Zero Tolerance or Community Tolerance?

Managing Crime in High Crime Areas

Sandra Walklate, Karen Evans

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429761737
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

First published in 1999, this volume presents arguments which compare two inner-city wards of Salford and look to introduce such a subtlety to the understanding of the management of crime in high crime communities and derive from a longitudinal research study which took place over a two and a half year period. Between 1994 and 1996, researchers based at the University of Salford and the University of Keele embarked on research into two similarly structured neighbourhoods within the city of Salford in the North of England. This research set out to situate an understanding of the risk from and fear of crime in a comparative, urban context – to uncover how people who live, work and go to school in designated 'high-crime' areas manage their routine daily lives and construct their own responses to 'risk of' and 'fear of' crime. The authors go on to highlight the similarities between these wards and other wards with which they have a clear resonance across Britain.

Part One:
Crime and Community

Introduction:

Ways of Thinking About Community

Preamble

In 1997 the new Labour government made clear its commitment to ensuring that crime prevention would become a statutory duty of local government (indeed this commitment had been pledged by the then Opposition spokesman on crime – Jack Straw, at a conference, ‘Crime – the Local Solution’, organised by the Local Government (LGA) Association in March 1997). In die light of this commitment local authority personnel up and down Britain were charged with the writing of corporate community safety strategies. At the same time the 1996 Intemationl Criminal Victimisation Survey suggested that these personnel will be working in a context of comparatively high national rates of crime which the British Crime Survey of 1996 estimated had risen 91% since 1985. This fast growing rate of crime has initiated much discussion in the public domain around law and order issues. Much of this discussion has revolved around the impact of such a high crime rate, and associated significant fear of crime, on the quality of life of people living in England and Wales. There has also been a great deal of debate on differing ways to manage die crime problem (Garland, 1996) with the significant emergence of the concept of community safety in die mid 1980s driven by the idea that the solution to an area’s crime problems lay in co-operation between community and law-enforcement agencies. The 1990s, however, has seen the debate around the concept of Zero Tolerance policing exported from America to Britain, which arguably signals a move away from the emphasis on community solutions to crime problems. Although ostensibly closely linked to the idea of community safety, zero tolerance in fact substitutes the notion of a complete respite from crime and incivilities for the community, where no infringement of criminal or civil statutes is tolerated. The zero tolerance policing style is justified by reference to community wants and needs but, due to its blanket coverage, it cannot recognise different degrees of tolerance which exist within a community, or between one community and another. Zero Tolerance policing posits a crime-free environment as the goal of every ‘law-abiding’ individual, without offering any degree of subtlety or attempting to understand the many dynamics of community relationships which are in existence or the diversity of responses to crime demonstrated by individuals.

Introduction

The arguments put forward in this book look to introduce such a subtlety to the understanding of the management of crime in high crime communities and derive from a longitudinal research study which took place over a two and a half year period. From 1994 to 1996 researchers based at the University of Salford and the University of Keele embarked on research into two similarly structured neighbourhoods within the city of Salford in the North of England. This research set out to situate an understanding of the risk from and fear of crime in a comparative, urban context – to uncover how people who live, work and go to school in designated ‘high-crime’ areas manage their routine daily lives and construct their own responses to ‘risk of and ‘fear of crime. We were interested to document the personal and individual ways in which the research subjects managed their own fear of crime and to what extent these management practices were informed by their own perceptions as to which actions were risky and which were safe within a local context.

The two areas chosen for the study were inner-city wards (to anonymise these places they have been named Oldtown and Bankhill), similarly structured in socio-economic terms, though physically different. Both wards were perceived to be areas of high deprivation, sharing many characteristics and indicators of poverty with many other areas of British cities which might be said to be ‘in crisis’. They were therefore locations in which those who utilise the term might assume an ‘underclass’ would be found and we will refer to this assumption later in the text, questioning both the assumption and the application of the term to any of the research subjects located in these areas. Although the empirical data presented in the following chapters relates to these two North of England wards, we argue that the similarity which they display to other wards across Britain, means that the findings generated have a clear resonance above and beyond the particular locations featured. The findings which will be presented address issues which are of concern to criminology, sociology, social policy and politics. The findings will contribute to an understanding of community, social exclusion, crime prevention policies and the meaning of social dis/organisation. They address too some fundamental questions regarding the salience of the fear of crime debate and the contribution which an understanding of community tolerance can make to this important debate and other national and local crime management policies.

Talk about community in criminology

The history of the study of community is one which is well rehearsed -from the rejection of the study of community in the 1960s to its replacement with the study of ‘locality’ during the 1980s. These locality studies recognised that:

People’s location within particular places tended to be an important aspect of their lived experience…. and is a major resource drawn upon for many purposes (Day and Murdoch 1993:84)

Some such studies also argued that a ‘locality effect’ existed, which meant policy-makers and practitioners adopting different policies in different areas in order to remain sensitive to the effects of local culture and political and social systems (Brownill, 1993; Day and Murdoch, 1993; Savage et al, 1987). However, the study of community itself was seen as outdated – with little to offer the contemporary context.

Within criminology, however, the theme of community has remained a recurrent one. Community has been investigated as a way of understanding the existence of criminal activity, explaining crime patterns and, as a result, the appeal to community, has also played a major part in crime prevention policies (Hope, 1995). Hope argues that these interventions have been informed by differing paradigms which are in turn informed by different ideas of community. Hope charts community-based crime prevention practices, from the Chicago School’s Chicago Area Project, established in the 1930s (the disorganised community), through the input of community work up to the 1970s (the disadvantaged community) and the appeal to the community’s surveillance of itself (the frightened community), which became fashionable in the 1970s in the US and the 1980s in the UK (through ideas like Neighbourhood Watch).

Despite the different political complexions of these crime prevention paradigms, Hope argues, all these approaches have in common the belief that:

…community structure itself shapes local rates of crime – that community crime rates may be the result of something more than the mere aggregation of individual propensities for criminality or victimisation. (Hope, 1995:129)

and, as a consequence, those active in the field of community crime prevention have looked to alter, strengthen or enlist existing community organisations and the activities of community members in order to reduce crime in residential neighbourhoods. The setting up community-based projects for the unemployed and for youth, Neighbourhood Watch schemes, encouraging self-help groups and tenants associations, moving council offices out of the Town Halls and into neighbourhoods, have all been advocated at one time or another as methods of empowering communities or involving communities in improving their particular conditions.

However, these appeals to community have been inadequately explored, theorised or evaluated. Current research understanding tells us that the mobilisation of community around any issues, but certainly in crime prevention practices, has most appeal in the more wealthy areas of predominantly owner-occupied housing which have stable populations and residents with the time and skills to divert to such activity; and that they are less successful in low-income, heterogeneous neighbourhoods with more transient population bases and where crime is high (Hope and Shaw, 1988). These are areas where, according to Skogan, residents are:

deeply suspicious of one another, report only a weak sense of community, have low levels of influence on neighbourhood events…and feel that it is their neighbours whom they must watch carefully. (Skogan, 88:45)

Our work in Salford suggests that this is an oversimplification and that poorer, inner-city neighbourhoods far from being the disorganised neighbourhoods of popular representation, may exhibit many and different community structures and patterns of local organisation and networks.

In order to understand fully the play of forces which shape local communities, their responses to local conditions and what prevents or allows effective community organisation itself, there needs to be a greater emphasis on these communities themselves in order to understand more fully, and more adequately, the conditions under which community crime prevention or community safety strategies might be successful or might fail either in their own terms or in others’ terms. We will argue that a significant reason for the failure or limited success of such schemes or strategies is that they have failed to understand the specific dynamics operating in the communities in which they have been applied.

Managing communities

Received wisdom reports that lack of social control within inner city areas is likely to arise as a result of weak communities, a lack of social networks and a lack of concern about an area: where neighbourhood exists as a collection of disparate persons living in close proximity but not caring for community values. Thus, interventions into such areas aim to resurrect ideas of community, for example, local people are exhorted to watch out for one another, care for neighbours, work collectively for change and to liaise with and accept the input of professionals, whether police or local authorities. However, our work challenges the assumption that lack of community feeling or weak social bonds are the key determinants of social disorder within these areas.

Within both Oldtown and Bankhill, we argue community works on a number of different levels. Many local people whom we spoke to were closely linked to their local areas and recognised the importance of sustaining such links in order to maintain their own ‘ontological security’ (Giddens, 1991). In Bankhill we found community activists struggling to maintain community cohesion against incredible odds. In Oldtown community looked very different; the close ties which existed in the area meant that an organised criminal gang could claim to control the area and to sustain levels of intimidation and fear. As one local community activist from this ward told us:

Everyone knows who this group is and what they are into at any particular time. This creates the fear – nothing is kept secret really and the grapevine is very active. The gang’s exploits are known throughout the estate very quickly after any incident has occurred. People then become wary of walking past this gang – they may be challenged as -because everyone knows what is happening – then everyone is a potential grass.

Rather than a lack of surveillance in this ward there is maintained a surveillance of local people by those involved in the criminal network, mainly young men, who maintain a vigilant gaze over the central part of the estate. It is a matter of importance and in need of some reflection, too, that despite the problems faced by local residents within both these wards, they opened their doors to our team of researchers and discussed, on their doorsteps and in their homes, issues of significance to their own lives which touched on extremely sensitive aspects of local social relations. Our experience strongly suggests that these areas are not the frightened maelstroms of some media, government and academic opinion but are areas where residents must find ways of coping with day-to-day issues of community, neighbourhood and locality and that they will work with others in an effort to find solutions.

Looking at the experience of crime in these two wards helps to reveal how people use their sense of community and of neighbourhood and how this can differ from place to place. Within the two wards in which we conducted our research very different strategies emerged. In Oldtown, we argue, your place in relation to crime places you in a community of belonging and exclusion; in Bankhill there is an absence even of this ordering. In Oldtown there exists a strong competing definition to a professional definition and application of community; in Bankhill there is an absence of trust beyond that shared by a few residents within very small areas or within social networks which have been built up over many years. Where trust is so limited that which is found can work to exclude individuals who are not party to a social scene or do not conform to certain roles and expectations. Given these differences and difficulties the question must be asked; what does community safety, community crime prevention or indeed community anything actually mean? Yet policy makers and practitioners still invoke the notion of ‘community’ without reference to how its different dimensions are actually experienced, intersect with one another and play a part in shaping local people’s beliefs and behaviour.

A study of community?

The research methodology utilised for this project employed various data collection techniques including ethnographic fieldwork as well as a more traditional crime audit conducted through a survey of residential households and business and community organisations in both areas. We also conducted a series of focus group discussions with local people, school students and police officers employed in the local areas. Although crime statistics for the two areas were collected, it was only in the last six months of the research that a detailed analysis of recorded crime and incident data in both wards was attempted. In this respect then, it was not a piece of work which focused on crime itself, more the experience of crime. The methodology adopted, although including a crime audit, was not typical of the approach taken up since by many local authorities in their own crime audits – instead it placed primaiy importance on the lay perceptions of both the area and its community make-up. The methodology and viewpoint adopted allowed some very interesting findings to emerge. The two research sites, although seemingly so similar when official indicators were chosen to measure their position within the city, and geographically so close (they were less than two miles apart) actually exhibited very different responses to their situation. In the light of these findings it became clear that we were researching two very different areas, suggesting that crime prevention and community safety initiatives must be sensitive to these differences, involving the communities at very different levels and utilising quite clearly dissimilar techniques of intervention.

The starting point for our research was neighbourhood, voluntary organisation and community. The study of these wards did include an analysis of the place which crime played in these localities but other aspects of living in the localities were allowed to form an equally important dimension to the research. By focusing on a comparative study of two similarly structured areas of the one city we hoped to draw out the different ways in which residents and users of these places might respond and adapt to their local situation. We hoped to uncover different sets of relationships to and perceptions of crime which rooted in such variables as gender, occupation, age and class and use the concept of ‘layering of community’ (Massey, 1995) to build upon the existing tradition within both sociology and criminology of examining the significance of the notion of community to an understanding of experiences of crime. Increasingly the research began to focus on the dynamics of what might be called ‘community’ within the two wards. Crow and Allen (1994) define a study of community as disclosing:

… ways in which individuals are embedded into sets of personal relationships which are based outside the household. (Crow and Allen, 1994:177)

We were interested in this notion of embeddedness, but through the course of the research were alerted to the idea that other relationships, apart from ‘sets of personal relationships’, come to play an important part in the way in which individuals feel within their localities, in how they behave and in how these sentiments and behaviours are expressed in the wider social context.

In this sense then, we became involved in a study of community and how this term ‘community’ resonated at a number of different levels within these inner-city neighbourhoods. We were conscious of the need to critically evaluate the term, not least because it is used with such regularity by those who are involved in the management and control of these areas and the people who live within them, but also because this term is so often uncritically invoked by both national and local government personnel who are concerned to ‘make a difference’ at a local level, in their quest to reduce fear, to lessen crime and its impact, and to increase the quality of life.

How people really talk about community

We were interested in whether the term ‘community’ did have any resonance for the local residents of Oldtown and Bankhill, whether it featured in the everyday understanding that they had of their neighbourhood or of the relationships that they had built up with others living nearby. We were unsure whether we would indeed find evidence of community solidarity in these areas in particular, where extreme disadvantage and deprivation are also found and whether notions of ‘community’, so prevalent in fictional and documentary accounts of the city of Salford in the early and mid twentieth century, could survive under the conditions of extreme instability and anxiety about the future and the present which are so much a feature of the late twentieth century. We were unsure, too, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• PART ONE: CRIME AND COMMUNITY
• PART TWO: CRIME AND COMMUNITY DYNAMICS
• PART THREE: CRIME, POLICY AND COMMUNITY
• Appendix One: Research Methodology
• Appendix Two: The Questionnaire
• Bibliography
• Author Index