Introduction

Anchored in an analysis of the official response to two incidents—the London Metropolitan police shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes in 2005 and the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017—this article examines how events come to be conceived and treated as public crises. It offers a detailed analysis of the life course of each would-be crisis-event, from the media’s initial conception of ‘what happened’ through to the review-work undertaken to resolve each matter. In doing so, the article seeks to deepen sociological understanding of the role of communicative and regulative institutions in translating social problems, and more specifically, how Alexander’s (2018, 2019) macro-sociological model of societalization works in practice. The article makes two key contributions in this regard, one analytical and the other theoretical. First, it provides an in-depth analysis of the semantics of code switching, the cultural process whereby an issue or incident is translated into a societal (as opposed to intra-institutional) problem that threatens civil values. In particular, I examine what it means to identify an event as, variously, an emergency, crisis, and catastrophe and the different forms of social action these framings prescribe.

Secondly, the article points to and explicates the role of a soft legal realm of review and investigation in managing public crises in the twenty-first century. It understands this work as an unfolding constellation of interconnected activities, shaped by shared ontological and epistemological assumptions about the best way of understanding what happened, and why. This article is the first to suggest that we see this investigatory work as having these shared features, and it makes the case for thinking of these activities as belonging to a discrete institutional realm. Below, I will suggest that we see the soft legal realm as what proponents of civil sphere theory describe as an ‘interstitial institution’, that is an institution that manages boundary tensions between the civil and the non-civil spheres, defining and on occasion ‘redefin[ing] where civil obligations stop, and the more specialized interests begin’ (Alexander 2006, p. 233). Looked at from this perspective, the work of, among other things, public inquiries, inquests, and ombudsmen reviews is about more than deciding ‘the facts’ of the matter. In specifying the parameters of an event, defining who and what to include in an investigation, and locating responsibility, the review-work that goes on in the soft legal realm does vital work in deciding whether an injury should be thought of as an individual matter or the product of a deeper injustice, and if the latter, whether it poses a threat to the core values of the civil sphere.

This is to think of the soft legal realm in ideal terms. In practice, and as the two case studies outlined below demonstrate, its work often stalls and is stymied by outside pressure to do more. This article draws attention to the ways in which the soft legal realm re-sets the tone, pace, and parameters of crisis-work, and in such a way as to diffuse and divert an original impetus towards crisis. In making this case, the article departs from the prevailing consensus within sociology that crises concerning public safety have proliferated in the late twentieth, early twenty-first century (see, among others, Altheide 2002; Furedi 2006; Ungar 2001). Instead, the analysis presented here will point to an obverse problem: the tendency for public crises to stall and calcify. These two positions are by no means incompatible. It is plausible to suggest that crisis-claims have proliferated, even as public crises have a greater tendency to fail in their performative function. Alexander (2018, p. 1067) makes a similar observation when he notes that ‘[f]ully enunciated sequences of societalization are more exception than rule’, adding that ‘[w]hen societalization is triggered, it often stalls’ (Alexander 2018, p. 1067). The analysis presented in this article illustrates how this works in practice, and in one sense confirms the cynical view that soft legal review-work is a form of whitewashing. The more analytically valuable observation is that this is achieved not through conscious, deliberate acts of obfuscation, but through the work of a distinctive institutional realm that gains partial legitimacy in counterposing volatile media debate. The key question for this article is not so much what official outcomes are reached (or evaded) in the treatment of crisis-events, but rather how those official outcomes are arrived at, in ways that indicate the distinctiveness of the soft legal realm as an institution that manages the strains that push at the boundaries of the civil sphere. The article turns now to clarify the performative function of crises, by considering what it means to call an event a crisis, as opposed to an emergency or a catastrophe, and the different forms of action implied by each.

Enacting and resisting a code switch: crisis, emergency, and catastrophe as calls to action

Localized social problems become public crises through a process of what Alexander (2018; 2019) calls societalization. It is the communicative institutions of the civil sphere, principally the media, that do the work of moving a matter through the initial stage of societalization, with journalists serving as what Alexander calls ‘agents’ in this process (2018, p. 1066). Their core task is to enact a ‘code switch’, that is, a semiotic trigger that shifts the ‘public attention space…from institutional part to civil whole’ and suggests an urgent need for outside, inter-institutional scrutiny (Alexander 2018, p. 1051). The analysis below illustrates how this works in practice, through a detailed examination of the claims that were made in the direct aftermath of two events. What this analysis points to is a tendency for early media coverage to name an event as, variously, a crisis, emergency, or catastrophe, and here I offer some introductory observations about what these mean, as different calls to action.

My point of departure is that these types of event have different formal qualities, the most culturally generative of which is ‘crisis’. Koselleck (1988) points out that this word originated from ancient Greece—‘crisis’ comes from the transliterated ‘krisis’—and meant a decisive moment, usually occasioned by a judgement or accusation. The word referred to a point of no return, one that demanded a resolution and, ultimately, an altered state of affairs. Crisis is either averted by changing paths or direction, or it is realized (and in being realized, leads to catastrophe).

To call something a crisis is, then, to make a performative statement: it is to urge action and intervention and make a claim about the risk of non-action. And as Rubenstein (2015) points out, crisis-claims urge particular forms of action, the exact character of which can be drawn out by thinking about how they differ from emergency-claims and disaster-claims. To call an event—for example, a fire—an emergency is to call for here-and-now, remedial action based on protocol. Any other form of action would be considered negligent. To call something a crisis, by contrast, is to demand far-reaching change, perhaps even an overhaul of first principles. If a fire, when seen as an event in and of itself, is an emergency, that very same event might be thought of as a crisis, when interpreted as a sign of deeper, systemic problems. Events, in other words, can be framed in more than one way, and whichever designation becomes dominant shapes our expectations of the official response to the event. Crises—unlike emergencies, which are here-and-now events—demand that we cast backwards and forwards to ask not just what happened, but why, and where now. Rubenstein (2015) describes this as cognitive action. Certainly, crises call for deliberation concerning how we should proceed, and on what ethical basis. In turn, to call an event a crisis is to attempt a code switch and seek to move a matter into an institutional realm which can perform this sort of deliberative (and, in time, regulative) work.

Disasters, Rubenstein (2015) points out, are different again. To call something a disaster is to suggest that ‘immediate action is not necessary (or, at least, it is not necessary in the same way as it is in an emergency) because the bad outcome has already occurred’ (Rubenstein 2015, p. 105). Disaster-claims focus on the catastrophic aftermath of an event and as such tend to be backward-looking. It is worth adding here that claims that an event is a catastrophe—the preferred term in this article for this third category of event—often seek to memorialize as a means of fastening attention on what has been lost, and in doing so suggest that no onward action is required.

None of this is to suggest that all claims that set out to distinguish an event seek to isolate it as purely an emergency, crisis, or catastrophe. For example, a claims-maker might suggest that not heeding the signs of a crisis will cause an inexorable slide towards certain catastrophe. This is a high-stakes rhetorical strategy for enacting a code switch, risking as it does counter-claims that focus on the empirical basis for there being a point of no returnFootnote 1. On other occasions, claims-makers will want to tell us that an event is squarely an emergency or catastrophe, and in such a way as to deflect claims that the event has any deeper resonance—and in doing so, they are resisting a code switch. There are several examples of this sort of claims-making in the analysis below, as well as, the more general purpose of this article, a consideration of the changing and contested meaning of public events as they move through different institutional realms. As they do so, there is a clear shift in how claims are made, in terms of both pace and tone. If the news media might be characterized as a ‘hot’ institutional sphere in terms of its treatment of public crisis-events–‘hot’ in the sense that it provides a platform for fast-paced, noisy, contested claim-and-counter-claim seeking, variously, to enact and resist a code switch–the soft legal realm of official investigation and review might be characterized as having a cooling effect. It is this institution that we turn to next.

The soft legal realm as an interstitial institution

In Alexander’s model, if a code switch is achieved during the early stage of societalization, a nascent public crisis may then pass to a regulative institution to decide a form of intervention (2018, p. 1051). In the penultimate phase of societalization, institutional elites are liable to push back and resist regulation. This impasse ends with a move to a ‘steady state’, and it is here, in the final phase of societalization, that social change is possible. A vilified institution might be purified and reincorporated into the civil sphere, or–more radically–the parameters of the civil sphere might be challenged, perhaps, in rare cases, redrawn (allowing, in turn for ‘civil repair’). Societalization can stall during these phases, too, and this article suggests that a key factor in this is the work and orientation of a soft legal realm of review and investigationFootnote 2, a regulative institution that has become the de facto site for managing civil sphere boundary tensions in the UK, and other late liberal democracies.

The analysis below seeks to draw out the distinctive features of the soft legal realm, both as a network of actors and activities whose work is in important ways oriented towards other actors and activities within the network, and in terms of its epistemological bases. By way of introduction, it is possible to discern three key characteristics of the work in the soft legal realm of official investigation and review. First, it has a distinctive temporal dimension. The work that goes on within this institution takes time, and that is partly because, as the analysis below indicates, this review-work is self-consciously careful, empirical, and detailed, but also because, as a distinctive network of activities and actors, there is an insistence that lines of investigation need to be carried out in a particular sequence (whether that be an inquest waiting for an inquiry to conclude, or a legislative review group waiting until a complaints commission has published its report).

The distinctive temporality of the soft legal realm is key to its cooling effect on the issue or event that it treats, as is its reliance on a seemingly neutral language of empirical review and legal principles. Thus, the second key element of this institution is its reliance on processes that are recognizably legal. Investigations rely upon interviews, testimony, evidence (from observers, key actors, and experts), and hearings. All the same, strict legal rules—around, for example, standards of evidence–are generally not in place. This is because the soft legal realm does not aim to prosecute, convict, or sentence—these are powers that belong to the ‘hard’ legal sphere of criminal and civil proceedings.

Finally, the work of the soft legal realm is presented as independent of both the official bodies being reviewed and the political sphere. This separation is signalled in a range of ways by, for example, a Prime Minister officially passing an issue to a judicial officer or announcing the recruitment of an independent Chair for an inquiry. Investigatory independence is a crucial feature of the soft legal realm, and challenges to this—in, for example, media coverage about the bases for recruiting particular panel members to public inquiries—threaten the legitimacy of a soft legal instrument, and more broadly, this institution’s suitability as a regulative institution for managing would-be public crises.

This article suggests that it is useful to think of the soft legal realm as an interstitial institution. By definition, interstitial institutions operate at the boundaries of the civil and non-civil spheres, managing interventions issuing from either of these spheres. Where an intervention issues from the civil sphere, it is precipitated by a perceived need for an institution to be subject to independent, outside scrutiny of alleged anti-civil practices and values. Thumala Olave (2019) explores the work of one such interstitial institution in her analysis of the civil sphere reaction to a set of scandals in Chile’s retail industry. In doing so, she offers an insight into the challenges faced by interstitial institutions in maintaining legitimacy across different spheres (in this instance, the civil sphere, the state, and the market). On other occasions, an intervention might issue from outside of the civil sphere. Alexander (2006) devotes considerable attention to this sort of intervention in The Civil Sphere (2006), as a way of illustrating how groups have sought incorporation into the civil sphere.

Irrespective of where an intervention originates from, interstitial institutions meet the civil sphere on its own ground, that is, by framing claims in a way that is consonant with civil discourse and the cherished principles of justice, individual freedom, autonomy, and (in a UK context) social protection. As Egholm (2023) suggests, interstitial institutions might usefully be thought of as ‘sites of translation’. They translate harms into ideas, values, and relationships that can be readily understood and recognized by the civil sphere. This might mean, to use a concrete example, interpreting a lack of adequate social housing as a form of social injustice (rather than, say, a non-negotiable problem of a market economy). An intervention such as this might cause limited disruption to the civil sphere—it might simply, as civil sphere theory has it, ‘facilitate input’. Or it might make a ‘disruptive intrusion’, one that pushes for an injury or harm to become the catalyst for more wholesale change. If successful, this offers the possibility for what Alexander (2006, pp. 205–209) calls ‘civil repair’, that is a re-setting of the boundaries of the civil sphere, such that a previously excluded group or issue comes to be incorporated into the civil sphere and granted recognition and protection in its universalistic form of solidarity.

All of this is to point out that the work done by interstitial institutions is vital to the regeneration of the civil sphere. They are also, despite what Egholm (2023) identifies as a recent growth of interest, under-researched. It may be that this is partly due to the difficulty in conceptualizing interstitial institutions, given that, as Egholm (2023) demonstrates, their achievements are more a product of cultural and historical factors than their institutional characteristics. With this important caveat in mind, this article proceeds on the basis that there is value to identifying, describing and analysing the work of the soft legal realm, an especially dominant interstitial institution in the UK, and other late liberal democracies. It does so not to suggest that the features of this institution are characteristic of all or any other institutional institution, nor that its organization, orientation, and legitimacy as an interstitial institution are anything other than the product of time and place.

Research note

This article examines the official response to two twenty-first century public crisis-events in the UK: the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes by Metropolitan police officers in 2005, and the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017. These case studies were selected on the basis that they are sufficiently different to bear out general observations about the tendencies of the soft legal realm. Chief among these differences is the central soft legal mechanism: the killing of de Menezes was reviewed by the then-named Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC), the Grenfell Tower fire by a public inquiry (that, at the point of writing, is yet to publish its final findings). The discussion of each of the case studies starts with a description and analysis of media debate in the immediate aftermath of the event and then proceeds to unpack how the event was subsequently handled in the soft legal realm. The reports of the central soft legal mechanism—the IPPC reports on the killing of Menezes and the Grenfell Tower Inquiry documents—form core resources for this analysis, and are supplemented by press releases from key organizations, news reports, scrutiny reports, government statements, and reviews of legislation.

The official response to the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes

On July 22nd 2005, Jean Charles de Menezes was shot and killed at London’s Stockwell Underground Station by officers of the Metropolitan Police Service during an anti-terrorist operation. De Menezes, it transpired, had been misidentified as someone involved in an attempted terrorist bombing the previous day. In the immediate aftermath of the event, the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) was the sole source of official information, and we know from the subsequent Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) investigation that they sought to maintain control of the official line on ‘what happened’ for as long as possible (IPCC 2007b, pp 44–45). Their press releases issued in the thirty-six hours following the shooting reveal something of the strategic work that goes into defining public events. Take, for example, the following two press statements, released by the MPS on the day of the shooting:

The information I have available is that this shooting is directly linked to the ongoing and expanding anti-terrorist operation. Any death is deeply regrettable. I understand the man was challenged and refused to obey. (IPCC 2007b, p. 114. Italics added).

The man shot at Stockwell station is still subject to formal identification and it is not yet clear whether he is one of the four people we are seeking to identify…This death, like all deaths related to police operations, is obviously a matter of deep regret. Nevertheless, the man who was shot was under police observation because he had emerged from a house that was itself under observation because it was linked to the investigation of yesterday’s incidents…’. (IPPC 2007b, p. 115. Italics added).

Of note, here, is the repeated description of the killing as deeply regrettable (in italics). At the same time—there is an implied ‘but’ in the first press statement, and a direct ‘nevertheless’ in the second—we are told (erroneously, it later turned out) that de Menezes had been acting suspiciously (in bold). In framing the event in this way, the MPS sought to suggest that the shooting was a reasonable response to an emergency situation, one that ‘like any death’, was saddening, to quote the first press statement, or ‘like all deaths’ is deeply regrettable, to quote the second. It is a turn of phrase—‘like any/all deaths’—that works to diminish the peculiarity of this death and justify the lack of frank apology.

The MPS’ press release on the following day contained some notable alterations. Here, in a statement issued in the early evening, the MPS concedes for the first time that de Menezes had no connection to the anti-terrorist operation. It’s an admission that requires a shift in tone and a greater show of contrition, but not, it turns out, any shift in framing:

We believe we now know the identity of the man shot at Stockwell underground station by police on Friday 22nd 2005, although he is still subject to formal identification. we are now satisfied that he was not connected with the incidents of Thursday 21st July 2005. For some body to lose their life in such circumstances is a tragedy and one that the Metropolitan Police Service regrets…’. (IPCC 2007b. p. 116).

‘Anybody’ becomes the less dismissive ‘somebody’, ‘regrettable’ is, now with added certainty about the context, ‘a tragedy’, but the statement still reads as a general truth inviting sadness and commemoration, rather than probing consideration of what happened.

In this way, the early MPS response to the killing sought to foreclose discussion of the event by casting it as a catastrophe: that is, a tragedy to which the only appropriate response was collective regret. As the circumstances of the shooting started to become clearer, other commentators challenged this framing. The Muslim Council of Britain were early frame-changers, releasing a statement within days of the shooting that explained the event in terms of the ‘overzealousness’ of police officers (Dennis 2005). The event was coming to be reframed as a crisis.

The Commissioner of the MPS, Sir Ian Blair, swiftly sought to resist this, and in doing so suggested an alternative reading of the event-as-crisis. In a set of news articles on the 24th July, Blair expressed regret for the family’s loss and asserted that the MPS took ‘full responsibility’ for what happened, and then went on to frame the shooting in terms of the pressure on police to respond quickly to life-threatening situations (MailOnline 2005; Daily Telegraph 2005; Bennetto 2005). Blair alludes here to the London bombings of 7th July 2005, occurring some two weeks ahead of the de Menezes shooting, a series of coordinated terrorist attacks that killed 52 members of the public and injured hundreds more. Blair puts forward a markedly different origin-story for the crisis-event: the deeper crisis, he wants to suggest, is the terrorism threat, which created an emergency, in response to which the police are right to use any power available to them, including what by this point was being openly referred to in the media as a ‘shoot to kill’ policy.

The broader point to make here is that in the days immediately following the de Menezes shooting, as the event was processed and repackaged by the MPS and media commentary, we can see a contestation about what happened—and this revolves not just around the question of what type of crisis this is, but also the question of whether the incident should be rightly understood as a catastrophe, a crisis, or an emergency-response. That the designation of an event should provoke this pattern of claim-and-counter-claim—we might see it as semantic jostling—tells us that there is much at stake in this early phase of societalization, where a code switch is possible.

Within days of the shooting, as the debates about the meaning of the event become increasingly fraught, the event was passed to the soft legal realm, and with this proceeded to the next stage of societalization. From therein, this became the central forum for resolving the matter. The initiation of a review by a body that could clearly assert its independence—a key feature of the soft legal realm, as noted above—served to close-down debate in the media and political sphere at this point, and in turn the soft legal realm came to be seen as the place where questions would be asked and answered (where, in other words, some form of regulation would be possible).

Figure 1 sets out the key strands of the soft legal review-work undertaken in the aftermath of the shooting. In the chart above, we can observe five major bodies undertaking their own lines of review-work and, beyond that, the central investigation—carried out by the IPCC—splits into two lines of inquiry (‘Stockwell One’ and ‘Stockwell Two’). This work is labyrinthine, voluminous, and fragmentary, and these features come to define the distinctive temporal dimensions of the soft legal realm. This is work that, to put it simply, takes time. And as an aside here, it’s worth noting what isn’t included in the chart above, namely the hard-legal review-work of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), which was lengthened in duration to allow for the IPCC investigation to reach its conclusion (The Guardian 2006). The appeals coming from the decisions reached by the CPS finally conclude in 2016—that is, eleven years after the event (Bowcott 2016).

Fig. 1
figure 1

Timeline of the official review-work following the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes

Full size image

Ahmed (2021) points out that the time taken to complain often becomes part of the problem, seeming, as it often does, like an attempt to derail, deny, and overwhelm. A similar observation might be made about crisis-work in the soft legal realm, where decisions are deferred for extended periods of time. I return to this point in due course, but before that want to make some further preliminary observations about what happens to a public event—one that is a would-be, potential crisis-event—once it is moved into a soft legal realm. This shift marks another change in how the event is understood. Each of the lines of inquiry charted above, irrespective of their specific aims and focus, share a distinctive orientation towards the matter they’re resolving. They focus on who did what, when, and where, and present their findings as a detailed moment-by-moment description of the event and its immediate circumstances.

This is not to question the value of these lines of inquiry, it is simply to note that this work relies upon a particular conception of what it means to understand ‘what happened’. We might think of this as a primary phase of the translation work carried out by an interstitial institution. In the case of the soft legal realm, it involves focusing on the event in and of itself as a discrete unit of analysis. A reliance on legal process is key here, oriented as it is towards pinning down the empirically provable reality of an event, before deducing responsibility. Writing about public inquiries, Elliott and McGuiness (2002) make a similar set of observations about this mechanism’s epistemological orientation, noting its tendency to approach causality as a technical matter, determined by empirically tracing effects back to specific causes. This serves a rhetorical function in making the work of the inquiry seem totally neutral—dealing in facts, not sentiment—an apparently necessary counter-balance to the affective, political claims that fill the public domain in the aftermath of a harmful event.

As Elliott and McGuiness (2002) suggest, this neutrality is illusory—and this observation might be extended to the soft legal realm more generally. After all, the work of determining the coordinates of an event involves, among other things, decisions about where and when the event begins, which parts of the event are amenable to empirical investigation, and which forms of expert knowledge will best reveal and explain what happened.

All of these decisions can become the subject of considerable contestation. The IPCC investigation in the aftermath of the de Menezes shooting is a case in point. This investigation sits at the heart of the official response to the de Menezes shooting, and this arrangement—a central investigation, around which the various other parts of the soft legal work sit—is an essential feature of the soft legal infrastructure that is set in place to resolve a would-be crisis-event and fundamentally shapes its temporality. The question of what mechanism this will be—a public inquiry, an inquest, an independent complaints commission investigation—is in itself important and often deeply contentious, but beyond the remit of this article. This article’s focus lies instead with the network of activities and actors in the soft legal realm, who in important ways orient their work and claims towards the other activities and actors within the network. If, I want to suggest, the work of the soft legal realm has a tendency to appear to the outside world to be obscure, self-serving, and frustratingly slow in reaching conclusions, this is at least partly because of how the soft legal network operates.

Take, for example, the relationship of the IPCC investigation with the rest of the actors and organizations involved in the broader investigatory work after the shooting. These strands of work were put on-hold as the IPCC investigation ran its course. The inquest, for example, was immediately adjourned. Figure 1 shows that it was adjourned again in September 2006, and finally completed in December 2008. That timeline is dictated by the IPCC investigation. In turn, the primary purpose of this central investigation is to service other organizations and institutions involved in the official response. The Foreword to the IPCC’s ‘Stockwell One’ report makes this clear:

The primary purpose of the report was to meet the statutory obligations of the IPCC following an investigation of this kind. These are to advise the CPS of any criminal offence that may have been committed and to provide it with the evidence necessary to come to its decision about any prosecution; to enable the ‘responsible authorities’ of the officers con cerned, in this case the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) and Metropolitan Police Authority (MPA), to consider what action they may need to take in relation to discipline of other matters; in cases of exceptional gravity such as this, to inform the Home Secretary of the circumstance; and finally, to assist the Coroner in relation to any Inquest. (IPCC 2007a, p. 5. Italics added).

The IPCC investigation is at once central, but also very clearly not decisive, such is its role as a bridge into the work of other organizations. This has a fundamental effect on the work this body does. For one thing, the IPCC’s advisory role means that, in practice, much of the work it does is directed inwards, towards the other bodies involved in investigating what happened. The risk here is that its processes might be legible and accessible to a designated network of actors within the legal and political sphere, but not to those outside of that network—the public, as well as those more closely connected to the event being reviewed.

What is likely to make this network of soft legal review-activities seem even more inscrutable is the tendency for key institutional actors to continually defer the power to decide to other organizations in the network. It is clear from the statement above that the IPCC defers ‘real’ power to the organizations it serves. Those same official bodies can point to the central soft legal investigation as the main conduit for resolving the situation. Elliott and McGuiness (2002, p. 6) observe something similar about public inquiries, noting that they offer a ‘protective screen to protagonists who can legitimately refuse to comment until an inquiry is complete’.

The official reaction to the leak of key details from the IPCC investigation in August 2005 suggests that central soft legal mechanisms work like this more generally. The leak revealed that, contrary to what the MPS had claimed in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, de Menezes had not been acting suspiciously, had not been wearing overly heavy clothing, had not jumped the turnstile at the Underground station, and had not resisted arrest. There’s an evident pattern to the flurry of news articles that followed these revelations: they unanimously called for the case to be examined by a judge-led public inquiry, rather than an IPCC investigation. In this way, earlier attempts at a code switch were reinvigorated, as media debate turned once more to the question of whether ‘what happened’ was a threat to the values and relationships of the civil sphere—in other words, a crisis. In response, key institutional figures released official statements which deferred to the IPPC investigation. The following are characteristic:

[The Home Secretary’s] officials say he will not be commenting until he has received a report from the IPCC. (Carrell and McSmith 2005).

Mr Yates [the Metropolitan deputy assistant commissioner] could not discuss the specifics of the case because the IPCC had taken over the inquiry. (Cowan and Phillips 2005).

The deputy prime minister, John Prescott, who is standing in for Tony Blair, also refused to comment. ‘This is under review by an independent inquiry and I think we must wait for the result of that… (Tempest and Jeffery 2005).

This idea—‘we’ll have to wait to see what the investigation says’—is a cherished principle in the soft legal realm, and it comes from (and in turn reinforces) the idea that this work is independent and pre-political, offering, eventually, the definitive version of ‘what happened’, derived by following legal process. The example above suggests that this serves a political function to dampen contestation about the fundamental nature of the event in question. Despite reliable evidence that the shooting of de Menezes was not what it first appeared to be at the point that it was moved into the soft legal realm, the official line was that the existing review, then in motion, had to continue. And by implication, other, potentially more effective mechanisms, had to wait.

Instead, the IPCC investigation expanded to incorporate additional lines of inquiry. We see this too, in the Grenfell Tower Inquiry, discussed below. There is, I want to suggest, a general tendency for soft legal investigations to be used in such a way as to absorb impulses towards crises as and when they re-emerge in the civil sphere. This helps explain why the central soft legal investigation has a tendency to extend in scope. It is used to contain any eruptions in public concern, and it does so in such a way as to neutralize them—to add them to the ‘list of issues’ to be discussed (and thereby ‘bracket-out’ certain issues, I’ll suggest later, when we come to discuss the Grenfell Tower Inquiry).

The effect, often, is to temporarily dissipate the impetus for societalization (or, as suggested in the concluding discussion, redirect it). Of note here is a tendency for the actors involved in the soft legal review-work to themselves acknowledge that fuller crisis-work is crucial, but that it falls outside of their remit. Thus, we find the following, revealing statement right at the end of the IPCC’s ‘Stockwell One’ report:

These recommendations have not addressed general issues about how the police should respond to suicide bombers or public concerns around a ‘shoot to kill’ policy…that have not been raised by the specific circumstances of this incident. The IPCC believes there needs to be a wide and well-informed public debate of these issues. (IPCC 2007a, p. 160)

That public debate never happened, in neither the communicative institutions of the civil sphere nor the political sphere. In fact, the MPS’ ‘shoot to kill’ policy and anti-terrorist policing policy more broadly went largely unexamined in the official review-work that followed the de Menezes shooting. Nor, in this case, did the impulse to make someone responsible for what happened go anywhere. The review-work directed towards resolving the matter produced a single trial—the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, was prosecuted under Health and Safety legislation, and duly fined (Sturcke 2007), and in December 2008, the inquest jury assessing the cause of de Menezes’ death returned an ‘open verdict’ (Smith 2012, p. 43).

The official response to the Grenfell Tower fire

In the early hours of 14th June, 2017, a fire started in Grenfell Tower, a high-rise block of flats in the London borough of Kensington and Chelsea. According to official figures, it killed 71 people on the night, and caused a further death some months later (Grenfell Tower Inquiry 2019, p. 3). In his opening address to the Grenfell Tower Commemoration Hearings, Sir Martin Moore-Bick noted that, ‘[i]n terms of loss of life’ the fire was ‘the single greatest tragedy to befall this city since the end of the Second World War’ (Grenfell Tower Inquiry 2018, p. 7). For some news outlets, the event was seen as evidence of a deeper crisis of austerity-era politics. An article written by The Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee, two days after the fire, is characteristic of this type of reporting:

That tomb in the sky will be forever Theresa May’s monument. Grenfell marks the spot and her visit marks the moment the last vestiges of her career were finally rubbed out…

[P]olitical blame spreads right through the Conservative party, with no escape on offer… That tower is austerity in ruins. (Toynbee 2017).

Notice the rhetorical work done here to create and then compound a sense of crisis, and particularly the repeated attempts to draw out the emblematizing power of the event through metaphor and direct entreaties to see the event as something other than an event-in-itself. This is interpretive work, designed to give meaning to an event, to make a claim about its point of origin and, later in the article, to point to the wholesale changes needed to address these original, systemic problems. This interpretation of the event was by no means accepted by all. Within days of the fire, news outlets started to condemn what they saw as attempts to politicize the event and pronounce too-soon on the causes of the Grenfell Tower fire (see, for example Phillips 2017; Samuel 2017). In short, in the immediate aftermath of the Grenfell Tower fire, there was an impulse towards crisis, as well as an evident push-back against emerging crisis-narratives, what might be thought of as semantic jostling, as some actors pushed for, and others resisted, a code switch.

This was the context in which the Grenfell Tower Inquiry was launched. Announced a day after the fire, it served to answer to the demand for far-reaching crisis-work. Still, nearly seven years after the event (at the time of writing), yet to publish its final report, the inquiry has arguably more thoroughly satisfied the call to postpone judgement. The launch of the inquiry marked the point at which the event was formally moved into the soft legal realm, and this decision was framed by the then Prime Minister, Theresa May, as an acknowledgement of the seriousness of the event and the need for independent scrutiny. It is this mechanism that has served as the central soft legal mechanism in this case. Figure 2 sketches out the various strands of the soft legal review-work.

Fig. 2
figure 2

Timeline of the official review-work following the Grenfell Tower fire

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Like the IPCC investigation following the de Menezes shooting, the Grenfell Tower Inquiry has fractured and stalled. At the time of writing the Inquiry has completed its Phase Two hearings and is due to publish its final set of findings in Spring 2024. This represents a significant delay in reporting, partly due to the COVID-19 pandemic pausing proceedings, and partly due to the inquiry taking longer than expected. Again, as in the de Menezes case, these delays affect other strands of review-work, and are part of the distinctive temporality of the soft legal realm. In the months following the fire, inquests into the Grenfell fire deaths were opened and immediately adjourned, and decisions on whether to proceed to criminal investigations were deferred until late 2023, at the earliest (Booth 2022). Each of these legal mechanisms (arguably more meaningful, certainly having greater powers to enforce their decisions) have been pushed back to allow for the public inquiry to take place beforehand.

Other strands of investigation have continued alongside the inquiry and have either petered out as the time taken to complete the inquiry has extended, or are continuing towards completion in the absence of broader public debate about the deeper social origins of the Grenfell Tower fire. An example of the latter is the independent review of the building regulations and fire safety led by

Dame Judith Hackitt. This review body released its final report in May 2018 and called for a ‘radical rethink of the whole system’ of building regulations and fire safety, an overhaul that ‘is most definitely not just a question of the specification of cladding systems…’ (Hackitt Review 2018, p. 5). The resulting Building Safety Act, enacted in April 2022, seeks to take forward this ‘radical rethinking’, but the new legal duties it imposes will be enshrined by secondary legislation that is yet to be drafted and introduced. Not only that, but as Carr et al. (2022, p. 10) point out, this set of policy and legislative changes constitute a ‘limited adjustment of policy within a normal frame’, due to the lack of contextual consideration of the purpose and complexity of social housing and the reality of tenure for social housing tenants. This is precisely the sort of far-reaching discussion that a public inquiry might involve and prompt.

In other instances, review-work undertaken alongside the inquiry has lost momentum and stalled. The independent review-work into the governance of Kensington and Chelsea Council is a case in point. In the aftermath of the fire, an Independent Grenfell Recovery Taskforce was created to review the efforts of the Kensington and Chelsea Council (RBKC) to meet the needs of survivors and re-build trust. In its most recent report, the Taskforce was still unable to provide ‘unequivocal assurance that RBKC is effectively delivering a recovery for the bereaved and survivors and the wider community in north Kensington’ (Independent Grenfell Recovery Taskforce 2020, p. 1). They noted that, three years after the fire, a small number of Grenfell Tower residents still remained unhoused in permanent accommodation, and they bemoaned too the Council’s decision to axe the dedicated Grenfell Overview and Scrutiny Committee and move its work into the Council’s general scrutiny committees (Independent Grenfell Recovery Taskforce 2020, p. 3). The Taskforce was itself dissolved following the publication of this report, on the basis that after three years of monitoring, the government was confident the Council could ‘continue to improve without support from the Taskforce’ (Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government and Robert Jenrick MP 2020).

As various strands of review-work get pushed to the side, foreclose, or stall, the public inquiry becomes ever more important in deciding matters, and the lack of progress elsewhere—and subsequent outcry from loved-ones and relatives as the time taken deepens a sense of injustice—means that this central soft legal mechanism is subject to calls for it to do more. Right from the outset, the question of coverage is a contentious matter in any form of public crisis-work. In the case of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry—and in other central soft legal mechanisms besides—the boundary-setting work started with the creation of its terms of reference. This is public-facing work, involving, often, a public announcement from a Prime Minister, a public consultation, and an official response to both from a Chair. This ritual, so crucial to the early stages of an inquiry, signals that the review-work undertaken is rational, legalistic, and determined not by the interests of a political elite or media commentators, but by an objective, independent appraisal of what needs to be known. Looked at differently, and as Elliott and McGuiness (2002) note, the role of inquiries’ terms of reference is to prescribe not just the aims of the investigation, but what is in, and what is out, and, by extension, who is in, and who is out. All of these decisions shape the type of forum the inquiry will become, as well as the substance and the nature of the conclusions that can be drawn.

In the case of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry, the Chair, Sir Martin Moore-Bick, undertook a public consultation and was asked to draft the Inquiry’s terms of reference with due regard for public sentiment. In proposing the inquiry’s terms of reference, Moore-Bick noted that ‘many of those who have been affected by the fire and some others feel strongly that the scope of the Inquiry should be very broad and include an examination of social housing policy’, as well as local authority management and disaster-management (Grenfell Tower Inquiry 2017, n.p). ‘I share their concerns’, Moore-Bick continues, but he nonetheless reaches the conclusion that ‘the Inquiry you have asked me to conduct is not the best way of satisfying their wishes’ (Grenfell Tower Inquiry 2017, n.p).

He goes on to identify two reasons for this decision: first, the importance of the inquiry reaching a timely conclusion and secondly, because, in his view, ‘the inclusion of such broad questions within the scope of the Inquiry would raise questions of a social, economic, and political nature which…are not suitable for a judge-led inquiry’ (Grenfell Tower Inquiry 2017). It is a comment that might put us in mind of the closing remarks in the IPCC’s ‘Stockwell One’. Moore-Bick, like the IPCC, sees the ‘broad questions’ related to the event as very important, he believes that there is a clear need to discuss these matters, but he is also clear that—in his view—these issues should not be within the remit of the inquiry, a mechanism that (after all) relies upon legal processes to assess evidence and determine the specific and empirically verifiable features of an event.

Moore-Bick’s statement here is all the more notable given that socio-legal commentators and politicians frequently see public inquiries as appropriate mechanisms for dealing with public crises precisely because (unlike an inquest or criminal proceedings), they can broach broader questions related to systemic failings (see Salter 1990, for a discussion of this function of public inquiries). Here we find a fundamental disjuncture between what an inquiry can do (or, rather, what a public inquiry, as it operates in this particular cultural and historical moment can do), and what the public and politicians want it to achieve. This disjuncture helps explain further why central soft legal mechanisms have a tendency to become over-burdened. They are under pressure to do work that belongs to other institutional spheres—namely, that of politics and media debate—work that is not amenable to the type of forensic investigations of who, what, where, and when to which the legal sphere is especially well-suited. Work, too, that the cadre of legal experts that serve the soft legal realm are not professionally trained to carry out. We might note here Moore-Bick’s pointed reference to the Grenfell Tower Inquiry being a judge-led inquiry.

At the same time, as seen in both case studies analysed in this article, the central soft legal mechanism at the heart of any given web of review-work undertaken after a major crisis-event is repeatedly called upon to do a fuller job of the crisis-work that ostensibly only it can do. It seeks to do so by bracketing-out concerns. So it is that, just as the IPCC investigation split into two lines of investigation, during the preliminary hearings for the Grenfell Tower Inquiry, Moore-Bick announced that this review-work would be split into ‘Phase 1’ and ‘Phase 2’. The first phase covered the incident itself by means of an empirical investigation into what happened and who did what. The second phase covered ‘all other issues’. This form of language—Phase 1, Phase 2, ‘issues’—conceals more than it reveals, and that is part of its rhetorical effect. It declares this investigatory work to be a fundamentally bureaucratic, legal endeavour: neutral, dispassionate, and focused. Yet there is a clear prioritization of certain strands of the review-work here: that ‘Phase 2’ will incorporate so much, and that the ‘other’ matters examined therein are to be turned to so much later on, tells us something of this.

Concluding discussion

This article approached the public crisis as a phenomenon with particular formal qualities, making it different in kind to catastrophes and emergencies. To call an event a crisis is to suggest that we have reached a point of no return and need to undertake searching deliberation and far-reaching change. If emergencies fasten our attention on the here-and-now and catastrophes require us to focus on what has been lost, crises ask us to look back to assess ‘how did we get here?’ and to look forwards to consider ‘where to next?’

Public debate in the aftermath of a harmful event often circles around the question of whether the event should be understood as an emergency, crisis, or disaster. This grapple over event-definition was evident in the aftermath of both the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes and the Grenfell Tower fire. This article suggests that we see this as a key feature of the semantics of code switching, the early phase of societalization where an issue or event is being transformed into a crisis that requires inter-institutional attention and action—although, as I point out below, it is often the case that attempts at code switching re-occur. The analysis above suggests that when code switching is attempted it prompts a pattern of claim and rapid counter-claim in the media—above, I characterized this as semantic jostling over the ontology of the event. In both cases above, this heating-up of media debate coincides with the event being moved to a new institutional forum, specifically a soft legal realm. I turn now to summarize and discuss the core functions of this interstitial institution, highlighting three threats to its legitimacy.

The analysis above illustrated how the key features of the soft legal realm—its independence and separation from both the political sphere and the institution it is tasked with scrutinizing, its temporality, and its reliance on legal process and expertise—work towards a distinctive understanding and treatment of the crisis-event. Together, these features produce a particular epistemological orientation towards the event in question, and this, I suggested above, constitutes the first level of translation undertaken by this interstitial institution. The various strands of the review-work in the soft legal realm approach the event as something to be fixed in time and space by determining the coordinates of the incident and empirically verifying ‘what happened’. This approach, a product of its reliance on legal process and principle, grants the soft legal realm a distinctive neutrality. This in turn is crucial to rhetorical claims in the political sphere that this is the rightful place of crisis-work—especially, as in both cases above, when juxtaposed with the noisy, declamatory sphere of media debate—but this neutrality is illusory. The work the soft legal realm undertakes, as with any interstitial institution, is interpretive in nature. It depends upon a particular way of seeing and understanding an event, not least of all, as an event in and of itself. Crisis-events, though, have an emblematizing power—that is, they are called upon to represent deeper, hidden problems—and when mechanisms for resolving would-be crises neglect this, or fail to give space to this aspect of crisis-work, the legitimacy of that mechanism is likely to be contested (and we see precisely this type of strain in the de Menezes case).

The analysis above identified other features of the soft legal realm that potentially threaten its legitimacy as a site for crisis-work. This article approached the soft legal realm as a network of actors and activities, and this distinctive composition, as well as the fact that this interstitial institution sits between and feeds into the work of other institutions, contributes to the tendency for public crises to stall and calcify. At the heart of this network sits a central soft legal instrument—in the Jean Charles de Menezes case it was the IPCC investigation, in the Grenfell Tower fire it is a public inquiry—and the power to decide is held somewhere between this official body and the other organizations and actors involved in resolving a matter. As illustrated in the analysis above, calls for more action, or action that is different in kind are generally met with the official response that ‘we’ll need to wait to see what the investigation says’. This gives a false sense of decisiveness to the central soft legal mechanism, which often lacks any real power to decide matters.

Power is always on the move in the soft legal realm, residing nowhere in particular—and potentially other interstitial institutions, too, given their role in mediating inter-institutional matters, and then brokering for and servicing multiple institutional actors. For those outside of the network of activities, this is liable to provoke frustration and the perception that the matter has run aground. So it is that, during the time it takes for the soft legal realm to do its work, there are often recurrent attempts to re-assert the impulse towards crisis. The standard official response—evident in both cases analysed here—is to extend the work of the central soft legal mechanism so that it absorbs these recurrent attempts at code switching. It struggles to do so. Of particular note in the analysis above is the frank admission by those in charge of the central strand of review-work that there are really important discussions to be had, wide-ranging and ethical in character, that lie outside of their remit, that are, they want to suggest, more suited to an altogether different institution of public debate. This helps explain why, as the central soft legal mechanism extends to absorb new impulses towards crisis, it tends to bracket-out issues, voices, and perspectives and keep them separate from the primary task in hand (which is, as noted above, determining, by empirical means, ‘what happened’).

All of this helps explain why review-work in the soft legal realm tends to become protracted and fragmentary, and as a result, why the crisis-work undertaken by this institution frequently stalls and calcifies. It is tempting to see this as a means of neutralizing crises in such a way as to make them less liable to be the subject of emotive media coverage or political point-scoring (a strategy discussed by Sulitzeanu-Kenan 2010). Another possibility is that the impulse towards crisis is diverted, rather than thwarted; that is, that it is absorbed into other forms of public action and feeling—namely public distrust, cynicism, and anger. These are sticky, pungent collective feelings and have become key political resources in the opening decades of the twenty-first century, animating other distinctive institutional responses to would-be public crises. Sociologists and political scientists have devoted considerable attention to the manufacture of crises in the service of a populist political rhetoric, but much less to the more neutral-sounding language and processes of the soft legal realm. This article suggests that we take more seriously—analytically and theoretically—the effects and affects of this institution, and grant it the same sociological attention as that afforded to the media and politics as cultural sites of meaning-making in the aftermath of a crisis-event.