Crime Prevention and Community Safety

The idea of crime prevention involves the notion that it is better to stop crime occurring in the first place than simply punishing it after it has happened. The role of the criminal justice system is of course oriented to detecting and punishing crimes that have already taken place. But this fact itself has always been considered to have a preventative dimension. The high likelihood of detection by the police, and the deterrent effects of punishment have been seen as forms of crime prevention.

But the traditional criminal justice agencies have prevention as a sort of side effect or unintended consequence of their main aim of detection and punishment. And they are, as we have seen in previous lectures, not that efficient. Specific measures aimed at preventing crime have always been around in an everyday sense. Families, schools and communities disapprove of crime and this acts as a form of 'informal social control' People lock their doors and windows against burglars, and perhaps avoid badly lit areas, or certain parts of town, with the intention of reducing the likelihood of victimisation. All this is fairly straightforward.

But since the early 1980's there has been a growth in the idea of crime prevention as important, if not more so than criminal justice in controlling crime.

Reasons for growth in concern with crime prevention during the 1980s

• From the 1980s there has been increasing concern with rising crime and falling police clearups. The police themselves have argued that various types of crime are increasingly difficult to control. Sir Kenneth Newman, who was Commissioner of  the Metropolitan Police during the mid 1980s, argued that 'mass private property' plus opportunist crime undermined traditional police detection methods. By ‘mass private property’ he meant mass produced consumer products such as video-recorders which, once stolen, are very difficult to trace because they are identical to thousands of other products of the same make. Likewise opportunist offenders, who take spontaneous advantage of an open window or door, may be impossible to trace, unlike professional criminals whose activities and whereabouts will be subject to police surveillance. These crimes (much household burglary and petty theft) should therefore, he argued, be the main focus of crime prevention and citizens must take responsibility for preventing them.

• There was also a more general concern with the decline of the processes of 'informal social control' by which local communities discouraged criminality. Economic deprivation, family breakdown, rapid population turnover in some of the poorest Council Estates (Public Housing Projects) led to areas where few people knew their neighbours, and the old collective processes of social control were weakened

• Another usage of the term  'mass private property' was that of the American criminologists, Clifford Shearing and Paul Stenning. They referred to the expansion of private spaces such as shopping malls and private housing estates or 'gated communities' (to use a term popular in the US) which have a particular interest in regulating who comes into the area. The public police will not normally patrol such areas and will only attend if called to a crime scene. Therefore shopping malls and gated communities will have a particular interest in Closed Circuit TV cameras (CCTV) or private security guards using civil powers of protection of private property.

• The 1980s saw the increased popularity, among governments and Home Office departments, of 'administrative criminology' in which the search for the causes of crime was replaced by a simple costs and benefits approach. It was assumed that the criminal was a rational calculator like everyone else and therefore rather than pondering about the motivations of criminals the aim should be simply to raise the costs of criminality in terms of putting obstacles in its way. These would of course include the likelihood of detection but also locks and bolts, fences and CCTV would help raise the cost. By contrast, during the same period and from the same people who expounded this ‘rational choice’ idea of committing crimes, there was a stress on the irrationality of many types of victim,. The notion gained ground that the fear of crime was considerably in excess of the actual risk.

• At a more general political level the 1980s in the UK were dominated by the politics of the Conservative governments led by Margaret Thatcher. They were heavily influenced by a right wing critique of the welfare state and social and economic planning in general. The so-called ‘New Right’ (which was replaced in 1997 by equally ‘New’ Labour!) argued that the welfare state had created a culture of dependency on state provision and had undermined our sense of self responsibility. What was required was that individuals and local communities took responsibility for their own problems—including much crime—rather than simply relying on the state (in this case the police) to sort it out. This Conservative call for more responsibility, by individuals and communities, to prevent crime fitted in nicely with police  ideas that part of the responsibility for dealing with low level property crime such as household burglary should fall on the shoulders of the public itself rather than be regarded as a wholly police task. So when the annual crime statistics showed a rise in crime, government ministers and police chiefs, instead of focussing on police ineffectiveness, could respond by saying that citizens are not acting responsibly enough and taking insufficient care in locking their doors and windows.

The view that the state and its agencies were less than efficient was, however, open to a number of interpretations. Conservatives focused on the way the centralised welfare state had, allegedly undermined individual responsibility and initiative and (according to the influential American conservative theorist Charles Murray) had created a dependency culture such that the welfare state was the cause of the very problems (single parents, labour market dropout, crime) that it was intended to solve. Meanwhile, for many left wingers in the Labour Party there was agreement that the centralised state was its bureaucratically inefficient, though not that it had created a dependency culture. The left remedy was, however, more democratic accountability. The perceived need was for more local control of key institutions, in particular the police, to make them respond more effectively to the needs of local communities.

For most of the 1980s and early 1990s these two radically different political orientations were reflected at two different levels of the English political system. Through much of the 1980s the Conservatives, in power in central government, faced considerable opposition from local government where, in many areas of the country, Labour was still heavily entrenched. The resistance of regional authorities such as the Greater London Council (GLC) to central government policy was a major conflict during the early 1980s. It was only resolved when the government abolished the second tier regional authorities in 1985-6 (GLC, Merseyside etc.) These two political tendencies lay behind, as we shall see, some of the policy debates about crime prevention during the period.

Social and physical crime prevention during the 1980s and early 1990s

The main types of crime prevention strategies that were developed can be roughly divided into physical and social 

Physical prevention

Physical prevention was oriented to removing the physical opportunities to commit crime. The police started giving out free crime prevention advice relating to locks and bolts while local authorities with substantial public housing stock obtained funding under the government's Safer Cities programme for investment in such things as improved street lighting, removing badly lit areas, video phone entry systems in housing estates, and, during the 1990s, CCTV became increasingly popular. There were some bold architectural experiments such as removing the walkways between blocks of high-rise apartments (seen as eliminating the escape routes for burglars) and discussions about the design of housing estates to maximise the level of 'natural surveillance' (e.g. apartment blocks grouped into little courtyards so that anyone looking out of a window could survey the entire area)

Social prevention

Social prevention was oriented to strengthening communities and restoring informal surveillance and social control of crime. This involved neighbourhoods taking a measure of responsibility for their security. The conservative government, from its standpoint of stressing individual responsibilities, tended to think of communities only as groups of individuals, such as residents and house owners concerned with the upkeep of their property. The notion of community groups debating and participating in the implementation of crime prevention policy was certainly not a priority. The government therefore naturally favoured such schemes which reinforced the role of the police as the leading agency. The favourite from this standpoint was the Neighbourhood Watch Scheme, which is aimed at recruiting the public to become the 'eyes and ears' of the police. Neighbourhood Watch schemes, which proliferated during the period, involved groups of residents engaging in surveillance of the streets, reporting ‘suspicious’ activities or strangers in the area to the police.

The Police meanwhile had set up 'Community Liaison Officers' as far back as the 1970s and following the Scarman Report on the Brixton riots in 1981 had been required, under the 1984 Police and Criminal Evidence Act, to set up liaison committees in which representatives of local communities could discuss their crime problems with the police. However the police retained their autonomy.

Often, these meetings revealed that police and local residents might have quite different ideas about crime priorities in the area. Police might think they 'know' what the most important crimes in an area are. They would base their data on public requests for police assistance and reported crimes. But certain crimes might be exaggerated. For example car and vehicle crime might constitue a high proportion of reported crime for reasos of insurance. Community groups were able to point out that things such as domestic violence, racial attacks, fear of the streets late at night by elderly residents and workers such as nurses coming home from late shifts, were actually considered more important but were less reported to the police because people just didn't think the police would do much about these issues anyway. 

An important ingredient of this new relation between police and community was the development of local crime surveys.  One of the most innovative and original of these was conducted in the London Borough of Islington which funded Middlesex Polytechnic (now Middlesex University) Centre for Criminology to undertake the Islington Crime Survey, the results of which were studied by local authorities as well as local police. The survey, in a similar manner to the government's British Crime Survey produced data on not only crimes not reported to the police but also on wider issues such as how local communities evaluated police behaviour and efficiency and similarly for local social services and council services. The data helped solve the issue as to whether the police were focussing their resources on the crimes that local people worried most about and also whether other local services were in fact meeting resident's needs. The idea, quite advanced for the time, was that, using the data from the survey, the police and the local council, in consultation with community groups, would work out a joint policy for crime prevention in the borough. This, at the time, was one of the most sophisticated attempts at integrated multi-agency approaches to crime prevention and involved both physical initiatives such as improved street lighting and social initiatives which attempted to involved community groups in crime prevention policy.

Problems with crime prevention in the 1980s and early 1990s

evaluation

A major problem with crime prevention schemes was that of how to evaluate their effect. Many attempts at physical prevention were sociologically naïve. For example grouping apartments into little courtyards in order to maximise nature surveillance resulted in creating a maze of little alleyways that could be hiding places for robbers. Taking down the walkways between high rise apartment blocks reduced burglary only for a time and meanwhile making it harder to get in and out of such areas would, some argued, increase levels of domestic violence as people were locked in their flats with their problems. Crime prevention seemed, according to critics, obsessed with household burglary and with the assumption that the most significant offender was from outside the home. Feminists and others concerned with crimes such as domestic violence certainly disputed this!

It was also difficult to measure actual crime reductions. One of the main issues was the effect of crime prevention schemes in simply displacing crime to adjacent areas. This seemed a particular problem with Neighbourhood Watch schemes. Displacement itself was difficult to measure since it is often not known to what precise area crime is being displaced. Some schemes such as CCTV tended, according to evaluation research, to make people feel a bit more secure but the effect on actual crime rates was negligible.  Usually the most frequent response to social surveys asking about crime prevention was the demand for more police officers on the streets. In an atmosphere of increasing concern for efficiency and effective use of resources, such an increase, whose outcome in terms of crime prevention might be minimal, was difficult to sustain.

social preconditions

One important criticism was that the social preconditions in the locality for setting up crime prevention, particularly social prevention schemes, had not been understood. Such schemes were hardest to set up where they were most needed. Neighbourhood Watch schemes were, for example, enthusiastically adopted by middle class communities whose crime rates were fairly low but who saw crime as increasing and were worried about it. Meanwhile in really poor areas with high crime rates and where criminals were powerful (e.g. residents would be reluctant to inform police about crime for fear of reprisals)  such schemes were very difficult to get off the ground. Such areas were seen by some as beyond salvation. People who could would leave the area, and those that remained would barricade themselves into their flats. Neighbourhood Watch was a non-starter.

Funding

There were also issues about funding for crime prevention initiatives.  Much funding was, as noted above, derived from central government Safer Cities programme and its successors. Such funding was for defined periods of time and rather short term. Often police and local authorities would collaborated to bring down crime on a particular estate, or area, only to find that when the funding ran out, none of the agencies involved could afford, because of other demands on their limited resources, to permanently devote the amount of time to the area that the project required.

Furthermore, in order to qualify for subsequent funding, results had to be shown. It was therefore in the interests those applying for funding not to tackle the worst hit areas in terms of crime rates but rather those amenable to crime reductions in a relatively short time. Again, the poorest and highest crime areas tended to lose out. Critics argued that this problem was inbuilt into the combination of performance indicators (showing results in a short time period) and short term funding

Finally, one of the outcomes, particularly of the crime prevention surveys, was that local residents wanted more police officers on the beat. This made people feel secure - provided of course that the community had good relations with the local police - but it was costly. Police managers were under pressure from central government to show 'value for money'. Having lots of officers spending time pounding the streets did not yield an increase in the arrest statistics, but was costly in terms of manpower. This issue was resolved to some extent - years later - by the Police Reform Act 2002 which created Police Community Support Officers who are basically uniformed civilians working with the police but lacking full police powers

From Crime Prevention to Community Safety

As the years passed and crime prevention activities expanded, it became increasingly obvious that a wide range of organisations were being drawn into the crime prevention world. Yet only the police had a statutory legal authority to deal with crime. Obviously it was desirable that powers such as arrest be restricted to full warranted police officers but in the area of prevention it was seen as desirable that other agencies be given greater recognition of their role in crime prevention.

The most obvious need was to give Local Authorites (local councils, county councils etc.) some formal status. Already in 1984 the Home Office sent a circular to all local authorities instructing them to take some responsibility for crime prevention. The circular stated:

“A primary objective of the police has always been the prevention of crime. However, since some of the factors affecting crime lie outside the control or direct influence of the police, crime prevention can not be left to them alone. Every individual citizen and all those agencies whose policies and practices can influence the extent of crime should make their contribution. Preventing crime is a task for the whole community.”

But this did not make citizens and local authorities legally responsible for crime control. Rather it urged them to take responsibility. In particular it urged police, local authorities, social services and community groups to develop inter-agency programmes for crime prevention. In practice of course, the police emerged as the most powerful agency in many of these collaborations.

In 1986 the government established the Safer Cities programme which became the main channel through which government funding for crime prevention projects would be directed. In the same year it set up Crime Concern to get private sector organisations such as local businesses involved in crime prevention

Local authority crime prevention oriented initiatives with a social dimension could include such things as youth facilities and community centres aimed at keeping young people off the streets and out of trouble. Meanwhile voluntary organisations which received Safer Cities funding such as The National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders (NACRO) also innovated in the areas of social prevention. For example NACRO set up the Safe Neighbourhoods Unit  (SNU) which did useful work with tenants groups on local authority housing estates and argued, on the basis of its experience, that the best schemes were where tenants had an incentive to get involved with the general management of their housing estates by having a say in such matters as repairs and maintenance.

So, by the early 1990s the term 'community safety' was beginning to replace crime prevention. The idea was that prevention conjured up notions of locks and bolts and street lighting while the growing collaboration between police, local authorities, social services, education, probation service, health authorities, transport authorities, housing associations, local businesses, involved a much wider concept of community safety in which all major organisations operating within the community would have a voice and the planning could be more imaginative and large scale.

1990 The Morgan Report:

The government felt sufficiently pressured by these developments to instruct the Home Office to produce a review of crime prevention policy.  The report, known as the Morgan Report (after its chairman, James Morgan), became a milestone in the development of crime prevention policy. It recommended replacing the concept of crime prevention with that of community safety. It argued:

The term crime prevention is often narrowly interpreted and this reinforces the view that it is solely the responsibility of the police. The term community safety is open to wider interpretation and could encourage greater participation from all sections of the community... We see community safety as having both social and situational aspects, as being concerned with people, communities and organisations including families, victims and at risk groups, as well as with attempting to reduce particular types of crime and the fear of crime. (Morgan Report, 1991)

Morgan understood the need for:

• A larger number of agencies, including local community groups, to participate actively in the formulation of crime prevention policy and in its implementation

• A wider range of problems, including employment, race relations,  youth problems, drugs etc, to be considered as relevant to crime prevention. Morgan understood the need to go further than simply Neighbourhood Watch and strengthening doors and street lights

Most importantly, Morgan urged that local authorities should not just be encouraged to be active in crime prevention, but should have a statutory responsibility for crime prevention. This would make them legal partners to the police. Morgan argued that this would help remedy the absence hitherto of elected members from crime prevention arrangements. He was aware that local councillors, who would of course be drawn from local community groups, could have a direct input into policy formation and help to refocus on the needs of various local groups whose concerns were not being so well represented in the focus on household burglary.

The conservative government of the time did not really like the implications of the Morgan Report - in particular its recommendation that local authorities be given equal status with the police as responsible for community safety. So its main recommendations had to await the arrival of New Labour in government in 1997.

New Labour and Community

New Labour was less obsessed by the theme of individual responsibility and, while retaining the idea that people should not just rely on the state to sort out their problems, was more oriented towards the idea of active communities participating in formulating policies. Tony Blair, influenced less by Neoliberalism than communitarianism was focused on what he saw as the need to restore a sense of moral community. He said in a speech in 1997

“The importance of the notion of community is that it defines the relationship not only between us as individual, but between people and the society in which they live, one that is based on responsibilities as well as rights, on obligations as well as entitlements.”

This was more in harmony with the ideas of community safety. Communities rather than just individuals could now be seen as important participants and in particular the more community oriented approach was sensitive to the notion that distinct groups in the community had their own victimisation problems and needed important voice. 

1998 Crime and Disorder Act

The 1998 Crime and Disorder Act was the key legislation in which New Labour put its crime prevention plans into action. Much of this involved the implementation of the main recommendations of the Morgan Report. In particular the granting of statutory responsibility for local authorities for community safety. But whereas Morgan had wanted local authorities to be responsible for community safety.  The Act gave the responsibility jointly to local authorities and the police and required them to collaborate to develop local Community Safety Partnerships. (These are nowadays known usually as Community Safety and Crime Reduction Partnerships) The range of bodies who have a statutory duty to participate in these partnerships was extended to the local Probation service and Health authority.

Community Safety and Crime Reduction Partnerships (by 2000 there were 400 such partnerships) in local boroughs in which police, local authorities, probation, health services, education etc. share responsibility for crime reduction. Police and Local authority have responsibility for conducting a ‘crime and disorder audit’ every three years.  This audit of crime and disorder levels and patterns in their area every three years and this will be the basis for the formation of a crime reduction plan, the effectiveness of which will be monitored in terms of its effects on crime levels. 

The formation of the crime reduction plan will involve the main community groups in the areas: local tenants, women’s, youth, ethnic groups, local businesses and branches of national organisations and voluntary organisations. All these will be expected to send representatives to these partnerships to discuss what can be done to prevent crime and disorder. You might, if you've been reading this carefully, have noticed that the word 'disorder' has crept in alongside crime as a target for reduction. The significance of this will be discussed presently

The issues discussed and the targets formulated are wide ranging (you can see this by following some of the web links below). The Community Safety area has become bureaucratised and managerialised with numerous Crime Reduction Directorates to coordinate police and Local Authority bodies. Professionalisation, creation of experts, development of performance indicators, Glossy plans on Local authority web sites:

Controlling anti-social behaviour

The 1998 Crime and Disorder Act has other important provisions alongside the reorganisation of community safety schemes. In particular it provides a power for senior police and local authority officials to apply to local  magistrates for the issue of Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs) and curfew orders for young people.  These orders are civil remedies. That is to say the evidence for them is not required to adhere to the criminal court standard of proof ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ but the lower civil court standard of proof  ‘on the balance of probabilities’ that the individuals concerned are engaging in behaviour “in a manner that caused, or was likely to cause, harassment, alarm or distress to one or more persons not of the same household [as the defendant].” Critics argue that the combination of a low standard of proof, combined with a rather vague definition of anti-social behaviour, give powerful weapons to the police and local authorities to control mainly, the young, poor and unemployed. These orders take a variety of forms such as exclusion: a ban on entering certain defined areas of the neighbourhood, night time curfews, and parenting orders in which the parents of unruly young people can be required to attend ‘parenting training’. While the issuing of such orders can be on the civil standard of proof, the violation of such an order (easy to prove beyond reasonable doubt) becomes a criminal offence under the act. Subsequent legislation has strengthened the role of ASBOs and similar measures. The scope of ASBOs was extended by the  Anti-Social Behaviour Act 2003 and further developments contained in the government's recent 'five year plan' entitled Cutting Crime, Delivering Justice issued in July 2004. 

So what is going on? There are two important ingredients to the recent measures against 'anti-social behaviour'. The first is a reversal of some of the traditional assumptions of the 'consensus policing' tradition that we talked about in Lecture Two where we stressed the role of discretion by police officers. Traditionally there was a view that good policing required good relations with the local community. This involved on many occasions police officers 'turning a blind eye' to some minor crimes or disorderly behaviour such as noise or drunkenness in the community in the expectation of more willing community assistance in cases of more serious crime.  But in the present period where deprived communities are more fragmented, besieged by crime, drug dealing and violence, so the argument goes, this assumption has to be stood on its head. Rather than ignoring minor crime in the interests of community peace, minor crimes and even various forms of disorder which do not amount to criminality have to be 'nipped in the bud' because, if left unchecked, they will create the conditions for the development of more serious crime.

This argument was developed way back in 1981 by two American criminologists, James Q. Wilson and George F. Kelling in a famous article called 'Broken Windows'. The thesis has become very popular in UK government circles. It amounts to the idea that crime, in a particular area, is part of a local ‘cycle of decay which can be conceived of as a number of stages roughly illustrated as follows

Various strategies of intervention can then be worked out to ‘interrupt’ this process of decay by halting it at particular stages. Thus much of the work of Crime and Disorder Partnerships will be concerned with trying to reverse the processes at work in stages  3 and 4. Anti-social behaviour orders and similar measures (such as 'zero-tolerance policing' popular a few years ago) will focus more on stage 2. Crime and Disorder Partnerships may well attempt, through encouraging the Local Authority to spend money on job creation programmes, or to make the area more attractive to private business, to reverse stage 1 and 5. A number of versions of this thinking have been developed over the last couple of decades but the above gives the essential flavour.  

The second ingredient of current policy dealing with anti-social behaviour might be called pre-emptive criminalisation or, as in the 2002 film Minority Report pre-crime. The idea is that it is legitimate to put the sort of constraint normally reserved for convicted offenders on individuals who have not yet been convicted of any crime is not exactly new but it has become more controversial with the rise of ASBOs and similar constraints. Football banning orders are another example of this principle at work in UK legislation.

Problems and Criticisms

The general community safety strategy discusssed in this lecture is not without its critics. Generally the criticisms boil down to two:

Despite all the new rhetoric about community, the problem of the difficulty in implementing such schemes in the poorest highest crime areas remains. There is a perceived danger of reinforcing the divisions between better off areas with effective crime reduction partnerships and poor, high crime areas. If , for example, community safety partnerships need to attract private sector funding and participation then their aims may be deflected towards that of securing property values in areas attractive to business and in effect “confining criminogenic communities to their usually depressed neighbourhoods, rather than liberating them from these.” (Gilling 1997: 196)

The second is the assumption that the solution and causes of problems of local communities lie within that community itself. This is one of the main criticisms of the ‘cycle of decay’ approach outlined above. Stage One: economic decay and jobless youth on the streets may be well beyond the capacities of the local authority and the police to remedy. It may be less a question of cracking down on incivilities than bringing investment into the area. Community Safety partnerships may well indeed consider the issue of creating more jobs in the area but there is very little they can do about it if it is more profitable for investment to go elsewhere. The present government would probably argue that a safe, crime free, cohesive community is more attractive to business than a high crime area. But in an era of globalisation when many traditional forms of employment are weakening then social tensions and competition for jobs and resources may well be the overwhelming factor in an area.

As regards anti-social behaviour orders much criticism centres on the problem of civil liberties already touched on. The ASBO is something that can be imposed on young people - on the lower civil law standard of proof - who have yet to commit a criminal offence. Yet, if they violate the conditions of their ASBO they have automatically committed a criminal offence and can end up serving a custodial sentence.