PART I: POSITIVELY UNDERTAKEN

demands of municipal politics in two US cities “during the criti-

cal period when gangs were becoming recognized as a widespread
national problem” (Meehan 2000: 338). What makes his study eth-
nomethodological is its focus on the interactional production of the
“problem”: “the context of accountability has a political and organi-
zational dimension but the police practices that satisfy the demands
of accountability and create the statistical reality that supports
organizational and political accountability are interactional” (2000:
340, emphasis in original). The level of detail can be appreciated
from the stages he distinguishes in “the organizational career of a
statistic” (2000: 340). What we identified in Chapter 1 as the report-
ing and recording moments of criminalization he separates into six
stages:
1. citizens’ formulation of a problem to the police operator in a call
for service and how such formulations are understood by operators
as constituting a gang/group problem and subsequently encoded
into an organizationally relevant and actionable category;
2. dispatchers’ formulation of the problem to the patrol officers
assigned to respond to a call;
3. patrol officers’ understanding of the dispatchers’ formulation of the
problem to which they are responding;
4. patrol officers’ location and assessment of the “problem”;
5. patrol officers’ response to the “problem”;
6. the various records produced by patrol officers regarding their
response and the gang statistics that result from those records
(Meehan 2000: 340).
He obtained two data sets. The first consisted of “a sample of tel-
ephone calls to the Bigcity 911 emergency number that were
categorized as gang calls by the police operators and dispatchers and
subsequently assigned to the gang car in Bigcity’s Corktown police
district” (Meehan 2000: 341). The second data set consisted of

all available records and recordings for one evening’s work in the
gang car . . . [including] the transcripts of citizens’ calls, dispatch-
ers’ assignments of the calls, transcripts of the police response
(tape-recorded), the author’s field notes from the car, and the cor-
responding records (e.g., patrol logs) of the police response for
that evening.
(Meehan 2000: 341)

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