Community Safety: A Critique (original) (raw)
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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.
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 and Social Policy
2001
This article examines community safety policy. In many countries community safety has become a replacement discourse for situational crime prevention, although in some countries such as the UK, it too is threatened with replacement by the narrower concerns of crime reduction. Community safety represents the apparent merging of the concerns of criminal justice and social policy, specifically over questions of social inclusion and exclusion. Focusing in the main upon UK policy, but also drawing upon experience elsewhere, this article scrutinises the policy of community safety, arguing that while it offers an inclusionary vision of crime control, its practice may be something rather different. More specifically, and in common with the trajectory of much advanced liberal social policy, in practice community safety may have an exclusionary effect. Thus, while community safety may represent the convergence of social and criminal justice policies, it does so on neo-liberal rather than welfare liberal terms. It also means that community safety has a closer connection to policies of punitive sovereignty -particularly sentencing policies of mass incarceration -than might often be assumed.
Local Safety Committees and the Community Governance of Crime Prevention and Community Safety
Over the past thirty years or so, the onus of crime prevention and community safety in Victoria has been shifting away from police to a more community-based role involving partnerships between multiple community stakeholders. This paper focuses on one such group of community stakeholders known as the Local Safety Committee (LSC). LSCs represent a form of public sector governance that is concerned with the Community Governance of Crime Prevention and Community Safety. This paper describes the outcome of two survey questionnaires involving 41 LSC members from six Local Government Areas in Victoria:
2013
This paper begins by outlining and critiquing what we term the dominant anglophone model of neo-liberal community safety and crime prevention. As an alternative to this influential but flawed model, a comparative analysis is provided of the different constitutional-legal settlements in each of the five jurisdictions across the UK and the Republic of Ireland (ROI), and their uneven institutionalization of community safety. In the light of this it is argued that the nature of the Corresponding author: Daniel Gilling, Plymouth University, Plymouth PL4 8AA, UK. Email: D.Gilling@plymouth.ac.uk 482612 EUC0010.1177/1477370813482612European Journal of CriminologyGilling et al. 2013