Debris

Stumbling my way into cultural criminology and the 'debris of everyday life'.

My mind often wanders, trying to explain some of the bigger, maybe deeper, meanings behind the casework we engage in, often in response to what I find to be deeply baffling behaviour among its participants.

I find myself frequently turning to the media as a way to explore these underlying currents. Mowing through films and books, trying to understand, maybe through art where science has seemed to have failed, just what ‘crime’ is.

For a time, I found myself hunting through horror to find a place to cognitively settle. But it wasn’t a good fit, not for me anyway. Horror takes it all just a step too far, particularly since I subscribe to the school of thought that horror movies “...reflect our deepest social anxieties, mirroring society’s moral panics and cultural fears.” Horror, to me, is a way to experience something and explore the “what ifs” – and where my own anxieties live. To suspend disbelief, but with control.

If you have ever had the unpleasant experience of witnessing a death notification delivered to a deceased child’s parent, you have a reference point for Toni Collette’s screams of grief in Hereditary. It is too close to home.

Through continued chats with a good friend (read PhD), he began feeding me some core texts in sociology and anthropology. I wasn’t sure how Balinese cockfighting, or the ‘theatre’ of everyday life, was related to crime, but I trusted my anthro-sherpa. I kept an open mind, I kept listening, and reading. I was surprised at what field it led me to: cultural criminology. Not a field I had heard of before, but one that I felt at home in immediately.

Cultural criminology is a rather squishy term for the field’s own acknowledgement that ‘crime’ itself is, well, kind of squishy. But cultural criminology has something interesting to offer and a perspective I felt drawn to, because as Mike Presdee says “cultural criminology uses the ‘evidence’ of everyday existence, wherever it is found, and in whatever form it can be found; the debris of everyday life is its ‘data’...life histories, images, music and dance, all have a story to tell in the unravelling of crime.”

Now we’re talking. It’s all the things.

Finishing a recent murder trial, my brain truly appreciated the bulb that had been turned on. The ‘debris of everyday life’ is truly what covers and constructs a crime scene, wherever that debris may lie, digitally, physically or psychologically. My mind traced back through freshly spilled Slurpee mixed with blood in a post-shooting convenience store parking lot; debris telling its own story of consumption, crime, and panic. Half-crushed joints left by a loitering crowd with an Air Jordan logo pressed into discarded gum beside it. Video recordings showing a young man dancing out a Fortnite emote on top of a vehicle – another cultural reference layered into a criminal act, leaving its own debris behind. The angled, always-on eyes of the convenience store’s extensive surveillance system, leaving digital debris on hard drives and cloud storage, capturing moments of everyday life and its everyday litter.

Debris has its own storied history in crime scene investigations, with the oft-quoted Locard’s Exchange Principle boiled down to its simplest form: Every perpetrator will bring something into a crime scene, and every perpetrator will leave with something from the crime scene.

This scene debris, as Paul Kirk puts it, “...bear[s] mute witness against him [the perpetrator]. This is evidence that does not forget. It is not confused by the excitement of the moment. It is not absent because human witnesses are. It is factual evidence. Physical evidence cannot be wrong, it cannot perjure itself, it cannot be wholly absent. Only human failure to find it, study and understand it, can diminish its value.”

This debris gets vacuumed, swabbed, photographed, analyzed, computed, inferred, judged and then further mediated via the evening news, podcasts and YouTube. What story the ‘crime’ tells depends on the teller, and it depends on the audience. The debris is what makes up the mosaic of a scene and the lives that lived up to that point. The debris itself can mean the difference between freedom and imprisonment.

So it gave me a start, somewhere, at least. Debris.

Still leaves me with other questions and more to ponder.

What of the debris left behind on the human actors? What of the lasting imprint of trauma, of loss, of grief? How does this debris become mediated and interpreted by the larger society? Where a crime scene may eventually be hosed and scrubbed of its history, it is not so for those who have witnessed, been victim to, or been charged with a violent crime. There is no ‘brain bleach’ and no hose for this debris. No squeegee to push the thoughts and prayers down the psychological storm drain with.

But debris is not part of a crime scene until the ‘crime’ itself is brought into existence, and cultural criminology helped pin this down for me further. Presdee (along with cultural criminologist, Jeff Ferrell) sum it all up nicely, “[f]or crime to come into ‘being’ and enter the realm of popular consciousness there must exist a tentative arrangement between criminal, police, media and the public on the criminalizing process…all become partners in crime…as much a part of the process of crime as the person identified and defined as the criminal.”

It is here, I think, that I recognize that I am (and you are too) a participant, or ‘partner in crime,’ and that comes with it responsibility and reflection. If nothing else, the world becomes a more fascinating and curious place, even in the absence of crime, if you spend some time looking at the ‘debris’ around you.