Crime and Insecurity

Adam Crawford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135989224
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Concerns over insecurity and questions of safety have become central issues in social and political debates across Europe and the western world. Crucial changes have followed as a result, such as a redefinition of the role of the state in relation to policing - a central theme of this book - and an explosion in the growth of private policing. These developments have, in their turn, heightened feelings of insecurity and safety, particularly where populations have become increasingly mobile and societies more socially fragmented, culturally diverse and economically fragmented. Responses to insecurity now increasingly inform decisions made by governments, organisations and ordinary people in their social interactions. This book makes a key contribution to an understanding of these developments, approaching the subject from a range of perspectives, across several different disciplines. The three parts of the book look at broader theoretical and thematic issues, then at cross-national and pan-European developments and debates in European governance, and finally explore specific examples of local issues of community safety and the broader implications these have. Leading figures in the field draw upon criminological, legal, social, and political theory to shed new light on what has become one of the most intractable problems facing western societies.

Part 1
Crime and insecurity

Chapter 1

The governance of crime and insecurity in an anxious age: the trans-European and the local

Adam Crawford

Introduction

Across European countries, nation-states appear to be confronting a major crisis under the dual pressures of globalisation and localisation. The march of global capital and finance, together with ever-closer European integration, has encouraged the international flow of business, trade and information. However, alongside this process of delocalisation – in which social systems are stretched across time and space – exists an apparently contradictory process of relocalisation. Here forms of control are increasingly inscribed into the fabric of local territorial and spatial interactions (Robert 2000). In the process, many traditional forms of place-based authority and social control have been torn up. Global flows of capital and culture have significantly affected and recast territorial communities.

This has resulted in what some commentators have referred to as the ‘hollowing out of the state’ (Rhodes 1994): the erosion of the nation-state’s capability to exercise political control. The modern state – the self-proclaimed monopolistic guardian of social order and crime control – is being restructured and its powers rearticulated both from above and below. This ‘hollowing out’ of the state is expressed in, and stimulated by, governmental strategies of privatisation, diverse forms of ‘state rule at a distance’ and the emergence of public–private partnerships and ‘policy networks’ (Crawford 2001a). As a result, there appears to be an increasingly profound relationship between globalised conditions and local circumstances. This constitutes a fundamental hallmark of late modernity. And yet these tendencies are uneven: whilst capital and information flow freely, politics and labour remain decidedly local (Castells 1996).

The impact and implications of these trends have been differently experienced in divergent European countries. In France, for example, the ‘shock of globalisation’ has been particularly acute as the French state has been forced to come to terms with its own limitations under external pressures (Garapon 1995). This is particularly so given the shortcomings of traditional French legal culture in responding to the tasks of contemporary social life: notably the flexible and pragmatic demands of global markets and the local demands of the recognition of diverse social identities. Both of these appear to be at odds with the rigidity, idealism and universalising symbolism of French legal and political discourse (Wieviorka 1997).

Across Europe, contemporary social life is one in which increasing uncertainty, insecurity and diversity co-exist with concerns about safety. Traditional forms of acquaintance and trust (often borne of localised relations organised in terms of place) upon which security and safety have been founded are increasingly fragmenting through processes of ‘detraditionalisation’. In its place we must increasingly place trust in disembedded and abstract systems as well as in the expertise of others. Structural changes in the labour market have been significant elements in ‘ontological insecurity’. The uncertainty of modernity – in the sense that self-identity is no longer embedded in biographical continuity – produces the absence of a psychic protective cushion of security, as a consequence of which trust necessitates taking risks. As Giddens notes: ‘The experience of security usually rests upon a balance of trust and acceptable risk’ (1990:36). This risk-taking imperative of modern life etches ‘ontological insecurity’ into the fabric of modern social existence. Moreover, this imperative is ‘individualised’ in the sense that individuals must produce and reconstruct their biographies and life trajectories themselves (Giddens 1991: 70–88).

New sources of harm appear to present themselves as a result of the dangers and opportunities presented by new technologies and as populations become more mobile. Dangers and risks stretch across time and space, unbounded by nation-states, but potentially invading our environment, our living-rooms and our kitchens (as anxieties over BSE and its human variant CJD remind us), let alone jumping out at us as we walk home at night through the anonymous metropolis. The new prominence of risk connects individual autonomy with the influence and role of scientific innovation and technological change. Science is central to the identification, amelioration and creation of hazard and risk. It is ‘one of the causes, the medium of definition and the source of solutions to risks’ (Beck 1992: 155, emphasis in original). Moreover, risks are not bounded by nation-states. Risks embody both opportunities and dangers; as such, they represent a rupture with tradition and nature. Hence, we are witnessing both a growing sensitisation to risk and the problematisation of risk itself. Experts and publics disagree as to risks. For Beck then, the ‘risk society’ is ‘by tendency also a self-critical society’ (1994: 11).

Consequently, concerns with ‘safety’ have become saturated with anxieties generated by other elements of contemporary existence, namely, insecurity and uncertainty. Responses to (in)security and (un)safety appear increasingly to inform decisions made by governments, organisations and ordinary people in their social interactions. Increasingly, towns and cities vie for new positions of influence and wealth in the reorganised national and international economy. The ability of cities to reposition themselves in a global economy depends upon their capacity to attract investors, both capital and people, which in part is determined by the attractiveness of a city as a ‘safe place’, particularly the inner-city business districts. At the level of the individual, insecurity and uncertainty can cause withdrawal into the ‘safe havens of territoriality’, producing a market in security that places increasing emphasis upon creating and offering ‘environments of trust’ where symbols of security and safety, as well as strategies of control, are inscribed into the architecture and surroundings.

On one level, these security concerns have been dispersed into new arenas – beyond the nation-state. At another level, the response of modern governments has been to identify new fields in which security can be reasserted ‘at arm’s length’ from the nation-state. Europe and the local community have provided different but inter-related outlets for this rearticulation. The focus of this book is to consider some of the interconnections between these two fields in diverse settings. In this chapter, I outline some of the broad contours to the debates around, first, the local governance of crime and insecurity and, secondly, the governance of crime and insecurity at a European level. I then go on to consider the manner in which local governance issues are increasingly securing a European-wide presence and the involvement of the commercial security sector within European developments.

The localisation of crime and insecurity

The resulting importance of locality and the salience of ‘place’, within an increasingly globalising economy and culture, have often been ignored or underplayed by commentators in debates concerning globalisation. However, it is precisely the interplay between these two processes which means that global pressures are refracted through local meanings, identities and sensibilities. The importance of a ‘sense of locality’ – what Taylor et al. (1996: 13) call the ‘local structure of feeling’ – can produce resistance or adaptation to global transformations. The communal identities produced can often be defensive or particularistic reactions against ‘the imposition of global disorder and uncontrollable, fast-paced change’ (Castells 1997: 64). This defensiveness to the ‘juggernaut’ of globalisation can often give rise to a nostalgia: a retrieval and reimagining of tradition.

Moreover, globalisation does not have uniform or homogenising effects. Rather, it has encouraged segmentation, social differentiation and dislocation. Structural changes in the economy have seen the erosion of the importance of social class replaced by other indicators of difference. And yet a person’s social position and where he or she lives remain fundamentally important with regard to that person’s ‘life chances’. Economic polarisation takes on a positively social and spatial form. This produces a distinct unevenness in local economic development both between, and within, cities in late modernity. At a cultural level, social diversity reproduced locally collides and fuses with a global culture. Globalisation, as Bauman suggests, ‘divides as much as it unites; it divides as it unites’ (1998: 2). The contemporary world, therefore, is more like a patchwork or mosaic of contrasting colours and fabrics than a uniform pattern.

The anxieties produced by the endemic insecurity and uncertainty of late modernity tend to be conflated and compressed into a distinct and overwhelming concern about personal safety. This localised concern finds its clearest expressions in the rise of discourses about ‘community safety’ across the Anglo-Saxon world (Crawford 1998a) and its closest equivalents across continental Europe: la justice de proximité and les contrats locaux de sécurité in France (Wyvekens 1996) and justitie in de buurt and the policy of integraal veiligheidsbeleid in The Netherlands (Boutellier 1997). This politics has given birth to an emerging institutional infrastructure and new forms of governance. This politics has been born out of crises of efficiency, effectiveness, economy and legitimacy in the institutional apparatus of criminal justice, which have fuelled, and simultaneously been fuelled by, an increasing politicisation of crime. In response, Europe has witnessed the growth of converging public policies concerned with (in)security (Hebberecht and Sacks 1997; Duprez and Hebberecht 2002), which combines a cluster of central themes:

1. A focus upon proactive prevention rather than reactive detection.

2. An emphasis upon wider social problems than merely crime, including broadly defined harms, people’s fears, low-level quality of life issues, anti-social behaviour and disorder.

3. A focus upon modes of informal social control and local normative orders, as well as the manner in which they relate to, and connect with, formal systems of control.

4. Implementation through decentralised and local arrangements for the delivery of this politics, in that local problems are deemed to require local solutions.

5. Delivery through a partnership approach, drawing together a variety of organisations and stakeholders, in horizontal networks incorporating local municipal authorities, major public services, the voluntary and business sectors, as well as relevant community groups and associations.

6. All of which are aimed at producing holistic solutions that are ‘problem orientated’ rather than defined according to the means or organisations most readily available to solve them.

The resultant politics calls for a reconfiguration of the traditional policy process – which is both hierarchical and departmental – through the development of cross-cutting policies that combine the synergy of the various actors and partner organisations. It seeks to co-ordinate national and local policies and practices, as well as to synchronise private and public provision of security services.

‘Community safety’, in so far as it is concerned with ‘quality of life’ issues, is saturated with concerns about safety and ‘ontological insecurity’. It evokes a ‘solution’ to crime, incivility and disorder, thus enabling the (local) state to reassert some form of sovereignty. Symbolically, it reaffirms control of a given territory, which is visible and tangible. Moreover, the increasing internationalisation of economic, political and cultural life and governance problems experienced by national governments has left the latter ‘casting about for spheres of activity in which they can assert their sovereignty’ (Zedner 2000: 201). The current governmental preoccupation with petty crime, disorder and anti-social behaviour reflects a source of ‘anxiety’ about which something can be done in an otherwise uncertain world. At the same time, concerns about safety connect with people’s everyday experiences of contemporary social life over which individuals and groups seek some form of control. This preoccupation with local safety – particularly with low-level incivilities and subcriminal categories of ‘disorder’ – also reflects the limited capacity for state action.¹ It reflects a dramatic narrowing of the horizons of state ‘sovereignty’. As Bauman suggests:

In the world of global finances, state governments are allotted the role of little else than oversized police precincts; the quantity and quality of the policemen on the beat, sweeping the streets clean of beggars, pesterers and pilferers, and the tightness of the jail walls loom large among the factors of ‘investors’ confidence’, and so among the items calculated when the decisions to invest or deinvest are made. To excel in the job of precinct policeman is the best (perhaps the only) thing state government may do to cajole nomadic capital into investing in its subjects’ welfare; and so the shortest roads to the economic prosperity of the land, and so hopefully to the ‘feel good’ sentiments of the electors, lead through the public display of the policing skill and prowess of the state.’

(1998: 20)

The recent globalising appeal of ‘zero tolerance’ policing mirrors this dominant concern with policing ‘signs of disorder’ and locality. The idea of ‘zero tolerance’ offers a strategy through which to reassert sovereignty, impose discipline and order and reclaim the streets from the deviant. ‘Zero tolerance’ policing evokes a nostalgic reassertion of moral authority through more aggressive and assertive strategies. As such, ‘zero tolerance’ serves to act as an emblem of a new form of authority. In so doing, it produces new ‘folk devils’ and ‘deviant others’ who, surprisingly, are not the contemporary mass murderers or rapists but are the victims of globalisation: the economically marginalised, socially excluded and alienated.

In addition, by claiming a link between incivilities and serious crime ‘zero tolerance’ allows for the collection of low-level information of use in risk-based techniques for analysing and targeting potential offenders and crime ‘hot spots’. It feeds into future-orientated strategies. Moreover, as with ‘community safety’ generally, ‘zero tolerance’ raises the danger that crime and disorder increasingly come to dominate concerns about ‘quality of life’, urban renewal, inequalities and social policies more generally, such that social problems are increasingly redefined in terms of their crimogenic potential. This is a development that increasingly infects and affects diverse European cultures (van Swaaningen 1997; Wacquant 1999). This is evident in the manner in which ‘community safety’ has refigured certain social problems in terms of their crime and disorder implications and drawn resources into crime prevention and order maintenance in England and Wales.² It is also apparent in the manner in which la prévention de la délinquance has become fused and confused within la politique de la ville in France (Lazerges 1995; Wyvekens 1997).

The preoccupation with community safety and order maintenance reflects the limited capacity for state action. In Garland’s (1996, 2001) account, punitive rhetoric and policy are as much a product of problems of state sovereignty and legitimation as they are a rational response to the problems of crime. As such, oscillation and ambivalence are products of late modern conditions which produce dilemmas for state governance. Bauman (1999: 16–18) has eloquently argued that the rise of concerns around disorder and safety can be located in what he calls ‘the cauldron of unsicherheit’. This German term translates into three different English concepts: insecurity, uncertainty and unsafety. The late modern condition, he suggests, is one in which security is ‘sacrificed day by day on the altar of ever-expanding freedom’ (ibid.). Governments increasingly can do little to guarantee security or certainty and, in some cases, promote insecurity and uncertainty, through flexible and unstable labour patterns and the corrosion of long-term commitments (Sennett 1998). As a consequence, governments invest in one of the few arenas in which they may be able to affect change: in the production of symbols of ‘orderly environments’ to entice nomadic capital and a sentiment of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on contributors
• Figures and tables
• Introduction: governance and security
• Part 1 Crime and insecurity
• 1 The governance of crime and insecurity in an anxious age: the trans-European and the local
• 2 Violence in the age of uncertainty
• Part 2 The governance of crime and insecurity across Europe
• 3 Fighting organised crime: the European Union and internal security
• 4 Freedom, security and justice: Pillar III and protecting the ‘internal acquis’
• 5 Whose insecurity? Organised crime, its victims and the EU
• 6 Immigration, crime and unsafety
• 7 Insecurity and the policing of cyberspace
• Part 3 The local governance of crime and insecurity
• 8 Towards a new governance of crime and insecurity in France
• 9 Commercial risk, political violence and policing the City of London
• 10 The introduction of CCTV into a custody suite: some reflections on risk, surveillance and policing
• 11 The poetics of safety: lesbians, gay men and home
• 12 Issues in local community safety: it’s all a question of trust
• Index