Crime prevention has become, in recent years, a major part of social and criminal justice policy in many European countries. Precisely because of this it is no longer possible to see the development of such policy as a simply a set of technical solutions to an agreed problem. An understanding of the development of crime prevention policy requires that it be located in the wider political context. I shall begin this essay therefore with an overview of the political developments which form the background to the development of crime prevention since the beginning of the 1980s. I shall then attempt to portray some of the main themes and conflicts which have permeated this area of policy from the beginning of the 1980s to the present.

The crisis of the welfare state

The election, in 1979, of the Conservative government led by Margaret Thatcher marked a decisive watershed in British social policy. From the end of the second world war until the mid 1970s there had existed a general consensus, embracing both Conservative and Labour parties, around what might be called the ‘Keynesian Welfare State’. The latter was based on two propositions: firstly, that Keynesian economic policy could guarantee near full employment and a steady rate of economic expansion which would gradually eliminate poverty and its associated social problems. Secondly, that a comprehensive system of ‘social rights’ to state education, health care, housing and minimum income would lay the basis for a cohesive, stable and homogenous society.

During the 1960s it became clear that remaining zones of economic backwardness, poverty and rising rates of petty criminality were stubbornly refusing to assimilate to the general affluence and were accordingly assigned to the category of ‘social pathology’. Such regions – the older industrial areas and the decaying central city areas – were now seen as in need of decisive expert intervention – social engineering, not simply at the level of additional economic resources, but also basic education, skills training, social work intervention in family pathology etc.

In this spectrum of policies the problems of crime occupied a relatively minor position. Crime rates were still generally low, even in these backward areas and predominantly juvenile petty crime was still seen very much as a stage in the transition to adulthood. The main issue in criminal justice policy during the 1950s and 60s was that of penal reform. As regards the treatment of young offenders, a strong philosophy of social reintegration through welfare, rehabilitation therapy and special education rather than by means of judicial punishment was a marked feature of the welfare state.

By the end of the 1970s the general strategy of the Keynesian Welfare State was in the grip of a severe ideological and political crisis. Firstly it was clear that it had failed to eliminate poverty and social inequality. But more important perhaps, from the standpoint of an increasingly enfeebled British capitalism which nevertheless desired to keep its global military commitments in place, the welfare state came to be seen by the political elite as something that could no longer be afforded, at least in its existing form. As if to illustrate the general impotence of the welfare state and the strategy of ‘social engineering’ of which it was part, crime rates had been continually rising since the end of the 1950s quite irrespective of the levels of poverty, unemployment, or spending on welfare and social services.

The historical importance of the Thatcher government lay its elaboration of a decisive ideological shift in which the status of the welfare state was transformed from that of rather ineffective remedy to social problems of poverty and crime to part of their actual cause. In addition the social social collectivist philosophy which accompanied the welfare state was now seen as undermining the entrepreneurial culture which had once made Britain a dynamic society. The growth in poverty and criminality were seen as the results of a ‘culture of dependency’ sustained by the easy availability of welfare provision and the consequent undermining of the desire to work. The early 19th century bourgeois fear of the ‘dangerous classes’ now returned as the fear of the growing ‘underclass’. The American sociologist Charles Murray was flown across the Atlantic to explain how the ready availability of housing and social security payments was giving rise to a proliferation of single young mothers with fatherless, criminogenic children. [1]

The central task of the Thatcher governments was, then, the political, economic and ideological management of the destruction of the old Keynesian Welfare State by disconnecting the social problems of poor communities from the responsibility of the state and reclassifying them as the responsibility of the victims themselves. The social citizenship of the welfare state was now seen as a debilitating passivity. It was to be replaced by new active citizens taking responsibility for their own misfortunes.

However behind the Thatcherite slogans of ‘free the people’ lay an inevitable incipient authoritarianism. The people had to be ‘forced to be free’. The agenda was not simply one of dismantling of the welfare state – easier said than done, but also a question of dismantling the ability of trade unions to ‘interfere’ in the working of the labour market and of local government (of the city and region) to either use local taxation to compensate for cuts in central government welfare spending or otherwise act as centres of political resistance to the Thatcherite project. Local city government found its revenue raising powers continually reduced. Meanwhile the powerful regional assemblies which had remained solidly Labour in their political complexion – the most important of which was the Greater London Council - were abolished in 1986.

It is crucial to understand that the ‘New Right’ conservatism of Thatcher (and her successor, John Major) envisaged a free society of active citizens taking responsibility for solving their own social problems but at the same time a society that was to be profoundly depoliticised. Freedom meant individual liberty and the marketplace, not the political liberty of collective decision-making. 

Crime and individual responsibility

In this ideological maelstrom crime and its control came to occupy an increasingly central place.[2] Firstly, crime had been rising more or less continuously since the 1960s. Crime rates in England and Wales doubled in the 1980s according to police statistics, while the Home Office’s British Crime Survey (BCS) indicated a smaller but still substantial rise in England and Wales. Since 1992 theft has been falling slightly but crimes of violence have continued to rise. Curiously, there seems to have been hardly any general increase in crime at all in Scotland, a fact which has been largely ignored by English commentators. It has to be added that the British Crime Survey also reveals that only about one third of crimes are reported to the police, a fact which both illustrates the unreliability of official statistics and says much about public confidence in the criminal justice system. Crime, according to both the BCS and other social surveys [3] was coming to be seen as a social problem second only to unemployment. Whatever the political complexion of the central government, there would have been concern with crime prevention. Under the Thatcher government, however, the control of crime became integrated into important political and ideological projects.

Crime is unique among social problems in that, unlike perhaps unemployment or poverty, it presents itself as the activity of a responsible individual who could have chosen to act otherwise. Public concern with rising crime, particularly the petty criminality of young people in the poorer urban areas was therefore a very appropriate vehicle for the elaboration of the new ideology of individual responsibility. The older welfare-oriented notions of crime as a product of poverty were now met with the response: "there are plenty of poor people who are not criminals!" Traditional preoccupations with diversion and non-punitive treatment for young offenders were now joined and partially displaced by a renewed emphasis on juridical punishment and ‘just deserts’.

Secondly, alongside a renewed emphasis on the individual responsibility of the criminal offender there was a similar stress on the responsibilities of the citizen to take action against crime. Crime prevention was an ideal embodiment of the new strongly apolitical active citizen celebrated by New Right Conservatism. Indeed, at a more directly instrumental level annual reports of rising crime could be deflected from a criticism of a failure of government and police to a criticism of citizens for not taking sufficient precautions to lock their windows, or avoid certain parts of the city during the hours of darkness.

The most popular manifestation of the active citizen in the sphere of crime prevention was the Neighbourhood Watch scheme. Introduced from around 1983, this American import required small groups of citizens in a particular street or block of housing to organise themselves to ‘keep their eyes open’ and report any suspicious events to the police. The police in return would in return provide details of recent crimes in the area and advise citizens as to what information they required. The police might ask citizens to keep an eye out for a particular individual or motor vehicle etc. By 1987 it was estimated that 2.7 million households were covered by these schemes and by 1996 the total was believed to be 6 million households. Needless to say there is no evidence which would enable an evaluation of the actual effect of these schemes on crime levels in their localities.[4] Nevertheless these organisations conformed to the ideal of the self active citizen and, in establishing a strong, direct relationship between citizens and the police, rather than with the democratic forum of the local authority, conformed to the Conservative aim of marginalising the local authorities.

Crime prevention and public housing

It has to be said that in Britain, as elsewhere, the ‘active citizen’ is a largely middle class phenomenon. One reason why Neighbourhood Watch has had little effect on crime levels is such organisations were most likely to be set up in areas where they were least needed. Middle class areas with a strong sense of collective interest based on property ownership and generally good relations with the police were enthusiastic recruits for Neighbourhood Watch. But these tended to be areas in which fear of crime rather than crime itself was growing. In the really poor inner city public (council) housing estates of high unemployment, high crime rates, little sense of a strong community and a general state of warfare between young people and the police, such initiatives were worse than useless. Much to the distaste of many Conservatives, old style centrally directed ‘social engineering’ was unavoidable.

From the late 1970s onwards much of the utopianism of an earlier period of social planning was viewed with a reluctant cynicism not just by Conservatives but also by many social democrats. Nowhere was this clearer than in public housing. It was admitted that the 1960s strategy of ‘slum clearance’ moving people out of the old city centres into housing estates on the urban periphery had been a mistake. Community cohesion in the old centres had been undermined and had never been reconstituted in the new estates. Part of this was the predilection for building enormous skyscrapers or ‘high rise’ housing as the British call them. A sense of community is difficult on the 15th floor from which the only escape is a lift which is more often broken than working. The decay of community combined with rising unemployment into a lethal mixture of high crime and the complete absence of informal social control. It was admitted that local authorities had also made many mistakes by allowing, in the allocation of public housing, the concentration of ‘problem families’ on particular estates which then became notorious for the absence of social control.

These estates became the focus of concern about rising crime during the 1980s and Local Authorities inevitably became therefore the main vehicle for crime prevention. Indeed, all local authorities were urged by central government to ‘speak the language of crime prevention’ in all aspects of their work. The old language of social rights and integration was being replaced by a language of dangerousness and management of risks. Poverty and homelessness were seen as social problems less because they were violations of social rights and more because of their perceived contribution to dangerousness and criminality. The themes of welfare and integration were being displaced by those of security and protection.

Of course much of the finance for crime prevention came from central government, particularly as the ability of local authorities to raise local taxes was placed under tight constraint. Although in one or two cases the central government Department of Environment directly managed crime prevention projects, these normally had to be administered by local authorities. Central government could insist that funds would be forthcoming only if local authority crime prevention plans were co-ordinated with the police and, from the second half of the 1980s, with local business and shopkeepers. This was an attempt to ensure that ‘non-political’ experts rather than democratically elected local councillors were the driving force. The guiding philosophy was that of an ad hoc partnership between a number of autonomous agencies. The role of the police will be discussed later. Finally, a key part of Conservative government strategy was to force local authorities to sell public housing to those tenants who could afford to buy them. But the proceeds went directly into the servicing of local authority financial loan debt and could not be used to build new public housing. Thus in many areas the public housing that remained in the control of local authorities was the poorest most deprived estates with high crime rates.

In fact one of the most interesting Department of Environment crime prevention initiatives highlighted some of the fallacies of the entire Conservative strategy. Between 1985 and 1994 the Priority Estates Project [5] aimed to "transform unpopular housing estates into places where people want to live". These projects, which of course only covered a few estates, have probably been among the most effective in the creation of safer communities. The programme supported schemes which included the following objectives: Physical improvements to dwellings, improving local estate management, involving tenants, diversifying tenure, attracting private investment and providing estate-based training and enterprise initiatives. One of the most important characteristics of the successful schemes was the involvement of tenants in managing the estate. This included the establishment of tenants committees who would negotiate with the local authority on matters such as repairs and maintenance. This helped reduce crime by developing a sense of empowerment and ‘ownership’ of the area which would strengthen informal social control. Meanwhile training workshops, with funding from local employers, and recreational facilities for young people were another important ingredient of those schemes which reduced crime.

The Safe Neighbourhoods Unit (SNU), for many years the leading voluntary sector organisation in crime prevention, in its survey of local authority crime prevention projects in 1995 concluded that "There is evidence that, where a mix of measures is introduced (including housing management, design, physical security and social measures), overall crime levels fall… and stay down longer." [6] The problem was that these projects clashed with overall government aim to reduce local authority powers and resources. Thus the successful schemes where tenants were encouraged to develop skills to help manage repairs and maintenance presupposed the ability of the local authority to respond speedily with resources and materials. Failure would lead to demoralisation, the lack of a sense of purpose, and so a weakening of social control. Crime would take over the area again and tenants would retreat behind their locked doors.

But a lack of resources was precisely the condition faced by the majority of local authorities in poor inner city areas. with a large stock of dilapidated public housing that could not be sold off to tenants who often could not even afford to pay their rent. Continual reductions in central government finance were accompanied by severe limits placed by government on the powers of local authorities to vary local taxes, e.g. on shops and business, to fund crime prevention and other projects. In many areas moreover it was difficult to attract investment from private business.

An additional problem was that central government increasingly demanded ‘value for money’ and would only provide funds for a specific ‘project’ of limited duration at the end of which decisive results in the form of reductions in crime would be demanded as the precondition for further funding. Typical of the methods of central government funding was the Safer Cities programme which began in 1986 in which 20 projects of three years duration were each given £250,000. [7] Such arrangements created an incentive to avoid areas of high crime and social problems most in need of crime prevention because success could not be guaranteed over the short period of three years. Furthermore it was clear that once central government funding ceased none of the agencies involved in the project – local authority, welfare, schools and the police – could only with extreme difficulty sustain the input of resources in terms of manpower or money, to make the crime reductions permanent.

The SNU report, [8] looking back over the 1980s and early 90s came to the conclusion that "there are, however, signs in many of the areas covered by the best schemes that crime problems begin to emerge again after a time. In some cases this is because a key element of the initiative is abandoned… (and that a)… 'project' approach to crime prevention favours 'instant' measures with short-term outputs, such as home security schemes, and militates against educational or social measures which require a long-term commitment before yielding results." SNU was certainly correct in concluding that in this political environment many local authorities favoured simple physical forms of crime prevention – street lighting, new door locks and answerphone systems in the hope that the crime reducing effects of such measures would outlive the end of the projects and the cessation of central government funding.

In this way a clear distinction emerged between ‘social’ and ‘physical’ crime prevention. Some of the latter schemes - new door locks and better street lighting - were, in themselves, unobjectionable. However there was a dangerous tendency for physical crime prevention to become elaborated into a totalitarian form of ‘architectural determinism’ reminiscent of Brave New World or Nineteen Eighty Four. A leading advocate of large scale physical crime prevention was the academic geographer, Alice Coleman [9] under whose enthusiastic, but less than intellectually coherent, recommendations a number of local authorities made drastic modifications to their housing estates such as removing the walkways (communication bridges above ground level) from their ‘high rise’ public housing projects. The thesis of Coleman and her followers was that this would reduce crime by making it harder for burglars to enter or escape from these types of housing estates. Massive reductions in crime were claimed to result from these demolitions, but once the dust had settled and the construction workers had gone home, crime levels soon returned to normal.

This obsession with the creation of obstacles to entry and exit serves to underline an assumption which underlay both physical crime prevention in public housing estates and Neighbourhood Watch in middle class areas, namely, the assumption that the criminal offender is someone who comes into the area from outside, who needs to be watched and deterred from entry. Only the more socially oriented projects which devoted resources to employment or youth activities could grasp the fact that much crime was committed by locals rather than strangers. The physical emphasis on door locks and reducing ‘escape routes’ completely ignored, moreover what went on behind locked doors such as family violence. There was a middle class, masculine, bias to so much of crime prevention policy from the mid 1980s until the present time.

Crime prevention and the police

For the Thatcher government any suggestion that crime prevention should be a local democratic participatory process under the direction of the local authorities was anathema. If local government must be involved then it should as far as possible as one agency among many in which the democratic element would be constrained by the necessity to accommodate to and negotiate with other, non-democratically accountable bodies. This meant principally the police. The constitutional position of the police in the UK is complex and need not detain us here. Suffice it to note that local authorities have very little direct influence in policing policy.

Throughout the 1980s, as far as central government was concerned, the police could do no wrong. While other areas of social and welfare expenditure were constrained, expenditure on police doubled between 1979 and 1984. Thatcherism aimed to link the social protest of the 1970s and early 1980s to crime. Trade Union militancy, political protest and criminality were linked together into a general theme of the ‘ungovernability’ of Britain to which the appropriate response was uncritical support for the police and the criminal justice system generally.

But there was a contradiction. Throughout the 1980s crime continued to rise. The increased prominence of the police meant their greater visibility as a target for public criticism. This came from many sources. The urban disorders of 1981 in Brixton (London) and other cities exposed the deteriorating relations between police and young people in poor areas, among whom ethnic minorities were strongly represented, which had resulted from a police strategy involving stopping young, usually black, people in the streets and searching them in public. The Mineworker’s strike of 1984 put on the television screens pictures of police violence against ordinary working class people which had not been seen since before the First World War. The militarisation of the police and the final collapse of the unique mythology of the British ‘bobby’ system became a prominent issue. Finally, and probably most decisively, the middle classes discovered the declining efficiency of the police. Police ‘clearup’ rates (that is the percentage of crimes reported to the police for whom someone is arrested, irrespective of subsequent conviction by the courts) had declined from 45 percent in 1960, 37 percent in 1983 to 26 percent by 1994. Of course it was even worse for property crimes in large cities. It was estimated for example that the clearup rate for burglary in inner London was in the region of 8 percent.

The government responded in a number of ways to this problem and the responses changed over the period from 1980 until the end of the Conservative government in 1997. The issue in the early 1980s presented itself as one of taking steps to restore the confidence of the public in the police. Lord Scarman, the High Court Judge who had written the report on the Brixton disorder of 1981, blamed police tactics such as stopping and searching large numbers of young (black) people in the streets which produced maximum public antagonism and had a minimal result in detecting criminal offenders. He called for increased police ‘accountability’ to the local communities in which they worked. The Left, from its position in the local authorities, campaigned vociferously for a new constitutional arrangement along American lines in which local police commanders should be directly answerable to the local authority for their general policing strategies, an arrangement which in fact existed in Victorian times. The Greater London Council, just prior to its abolition in 1985, published elaborate plans for constituting itself as a Police Authority to whom the largest and most powerful police force, the Metropolitan Police, should become accountable for its general policing policy.

The government was determined to avoid any such thing. Instead, under legislation of 1984 a system of ‘community liaison’ was instituted in which local police commanders would meet with significant groups in the local community to ‘discuss’ local crime problems and how they might be solved. The membership of these groups was entirely outside the democratic electoral structures of local government, a deliberate attempt to keep local authorities in a marginal position. These committees generally came to be regarded as middle class ‘talking shops’ in which people already favourably disposed to the police - usually the same people who were active in the Neighbourhood Watch schemes - came to ‘drink tea’ as we say. As a few of the more intelligent police officers realised, the real dialogue which was necessary – between police and young unemployed, was certainly not taking place in these forums. [10]

In this context the police entered enthusiastically into the crime prevention movement. They saw it as a method of both deflecting public criticism of their inefficiency and at the same time confirming new areas of police expertise and hegemony. They could show how they were really the experts in town planning and the design of street lighting while simultaneously demanding that the public take over a large part of the responsibility for the prevention of street crime.

One of the most sophisticated police intellectuals, Kenneth Newman, who was Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police during the early 1980s put forward an intellectually appealing argument to show that in a society of ‘mass private property’ traditional police detection skills were no longer much use in solving household burglary. A video recorder or television, for example, once stolen is identical to thousands of others and therefore it is a waste of valuable police time worrying about this type of crime which could be dealt with more effectively by crime prevention. It was of course pointed out that the implications of this policy were unacceptable: there would be a prompt police service to middle class owners of idiosyncratic items of property while poor people reporting a burglary of ordinary household goods would be told to go elsewhere! Nevertheless de facto police policy probably conforms to such reasoning to a larger extent than is publicly admitted. Again, it was not officially admitted that members of Neighbourhood Watch would receive a faster response to telephone calls to the police.

If the police were now claiming that they had less ability to deal with crimes such as household burglary, they were simultaneously claiming an enhanced perceptiveness in matters of planning and urban design. Police crime prevention officers (CPOs) had traditionally been simply advisors who usually visited homes or commercial premises after a burglary had taken place in order to advise on better locks. The CPO now blossomed into the Crime Prevention Design Advisor, and the Architectural Liaison Officer.

Police officers sitting on local authority architecture and building committees was one example of what during the 1980s came to be called ‘multi-agency’ intervention which referred to increasingly closer co-operation between police and other agencies across a wide spectrum. For example closer liaison with medical or social work agencies in the detection of child abuse, or with police officers taking classes in elementary schools to ‘discourage’ young people from criminal activities. In most areas police had for many years collaborated with social work and educational authorities in the diversion of young offenders from criminal prosecution. This was now extended to the area of prevention.

There was a natural continuity between multi-agency collaboration and the implementation of area based prevention partnerships funded by the Safer Cities programme. A typical such scheme would involve the selection of a small area – one, as mentioned above, where there was some hope of a speedy reduction in crime levels. Police and local authority officials would meet with local residents, usually a social survey would also be conducted, and the main crime problems of the area discussed and how they could be effectively reduced. In the more successful type of projects mentioned previously, police would become involved in various ways. They may participate in youth projects, even playing football or helping to set up recreation facilities. At the same time they would be under some pressure from local residents to increase the number of officers on foot patrol in the area or change or to pay attention to particular groups of young people, perhaps in conjunction with nearby schools. Meanwhile the local authority and social service agencies would be involved with similar appropriate activities.

Much useful work was done but it is necessary to remember that there was a more authoritarian aspect to this relationship. In the mid 1980s the crime prevention world was paying close attention to the writings of the right wing American criminologists James Q. Wilson and George Kelling. [11] Traditionally both in Britain and North America the predominant approach to normal policing of working class areas was to ignore minor infractions of the law such as noise, dropping litter, loitering, drinking in public and general disorderliness in order to not antagonise the public who would then be more co-operative when it came to dealing with serious crime. Wilson and Kelling argued that this was fundamentally wrong. Particularly so in those communities plagued by large numbers of unemployed disorderly youth. Disorderliness was what caused adults to stay indoors, to move out of the area altogether and to abandon processes of informal social control. This would leave the streets and public places free to disorderly youth and eventually more serious crime – drug dealing in particular, would become predominant. The Wilson-Kelling argument thus underpins a more general explanation of urban decay in which disorderliness leads to more serious crime which, in turn, drives high income families and business out of the area. The drug dealers then move in and the result is the urban blight of North American and, increasingly, though on a much smaller scale, of European cities.

As regards policing, instead of ignoring petty offences in order to concentrate on serious crime, Wilson and Kelling urged the opposite. Police should concentrate on policing disorder and minor criminality to prevent the social decay of the area and the eventual increase in serious crime. The strategy is that of a continuous police presence on the streets. It is the very opposite of the minimalist style in which police wait for the telephone call to an incident and then rush to the scene in fast vehicles with flashing lights and enormous noise, usually arriving after the participants to the crime have left the area.

The Wilson-Kelling argument, as it has become known, gives rise to considerable controversy. [12] It becomes part of a wider right wing thesis that locates the sources of urban decay - of unemployment and poverty - not so much as in basic structural changes in social and economic structure but in the simple failure of communities to deal with their disorderliness. The conclusion, very comforting to the neo-liberals of the New Right was that traditional Keynesian macro-economic policies aimed at full employment and urban regeneration could be replaced by a policy of simply allowing the police to deal more firmly with drunks and noisy youth! Crime and disorderliness, thus no longer seen as a result of poverty could now be reinterpreted as one of the causes of poverty.

The argument had however an immediate empirical plausibility which rested on a change in the nature of urban communities. The traditional police practice of ignoring petty disorder presupposed a cohesive community all sections of which would be antagonised by a police who insisted on continuously proceeding against every minor infringement of the law. The logic behind the Wilson-Kelling argument is the divided community where one section feels threatened by the mere presence of the other, most obviously where adults, families with young children, old people etc., feel threatened by the very presence of ethnic minorities and unemployed teenagers – the notorious underclass.

In many local authority based crime prevention projects in which police became involved, the demands placed upon them by adult residents of the area was precisely this, to spend more time and manpower pursuing gangs of noisy, threatening young people who, being largely unemployed and refusing to attend school, spent the day loitering and even if committing no particular serious crime, making other people feel insecure. The very fact that such demands were being made on the police to deal with this problem was indicative of the crisis of funding in the traditional welfare and social work agencies, school truancy officials etc who, in the days of the Keynesian Welfare State would have been expected to be the main agency to act, with the police in the background purely to deal with any actual violence or other criminal activity.

However, by the beginning of the 1990s a contradiction was becoming clear. The fact was that neither crime prevention schemes of various types nor massive increases in police funding seemed to have had much impact on general crime levels. This encouraged the government to rethink its attitude to the police. The result was that overnight the police were transformed from a key defender of civilisation to be protected at all costs from the ideological bombardment of neo-liberalism to simply another large bloated public bureaucracy that must be forced to deliver value for money and to learn the rigours of market based criteria of efficiency. [13]

Once the auditors and management efficiency experts were let loose on the police at the beginning of the 1990s they found that much of what the police spent their time doing seemed to have no immediate effect on the number of crimes solved. The Wilson-Kelling argument was put back on the bookshelf and the police were enjoined to spend less time dispersing noisy youth and concentrate on catching ‘real’ criminals. Some forms of crime prevention such as Neighbourhood Watch might be said to contribute to police efficiency by increasing the flow of information to the police. But even here, by the beginning of the 1990s it was clear that the bulk of such information was of little use in crime control and moreover took up valuable police resources in answering telephone calls from Neighbourhood Watch members.

But Neighbourhood Watch, like crime prevention on public housing estates, gave rise to increased demands for police presence in the area. These demands conflict with the new concern with efficiency and the effective deployment of resources. One solution to this conflict which is beginning to be taken seriously is the employment of private security companies on public street patrol, paid for by local residents through Neighbourhood Watch or the local authority. The private security industry has expanded rapidly over the last two decades and certainly now employs more personnel than the state police. The movement from guarding private property and goods in transit to street patrols raises all manner of legal and ideological questions about legal powers of arrest and jurisdiction. But it is certainly a phenomena on the increase. Even if uniformed employees of private security companies have no police powers, they certainly have the capacity to exercise de facto coercion on the streets. The vision of a new division of labour in which state police concentrate on major crimes while lower paid and lower skilled private security guards patrol the streets is one that a few years ago would have been regarded as almost logically impossible. But now it has begun to be taken seriously. The fact that it is so shows the distance we have moved from the classic welfare state crime control measures to reintegrate potential offenders through employment and education to the preoccupation with strategies to keep potential offenders out of the area.

Community Safety

A further area of problems lay in the governments insistence on the one hand that citizens take an active responsibility for crime prevention while, on the other, seeking to keep the role of the elected local authority to a that of one agency among many in a partnership arrangement, even though most of the key problems of crime prevention strategy were encountered on public housing estates managed by local authorities. The management of crime prevention projects was often placed in the hands of voluntary agencies such as SNU and after 1989 by a new organisation, Crime Concern, who had only powers to discuss with, not to direct the work of other agencies. The police in particular jealously guard their constitutional autonomy. The problem of proper co-ordination between the participating agencies in crime prevention has become increasingly recognised. In which forum are conflicts to be resolved? Even in a small city there will be distinct groups of citizens with their own crime prevention problems all making a claim on scarce resources: shopkeepers and merchants, tenants of public housing, owners of private houses, young people who want somewhere to go for recreation, and so on. There will be a plurality of agencies: the police, the local authority with its various departments – social and youth workers, local schools and so on each with their own ideas about the best crime prevention methods and each with their own mechanisms for consultation with particular sections of the public.

Critics saw the arrangements as typically British pragmatism and worship of the ad hoc compromise; meanwhile looking with envy across the channel to France where the Bonnemaison Commission had instituted a centrally directed crime prevention strategy under the control of the powerful city Mayors. [14]

The problem of co-ordination was becoming more severe in that by the end of the 1980s it was clear that many of the crime prevention methods of the previous decade had achieved little or no noticeable results on overall crime levels which were still rising. Both physical crime prevention measures and Neighbourhood Watch, where they did have an effect, often simply displaced crime to adjacent areas. Meanwhile the few successful examples of prevention on public housing estates, mentioned above, required considerable resources and the co-ordinated contribution of a number of agencies: police, local authorities, business, education, social services.

The government finally agreed to review the way crime prevention partnerships operated. The Morgan Report (1991) [15] concluded that the majority of partnerships – of which currently there are about 200 in England and Wales - lacked both a clear definition of crime prevention or an agreement on strategy shared by the various agencies forming the partnerships. The report recommended that the local authority should be the main co-ordinating agency responsible for the production, in consultation with other agencies of course, of a comprehensive community safety plan in which the role of all participants would be agreed. While agreeing the need for better formulated crime prevention plans the government refused to implement Morgan’s recommendations regarding a leading role for local authorities as the co-ordinators of community safety. The Safer Cities programme was renewed and the existing partnership arrangements were continued. There was some reorganisation of the mechanisms for delivery of central government finance for the relief of urban problems, including crime prevention. But these were largely cosmetic changes which left the major problems unsolved.

The frustrations of working within an incoherent organisational framework under conditions of financial stringency were expressed recently by Jon Bright, a leading practitioner in crime prevention and member of Crime Concern, the voluntary sector organisation which had succeeded the Safe Neighbourhoods Unit.

"We do not know the incidence or prevalence of crime and there is no agreement between agencies about how to prevent crime. Crime prevention is not the responsibility of any one agency and local efforts are constrained by national policies. In addition, resources are scarce. Prevention in high crime areas requires a co-ordinated input of measures by a variety of agencies which is often difficult to organise. Such problems are not going to be overcome simply by setting up a multi-agency partnership." [16]

Meanwhile among practitioners the comprehensive approach to crime prevention which was gaining ground. Indeed, the term ‘crime prevention’ increasingly tended to be replaced by the more all-embracing terminology of ‘community safety’ in which all agencies and actors operating on the urban terrain had their part to play. For the Left, now very strong in local authorities and continuously in conflict with central government over reduction, in finance, community safety was a potentially progressive concept in that it took a holistic view of local problems. In particular the need could be emphasised that crime prevention could never work simply by a strategy of exclusion of ‘potential’ offenders from public places. If young unemployed people were chased out of the shopping areas of city centres by private security guards and Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) they would go somewhere else – Prevention had to reorient itself to a strategy of re-integration more in tune with the older welfare state ideas of social citizenship. Obviously the full implementation of such a strategy would require a fundamental change of orientation by central government. Many imagined that Labour would win the 1992 General Election. In fact it was necessary to wait another five years.

In the context of Conservative government’s overall policy it was clear that the concept of Community Safety faced some problems. Firstly, the integrative approach to community safety required – this was the lesson of the more successful and comprehensive projects - a long term strategic plan for a local area. Communities are not rebuilt overnight. There is a need for action across a wide spectrum of issues: bringing new forms of employment and economic activity into the area, improving education and local schools, environmental improvement in housing and shopping areas, parks and public spaces etc., new working relations between welfare, youth services, voluntary agencies and the police must develop. Such measures require long term capital investment and a considerable period of time may elapse before real results, in terms of measurable reductions in crime rates and in fear of crime, become evident. This whole approach clashed with the short-term orientation of central government policy: the demand on agencies to produce immediate ‘performance indicators’ in terms of which their ‘effectiveness’ could be measured, and by which yardsticks the allocation of short term funding was allocated.

Secondly, the continuation of the partnership approach in which autonomous agencies and interest groups form a coalition of interests for crime prevention can often lead to a marginalisation of those poor communities with really high crime rates. The requirement to recruit support from local business influences the orientation of community safety. In many older industrial cities, regeneration has taken the ‘Disneyland’ approach. Areas such as docks and waterfronts may be refurbished with shops and wine bars designed to attract tourists and others with money to spend from the well protected middle class suburbs. Police, who may even have attracted business sponsorship themselves, will be mainly concerned to keep these new consumer zones safe at the expense of a concern for the problems of the really poor housing estates. Community safety begins to approach the type of ‘urban apartheid’ described by Mike Davis in Los Angeles (1990). Even under the newer more comprehensive slogan of community safety crime prevention therefore retains its orientation to the exclusion of the ‘dangerous classes’ rather than the reintegration of citizens into a common public sphere.

New Labour: crime prevention as law enforcement

The election of a Labour Government in May 1997 by a huge parliamentary majority brought a massive sigh of relief from millions of people who had suffered for two decades the stringencies of neo-liberalism. For many working in local authorities, welfare and social service agencies, the atmosphere was one of euphoria. The ground seemed set for some fundamental policy reorientation of crime prevention as in other areas of social policy.

At last a government which understood that the re-emergence of an urban underclass was not due to bad child rearing by single mothers but by social policies which continually aimed at social exclusion; which sought to categorise young people in poor areas as already criminal offenders, as social outsiders and ‘non-citizens’ who must be continually prevented from entering public space by locks and gates and place under close surveillance if they did enter! At last a government which understood that the provision of education, employment, hope for the future and a worthwhile life should be the starting point for a policy of social solidarity and reintegration!

The main criminal justice legislation now (February 1998) before Parliament is the Crime and Disorder Bill. In the area of crime prevention it contains some encouraging propositions. Firstly the main orientation of the Morgan Report is now implemented. The local authority and the police will have a statutory duty to co-operate, conduct surveys of the crime prevention needs of their area, consult all interest groups and other local social welfare agencies, and produce a comprehensive Community Safety Plan. If this is seen in the context of another proposal of the new government, to create strong directly elected mayors on the French model for large towns and cities, then there is a possibility of the local authority taking the leadership role in community safety. Additionally the government has established a Social Exclusion Unit which is based in the Cabinet Office. Its main work will be to co-ordinate the work of central government departments and, it is claimed, shows the seriousness with which Blair and his government take the issues of social marginality. Finally the government is committed to a ‘welfare to work’ programme, beginning in April 1988, to move young people and single parents off social security payments and into work.

However, it is precisely around these issues that the ‘honeymoon’ enjoyed by the Blair government has come to a rather abrupt end. Towards the end of 1997 the proposals to cease social security benefits for single parents, justified as part of the creation of new opportunities for these groups to move back into the labour market, caused a substantial parliamentary rebellion of Labour MPs and widespread criticism in the media. It is becoming abundantly clear that the Blair government owes less to old style social democracy than to Thatcherism. The starting point for Blair’s legislative programme is a determination to maintain the stringent constraint of public spending introduced by the previous Conservative regime. The much heralded Social Exclusion Unit has no additional funds at its disposal and the ‘welfare to work’ strategy is very much along the lines of the Wisconsin model adopted by Clinton in his promise to ‘end welfare as we know it.’ Young people and single parents will be forced off social security benefits back into the labour market not as part of an old-style Keynesian programme of public works but as part of some thing like a neo-liberal assumption that the availability of cheap labour of young people and single mothers, accompanied by a small subsidy to be paid to the employer, will of itself produce offers of worthwhile employment. Government policy appears to be rather timid as a comprehensive plan for the regeneration of the economically and socially blighted areas of our cities. In this context, with little or nothing in the way of increases in public spending for urban regeneration, the voice of local business in the development of Community Safety Plans may continue to remain disproportionately large.

Returning to the Crime and Disorder Bill, some of the other provisions of this legislation seem to mark a new preoccupation with a more authoritarian form of crime prevention focussing on the criminalisation of ‘anti-social’ behaviour through increasing the powers of local authorities to use civil law injunctions to control the movement of people who have or are considered likely to cause what the Bill characterises as ‘alarm, harassment or distress’. The police and the local authority may apply to the lower courts (the Magistrates courts in England and Wales, or the Sheriff court in Scotland) for an ‘anti-social behaviour order’. Local authorities and police already have powers to seek such orders where someone has actually committed violence. These are used in cases of family violence to prevent, for example, a violent husband or partner from returning to inflict further physical violence on his wife or children. However, under the new Bill no person actually has to have suffered such alarm, harassment or distress as a precondition for such an order. The Bill does not define what this behaviour is, nor does it have to be criminal. Such an order which will last at least 2 years, and could include a curfew or banning a person from entering a particular locality which could force them to leave their home. The order can be made without the person being present in court and breach of the order could result in up to five years imprisonment. Finally, where such orders are made against young people they may be accompanied by Parenting Orders which require the parents to attend special ‘counselling and guidance’ sessions for a period to be defined by the court.

At the beginning of February several leading academic lawyers spoke out against these proposals and claimed that they may well contravene the European Convention on Human Rights which the government is committed to incorporating into UK law. Meanwhile the Director of the Howard League, one of Britain’s oldest and most prestigious civil liberties pressure groups in the penal area issued a statement to the press claiming that the proposals are

"potentially the most insidious attack on civil liberties this century." The League argued that such legislation could be used in a discriminatory way against anyone considered ‘deviant’.

The Bill certainly seems to mark an authoritarian turn in crime prevention. An order by the court for some individual or groups to keep out of an area is ipso facto an order to go somewhere else. In this way the tradition of exclusion rather than integration is maintained as a central characteristic of crime prevention strategy. The Howard League, in its criticism of the Government advocated that the Government should have given local authorities, as part of their crime prevention duties, a responsibility to set up local arbitration schemes to solve problems and small disputes between neighbours. This is a more integrative perspective and indeed some local authorities and police forces have set up experimental schemes oriented in particular to young people. But participation is usually entirely voluntary.

'Zero-tolerance' policing

This tendency to a more authoritarian form of crime prevention is being reproduced by the police. Last year a great deal of enthusiasm was shown in UK police circles for the activities of the New York Police Department (NYPD) whose Chief, William Bratton, was alleged to have achieved remarkable reductions in homicide and other serious crime by a policy of ‘zero tolerance’.[17] This was in essence a more belligerent version of the ‘Wilson-Kelling’ strategy mentioned previously, involving dealing with disorder and petty anti-social behaviour in public places by an aggressive response involving arrest. The argument is that arresting street beggars, drinkers, or those who insist on washing your windscreen at the traffic lights will give a sign to the public that the streets belong to the law-abiding citizen and will somehow reduce the rate of more serious crime.

The fact is of course that crime rates have recently been falling in most North American cities quite irrespective of the aggressiveness of their police officers. This has not prevented the British Home Secretary (the nearest equivalent the UK has to a Minister of Justice) from being an enthusiastic exponent of zero tolerance. In 1995 after a visit to New York, Straw became an advocate of the Wilson-Kelling strategy, arguing that "Aggressive begging, along with graffiti and... ‘squeegee merchants’ (windscreen washers) all heighten people’s fear of crime on the streets.... The result is a vicious circle in which people use the streets less, society becomes atomised, and community life breaks down." [18]

Aggressive policing – particularly of ethnic minority youth - is nothing new in the UK, though by comparison with the United States and other areas of Europe policing is relatively civil. Nevertheless throughout the 1970s the police were notorious for using various nineteenth century laws against loitering, which were still in force, to move young black males out of the central shopping areas of the West End of London. The decentralised police organisation of the UK gives considerable autonomy to regional police chiefs (Chief Constables) to decide their own approach to policing. Thus in some towns zero tolerance policing is being pursued with enthusiasm while in others it is regarded with disdain. Thus one of the current generation of ‘intellectual’ Chief Constables, Charles Pollard of the Thames Valley police has recently argued (REF Pollard 1997) that although an aggressive stance towards young people on the streets may yield short term reductions in some forms of street crime, "The problem is that sustained policing of this sort ends up targeting minorities within communities. That was the case in Brixton in 1981 … which would have been described as ‘zero tolerance’." [19]

Pollard is of course referring to the uprising mentioned earlier which began the modern period of criticism and scrutiny of police practices. Things seem to have come full circle except that there is now a stronger sense of social polarisation. Adults are perceived to be more ready to support tough police action against unemployed youth than in the early 1980s. Zero tolerance, the aggressive policing of even minor forms of disorderliness is the strategy most appropriate for the marginalisation of the underclass: they are kept out of the private spaces of the shopping and entertainment of the central city by CCTV and private security guards while the state police drive them out of the public spaces. They are driven back to the poor housing estates of high crime and deprivation where both they and their parents will be the target of the new civil regulations against anti-social behaviour.

The Blair government talks continuously about a New Britain, full of hope and enterprise, a ‘young country’ as he calls it. For many young people faced with the collapse of the welfare state, the increasing cost of participation in University education, enforced work in low waged jobs that lead nowhere, and increasingly authoritarian policing and crime prevention measures, Blair lives on another planet.

REFERENCES

[1] C. Murray, 1990, The Emerging British Underclass. London, Institute of Economic Affairs

[2] See D. Downes, R. Morgan, 1994, 'Hostages to Fortune'? The Politics of Law and Order in Post-War Britain. in Maguire, M. Morgan, R. Reiner, R. eds. The Oxford Handbook of Criminology, Oxford University Press.

[3] See for example, P. Mayhew et al. 1993, The 1992 British Crime Survey. London, Home Office., A. Crawford et al. 1991, The Second Islington Crime Survey, London, Middlesex Polytechnic Centre for Criminology

[4] See for example T. Bennett 1987, An Evaluation of Two Neighbourhood Watch Schemes in London, Cambridge, Institute of Criminology. M. McConville, D. Shepherd, 1992, Watching Police, Watching Communities, London, Routledge.,

[5] A. Power 1989, ‘Housing Community and Crime’ in D. Downes ed. Crime and the City, London, Macmillan.

[6] Safe Neighbourhoods Unit, ‘Successes and Failures in Neighbourhood Crime Prevention’, Housing Research 149, June 1995

[7] For a useful overview of the development of Crime Prevention in the UK see D. Gilling, 1997, Crime Prevention: Theory, policy and politics, London, UCL Press.

[8] see note [6]

[9] A. Coleman 1985, Utopia On Trial: vision and reality in planned housing, London. Hilary Shipman.

[10] For an account of relations between police and community see R. Kinsey, J. Lea, J. Young 1986, Losing the Fight Against Crime, Oxford, Blackwell.

[11] The seminal article was J.Q. Wilson, G. Kelling 1982, 'Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety, Atlantic Monthly

[12] see for example W. Skogan 1990, Disorder and Decline, New York, Free Press; T. Hope M. Shaw 1988, Communities and Crime Reduction , Home Office Research and Planning Unit London, HMSO.

[13] see R. Morgan, T. Newburn, 1997, The Future of Policing, Oxford, Clarendon Press.

[14] for general critiques of community safety strategy see D. Gilling op. cit., A. Crawford 1997, The Local Governance of Crime Oxford, Clarendon Press.

[15] Home Office 1991, Safer Communities: the local delivery of crime prevention through the partnership approach, London, HMSO.

[16] J. Bright 1995, Working in Partnership – Opportunities and Challenges. London, Crime Concern

[17] W. Bratton, 1997, 'Crime is Down in New York City: blame the police' in N. Dennis ed. Zero Tolerance, Policing a Free Society. Choice in Welfare No. 35, London, Institute of Economic Affairs .

[18] The Independent, 7th September 1995

[19] C. Pollard, 1997, 'Short Term Fix, Long Term Liability? in N. Dennis ed. Zero Tolerance, Policing a Free Society. Choice in Welfare No. 35, London, Institute of Economic Affairs.