Moral panics are often centred around people who are marginalized in society due to their race or ethnicity, sexuality, class, nationality or religion. Discuss within the context of a case study.

Moral Panics and the George Floyd Case: A Racialized Crisis Student’s Name Institution of Affiliation Course Date Moral Panics and the George Floyd Case: A Racialized Crisis A moral panic refers to how the community responds to felt threats, usually in an overblown fashion, furthering the reproduction of power as usual, according to Mohul (2024). Stanley Cohen first explained the idea in his book Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972), where he investigated how certain groups are scapegoats of broader social distress. Cohen argues that a pattern is set wherein a particular group or behaviour is portrayed as dangerous, the media spreads the public fear, and moral entrepreneurs such as politicians, law enforcement, and advocacy groups call for retributive action. Such reactionary policies based on these moral panics, notwithstanding, tend to disproportionately affect marginalised communities while bolstering the power of the state. Using the lens of moral panic, we can examine the killing of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, and the ensuing global protests aiming at bringing down police brutality. Floyd's death from Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on his neck for more than nine minutes was caught on video and circulated quickly on social media and news networks (Lennox, 2022). The footage fueled outrage and brought millions of people to the streets, demanding racial justice and against state-sanctioned violence. But with protests in the United States and around the globe, they became the catalyst of a moral panic. For some, these demonstrations were merely a justifiable response to racial injustice. In contrast, others, who are conservative political figures and media outlets, deem them as violent uprisings against law and order. This story, endowed with racist fears, followed a par converging that Black-led Resistance movements were criminalised and delegitimised. Using the George Floyd case as a contemporary example, this paper explores these mechanisms of moral panics. It tries to understand the sociohistorical framework of moral panics, how they have affected marginalised groups, and why they lead to the construction of crime and deviance. They offer to analyse the media's, politicians,’ and eventually law enforcement’s role in the construction of moral panics as tools of social control that maintain systemic inequality. Understanding Moral Panics A situation where a social issue is exaggerated or misrepresented, and people get widespread fear and ask for speedy action to be taken is called moral panic, according to Falkof (2021). Cohen's framework describes this escalation as moral panics via media sensationalism, political rhetoric, and law enforcement crackdowns. Not all these crises are based on real threats, but the product is crises built as urgent dangers for which extreme measures are justified. Moral panics about marginalised groups are often about them as threats to societal values, but throughout history. For example, the War on Drugs in the 1980s and 1990s is one of the most notable cases of framing people as having a problem with drug use, specifically, crack cocaine as a predominantly Black problem (Lindsay & Vuolo, 2021). This moral panic generated a policy such as the Anti‐Drug Abuse Act of 1986, which mandated minimum sentences that disproportionally ensnared Black Americans. During the 1990s, new kinds of young Black and Latino men were policed as inherently violent criminals through the 'superpredator' panic that fueled an expansion of zero-tolerance policing and mass incarceration. Moral panics do not arise naturally but are actively created by powerful actors, such as media institutions, political leaders, and law enforcement agencies, according to Walsh and Hill (2023). The role of media coverage in shaping public opinion is vital as it selectively reports on cases, focuses on a particular narrative and words out the context of the event in question. Moral panics are not only used to advocate for policy changes that permissively apply the state's power, such as the spending of more police dollars or the enactment of draconian laws of sentencing, but politicians also employ them to gain popular support for existing laws. Then, the panics are reinforced by law enforcement agencies, who act as protectors of order in the face of supposed social chaos. The George Floyd case reveals how this society's original moral panic persists (Oakley, 2024). The protests that took place following Floyd's killing were soon rebranded as violent and destabilising both on social media and in mainstream discourse. Here, a new narrative emerged that politicised many of these issues, allowing political leaders as well as media figures to follow suit by distracting attention from systemic racism and toward matters concerning law enforcement and public safety. Law enforcement agencies take part in both creating moral panics and receiving advantages through these societal phenomena. The rise of public fears can lead organi...