%0 Journal Article
%@ 0141-9870
%A Nwonka, Clive Chijioke
%D 2025
%F discovery:10205874
%I Informa UK Limited
%J Ethnic and Racial Studies
%K Race, visual culture, crime, blackness, police, media
%P 1-17
%T The constructions of anti-Black anxiety: Operation Trident's “as if” fictionalisms
%U https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10205874/
%X The Metropolitan Police’s Operation Trident (1998–2012) was a key  example of how Black criminalization was accentuated through the  inferential narratives of the media. However, Operation Trident’s  independent use of the media would see them exhibit a varied  practice of community policing as part of its broader preventative  measures that would use a variety of visual mediums in its crossmedia campaign strategy specifically aimed at London’s Black  urban communities as an intervention into what was perceived as  the natural allure of gun violence within the city’s Black symbolic  locations. This article considers the modes through which  Operation Trident attempted to structure public opinion. In  conducting an underexamined analysis of Operation Trident, I  apply the Neo-Kantianism of Vailhinger’s “as if” philosophy to  consider the means through which the Metropolitan Police’s antiBlack gun crime initiative instituted anxiety as a Black  criminological visual culture, and in doing so, secured its legitimacy.
%Z © 2025 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group  This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.