Crime Control and Community

Gordon Hughes, Adam Edwards

• Publisher: Willan
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135989507
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Community-based crime control has become one of the principal policy responses to crime and disorder across western societies, and is regarded now as one of the keys to successful crime prevention and reduction. The aim of this book is to bring together findings from case studies of community-based crime control in England as a means of examining the prospects for this approach, its evolving relationship with criminal justice and social policies, and to assess the lessons internationally that can be drawn from this in the theory, research methods, politics and practice of crime control. At the same time the book advances an important new conceptual framework for understanding community-based crime control, focusing on an understanding of the diversity of control and preventative strategies, the locally particular conditions in which they are conducted, and the degree of choices open to local political actors involved in their conduct. Understanding diversity in this way is central to drawing lessons about the transferability of crime control theory and practice from one social context to another, avoiding the naïve emulation of practices in different contexts.

Chapter 1

Introduction: the community governance of crime control

Adam Edwards and Gordon Hughes

In December 2001, as we were finalising this edited volume, a story broke in the British media about the murder of a suspected sex offender on the Kirkholt housing estate in Rochdale, Greater Manchester, in the North of England (BBC 2001a). George Crawford, who was due to face trial on ten charges of child sexual abuse, had been beaten to death in an attack which both his brother and local police thought was connected to these charges. Students of the recent history of crime control in England may note the irony of vigilante ‘street justice’ on an estate made famous by Home Office action research into the virtues of situational crime prevention and, in particular, the prevention of repeat victimisation (Forrester et al 1990). It is, however, precisely in the vacuum of political authority generated by the perceived failure of government strategies to control crime that vigilante action thrives.

In England it is reported that such action has intensified in recent years, especially in relation to attacks on actual or suspected sex offenders (BBC 2000a). It is also thought that a particular catalyst for these attacks has been the media campaign to ‘name and shame’ paedophiles conducted by one tabloid newspaper, the News of the World, in July and August 2000 in the wake of the sexual assault and murder of the infant Sarah Payne (News of the World, 23 and 24 July, 6 August 2000). Following this campaign, in which names, residential details and in some instances the pictures of sex offenders were published, one male bearing the same name as a sex offender ‘outed’ by the News of the World had to be given police protection after letters accusing him of child abuse were circulated to 500 residents around his south London home by an organisation claiming to provide ‘a service to the community’ (BBC 2000b). In another incident an innocent male who resembled one of the sex offenders pictured in the News of the World campaign was attacked in Bradford (BBC 2000c). Both of these incidents were, however, overshadowed by five nights of rioting on the Paulsgrove estate in Portsmouth when over 100 people carrying the picture of an alleged sex offender, as it appeared in the News of the World, besieged and ransacked his home, fire-bombed his sister’s car and then assaulted the police who were protecting the suspect (BBC 2000d). While the editor of the News of the World condemned the violence and called for ‘vigilance not vigilantism’, she defended the campaign, arguing that ‘every parent has an absolute right to know if they have a convicted child offender living in their neighbourhood’ and that the newspaper had a mandate for the campaign expressed through ‘overwhelming public support’ and given ‘the disturbing truth that the authorities are failing to properly monitor the activities of paedophiles in the community’ (BBC 2000c).

The trend towards vigilante groups exacting their own justice from suspected offenders is not restricted to the highly emotive issue of child sexual abuse but relates to a more general lack of faith in the ability of statutory authorities to deliver public safety. Following the conviction of the Norfolk farmer, Tony Martin, in April 2000 for shooting and killing a young burglar on his premises, Members of Parliament representing rural constituencies claimed there was strong support among their electorates for ‘defending themselves if the police were unable to help them’ in the context of severe reductions in service from rural police forces (BBC 2000e). Vigilante action was also feared by local councillors in Bangor, North Wales, when residents on the Maesgeirchen estate responded to an upsurge in vandalism and attacks on the homes of pensioners in August 2001 by patrolling the estate. One local councillor sympathised with the frustration of local residents at the paucity of not only policing but general statutory services on the estate, while another actually expressed tacit support arguing that, ‘As a home care worker on the estate, I have seen youngsters climbing over roofs and banging on doors. There are residents who are 70, 80 and 90 years old who do not want this; they are frightened to open their doors … These men who have been going out on patrol have been doing more than the police and if they are not doing any harm, good luck to them’ (BBC 2001b).

Community governance and the crisis of legitimate crime control

These stories of vigilante ‘service to the community’ exemplify a broader crisis of legitimacy facing statutory authorities in advanced liberal democracies. The willingness of citizens to take the law into their own hands forms part of a more general disenchantment with political authorities and, more dangerously, with the process of liberal democracy itself (Pharr and Putnam 2000). In the context of this crisis, the appeal to ‘community’ in crime control and across the spectrum of public policy can be understood in terms of the struggle by political authorities to relegitimate their powers. Yet, whereas the active participation of local communities in their own government has been promoted by successive administrations in Britain over the past two decades as an unqualified ‘good’ thing, both for the democratic accountability and economic efficiency of liberal government, experiments in what has become known as ‘community governance’ have provoked major controversies among social scientific commentators (Hughes and Mooney 1998).

The recent intensification of vigilante action in British localities has a broader salience beyond the immediate exigencies of controlling sex offenders, burglars and the incivilities of youth gangs etc., precisely because it exemplifies the extent to which the legitimacy of political authorities has been eroded and popular consent to be governed withdrawn. From this perspective, the real significance of experiments in ‘community governance’, beyond official platitudes on increasing the economy of ‘joined-up’ government, reducing duplication of effort and bureaucratic waste, ‘empowering’ citizens to take greater responsibility for their own security and well-being etc., is the reformulation of sovereignty for social modes of governing (Stenson 1999, and in this volume). What distinguishes this social mode of governing from that of the welfare state is the replacement of universally provided services, whether healthcare, education, housing, public safety etc. by interventions that are targeted on those cohorts of the population in which problems of chronic illness, poor educational attainment, housing blight and crime etc. are thought to be concentrated. This use of community, to signify ‘hot-spots’ of trouble, is one way of interpreting the distinctive ‘third way’ approach to governing adopted by the administrations of New Labour since their election in May 1997 (Stenson and Edwards 2001; Stenson in this volume; Edwards in this volume). Neo-Marxist studies have also interpreted community governance as a means of reasserting sovereign authority, but with a particular focus on the political-economic rationale of this authority in advancing the interests of capital (Coleman and Sim 1998; Coleman, Sim and Whyte in this volume; Jessop 2000).

Alternatively exercises in community governance, in which responsibility for governing is shared between ‘partnerships’ of statutory, voluntary and commercial organisations, have been interpreted as the means by which responsibility for goods, such as security, is being genuinely devolved from statutory authorities to private citizens and organisations (Stoker 2000). One influential analysis in criminology describes this process under the heading of ‘responsibilisation’. It is claimed that over the past two decades, private citizens and commercial firms have been encouraged to assume greater responsibility for their own security and well-being (Garland 2001). This signifies the erosion, even ‘death’, of public, ‘social’ modes of government, characteristic of the welfare state, which aim to promote collective solidarity and shared security. These have been replaced increasingly by a Darwinian, competitive struggle for survival, which favours the strongest and most resourceful. In this climate, those individuals and population groups least fitted for the struggle suffer from, at best, ‘benign neglect’ by state agencies. In crime control, as in other spheres of policy, this approach to government seeks to manage the risks presented by poor and disaffected populations. It also seeks to ‘liberate’ wealth creators from the burden of redistributing resources to the poor and weak, in the belief that public authorities cannot, and should not, intervene to correct the inequalities of free market economies (Rose 1996; O’Malley 1992; Taylor 1999).

Yet others have interpreted community governance as a genuine attempt to formulate a new model of ‘associative’, ‘participatory’ and ‘cosmopolitan’ liberal democracy, in which the interests and needs of diverse communities of interest and identity can be recognised and addressed (Hirst 2000; Held 1995). Here the deficiencies of representative democracy and government through public bureaucracies are contrasted with the potential of public-private partnerships and networks to give voice to the real pluralism of social relations in advanced liberal societies (Hughes 1998 and this volume; Foster in this volume). In place of the ‘one size fits all’ model of the welfare state and the ‘Darwinianism’ of the neoliberal state, critical pluralists advocate the cultivation of ‘self-governing communities’ allowed to regulate the affairs of their own members according to the values shared by those members. So, for example, cities could be divided into ‘permissive’ and ‘restrictive’ zones with regard to the use of various sexual and narcotic services (Hirst 2000). It is argued that far from exacerbating conflict between communities of interest and identity with divergent norms, such a system of self-governing communities would reduce intercommunity friction and restore public faith in, and consent to, political authority, ‘People would not be criminalized for matters of value choice – remember when homosexuality was a crime in the UK? In consequence they would not come to hold the whole apparatus of law in contempt. For that core of common offences, agreed by all, the police would enjoy greater cooperation and respect’ (Hirst 2000: 142).

The community governance of crime control

These competing interpretations of the real meaning and salience of appeals for community governance are indicative of the capacious way in which notions of community have been used in relation to crime control policy. The elusiveness of what ‘community’ actually means in relation to crime control, the absence of any clear consensus over what constitutes ‘community-based crime control’, ‘community safety’, ‘community crime prevention’ and ‘community policing’ etc., is a product not of intellectual vacuity but of the political struggles to define the responsibilities for, and strategies of, crime control. Rather than reducing an explanation of community governance to either the reformulation of sovereign authority or making private citizens more responsible for their self-government or the search for a new model of associative democracy or a more economical government of crime etc., it is better to see these objectives as coterminous. They are being advanced by different policy actors who each regard the capacious character of community governance as an opportunity for advancing their particular agenda for policy change. Whether a particular governing strategy wins out and defines the uses of community or whether crime control policy drifts chaotically along, vacillating between equally matched coalitions of policy advocates is a contingent outcome of broader political struggles and not the unfolding of some inevitable and inexorable logic of social change (see Hallsworth in this volume).

The reassertion of sovereign authority

The changing uses of ‘community’ in crime control can be illustrated through reference to discernible periods of law and order politics in postwar Britain. The reassertion of a ‘paternalistic’ sovereign authority can be discerned in the establishment of the Community Development Projects (CDP) by the Wilson and Callaghan administrations of the 1970s. Significantly, the CDPs were the brainchild of a Home Office civil servant, Derek Morrell, and were implemented in the context of concerns over the consequences of urban deprivation and racial tension for serious public disorder, as had been experienced in the US during the ‘hot summers’ of the mid- to late-1960s (Higgins et al 1983). Morrell’s paternalism was premised on a ‘pathological’ view of ‘individual, family and community malfunctioning’ (Higgins et al 1983: 25) and was challenged by the Marxist-inspired coordinators of the Coventry CDP for concentrating on the consequences of poverty in the rising crime rate rather than its causes in the structural inequalities produced by capital accumulation (Higgins et al 1983: 33). The consequence of this political struggle over the rationale of the CDPs was their termination by Callaghan’s administration following the publication of a report on the CDPs, Gilding the Ghetto. This was produced by local policy actors who had participated in this scheme and who were highly critical of Morrell’s vision (CDP, 1977).

Responsibilisation

A decade later, in the aftermath of major urban rioting in English cities, Lord Scarman offered a more structural interpretation of the root causes of crime and disorder by identifying the failures of social policy to ameliorate inequality and disadvantage and the role of the police themselves in undermining relations with local communities in Brixton, Toxteth and other multicultural inner-city neighbourhoods in which disorders had occurred (Scarman 1981). In the seismic change to the national political context marked by the election of Margaret Thatcher’s ‘New Right’ administration in 1979, however, the redistributive aspects of Lord Scarman’s Report, along with the wider lessons drawn from the failure of the CDPs, were ignored in favour of a vision of limited government intervention for social welfare. This was combined with an expanded capacity for maintaining public order and exercising social control through investment in the police and criminal justice system (Downes and Morgan 1994). Given the political pressures of rapid increases in recorded crime, further instances of major urban disorder throughout the 1980s and Treasury resistance to further public expenditure on policing and criminal justice, the Thatcher administrations switched tack by arguing, in the Home Office Circular 8/84, that crime prevention cannot be left to the police alone but, ‘is a task for the whole community’ (Home Office 1984). This appeal to community, for private citizens to assume greater responsibility for their own security, is described by criminologists as a ‘responsibilisation’ strategy and was ideal for a Conservative national administration wishing to distance itself from crime control policy failures while maintaining its rejection of the welfare state (Benyon and Edwards 1997). It is in this context that the vision of community governance as a ‘responsibilisation’ strategy prevailed against alternative conceptions of community-based crime control.

The reformulation of sovereign authority

As we have argued elsewhere, however, an unintended consequence of this vision was the devolution of significant decisionmaking powers to local policy actors, especially Labour Party-led municipal authorities, who used their involvement in experiments in local crime prevention partnerships, funded in particular by the Conservative national administration’s ‘Safer Cities’ programme, to redefine crime control in terms of ‘community safety’ (Hughes 1998 and this volume; Edwards and Benyon 2000). Through the concept of community safety Labour municipal authorities and their national policymaking bodies, the Association of Metropolitan Authorities (AMA 1990) and Association of District Councils (ADC 1990), broadened crime control strategies beyond the narrow concern with situational crime prevention to encompass measures focusing on the social an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: the community governance of crime control
• 2 Plotting the rise of community safety: critical reflections on research, theory and politics
• 3 ‘Same bed, different dreams’: postmodern reflections on crime prevention and community safety
• 4 The rediscovery of learning: crime prevention and scientific realism
• 5 Power, politics and partnerships: the state of crime prevention on Merseyside
• 6 Community safety in Middle England – the local politics of crime control
• 7 Learning from diversity: the strategic dilemmas of community-based crime control
• 8 ‘People pieces’: the neglected but essential elements of community crime prevention
• 9 Representations and realities in local crime prevention: some lessons from London and lessons for criminology
• Index