Local Safety Committees and the Community Governance of Crime Prevention and Community Safety (original) (raw)
Related papers
Community Safety and Crime Prevention Partnerships: Challenges and Opportunities1
In many jurisdictions around the world, community safety and crime prevention activity is supported by interagency committees. In the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW), local government Community Safety Officers (CSOs) lead, support or participate in a range of interagency and ‘whole of government’ networks, most of which were established to support central NSW state government crime prevention and community safety initiatives. Research was conducted with the aim of exploring the CSOs’ experience of the ‘whole of government’ partnerships established to support community safety and crime prevention in NSW. The findings support international research which suggests that central‐local partnerships are inhibited by different agendas, responsibilities and power dynamics across different levels of government. Some of the key contextual challenges for this work include concerns about costs shifting from State to local government and about shifting State government priorities; barriers to funding and to accessing crime (and other) data; and various administrative burdens. Consequently, we argued that there is a need for formal engagement and negotiation between, on the one hand, State government agencies that steer NSW crime prevention and, on the other, community safety policy initiatives and local government. Such engagement could help overcome the perception, indeed the reality, that shifting and dumping costs and responsibilities to local government is creating a range of burdens for CSOs.
Understanding the local government role in crime prevention
In Australia, crime prevention is primarily the responsibility of state and territory governments. What is less well understood is the significant role of local government in developing and delivering crime prevention at the community level, although councils have long been involved in helping to create safer communities. This research offers one of the first detailed insights into the valuable contribution made by local government within the multi-layered crime prevention strategies and initiatives which keep Australian communities safe. The Drugs and Crime Prevention Committee of the Parliament of Victoria carried out this research as part of an investigation into locally-based approaches to community safety and crime prevention in 2011. The results of a comprehensive survey of the crime prevention activities of local government authorities across Victoria are examined. This study reveals the issues local government prioritise, the responses they deploy and the challenges that they face, such as gaps in capacity and the need to manage complex relationships between participants who work on local community safety. Findings reveal a system that, while highly variable in sophistication and reach, provides an important platform for improving local community safety. The study also identifies important gaps and opportunities to improve collaboration between government and the private and NGO sectors.
Hard on the heels of the great paradigm shift towards prevention and, later, local partnerships in law and order policy making during the 1980s came a development of potentially greater importance: the shift to 'community safety' planning. Pioneered initially as a social democratic and 'welfarist' antidote to the retributivist drift in national criminal justice policy, community safety approaches were adopted within progressive local government circles for a combination of both ideological and instrumental reasons. Yet just as the election of a new government, with its declared commitment to the community safety agenda, promising a new statutory responsibility upon local authorities and requiring the establishment of strategic community safety partnerships, appeared to bring communiy safety planning to the centre of the local stage, so the first murmurings of criticism of this new paradigm began to make themselves heard (Crawford, 1994, 1997). Ultimately, as this article will argue, it is difficult to disentangle many of the criticisms of the emerging 'community safety' discourse from related criticisms including; questions of accountability in the delivery of policing services, interest representation in local corporatist policy-making systems, market-led developments and growing consumerist pressure in the risk management field, new forms of public management, ambiguous notions of 'community' and the social division of victimisation. More explicitly theorised versions of these emerging criticisms also began to stress community safety strategy's potential for selective problem construction, 'deviancy amplification' and, following Cohen (1985), the extension of undemocratic forms of insidious social control. Yet if these criticisms began to surface even in relation to the relatively 'pure' form of the community safety project they appear ever more pertinent to the proposals emerging in New Labour's Crime and Disorder programme.[1] The irony is, no sooner had the community safety paradigm reached centre stage in a distinctly local government approach to strategic crime prevention planning, than it came to be somewhat decentred by New Labour's more specific crime and disorder and youth justice proposals. It is too early to draw any firm conclusions and there is undoubtedly still great potential for imaginative local work in the new arrangements. But a great deal will depend upon the contexts in which the new arrangements have to operate and the extent to which the new partnerships are able to address genuine community safety needs whilst avoiding the kinds of problems, referred to earlier, where the community safety paradigm was already attracting criticism. The following article considers the origins of the community safety discourse, develops a critical analysis of it, and concludes with a brief commentary upon some of the potential pitfalls in New Labour's partial adoption of these approaches. Community safety: ten years on The discourse on 'community safety' has been around for little over a decade. (SOLACE, 1986) Even so, it has become well established in a fairly short period of time, but this only begs a further question. We should not take them for granted. Use of the concept 'community safety' was developed by the GLC Police Committee Support Unit to describe a distinctly local government approach to crime prevention and related issues. More and more in local government circles the phrase 'crime prevention' has been reinterpreted to mean the promotion of community safety and the securing of improvements in the quality of life of residents by reference to a wide range of social issues, the tackling of certain risks and sources of vulnerability and development of policies on a broad range of fronts (ADC, 1990; Coopers and Lybrand, 1994). According to the Local Government Management Board, 'community safety is the concept of community-based action to inhibit and remedy the causes and consequences of criminal, intimidatory and other related antisocial behaviour. Its purpose is to secure sustainable reductions in crime and fear of crime in local communities. Its approach is based on the formation of multi-agency partnerships between the public, private and voluntary sectors to formulate and introduce community-based measures against crime' (LGMB, 1996). A survey into the community safety activities of local government by the Local Government Management Board in England and Wales, from which the above definition is derived, asked authorities to nominate their core priorities for the coming year. The specific priorities identified by the responding authorities were, in descending order: (1) young people, (2) substance misuse, (3) fear of crime, and (4) CCTV and town centre security (LGMB, 1996: 25.) Such a list of priorities will hardly be surprising though they reflect a variety of concerns and in some respects quite contrasting criminological perspectives. To some, no doubt, they will reflect a pragmatic, balanced and multi-layered response to problems of crime and community safety whilst to others it will appear more of a 'shotgun' approach-something might work-or perhaps just 'suck it and see'. From crime prevention to community safety According to the London Strategic Policy Unit, 'using the concept of community safety rather than crime prevention was deliberate, in order to set the agenda in a positive way, emphasising people rather than property, and the roles of local authorities, community and tenants' groups rather than the police. The concept recognises that improving the physical security of individual houses and estates, while useful, will not of its own necessarily improve people's safety or sense of security in their own homes and neighbourhoods. A sense of safety is related to the relations among the people who live in the neighbourhood, and to their fears about crime as well as to their personal experience of crime' (London Strategic Policy Unit, 1986, from Demuth, 1989). Furthermore, according to this approach, safety needs to be addressed by people becoming involved and responsible for taking coordinated action within their own residential neighbourhoods in conjunction with statutory agencies. The Morgan Report (1991) spelled out the important differences of emphasis in the ideas of crime prevention and community safety. The term crime prevention is often narrowly interpreted and this reinforces the view that it is solely the responsibility of the police. The term community safety is open to wider interpretation and could encourage greater participation from all sections of the community... We see community safety as having both social and situational aspects, as being concerned with people, communities and organisations including families, victims and at risk groups, as well as with attempting to reduce particular types of crime and the fear of crime. (Morgan Report, 1991) Furthermore, it has been suggested (ESCC, 1996) that Community Safety initiatives could be guided by a general theme of 'protecting those at risk'. Thus, in considering what action to take in relation to a particular crime and safety problem, prevention and safety would be defined in their widest sense. For example, inter-agency work on the prevention of racial harassment would require the involvement of the police, housing departments, education departments, health authorities and other agencies including, for instance victim support, voluntary sector agencies and the Crown Prosecution Service-to say nothing of About the author Peter Squires lectures in criminology and allied topics in the School of Applied Social Science at the University of Brighton. His research interests include crime prevention, community safety, CCTV, firearms, crime and gun control, and citizenship and social security.
2000
The policy shift over the last decade or so from situational crime prevention to community safety is one which has been interpreted by many as a progressive change, rationally responding to the alleged weaknesses of the situational approach with a more liberal and holistic approach to crime prevention. However, this paper sets out an argument which casts doubt upon such an interpretation. It presents the shift towards community safety as a consequence of the harnessing of crime prevention to the interests of those who see within it a means of governance which risks undermining the best intentions of local practitioners.
2016
The Local Government in Scotland Act (2003) introduced Community Planning as a statutory responsibility in Scotland. The main aims of community planning are described as "making sure people and communities are genuinely engaged in the decisions made on public services which affect them; allied to a commitment from organisations to work together, not apart, in providing better public services" (Scottish Executive, 2003a). For the police, this implied the need to create 'local solutions to locally identified concerns' (Strathclyde Police, 2004, p2) and to adopt a holistic approach to community safety which is problem oriented rather than organisation led (Crawford, 1998, p10). The specific and often local nature of problems put forward by communities, is therefore allocated a dominant role in determining the nature of the solution (Goldstein, 1990). This thesis has explored the implementation of community planning and associated community safety policies within a case study area of the former Strathclyde Police. The processes of partnership working and community engagement were found to be central to this approach. Meta-bureaucracy has been used to describe the partnerships activities and linkage to national outcomes presented in this thesis. That is to say, partnership working in this research does not represent a clear growth of 'autonomous' networks and governance arrangements as set out by Rhodes (2000) but rather an extension of bureaucratic controls. State actors such as the police service remain pre-eminent within increasingly formalised systems of partnership. Issues of voice, leadership and pragmatic culture were all important findings for the implementation of community planning in practice. However, an implementation gap was identified between the rhetoric and lived experience of those entrusted to deliver these policy goals. Compared to more recent developments of a national police service, issues of professionalisation, operational autonomy and reduction of effective local accountabilityall supported police focus on enforcement led policing as iv opposed to partnership working and community safety more broadly.
Hard on the heels of the great paradigm shift towards prevention and, later, local partnerships in law and order policy making during the 1980s came a development of potentially greater importance: the shift to 'community safety' planning. Pioneered initially as a social democratic and 'welfarist' antidote to the retributivist drift in national criminal justice policy, community safety approaches were adopted within progressive local government circles for a combination of both ideological and instrumental reasons. Yet just as the election of a new government, with its declared commitment to the community safety agenda, promising a new statutory responsibility upon local authorities and requiring the establishment of strategic community safety partnerships, appeared to bring communiy safety planning to the centre of the local stage, so the first murmurings of criticism of this new paradigm began to make themselves heard (Crawford, 1994, 1997). Ultimately, as this article will argue, it is difficult to disentangle many of the criticisms of the emerging 'community safety' discourse from related criticisms including; questions of accountability in the delivery of policing services, interest representation in local corporatist policy-making systems, market-led developments and growing consumerist pressure in the risk management field, new forms of public management, ambiguous notions of 'community' and the social division of victimisation. More explicitly theorised versions of these emerging criticisms also began to stress community safety strategy's potential for selective problem construction, 'deviancy amplification' and, following Cohen (1985), the extension of undemocratic forms of insidious social control. Yet if these criticisms began to surface even in relation to the relatively 'pure' form of the community safety project they appear ever more pertinent to the proposals emerging in New Labour's Crime and Disorder programme.[1] The irony is, no sooner had the community safety paradigm reached centre stage in a distinctly local government approach to strategic crime prevention planning, than it came to be somewhat decentred by New Labour's more specific crime and disorder and youth justice proposals. It is too early to draw any firm conclusions and there is undoubtedly still great potential for imaginative local work in the new arrangements. But a great deal will depend upon the contexts in which the new arrangements have to operate and the extent to which the new partnerships are able to address genuine community safety needs whilst avoiding the kinds of problems, referred to earlier, where the community safety paradigm was already attracting criticism. The following article considers the origins of the community safety discourse, develops a critical analysis of it, and concludes with a brief commentary upon some of the potential pitfalls in New Labour's partial adoption of these approaches.
2011
Victoria University in conjunction with Crime Prevention Victoria (CPV) received an ARC grant to investigate the relationships between crime prevention and community governance. The first task of the project was to develop a framework, linking community needs, community capacity, wellbeing and CPV interventions, which guide selection of social indicators and then compile a database of data from various sources. Among the difficulties inherent in developing social indicators are: selecting a framework to guide the development and analysis of the indicators, the difficulty of obtaining a reliable across-government comprehensive data base that would be continuously up-dated, the different contexts, policy goals and programs that indicators could serve, the significance of different definitions and contexts, applying appropriate criteria to guide the selection of the indicators, and the diversity of views about how indicators how indicators should or could be used The purpose of this pa...