Crime, Community and Locale: The Northern Ireland Communities Crime Survey

The Northern Ireland Communities Crime Survey

David O'Mahony, Ray Geary, Kieran McEvoy, John Morison

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781138729711
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351747011
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This title was first published in 2000: This text reports on the findings of the Communities Crime Survey, a communities-based survey carried out within Northern Ireland. The survey asked a number of questions beyond the usual remit of local crime surveys, in order to explore more fully a whole range of issues relating to the experience of living in a society where 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 book aims to go behind the headlines of violence and political conflict to examine how people in a range of communities in Northern Ireland experience a whole range of factors relating to crime, policing and the general experience of living within their particular communities. The process of change is far from over in Northern Ireland, and this book indicates how some of the central issues that must be resolved are perceived by a range of ordinary people in various urban and rural communities, in religiously segregated and integrated communities and those with different levels of income and social infrastructure. The experiences and attitudes gathered are important in understanding how the process of change and development in this society might be advanced, and what lessons might be offered to elsewhere. The survey ultimately concludes that Northern Ireland is neither a homogeneous entity nor a society that is simply divided on religious and/or political grounds. Rather it is a society that is divided by religion and politics, but also by a number of other variables, including geography, gender, age, socio-economic class and ethnic origin, all of which in part influence people's experiences and attitudes towards crime and policing.

1 Introduction

This book reports the findings of the first communities based crime survey carried out within Northern Ireland. The survey asked a number of questions beyond the usuai remit of locai crime surveys in order to explore more fully 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 stili important issues relating to crime and policing are coming to the fore. The production of this book coincides with dramatic changes to the politicai, 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’ politicai conditions in the jurisdiction. Along with the large-scale politicai 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).

The centrality of issues of crime, security and policing to the process of conflict resolution reflects the fact that such matters lay at the very heart of the three decades of politicai violence. The fact that many of these issues are now being addressed anew, paradoxically presents opportunities for fresh and innovative approaches to basic issues that elsewhere are frozen in politicised or technocratic debates on crime management (Currie, 1998; Beckett and Sasson, 1999; Crawford, 1999; Garland, 1996). There is now a real opportunity to address and resolve issues beyond the macro politicai level and develop ideas about how basic issues of crime and policing ought to be addressed at a community level in the new Northern Ireland.

One key part of the contested nature of the conflict has related to images and discourses concerning ordinary crime as well as politicai violence. As elsewhere, crime rates in particular have been deployed in an explicitly politicai fashion (Brownlee, 1998; Ryan, 1999). However, the intensity of the conflict in Northern Ireland meant that the significance of this politicisation process over crime rates considerably augmented their importance.

Drawing upon such information as was available, two competing theses about the level of crime in Northern Ireland emerged (see further, Morison and Geary, 1989). The first, originating with those interested in the psychological casualties of the ‘Troubles’, gained currency during the 1970s. This suggested a process whereby violence from the politicai context became generalised to other areas of life in a pattern of escalating crime where new generations infected by the disruption of the politicai conflict replaced the older more law-abiding population. There is some evidence of this view gaining officiai currency with a moral panie developing among policy makers over juvenile crime (Caul, 1983) and government taking precautions to avoid a crisis of anti-social behaviour (Powell, 1982).

Of course this ‘breakdown of the social fabric’ thesis depended upon denying the validity of the officiai statistics which generally showed lower rates of crime in Northern Ireland than in the rest of the UK. This was done by questioning whether hostility to the police within some sections of the community, and sympathy towards them in others, combined with paramilitary activity in policing certain areas to produce lower reporting rates. This early view was framed within a wider perspective which located blame with the paramilitary forces who had ruptured the social and politicai fabric of a traditional society. Reference to crime rates and social disorder provided the material that was used to fashion this thesis.

The other thesis, emerging during the 1980 s and gaining currency since then, suggests that there may in fact be a ‘surprisingly low rate’ in Northern Ireland despite the ‘Troubles’. Although there are high levels of relative deprivation which might suggest high levels of crime¹, this thesis maintains that the fabric of society in Northern Ireland has not broken down and that levels of what the security forces term ‘ordinary decent crime’ remain low compared with elsewhere in the United Kingdom (Heskin, 1981). This view was supported by what statistical evidence was then available from the Chief Constable’s Annual Reports and the Northern Ireland Office’s Commentaries on Northern Ireland Crime Statistics. These measures were used to support the assertion that underneath a veneer provided by ‘the men of violence’, Northern Ireland was a decent, church-going, family oriented society with low rates of ordinary decent crime - a ‘paradise on earth’ as one former Tory minister described it (Patten, 1996). The measurement of crime rates became a politicai tool to pathologise and obscure the politicai origins of paramilitary crime. Only a very uncritical view of there being ‘two communities’ engaged an age-old, sectarian squabble with little appreciation of the role of the state as anything other than a neutral and ultimately benign umpire.

Since the emergence of these two conflicting theses, the level of available information has changed dramatically. In 1989 Northern Ireland was included in the International Crime Survey, (Van Dijk et al., 1990) although not the 1992 version (van Dijk and Mayhew, 1992). Northern Ireland was also included in the 1996 International Crime Victims Survey (ICVS) (Mayhew and van Dijk, 1997) and a Northern Ireland wide crime survey was conducted in-house by the NIO in 1994/5, selected extracts of which have now been published (Boyle and Haire, 1996). In addition, there are a large number of on-going public opinion surveys carried out on behalf of organisations such as the Police Authority for Northern Ireland (e.g. PANI, 1998).

However, some of the major questions raised by the originai two competing theses about crime in Northern Ireland have not been answered. Both these, and the politicai premises that they predicated, were based upon a holistic view of Northern Ireland inhabited by ‘averaged up’ citizens who remained largely undifferentiated beyond the two major religious blocks (Catholics/Protestants)². Little room was afforded to important and defining variables and other important localised factors.

In contrast, the survey described in this book takes the view that Northern Ireland is neither a homogeneous entity nor a society that is simply divided on religious and/or politicai grounds. Rather it is a society that is divided by religion and politics, but also by a number of other variables - including geography (particularly the urban/rural divide), gender, age, socio-economic class and ethnic origin - all of which will in part influence people’s experiences and attitudes to crime and policing³. While this study does appear to confimi the relatively low levels of victimisation suggested in previous research, it was also found that there were significant variations to be found in the different communities as regards experiences and attitudes to crime and policing. This research also seeks to relate crime to a broader spectrum of nuisance and anti-social activity i.e. ‘quality of life’ issues as opposed to simply law-breaking. Similarly, in terms of the response to crime, the research seeks to explore not only whether or not people cali the police but whether they engage in a range of ‘problem-solving’ techniques either involving their own actions or those of their family, their community or other aspeets of civil society.

Background to Locai Community Crime Surveys

The developments within criminology over the past twenty years, which have seen ever greater specificity in the data available for analysis, have been well covered elsewhere (Bottomley and Pease, 1986; Maguire, 1997) and it is unnecessary to reproduce them in detail here. Suffice to say that in the USA and Britain national victimisation surveys were conceived from the late 1960 s through to the early 1980 s as a method for estimating the frequency and distribution of unreported crime (Ennis, 1967; Hood and Sparks, 1970; Hough and Mayhew, 1983; Chambers and Tombs, 1984). These surveys confirmed that considerable numbers of crimes went unreported (the ‘dark figure of crime’). They stressed that, in fact, most crime was petty and that the risks of being victimised were statistically improbable (Hough and Mayhew, 1983). For example, the 1983 British Crime Survey argued that a ‘statistically average person’ aged 16 or over can expect a robbery every five centuries, an assault once every century, a car to be stolen once every 60 years and a burglary once every fifty years (Hough and Mayhew, 1983, p. 168).

Some commentators suggested that such surveys were guilty of distorting the ‘real’ experiences of crime of particular groupings such as the poor, ethnic minorities and women (Matthews and Young, 1986; Stanko, 1988) and of denigrating fear of crime amongst such vulnerable groupings as ‘irrational’ (Young, 1988). Such ‘left realist’ commentators argued that there were considerable differences in the experience of crime and policing between and within different areas, triggered by such issues as gender, ethnicity and socio-economic status (MacLean, 1991; Young, 1997). Commissioned by Labour councils with a particular interest in police accountability (Currie, DeKerskey and MacLean, 1990), locai surveys were carried out in a range of British cities including Islington (Jones et al., 1986; Crawford et al., 1990), Merseyside (Kinsey, 1984) and Dundee (Jones et al., 1994)⁴. While left realist locai survey work has been criticised on a number of grounds (DeKerskey, MacLean and Schwart, 1997), it is the complexity of the notion of ‘community’ upon which they predicate much that is perhaps most relevant to discussions of the Northern Ireland Community Crime Survey.

The Notion of Community

Crawford (1995; 1999) has described the notion of community as ‘both a signifier and a referent around which complex and contradictory effeets, meanings and definitional struggles coalesce’. It is a concept, which, while it lacks definitional precision (Butcher, 1993, p. 3; Crawford, 1999), is nonetheless of huge significance to a broad range of disciplines including geography, politicai science, sociology, social policy, psychology, women’s studies and others - ‘ali of which have recognised a tendency to use the word uncritically as a blanket which ‘means all things to all people’ (Dalley, 1988, p. 48). Community has been described as ‘interlocking social networks of neighbourhood, kinship and friendship’ (Crow and Allan, 1994, p. 178-179), and as something shared in common between people whether in terms of territoriality, ethnicity, religious background or occupational or leisure pursuits (Willmott, 1986). Communities may in effect be socially constructed (Cohen, 1985), playing an important symbolic role in encouraging and maintaining a sense of belonging in particular by identifying boundaries that define who is and who is not a member of the community (Cohen, 1987, p. 14).

Within criminological discourse, community has often been considered more narrowly than in other disciplines. It has been described as having at least three meanings within criminological work (Walklate, 1996), all of which were of relevance to our Northern Ireland Communities Crime Survey (NICCS).

Firstly, there is the idea of disorganised community. Inspired by the Chicago school emphasis on zones of transition in a changing urban setting, such a view suggests that a lack of community infrastructure, developed social and familial networks and shared norms contribute to criminal behaviour (Shaw and McKay, 1942). The corresponding conclusion of such analysis is, of course, that the presence of a developed community infrastructure and networks of social control suggest a well-balanced, low crime rate society.

Such ideas are closely related to a second sense of community as social cement. This develops the negative sense of community disappearing, and turns it into a more positive, communitarian or authoritarian thesis that ‘community values’ should be restored - by government action if necessary. Within such a viewpoint, Northern Ireland can serve as an indicator of how traditional values can be deployed to resist the spread of crime. This may at first sight appear strange, and it is certainly contrary to the image that is portrayed within popular culture (Geary and Morison, 1996). However, this supports the thesis that Northern Ireland society, despite or perhaps because of its ‘Troubles’, has missed out on many of the influences which elsewhere have eroded family and church ties. An exploration of community in this sense is important in so far as it may assist in interrogating the assumptions behind how the ‘decline into lawlessness’ thesis of 1970 s has been replaced in 1980 s and 1990 s by a ‘surprisingly low crime rate’ thesis (Morison, 1995).

Thirdly, there is the idea of a disadvantaged community. Such an idea can be found in the work of Hope and Shaw (1988) developing the ideas of Cloward and Ohlin (1960) amongst others. This advances the idea that crime, particularly juvenile crime, arises because of disparity between material aspirations which popular culture suggests to young people and their concrete circumstances. The ability to achieve such goals is blocked by practical structural impediments such as social class, ethnicity or lack of employment opportunities. In the Northern Ireland context, where relative levels of deprivation are very varied, the implications of exploring how communities vary depending on degrees of deprivation and relative affluence are of considerable interest.

Conscious of the problematic notion of community, the Community Crime Survey sought to go beyond much of the officiai and media discourse, centred as it is on discussion of the two principle religious blocks (the Protestant and Catholic ‘communities’) as more or less homogenous entities. Such a focus was not designed to obfuscate the differential views or experiences of Catholics or Protestants on crime and policing. Rather, religious division was viewed as one variable which is intersected by a number of others including socio-economic status, geographical setting and sense of community. People live, socialise and bring up their children in different communities, and view themselves as belonging to different communities based on the whole range of variables discussed above. Individuai’ experiences and attitudes are determined therefore not simply by what they themselves directly encounter, but by the experiences, attitudes, values and self-image of ‘their’ community, however defined.

Governmentality and the Crime Survey

In a recent article, Garland has highlighted how ‘the governmentality literature offers a powerful framework for analysing how crime is problematized and controlied’ (1997, p. 174). This literature has developed over the past twenty years in response to Foucault’s later writings, lectures and interviews on the topic. By the time of his death in 1984, however, Foucault had not fully developed his project on governmentality. We are therefore left with some specific writings on the theme, notably ‘Governmentality’ (1991) and ‘The Subject and Power’ (1982), and a rich seam of lines of inquiry that remain suggestive rather than fully realised. The themes that Foucault introduced, however, have been taken up by a number of writers who have considered various aspeets of governmental concerns. Though they differ in some aspects of their analysis (see, for example, Burchell et al., 1991; Rose and Miller, 1992; Barry et al., 1993; O’Malley et al, 1997; Smandych, 1999), they employ the same conceptual tools in anatomizing the actions of government. It is these tools that we have sought to utilize in analysing how crime is perceived and how it effects individuals in different communities in Northern Ireland; how these individuals perceive and respond to governmental actions on crime and policing; and how governmental actions may be effected by those responses in the different communities, particularly in the manner in which they are considered in ‘The Report of the Independent Commission on Policing for Northern Ireland’ (Patten, 1999).

The approach that the writers on governmentality share is a rejection of the notion of government as being synonymous with the state, and of power emanating simply from a sovereign monolith. Instead, power is exercised at a distance, diffused through a diverse number of sites, both traditional, in the sense of the police and the criminal justice system, and extended, by way of families, experts, professions, counsellors, churches and so on, who are all concerned with the ‘conduct of conduct’. This was one of the twin facets of government that Foucault was concerned with, the means by which individuals govern, conduct themselves, and so shape their own subjectivity. The other facet was in terms of the government of others in the politicai domain, and equally important, the interconnections that exist between the two forms of government. For, ‘the exercise of power consists in guiding the possibility of conduct and putting in order the possible outcome’ (Foucault, 1982, p. 222).

The governmentality literature eschews a historical or sociological approach, not being concerned with attempting to construct what may have actually happened in the past or revealing the actuality of present day government through a substantive account of its workings and motivations. Instead it is concerned with looking at the practices of governance in different areas at a micro level and how the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Perceptions of the Communities
• 3 Crime and Victimisation in the Communities
• 4 Worries and Fears in the Communities
• 5 Policing and the Communities
• 6 Securing the Home
• 7 Children in Public Space
• 8 Governmentality, Communities and Crime
• Appendix 1
• Appendix 2
• Bibliography