The Neighbourhood Watch UK

11 Key excerpts on "The Neighbourhood Watch UK"

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  Citizens, Community and Crime Control

  • K. Bullock(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  6 Neighbourhood Watch

  Introduction

  The aim of establishing Neighbourhood Watch is to assist the police in detecting crime, reduce fear of crime and improve the relationship between the police and the community. Participants in Neighbourhood Watch have been encouraged to be on guard for ‘suspicious’ activity and to report it to the police service. A stereotype, which persists somewhat, of participants in Neighbourhood Watch being nosy ‘curtain twitchers’ no doubt derives from this particular objective! On the face of it Watches are initiated, managed and operated by volunteers. As such they perhaps embody the imagery of the active citizenry taking responsibility for their own security which has been much promoted by governments. Neighbourhood Watch, notes Neuberger (2009), is the largest voluntary movement in the UK and, according to Bennett et al. (2008), the largest single organised crime prevention activity in the US. The ‘success’ – and we should use this term advisably for reasons we will come to explore – of Neighbourhood Watch has inspired wide-ranging lookalike schemes. As Laycock and Tilley (1995: 4) put it, ‘It is almost true to say that if anything constitutes a mobile piece of property, then somewhere in the United Kingdom there will be a Watch scheme set up to watch it’.

  This chapter starts by considering the origins of Neighbourhood Watch, situating its development within changing discourses of Anglo-American crime control. Much reflecting community policing, Neighbourhood Watch developed in the context of concerns about the efficiency of the Professional Model. Accordingly, this chapter considers the impact of Neighbourhood Watch in terms of some of the objectives it sets for itself. The issue of whether the Watches are effective in preventing crime is highly contentious, as we will shortly see. In light of the overall themes of this monograph, a focus will be on the nature and extent of citizen participation in Neighbourhood Watch. A focus of this chapter is on equity – a point which is important since these schemes, whilst fairly widespread, very clearly proliferate in wealthier areas where there are low crime rates. Accordingly, a primary consideration of this chapter is whether Neighbourhood Watch functions to distribute resources in ways that are inverse to crime risk.

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  Crime, Fear and the Law in True Crime Stories

  • Anita Biressi(Author)
  • 2001(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  They conclude: NW [Neighbourhood Watch] has achieved its aim of making members more alert to the risks of crime. They are, though, more Discourses of Law and Order 83 worried about burglary. This was no doubt a factor in their joining the NW, and schemes may inevitably sustain this worry in trying to foster an awareness of the risk. (ibid.: 61) Neighbourhood Watch offers individual subjects the chance to situate themselves within a broader community of concerned citizens. The concept of vigilant neighbourliness is attractive because it offers citi- zens the chance to take proactive measures, to form alliances with the police and perhaps even the chance to recuperate a positive commu- nity ethic which stands in direct opposition to the demonised street culture of youth gatherings. It appears to offer people a measure of autonomy and direction in controlling their own environment. Having said this, the ethos of Neighbourhood Watch is often at odds with what it manages to achieve. As Johnston (1992: 148) argues: The mechanisms whereby such lofty ideals might be realised are often unclear. In practice, therefore, schemes have tended to focus on the more limited goal of opportunity reduction, by having par- ticipants act as ‘the eyes and ears of the police’. This concerted effort to police public space and defend private prop- erty is overtly flagged by street signs, posters and door stickers, which signal the formalised vigilance of local people. Here organised pre- ventative measures are established in an attempt to repel or warn off the perpetrators of street crime and burglary. As Stuart Hall (1976: 230–1) has argued, reactions to both these threats are usually founded upon unexamined judgements about present and past expe- riences as the victims of crime, wherein the wish is to return to an idealised past when people felt secure in their neighbourhoods.

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  The Challenge of Community Policing

  Testing the Promises

  • Dennis P. Rosenbaum(Author)
  • 1994(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications, Inc

    (Publisher)

  The findings of this research tend to reflect the findings of anecdotal and related evidence. There is no strong evidence that Neighborhood Watch has prevented a single crime in Britain since its inception in the early 1980s, yet it continues to grow in popularity and is now the most widespread community-oriented crime prevention strategy in this country. 241 Developments in Britain However, Neighborhood Watch (and other community crime prevention pro-grams) might be evaluated differently when discussed in the context of the debate about community policing. Neighborhood Watch facilitates the two central principles of community policing: namely an opportunity for consult-ation and opportunity for collaboration between the police and the public. In this sense Neighborhood Watch helps achieve the related goals of policing by consent and of police accountability. It also helps achieve collaborative problem identification and collaborative problem solving (albeit the problem-solving aspect of the alliance appears at this point not to be helped much by community involvement). Proactive Policing Proactive policing (including problem-oriented policing and targeted polic-ing) can be considered community policing when the problems tackled by the police have been discussed and agreed with the local community (at least within the definition of community policing used in this chapter). This might occur when local residents identify a problem and approach the local police (either through consultation arrangements or letter writing) to do something about it. It might also occur when the local police identify a problem and approach the local community in order to obtain their consent to tackle the problem. The national survey of community-oriented policing identified a large number of strategies currently in use by the police as a means of targeting particular local problems (Bennett & Lupton, 1990).

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  Neighbourhood Watch in a Digital Age

  Between Crime Control and Culture of Control

  • Vasco Lub(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Tonight the team presents itself to its fellow residents. At the start of the ceremony at a local park, attendants chat with one another while enjoying coffee and cake. The initiator of the team is engaged in a conversation with the mayor, recognizable by his chain of office. The mayor appears to be a big fan of the initiative: ‘We encourage neighbourhood watch throughout our municipality. When residents want to establish a team, we immediately support them!’ Scepticism of some of the attendants that watch teams suit a retreating government and cost-cutting police force is waved off by the mayor: Of course, the police are faced with a diminished capacity and cannot do everything by themselves. Citizens will therefore have to do their part. But then isn’t this a wonderful way to contribute? Following suit with the English-speaking world, the phenomenon of ‘neighbourhood watch’ has boomed in the Netherlands in recent years (Lub 2016). Neighbourhood watch is a form of community crime prevention which aims to contribute to the safety and quality of life in residential areas (Schneider 2007 ; Sagar 2005). A neighbourhood watch team on patrol will perform duties that include identifying and reporting suspicious acts and unsafe situations to the police, educating residents about security issues, and reporting physical or social signs of disorder to local authorities, such as wrongly presented house garbage, broken streetlights or troublesome youth. Many teams actively patrol the streets several times a week. During patrols, volunteers are recognizable by their uniform fluorescent clothing. The first neighbourhood watch schemes actively carried out in the Netherlands date back to the 1980s (Van Noije and Wittebrood 2008). Yet the phenomenon recently received a second wind

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  Surveillance and Democracy in Europe

  Courting Controversy?

  • Kirstie Ball, William Webster(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Spain . Neighbourhood Watch schemes have national co-ordinating bodies (for England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland), with which they can register. National co-ordination of Neighbourhood Watch activities in Scotland commenced in 2006 with the Association of Scottish Neighbourhood Watches, which subsequently changed its name to Neighbourhood Watch Scotland in 2011. It is registered as a Scottish Charitable Incorporated Organisation. It employs two members of staff and is governed by a board of volunteer trustees, with funding being provided by the Scottish government. It is very difficult to know exactly how many schemes are active at any one time. This fact is exemplified by Fyfe (2013), who records that in 1996/97 within the Strathclyde Police Force area alone, there were 1,671 schemes, and 4,597 within Scotland, although by 2005/06, there were 427 schemes within Strathclyde and 2,874 within Scotland. Fyfe ascribes the growth in interest in Neighbourhood Watch during the 1990s to government policies at the time which promoted active citizenship and “civilian policing”, which primarily took the form of Neighbourhood Watch and special constables (volunteer police). The Association of Chief Police Officers in Scotland (ACPOS, 2007) also acknowledges the work of special constables and community wardens in assisting community police officers: “The targeted use of the Special Constabulary, volunteers and community wardens will provide resilience and support the work undertaken by community police officers” (ibid.: 7).

  Community police officers and special constables are also the link between Neighbourhood Watch and the police in England and Wales. Neighbourhood Watch in England and Wales was originally called Home Watch, a name by which it is still known in some parts of the country. In 2007, with support from the Home Office, the Neighbourhood and Home Watch Network (England & Wales) was formed. Prior to this, there had been a national co-ordinating body for England and Wales called the UK Neighbourhood Watch Trust; however, this was disbanded due to internal and irreconcilable differences amongst some of the members and co-ordinators. This may explain why some current members and co-ordinators of Neighbourhood Watch schemes are unwilling to register with the national database, or to become involved with national initiatives. For example, in Wales there is some active opposition by their members and co-ordinators to the national database, and as a result, fewer schemes have registered. The Neighbourhood and Home Watch Network currently has seven employees and provides support to new groups wishing to start up, including directing people towards the various resources on their website, such as Toolkits, a Document Library, and a Members’ Area. Local associations may provide further and more detailed support depending on the characteristics of the area, what the local issues are, and what the relationships are like between the local Neighbourhood Watch groups and the police.

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  Citizen Spies

  The Long Rise of America's Surveillance Society

  • Joshua Reeves(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • NYU Press

    (Publisher)

  In its early days, police agencies promoted Neighborhood Watch by evoking nostalgia for an idyllic, crime-free past complete with unlocked doors and stay-at-home moms. In a federally funded study conducted by the RAND Corporation in 1976, researchers claimed that Neighborhood Watch had emerged in response to the “reduced sense of public safety during the 1960s and early 1970s.” 59 Illustrating how police officials tapped into this reduced sense of public safety, a 1981 Watch brochure released by the Virginia Division of Justice and Crime Prevention waxed dreamily on a crime-free era long gone: “In any discussion about crime, a frequently expressed desire is to have neighborhoods return to the way they were in the good old days when one could leave the home unoccupied and not have to worry about locking doors.” 60 In the old days, the brochure claims, “neighborhood watching” occurred naturally because homes were always occupied (typically by women working in the home). In the chaotic and volatile word of today, however, citizens have to learn to be “nosy”: “The best way to describe Neighborhood Watch is neighbors being ‘nosy’ about their neighbors. The prying eyes of neighbors may at times seem a nuisance but those prying eyes are enhancing neighborhood safety and security.” 61 In addition to distributing local Neighborhood Watch stickers that said, “Use your eyes and your ears. Be nosy,” 62 Virginia’s Watch organization reminded citizens of the fundamental duties of the citizen officer: “Trust your eyes, your ears, and your common sense.” 63 A 1984 Department of Justice report emphasized the importance of reorienting citizens’ sociality toward these rituals of suspicion: “If citizens are to recognize crimes while the crimes are being committed, citizens need to know what a crime looks like and where it is likely to occur: to provide such knowledge is the goal of programs like Neighborhood Watch

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  Watching Police, Watching Communities

  • Mike McConville, Dan Shepherd(Authors)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 4

  The reality of neighbourhood watch

           

  Crime and the fear of crime have been presented as increasingly serious social problems, their prevention or containment continually forced high on the political agenda. The ‘crime problem’ constitutes a standing demand that politicians do something to combat threats to order and to create in people a well-founded sense of security. In the most recent past, however, there has been a conscious attempt to delegate responsibility for crime, to make dealing with crime a civic duty rather than simply a matter that can be laid at the door of the police. In this initiative, neighbourhood watch is put forward as one of the central vehicles through which collective community action may be co-ordinated and expressed by ‘active’ citizens.

  This conception of neighbourhood watch has to be seen against the background of an important debate between two conflicting sociological models of the relationship between crime, fear of crime and people's responses to these (see Skogan, 1981). On one view, crime is essentially something which fractures communities, eroding their capacity to exercise informal social control. According to this model, advanced by Conklin (1975), crime and fear of crime generates insecurity, suspicion and withdrawal from community affairs. Residents develop a negative view of their own localities, neighbourly interaction diminishes, with the result that the community is even less capable of exercising informal control. Although, as Skogan (1981, p. 73) points out, recent evidence tends to favour this explanatory model, it is the other one that has attracted political support.

  The earlier model was that advanced by the French sociologist, Emile Durkheim (1933). In Durkheim's view, crime has an essentially integrative function. By shocking the sentiments of ordinary people crime stimulates them to act individually and collectively: community solidarity and morale are thereby increased, and informal social control exercised by the collectivity is strengthened. In the United States of America, this kind of thinking has been taken up by advocates of the ‘social control’ model, who see crime and fear of crime as indicators of the erosion of informal social control processes that are believed to establish and maintain order in society (Wilson, 1975; Wilson and Kelling, 1982; Kelling, 1986). The central argument is that ‘collective neighbourhood efforts can influence crime and fear of crime … community crime control works’ (Kelling, 1986, p. 91).

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  Handbook of Crime Prevention and Community Safety

  • Nick Tilley, Aiden Sidebottom, Nick Tilley, Aiden Sidebottom(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  www.ncjrs.gov/criminal_justice2000/vol_3/03g.pdf (7 June 2015).

  Gresham P. , Grainger E. , Stockdale J. , Woodhead D.C. and Shermer D. (2004) Keeping Watch: Report to the Home Office, Crime Strategy and Resources Unit, on the Neighbourhood Watch Development Project . Crime Strategy and Resources Unit, Home Office, London.

  Grinc R. (1994) ‘Angels in Marble’: Problems in Stimulating Community Involvement in Community Policing. Crime and Delinquency 40 (3) 437–468.

  Henig J. (1984) Citizens Against Crime: An Assessment of the Neighbourhood Watch Programme in Washington D.C. Occasional Paper No. 2, Center for Washington Area Studies George Washington University. Available at: www.popcenter.org/library/scp/pdf/85-Henig.pdf (5 June 2015).

  Herbert S. (2001) Policing the Contemporary City: Fixing Broken Windows or Shoring up Neo-Liberalism? Theoretical Criminology 5 (4) 445–466.

  Herbert S. (2005) The Trapdoor of Community. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 95 (4) 850–865.

  Herbert S. (2006a) Tangled up in Blue Conflicting Paths to Police Legitimacy. Theoretical Criminology 10(4) 481–504.

  Herbert S. (2006b) Citizens, Cops, and Power: Recognizing the Limits of Community . Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

  Hope T. (1995) Community Crime Prevention. In: Tonry M. and Farrington D. (eds), Building a Safer Society: Strategic Approaches to Crime Prevention (Crime and Justice) , Vol. 19. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. 21–89.

  Hope T. (2001) Community Crime Prevention in Britain: A Strategic Overview. Criminology and Criminal Justice 1 (4) 421–439.

  Hornqvist M. (2014) The Fluid Legitimacy of the Husby Riots. Criminology in Europe 13 (1) 4–7.

  Hughes G. and Rowe M. (2007) Neighbourhood Policing and Community Safety. Criminology and Criminal Justice 7 (4) 317–346.

  Husain S. (1988) Neighbourhood Watch in England and Wales: A Locational Analysis . Crime Prevention Unit Paper 12, Home Office, London.

  Innes M. (2004) Signal Crimes and Signal Disorders: Notes on Deviance as Communicative Action. British Journal of Sociology

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  Handbook of Loss Prevention and Crime Prevention

  • Lawrence J. Fennelly(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Butterworth-Heinemann

    (Publisher)

  We actually worked under grant funds secured by the local health department to help provide a healthy community with a higher quality of life as it relates to crime, fear of crime, violence prevention, outdoor physical activity, and access to services. As a part of this process, we are gathering crime stats, calls for service, census data, and other demographic information for the neighborhood. Our goal is to educate the community with an on-site training program on crime prevention, physical security, and crime prevention through environmental design and then follow up with a neighborhood assessment that is completed by the instructor(s). A formal written report with recommendations is then prepared and incorporated into the current initiatives for the neighborhood. This plan incorporates well into community policing concepts in terms of the community coming together for problem-solving results. 2 Ten secrets of Neighborhood Watch are as follows: 1. Awareness and knowledge strategies are number one. Inform your community as to what crime prevention is, how it works, how to be proactive. What is Neighborhood Watch? What can citizens/employees do and what is available to them? 2. Communication. We are living in the electronic era: e-mails, tweeters, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, cell phones, texting, radio public services spots, posters, chain calling, brochures and community newspapers, etc. just to name a few. Verbal communication is also very important. The facilitator or practitioner should completely explain the program and objectives to his/her community. 3. Knowledge. The awareness campaign, although important, opens the door to private citizen participation. A public awareness campaign results in widespread recognition of crime prevention. This will trigger awareness in target hardening, security surveys of a complex, and the turning on of lights and added patrol. Some police departments offer training resulting into a 40-hour program. So look into this

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  Coming to Terms with Policing

  Perspectives on Policy

  • Rod Morgan, David J. Smith, Rod Morgan, David J. Smith(Authors)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  8 The neighbourhood watch experiment Trevor Bennett

  Introduction

  The decision by the previous Commissioner of the Metropolis, Sir Kenneth Newman, to launch neighbourhood watch (NW) in September 1983 throughout the Metropolitan Police District (MPD) within a year of taking office was both courageous and unique. NW schemes had a relatively short history in the United States of America and virtually none in Britain. The earliest versions of NW in North America appeared in the late 1960s (Washnis 1976 ) and more fully rounded schemes appeared in the early 1970s (

  Cirel et al. 1977

  ). The earliest schemes in Britain were implemented in the early 1980s and the first fully operational scheme was launched in 1982 (Anderton 1985 ). Until early in 1983 no force in this country had committed itself to launching NW on a force-wide basis (Bowden 1982 ). The Metropolitan Police was the first of the metropolitan forces in the country to adopt NW force-wide and in so doing made the programme available for the first time to a large urban population.

  The aim of this chapter is to present some of the findings of an evaluation of these early NW schemes in the MPD. The research arose out of discussions between the Metropolitan Police and the Home Office Research and Planning Unit. At the time of the discussions the Metropolitan Police, through the Directorate of Management Services, were conducting their own large-scale evaluation of NW in London using police-recorded crime as the data source. It was felt that a more focused project was needed not only to complement the police research but also to produce findings which were independent of the police. The Home Office Research and Planning Unit agreed to fund the project.

  Before presenting the findings of the evaluation it might be helpful to describe briefly the theory and practice which guided the choice of the particular version of NW that was eventually adopted in London. The key decisions which shaped the choice of programme implemented can be traced through the major policy documents issued by the Metropolitan Police.

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  Introduction to Policing

  • Michael Rowe, Liam Ralph, Ali Malik(Authors)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 11 .

  Box 5.3 Neigbourhood Policing

  The purpose of Neighbourhood Policing is to tackle crime and fear of crime better and bring the police closer to communities. Its key principles are:

  • Visible and accessible police – local people seeing and having regular contact with the same officers – week in and week out – who stay in the job long enough to build lasting and trusting relationships with the communities they serve;
  • Influence – over community safety priorities in their communities which might be dealing with persistent burglaries; clearing up graffiti and vandalism or tackling open drug dealing or gun crime. Local people who are closest to the problems in their communities are often best placed to help shape and participate in the solutions to them;
  • Interventions – joint action with communities and partners to solve problems and harness everyone’s strengths;
  • Answers – sustainable solutions to problems and feedback on results. People will know the names, numbers and email addresses of their Neighbourhood Policing teams. They will also know who is responsible for what in terms of reducing crime, tackling anti-social behaviour and keeping the areas where they live and work safe. The Government is legislating to make it possible for local people, through the Community Call for Action, to trigger action by the police and other partners to address acute or persistent problems of crime or anti-social behaviour.

  (Home Office, 2006a: 4)

  Important elements of the NP agenda include a re-commitment to the delivery of high-visibility front-line policing that both leads and encompasses diverse partners from among the extended police family described more fully in Chapter 8

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