When the sociologist Stanley Cohen began his research into folk devils and moral panics he primarily looked at how the public created and fueled – with the assistance of the media - these things; he looked at how a small number of fights between “mods” and “rockers”, two opposing youth cultures in the 1960’s, was blown up by the media to create a national panic and the vilification of anyone who rode a scooter or a motorbike, and/or listened to a particular type of music etc. However, moral panics and the creation of folk devils can also happen at an institutional level, and like those that occur in public, can be somewhat self-fulfilling/confirming.

In Brixton, London in the 1980’s, there was a widespread belief by law-enforcement that most young black men in the area/locale were involved in crime, creating both a folk devil and a moral panic within policing. The response was to increase the practice of “stop and search” e.g., stopping and searching more young men on the loose pretense/premise that their presence in a particular location, at a particular time was “suspicious” and indicated that they could be thinking about/planning committing an offense etc. From a simple statistical perspective, the more people you stop and search, the more likely you are to find items on them which are illegal, such as a weapon or drugs etc. This practice ends up creating a “self-fulfilling prophecy” e.g., when you stop and search 100 people, you find 10 illegal items, when you stop and search 200 people, you find 21 illegal items i.e., more than double! When you consider that as a species, we are far more likely/susceptible to believe a story than statistics, one stop and search incident that found everyone in a group of three had something illegal on them, will circulate and become folklore within an institution, and when that seeps out to the public, the institutional moral panic becomes a societal one. 

From a statistical perspective the same thing happens with zero-tolerance policing. If you stop/arrest somebody for any minor infraction, you are going to find more people who are wanted for having committed a more serious crime e.g., if you apprehend everyone who appears to be skipping a barrier at a subway station, you are going to find more people who are wanted on a warrant etc. Increase the sample size, increase the results. At the same time, you may alienate more people who are innocent, increasing a perception that those in law enforcement are unfair and overly heavy-handed etc. When the story of one individual being unfairly apprehended by a law enforcement for skipping a barrier when they had a ticket etc., gets out, that “story” is also more likely to have more weight than it actually deserves, when compared to the statistics; possibly creating a moral panic concerning overly strong-handed/aggressive policing and law enforcement officers being portrayed as “folk devils”.

One institutional “moral panic” that happened in 2025 was the spreading of an idea through law enforcement that the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua (TdA), had told its members that they should proactively attack law enforcement agents and agencies, engaging with them using lethal force. Whilst some politicians jumped on this “rumor” and voraciously spread it, partly to justify the removal of South American immigrants from the US, a few months after Greg Abbott made a statement about the gang’s intent, the FBI -possibly the organization with the most accurate information and knowledge on gang activity - in an internal report stated that there was no credible evidence to support the claim that TdA were looking to actively target law enforcement officers. The rumor/idea that the gang was looking to target members of agencies was initially started in 2024 by the Albuquerque Police Department when they issued an Officer Safety/Awareness bulletin citing that there was credible evidence from Homeland Security Investigations (HIS), that the gang was looking to target LEO’s and other law enforcement agencies’ members. This warning was later distributed to a number of other agencies across the US and the “moral panic” started to spread and whilst obviously the gang Tren de Aragua should be on law enforcement’s radar, its status was raised to that of the proverbial “Folk Devil”. Although this incorrect information regarding TdA wasn’t meant to get into public hands it inevitably did with many news agencies stoking the fire and introducing the public to a new threat and danger that they needed to be aware about.

It soon became apparent, within security circles, that there was an acute lack of knowledge by many at the “top” concerning how Tren de Aragua was organized and operated, in fact around this time it appeared that the group didn’t have much control of who used the name, with individuals around the US identifying themselves as being part of the gang without actually having any ties to the central leadership in Venezuela, and it appears that the gang functions more like a franchise or network of semi-autonomous cells operating under the TdA brand or name, rather than having a single unified chain of command. This creates an issue for security and law enforcement agencies and intelligence in that because of this brand-usage those involved with gaining intelligence on the group have to assess affiliation levels e.g., core vs peripheral, rather than assume all “TdA” labelled actors are centrally directed.   

This is not to suggest that Tren de Aragua (TdA) both as an organization and as a “brand” shouldn’t be taken seriously, but rather to demonstrate how a rumor/piece of misinformation by an agency can quickly create a panic within law enforcement and other agencies that spills out into the political/public domain, with the folk-devil that has been created being far more frightening and wide-spread than it actually is. The problem is that once such genies are out of the bottle they are very hard to get back in again, especially when they have a degree of truth to them.