In Boston, a man who told police that his wife had been killed by a black mugger was immediately believed - until the evidence showed that he was lying.

A bit dodgy using a hypothetical black mugger as an example anyway don't you think?!

After all, doesn't Elya almost kill the black mugger by beating him over the head with that bag of his clumsy sculptures and Stars of David he intimidates American Jews into buying?

The police handling of the case touched off intense criticism among blacks here, who accused the authorities of too readily accepting Charles Stuart's account that a black mugger shot him and his wife as they sat in their car last October.

At the time, Mr. Stuart said the couple had been assaulted by a black mugger, setting off racial animosities here and creating a wave of sympathy for himself, his dead wife and their prematurely delivered son who died 17 days later.

The case quite clearly pulls upon the same set of socially constructed fears that Hall and his colleagues analyse as the creation of the black mugger in Policing the Crisis.

As with the vast majority of combat ranges, lifelike targets were employed, depicting enemies: black muggers, hook-nosed Jews complete with arms and automatic weapons, Oriental immigrants and agents of the IRS.

At first Mr. Stuart said a black mugger had jumped into the car as they were leaving a childbirth class and had shot them.

In a bizarre murder story that polarized Boston's white and black residents, Ms. Stuart's husband, Charles, told the police that a black mugger had shot them as they left a childbirth class.

Moreover, resistances other than those posed by 'immediate experience' are ignored; for instance, possible sexual anxieties provoked by moral panics, common enough in the 1970s and early 1980s, around black 'muggers'and 'rapists'.