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The article is about the relationships between crime and politics. It would be banal to say that the boundaries between crime and politics are now more complex than criminologists imagined thirty years ago. The question is what do people make of this complexity? The deconstructionist suggests one answer and post-modernist theories that have so seduced the intellectual avant-garde over this period. For them, crime and politics are always to be placed in inverted commas, to be seen not as terms depicting any identifiable object but as free-floating signifiers, capable of an infinite transferability from one realm to the other. All one can study is the construction of discourses about crime and politics. This solution is aesthetically appealing and can be carried quite far, far enough perhaps to make the author's two lists redundant or interchangeable. It leaves little room, though, to understand the substance of those shifts that the author has listed, such as the politicization of street crime and criminalization of certain forms of political action. And it leaves any normative, value, questions even further from reach in analytical terms, the original enterprise of looking for the links between crime and politics was justified. But do people really want a social order where there is no distinction between the two? The atrocities that have become daily life in so many parts of the world are an appalling expression of precisely the obliteration of any distinction between political dispute and criminal violence.