Community Security: The Irish Problem (original) (raw)
Related papers
Ashgate , 2000
This book details the first communities based crime survey carried out within Northern Ireland. It explores a number of questions beyond the usual remit of local crime surveys in order to more fully understand a whole range of issues relating to the experience of living in a society where the more obvious manifestations of conflict are beginning to recede and other more mundane but still important issues relating to crime and policing are coming to the fore. The production of this book coincides with dramatic changes to the political, social and criminological framework of Northern Ireland. Following the conclusion of the multi-party talks in April 1998, and the enactment of the Northern Ireland Act 1998 detailing structures for devolved government, there has been a movement towards restoring ‘normal’ political conditions in the jurisdiction. Along with the large-scale political changes there has been a concomitant process of review in the areas of criminal justice and policing. Mechanisms have been put in place to secure the early release of the vast majority of paramilitary prisoners and provisions for victims of the conflict have been considered. These changes reflect the fact that life in Northern Ireland is poised to change in fundamental ways and will hopefully emerge as, in the words of the Independent Commission on Policing, ‘a community at peace with itself and committed to the democratic process’ (Patten, 1999 p. 1).
Crime and Community: Continuities, Contradictions and Complexities
1996
This article explores the research on community crime prevention, fear of crime, and alternative crime control strategies that go beyond those of traditional criminal justice agencies. The discussion focuses on the competing paradigms for prevention and control that have been tried over the past 20 years and relates that debate to the larger questions of crime causation and public attitudes toward crime that fuel this competition. Alternative policy options are discussed and recommendations related to the most promising approaches are made.
Questioning Appeals to Community within Crime Prevention and Control
European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research, 1999
This article casts a critical eye over some of the (often ignored) assumptions which underlie recent appeals to community in crime prevention and control. The article considers the philosophical origins, ambiguities and tensions within such appeals. In so doing, it draws explicitly upon the growth of ‘community safety’ and to a lesser extent ‘restorative justice’ in Britain and considers some of the implications to which this shift may give rise. In particular, it focuses upon the manner in which appeals to community converge and collide with changing social relations which may undermine their progressive potential. Specific attention is given to the implications of: increasing social and spatial dislocation; the commodification of security; and policy debates about a growing ‘underclass’. It is argued that there is much confusion as to how, and to what extent, communities can contribute to the construction of social order. Within the dynamics of community safety and crime control practices there are dangers that ‘security differentials’ may become increasingly significant characteristics of wealth and status with implications for social exclusion. This questions the extent to which crime is an appropriate vehicle around which to (re)construct open and tolerant communities.
Prospects of Community Crime Control Initiatives in an Era of
2016
Terrorism has arguably become one of the foremost security challenges besetting Nigeria today. Not only has the country lost so much interms of human and material resources to several terrorist attacks, the social and political colourations of this phenomenon have become the newest threat to Nigeria’s corporate existence. Although the deployment of the combined team of the armed forces, the police, and allied state security services by government has recorded some successes, it is believed that much more successes would have been recorded if this response took the local people into confidence, especially because in many cases, the insurgents live and operate among these people. Against this backdrop therefore, and drawing from the success stories of the neighbourhood crime control groups in Lagos State, this paper explores the prospects of community crime control initiatives in fighting terrorism. The paper is anchored on the twin theories of community participation and partnership ...
Inter-Agency Co-Operation and Community-Based Crime Prevention
The British Journal of Criminology
The role of 'inter-agency' cooperation in the sphere of crime prevention has been promoted increasingly by central and local government policy initiatives in recent years. In this paper we consider a number of theoretical issues raised by the examination of power relations in interorganizational contexts and the definitional processes through which local crime 'problems' are identified and translated into policies and practice. The work of Geoffrey Pearson and colleagues represents the pre-eminent contribution to criminological understanding in the field. In this paper we develop a sympathetic critique of their work. In doing so we draw on our own two-year research study of the social dynamics of inter-agency cooperation in a number of metropolitan and shire county community-based crime prevention initiatives.
2005
This paper aims to introduce readers to the contemporary British experiences of crime prevention, crime reduction and community safety. The different terms used to depict the policies, practices, politics and theories geared towards the ‘prevention’, or failing that the ‘reduction’, of crime, and those strategies aimed at the promotion of ‘community safety’ are indicative of the changing and hybrid nature of the policy domain under scrutiny here. In part these different preventative logics and techniques arise out of criticisms of traditional ‘reactive’ criminal justice responses to crime such as punishment and individualistic treatment approaches. Both situational and social prevention approaches which came to the fore in the 1980s share a preoccupation with preventing ‘criminality’ before the event. Meanwhile, targeted crime ‘reduction’ approaches, based on the pragmatic evaluation of what can be measured and counted in terms of ‘what works’, have come to prominence since the late...
Community Dimensions of Offending, Crime and Fear of Crime
ESRC Seminar Series: Crime, Insecurity and Well-being Seminar Four: Thursday 16 December, 2004 Additional notes to the paper “Attitudes to Punishment in two high-crime communities” We were asked to make this contribution to the ESRC Seminar because, apparently, the Seminar has so far focussed very predominantly on individual dimensions of victimization and the fear of crime, and raising the issue of a potential community dimension was thought to be valuable. Our principal empirical contribution rests in the paper that has already been circulated, concerning a recent study of attitudes to punishment in two high-crime communities in Sheffield. That paper is not as irrelevant to the general themes of the ESRC Seminar as might appear at first sight, because in order to explain the difference in punitiveness between the two neighbourhoods it was necessary to explore issues relating to disorder and ‘control signals’ in the two areas. However, in order to relate the circulated paper more closely to the main concerns of the ESRC Seminar, it has been considered helpful to prepare also this brief additional note.
Crime control, the security state and constitutional justice in Ireland
The International Journal of Evidence & Proof, 2016
It is clear that Ireland has witnessed evidence of a ‘tooling up’ of the state in the fight against crime over the last two decades. Crime control analyses—often relying upon the use of stark juxtaposition—are very useful in describing this trend. They can, however, also conceal the complexities that exist underneath the illusory comfort of binary labels such as ‘crime control’, ‘security state’, ‘actuarial justice’ or ‘Rule by Law’ governance. In employing examples of recent case-law relating to terrorism and sexual offending, this article will argue that crime control analyses fail to properly account for particular legal liberal properties such as rights as trumps, deontological reasoning, fidelity to precedent, the coordinated and hierarchical features of law, and the last ‘authoritative voice’ possessed by the judiciary in dispute resolution. These properties continue to possess institutional and epistemic authority in Ireland, and need to be written in to any ‘history of the p...