam, was kidnapped, molested and decapitated in 1981. The murder remains unsolved.”⁸⁹ The show was thus inextricably linked with Walsh’s personal story of his son’s murder and the shattering of a seemingly perfect suburban life.⁹⁰ In whatever venue he appeared, including most prominently as America’s Most Wanted’s host, Walsh brought his son’s case and all of its associations with him. He was a reminder that crime happens even in the suburbs and, as an advocate and the host of America’s Most Wanted, he reminded viewers to be vigilant in protecting themselves lest a similar tragedy befall them.

In format, the show functioned much like a telethon with John Walsh relaying information while urging his audience to call in with information rather than money. Usually, he would spur their action by featuring reenactments of crimes presented in a visceral low-budget style in which “the camerawork is hand-held; the music is urgent; there are a number of scenes in which guns are pointed or fired into the camera lens.”⁹¹ Through these minimovies, America’s Most Wanted conveyed the moral certitude of the vigilante heroes in the film series Dirty Harry and Death Wish. The exhaustively reenacted crime left little doubt as to the alleged criminal’s guilt while eliciting sympathy for victims by melodramatically portraying their plight and that of their families after their lives had been shattered by crime. These reenactments were crucial to achieving the show’s purpose as they brought jarringly violent recreations of real crimes into American living rooms, thereby promoting the show’s vision of crime as the vision of crime in America—graphic, immediate, and local. The producers presented the reenactments in this way to make the audience feel their participation was of critical importance to stopping criminals from committing even more heinous crimes, especially given the explicit suggestion that a criminal may soon be pointing a gun at them.

Compared to Walsh’s campaign on behalf of missing children, America’s Most Wanted was less critical of law enforcement officers but still skeptical of the criminal justice system. The show operated under a friendlier premise that no organization could keep up with crime or with wily criminals who killed without conscience. No matter the particular problem with law enforcement, the message was ultimately the same. The show urged the audience to act in circumscribed ways to protect themselves as a supplement to police action.⁹² In an interview with television critic Tom Shales, Doug Linder, the producer of America’s Most Wanted, said, “This show is sending a subtle message that the criminal justice system doesn’t work.”⁹³ Linder revealed that many of those who called the toll-free number hung up when they heard someone answer, because, he surmised, they expected the same result as when they might call 911: no one would actually be there to listen. Walsh and America’s Most Wanted were careful not to undermine the system or explicitly endorse vigilantism even as they acknowledged the futility of relying solely on law enforcement. “I’m not a cop,” Walsh said. “Nor am I some kind of vigilante. But there are 280,000 fugitives out there, and this is a chance to show that Americans can make a difference.”⁹⁴ The message was not difficult to decode. If there were that many criminals running wild, the viewer must do something because traditional law enforcement was evidently unwilling or unable to stop criminals and prosecute offenders.

This explanation represented the balance the show was trying to strike, and the suburban politics in which it was engaged. Rather than airing an all-out critique of law enforcement each week, the show emphasized cooperation with authorities and made the “subtle” suggestion that the criminal justice system was failing, while asking its audience to do what they could from the safety of their La-Z-Boy recliners, because as Walsh emphasized at the end of each episode, “You can make a difference.”⁹⁵ That was the mission of the show as John Walsh articulated it. “The American public needs to know that [violent criminals] are out there. This is not a screenwriter’s nightmare. This is a nightmare of reality.”⁹⁶

Much like the genre of educational literature and games designed to teach children about danger in their neighborhood, a genre of self-help books for adults emerged that echoed the sense of fear and of self-reliance in fighting crime fostered by America’s Most Wanted. In Safe Homes, Safe Neighborhoods, author Stephanie Mann (with M. C. Blakeman) made the case to suburban homeowners for “Why Crime Prevention Is Up to You and Your Neighbors,” as the title of the book’s opening section put it. In explaining why neighborhoods needed individual and community action, the authors noted, “In the past, when neighborhoods were more stable, … neighbors watching out for one another was a fact of life.” However, that had changed. The authors cited statistics showing that most crime was local and police could not possibly protect everyone.⁹⁷ Similarly, On Guard! How You Can Win against the Bad Guys (1994) argued that crime is inevitable and homeowners must be vigilant protectors of their families.⁹⁸ This genre of self-help book continued the depiction of criminal threats as pervasive and local while doling out pages of advice on how homeowners must supplement or supplant law enforcement in order to stay safe and truly enjoy the privilege of suburban living.

Like this self-help literature and neighborhood watch patrols, America’s Most Wanted epitomized the new suburban culture of crime prevention by asking the audience to peer out windows and phone in tips rather than taking more direct action. This appeal both produced and mobilized suburbanites’ increasing sense of victimization and encouraged necessary private defensive measures. Still, though John Walsh and the producers of America’s Most Wanted went to great lengths to spur audience action, they warned them not to turn to vigilantism lest the precarious relationship with law enforcement be upset. Although suburbanites understood crime as rampant and law enforcement as overwhelmed, they did not want to alienate the state agencies they needed to assist them. Alarm systems, neighborhood watch programs, gated entrances, private security, and, later, armed self-defense required the criminal justice system’s support and acquiescence, which supposedly would not be possible if active vigilantism became a regular occurrence.

Go Ahead, Make My Day

By the premiere of America’s Most Wanted in 1988, however, the vigilante film genre had already provided explicit, violent narratives that endorsed stopping crime through extralegal means and exacting justice outside an inept criminal justice system more interested in protecting the rights of criminals than victims. These films expressed white, middle-class aggrievement and imagined salvation through the vigilante’s good works. Indeed, this genre portrayed the vigilante as what Vincent Canby has described “as nothing less than the redeemer” within a moral universe neatly constructed through a narrative that provided a fantasy of justice, an affective salve to the unstoppable problem of crime not unlike America’s Most Wanted armchair vigilantes.⁹⁹ Yet those fantasies of private justice also worked with the broader suburban discourses of crime to undergird a more expansive doctrine of home and self-defense that legislatures ratified into laws and courts confirmed in rulings whereby suburbanites could and did legally kill.¹⁰⁰

After the release of the original Dirty Harry (1971) and Death Wish (1974) films, the genre had run aground by the early 1980s with many poorly executed, low-budget imitations set in the assumed criminal wastelands of American cities in crisis.¹⁰¹ However, in seeking to reimagine the genre and capitalize on the perception that suburban crime was also on the rise, the makers of the most popular series in the vigilante genre moved their stories of persistent crime and extralegal solutions out of the city and into the suburbs. In Death Wish II, released in 1982, architect-vigilante Paul Kersey moves to suburban Los Angeles to start over after the horrors recounted in the first film, while in 1983’s Sudden Impact, “Dirty Harry” Callahan is put on administrative leave in a quiet community on the California coast.

Death Wish II and Sudden Impact maintained the vigilante genre’s critique of the criminal justice system while asserting that the suburban environment, too, had become dangerous and needed the action of the righteous vigilante to rescue it.¹⁰² However, these movies’ portrayals of vigilante justice were a fantasy that presented active defense in contrast to the largely defensive devices and practices used by suburbanites to protect themselves until the early twenty-first century when laws further empowered homeowners to regulate local spaces. Populated by images of graphic violence and feelings of powerlessness, these films created a suburban world where the heroes act with moral clarity and without involving law enforcement or waiting for passive measures to ensnare a dangerous criminal already committing a crime. These popular depictions paved the way for lawmakers to pass so-called “make my day” laws. While invoking Dirty Harry’s most famous line from Sudden Impact, states enacted Stand Your Ground laws that gave legal protections to people who use deadly force to protect themselves anywhere they have a right to be. This legislation led to an astounding increase in “justifiable homicide” cases in states with the law on the books.¹⁰³

Death Wish II opens with helicopter shots of the sprawling landscape of greater Los Angeles, a sunny alternative to the first Death Wish’s gritty setting of 1974 New York City. Paul Kersey, played by Charles Bronson, seeks a quieter lifestyle on a peaceful, tree-lined street, but he is not left alone to do so for long. While spending the day at an outdoor market with his new girlfriend, Geri Nichols, and daughter, Carol, who has been institutionalized following her assault in Death Wish, Kersey is mugged by a gang who steal his wallet. Then, the muggers use the information on his driver’s license to find his house and break in. Kersey is knocked out cold while the gang rapes and murders his maid. The intruders abscond with Carol to their hideout inside an abandoned mansion, where they continually rape her. In an attempt to escape, Carol mistakenly jumps out of a window to her death. Despite the brutality of the initial mugging, Kersey tries to turn over a new leaf and calls the police. The film’s message is clear, however, that he knows there is very little they can or will do. The vigilante plot is reenergized by the intrusion of senseless, explicit, and brutal violence against Kersey’s family into what had seemed the safe suburban spaces where he had sought to retreat from what he thought were urban hazards.

After meeting with the police, Kersey searches for the gang by living a double life. During the day, he remains a devoted boyfriend and successful architect while at night he stalks his prey on Los Angeles’s skid row. The transition between the two landscapes is stark and enhances the moral clarity of the series established in the first Death Wish. His suburban home is always shown as sunny, clean, and quiet. On skid row, Kersey mingles with drug dealers, addicts, and street preachers while rooting out the gang. The movement back and forth between locales tracks a movement between respectability and criminality, and in some way provides the audience a mode of slumming as the thrill is doubled by Kersey’s own voyeurism and vigilantism. Further, his taking a room in this location and living the double life suggest his ability as a respectable, middle-class person to transcend the criminal actions he takes and locations he frequents because of the righteousness of his mission. In the world of the vigilante film, he is not a criminal but a one-man justice system who can do bad things but not be essentially bad himself. He can safely return to the suburbs after he exacts his revenge. This notion is reaffirmed in the film when Kersey evades his own arrest and prosecution for killing the gang’s members because the police fears that his “crimes” would be seen as noble by the public at large. At the end of the film, he returns to the suburb having helped remake it as safe (cinematic) space. Rather than an ongoing crisis, crime in Death Wish II can be stopped rather than accepted and coped with as it was by actual suburbanites.

Released a year after Death Wish II and featuring the iconic line “Go ahead, make my day,” the Clint Eastwood–directed Sudden Impact takes detective “Dirty Harry” Callahan out of San Francisco. Having illegally seized some evidence that lets a criminal go free on a legal technicality, Harry is forced to go on a “vacation.” In his new, bucolic, suburban home, Harry is soon drawn into a local case involving a serial killer. Just then, he meets his love interest for the film, artist Jennifer Spencer (Sondra Locke). On their first date, Jennifer says, “This is the age of lapsed responsibilities and defeated justice. Today an eye for an eye means only if you’re caught and even then it means an indefinite postponement and, ‘Let’s settle out of court.’ ” Harry is intrigued if not overwhelmed by a beautiful woman essentially endorsing his worldview in which justice is clear, swift, and merciless.¹⁰⁴ Unbeknownst to Harry, Jennifer’s views were formed years earlier by a violent incident. In previous scenes, the audience sees her and her sister gang raped on the beach, an incident that leaves the sister in a catatonic state much like that of Paul Kersey’s daughter in Death Wish. Years later, returning to the scene of the crime, Jennifer finds all of the perpetrators going about their normal lives, reinforcing the notion of violent criminals living freely in a suburban setting. At that point, Spencer decides to exact the revenge the state could not. A rash of mysterious killings ensues that those same local police are unable to solve.

The film builds to a climax as Spencer attempts to finish off the last two members of the gang that raped her and her sister. She discovers that one of them is the police chief’s son, who, it happens, has been left in a catatonic state after a car accident. The chief tells Jennifer he will essentially look the other way as to her killings so as to be rid of the “scum” responsible for her attack. As in the Death Wish series, vigilantism in Sudden Impact is sanctioned by police who seek expedient solutions to crime and necessary help in cleaning up the streets. However, Jennifer’s vigilantism presents a dilemma for “Dirty Harry,” as he endorses the elimination of criminals but also, if somewhat perversely, believes in the rule of law. Before he decides whether to turn Jennifer in, she delivers a searing critique of the justice system that encapsulates the politics of the vigilante genre and the emergent culture of crime in the 1980s: “What, are you going to read me my rights? Where was this concern for my rights when I was being beaten and mauled? … There is a thing called justice. Is it justice that they should all just walk away?” Already sympathetic to her cause, Harry is swayed by her argument and tells the local police that a gun found on one of the rapists was the one used in all the other killings.

Death Wish II and Sudden Impact helped alter the cognitive map of the suburbs to include the threat of crime while promoting a fantasy of individual agency whereby suburbanites caught criminals rather than just avoiding them while waiting for a failing system of law enforcement to enact justice. In showing the efficient removal of crime and criminals by empowered victims who unquestioningly deserve justice the system denies them, the films gave credence to the notion that crime was ubiquitous and justice could be simple if suburbanites protected themselves (or were legally permitted to do so, as seen with later expansions of the Castle Doctrine).

However, these vigilante solutions to crime were not ultimately practical, as America’s Most Wanted warned. Although the television show portrayed a similar world of crime and justice, it demonstrated that vigilantism was largely imaginary since it asked its audience to supplement the work of law enforcement—catching criminals rather than stopping crime, even as John Walsh urged audience members not to be passive victims. “As I began to understand that tragedy,” he once said about the loss of his son, “I decided not to be victimized by fear or revenge, but to share my realization that each of us can help—must help—stop crime. That’s what America’s Most Wanted is all about.”¹⁰⁵ As armchair vigilantes, then, viewers could enjoy the visceral thrill of looking for a wanted criminal and vicariously enjoy his or her arrest by law enforcement, knowing they or someone just like them had played a part. USA Today characterized the show as thriving “on a collective preoccupation with random crime and voyeuristic crime-solving. Is your neighbor a runaway killer with a new identity—and an incriminating ‘Mom’ tattooed on his behind?”¹⁰⁶ Watching the show and looking for criminals, though largely reactive moves, let suburban viewers imagine they were actively participating in their own defense against crime, thus reinforcing the notion that active protection was necessary. In highlighting suburbanites’ limited power in the face of crime and making use of their fantasies of aggressive defense, the show, the films, and the suburban culture of crime they represented made the expansive reinterpretation of the Castle Doctrine and new, Stand Your Ground laws appear logical and necessary in the twenty-first century expression of productive victimization.

If you have to retreat … you’re a dead man

Facilitating suburbanites’ privatization of policing power was the emergent and, ultimately dominant, politics of law and order at the end of the twentieth century. That politics advanced a harsh, overwhelming response to crime as a correction to the prior era of law enforcement that many citizens and politicians believed had been too interested in protecting the rights of criminals over those of victims.¹⁰⁷ Under the new regime, arresting and jailing criminals was not meant to rehabilitate but to punish lawbreakers so harshly as to discourage further crime, reassert “order” as a means of social control, and restore a nostalgic cultural ideal of peaceful streets and self-governing citizens. Those broader political initiatives dovetailed with the budding cultural conservatism of suburbanites in the same era, a law-and-order politics focused on “limited government, moral leadership, and judicial firmness,” as historian Michael W. Flamm has characterized it.¹⁰⁸ Each of those imperatives made possible the suburban expansion in privatized police functions, which came to seem more reasonable and necessary as more communities adopted the approach. Rather than rely on the state to protect them, which it had clearly failed to do in the earlier age of urban crisis and unrest, suburbanites felt not only empowered but required to protect themselves however possible.¹⁰⁹ In doing so, they continued to pose as aggrieved victims acting legitimately to beat back crime that was no longer relegated to the inner city; meanwhile, the state assailed people of color as inherently criminal and as subjects of legal discipline.

The legal movements to expand homeowner power and pursue the law-and-order politics that facilitated them were aided by the shifting tactics of the National Rifle Association (NRA) during this era. In the mid-1970s, the organization migrated from its roots in promoting marksmanship and gun safety to focusing on stopping gun control legislation by supporting pro-gun political candidates and extensive legislative lobbying.¹¹⁰ The association’s efforts also included an advertising campaign that sought to bring in new members who, it believed, would not otherwise be interested in guns or the NRA. The “I’m the NRA” campaign showed average citizens, including many women, as gun owners and was wildly successful in broadening the ranks of NRA membership, which, in turn, led to more money for lobbying against gun restriction laws.¹¹¹ Those members received the NRA’s monthly magazine, American Rifleman, which further reinforced the sense of ongoing criminal endangerment and positioned gun ownership as crime prevention. In a regular section, gun owners told stories about preventing crime by using or brandishing a firearm. These efforts reinforced the idea of private regulation of crime and helped make homeowners’ expanded powers to regulate space more deadly by making gun ownership more accessible.

Into the early twenty-first century, courts and legislatures endorsed homeowner policing of space by taking a hard line against criminals and a compassionate stance toward homeowners’ “defensive” actions. Convicted defendants were subject to lengthy mandatory sentences and “three strikes and you’re out” rules, which condemned many to a lifetime behind bars, while valiant homeowners defending property rights and the privileges of suburban life were exonerated and even hailed as heroes for using lethal force.¹¹² In particular, the Castle Doctrine, and its public-space extension through Stand Your Ground laws, embedded in the law the rights of homeowners to defend themselves at home and beyond with little risk of prosecution.¹¹³ The Castle Doctrine provides for legal self-defense in one’s own home or “castle” when confronted with an intruder. Stand Your Ground laws expanded the spaces in which a person may exercise lethal force in self-defense beyond the home in a place where the person has a “right to be,” essentially making the protections of the Castle Doctrine portable. These laws and their endorsement by the courts endowed homeowners, largely suburban, with the right to dispense justice in a wide array of spaces and to defend their actions as necessary self-defense.

Stand Your Ground laws marked a shift in the view of homeowner rights. Until late in the twentieth century, the Castle Doctrine included a duty to retreat or avoid the danger unless one is faced with what a reasonable person would consider a threat of imminent death or bodily harm; it did not include a right to stand one’s ground regardless of the threat posed. The history of the doctrine in Florida, where George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin, is instructive in understanding the changes in the Castle Doctrine made possible by the shifting culture of suburban crime. For most of the twentieth century, Florida courts largely held a narrow view of when and where deadly force could legally be used by a homeowner and thus refrained from extending that right to an automobile or public space.¹¹⁴ In a 2005 revision of state law, however, the legislature removed the duty to retreat when the person threatened is in a “place where he or she has a right to be,” while extending the right of self-protection to any dwelling and any person in that dwelling.¹¹⁵ Further, the law codified the common law principle that reasonable fear must exist for legally sanctioned lethal force. Although it did not permit all homicides in cases of self-defense (notably, shooting a police officer was not considered justifiable under the law), the shifting sense of suburban space as embattled and, hence, of a world where one should be legitimately fearful, was easily mobilized to justify these killings in the courts and news media. In essence, as legal scholar Wyatt Holliday argues, “the legislature was clearly and completely removing Florida from the minority of states requiring retreat before the use of deadly force” and, according to the Florida Supreme Court, risked making “innumerable castles” that could be legally defended.¹¹⁶ By extending the right of nonretreat and substituting a person’s sense of their right to be someplace as a rationale for self-defense, Florida codified the private power of homeowners in public spaces who had come to see their local surroundings as part of their private domain.

In the public debate over revising the state law, newspapers framed the Stand Your Ground law as the beginning of a new “Wild West,” but often talking of the law in terms of a more modern reference: the vigilante film. In 2005, Jim Haug of the Daytona Beach News-Journal, “Tallahassee Dirty Harry may soon be in his rights to say, Go ahead, make my day and blast away at his attacker,” while the Palm Beach Post titled an editorial, “Go Ahead; Pass this Bill” and warned, “When ‘Make My Day’ is in force, individuals will practice the racial profiling police forces have tried to eliminate. More innocent people will get shot.”¹¹⁷ Even in criticizing the law, these articles made the explicit link to the vigilante fantasies of justice and power dispensed by the homeowner, which was, to the many Floridians who supported the law, actually a compelling argument.

Indeed, supporters saw the change as necessary for the innocent to protect themselves in a world rife with criminal hazards. Republican senator Durell Peaden understood the bill as channeling the belief of most homeowners that they needed the legal safeguards of the bill so they could protect themselves without going to jail for it.¹¹⁸ Despite his opposition, Senator Ron Klein, expressed the logic of suburban crime culture in the twenty-first century: “I’m not a big gun person but I recognize that there are a lot of people who think that criminals rule, that they’ve got the run of the land.”¹¹⁹ Similarly, Don Coppola of Charlotte County, Florida, explained, “The gun put me in command of the situation.”¹²⁰ This sentiment pervaded comments by supporters of such laws. They saw the laws as legal sanction of the moral stance that when society abandons you, you must defend yourself, notwithstanding the history of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries that clearly demonstrated the myriad structural advantages enjoyed by suburban homeowners. David Kopel, director of the Independence Institute, a libertarian think tank, said, “These laws send a more general message to society that public spaces belong to the public—and the public will protect [public places] rather than trying to run into the bathroom of the nearest Starbucks and hope the police show up.”¹²¹ Kopel’s remark demonstrated the pervasive fear, not just of crime but of the potential double victimization by a criminal and by the failure of law enforcement, a vulnerability that, in supporters’ logic, required new private powers with which citizens could protect themselves.

The law-and-order regime had stunning effects on perceptions of crime, its perpetrators, and law enforcement policy and procedure. Florida was not alone in passing “make my day laws” in the first decade of the twenty-first century. According to the New York Times, by August 2006, fifteen states had expanded the right to use deadly force in self-defense, using the Florida law as a model.¹²² They liberated suburbanites, largely white and middle class, to craft their own, privatized solutions to “threats” appearing on their doorsteps and in their neighborhoods.¹²³ These solutions—gates, volunteer patrols, private security forces, vigilante justice—would not have been possible without the conditions created by the politics of law and order and the new culture of suburban crime. That culture encouraged seeing the landscape as under siege. At the same time, passage of new, more permissive laws regarding lethal force used in self-defense empowered the lone, implicitly white, middle-class homeowner to defend the home in what the state itself acknowledged was a vacuum created by the implicit failure of law enforcement to prevent crime and protect the innocent. As the sponsor of Florida’s Stand Your Ground law commented about his bill, “It’s pretty much understood how we want to protect our homes and families”—namely, by exercising their unabridged rights to police space, regulate people, and dispense justice in their neighborhoods as the necessary response to out-of-control crime.

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In the 1970s and ’80s, overlapping narratives of crime and the defenses against it produced imagery, ideas, and practices that shifted the associations of the suburban landscape from safe to criminally imperiled. Portrayals of lawbreaking and violence—in cultural productions ranging from the television movie Adam to news and magazine stories of home invasions, educational board games and books, and vigilante television shows and films—confronted suburbanites with visions of local, endemic crime beyond the reach of law enforcement. In those spaces, safety became premised on personal vigilance and technological superiority that, while promising protection, undermined the essence of the postwar suburban project itself. However, the carceral suburb’s emergence did not just destabilize the bucolic, utopian legacy of suburban life. It also created the cultural conditions for empowerment, whereby suburbanites consolidated and extended private police power through the turn of the twenty-first in response to the expanding sense of criminal hazard. The employment of walls, gates, fences, and private guards was a logical extension of the security ethos forged around the seemingly legitimate responses to criminal threats, even though by nearly every measure these threats declined during the emergence of this suburban culture of home security.¹²⁴

Suburban Americans bought security systems, changed educational priorities, constructed gated communities, and employed private security forces not simply in response to encroaching “urban” dangers or as an explicit part of a broader political project to “get tough on crime.” Although they were facilitated by and facilitated those political discourses, suburbanites acted to protect against local threats and made productive use of their perceived victimization for local ends. They enhanced and extended suburban exclusivity and local power in response to, and often without, the state—moving from securing the home to securing the neighborhood with barriers and guards at a time when local law enforcement appeared unable or unwilling to secure the cultural and material benefits of suburban living. This strategy allowed suburbanites to feel secure while ignoring the structural origins of and solutions to crime that might have had much farther-reaching effects on their lives if acknowledged and acted upon.¹²⁵ Instead, they remained focused on the local concerns of protecting and expanding the privileges of their safety and spatial power. All the while, their actions and the sense of ongoing criminal danger they symbolized bolstered the tough-on-crime political culture that created the “new Jim Crow,” and the concomitant manifestation of the neoliberal carceral state as the “golden gulag.”¹²⁶

During this same era, the focus on spatial power and security would also appear in responses to teenagers in public spaces such as the shopping mall and arcade. Parents, police, and local municipalities moved to more closely regulate teenagers and the spaces they frequented, not only because of the era’s increasing sense of criminal danger but also because teenagers themselves had become threats to orderly public space.