Daniel Gilling

Community Safety and Social Policy

This article examines community safety policy. In many countries community safety has become a replacement discourse for situational crime prevention, although in some countries such as the UK, it too is threatened with replacement by the narrower concerns of crime reduction. Community safety represents the apparent merging of the concerns of criminal justice and social policy, specifically over questions of social inclusion and exclusion. Focusing in the main upon UK policy, but also drawing upon experience elsewhere, this article scrutinises the policy of community safety, arguing that while it offers an inclusionary vision of crime control, its practice may be something rather different. More specifically, and in common with the trajectory of much advanced liberal social policy, in practice community safety may have an exclusionary effect. Thus, while community safety may represent the convergence of social and criminal justice policies, it does so on neo‐liberal rather than welfare liberal terms. It also means that community safety has a closer connection to policies of punitive sovereignty – particularly sentencing policies of mass incarceration – than might often be assumed.

‘Mission Impossible’? The Habitus of the Community Safety Manager and the New Expertise in the Local Partnership Governance of Crime and Safety

It is difficult to ignore the growing salience of the new governance of crime and disorder in many late modern societies. To date there has been limited empirical exploration of the practices and experiences of these new local actors and institutions. This article aims to correct this neglect in the criminological literature by its exploration of the knowledge and skills base and habitus of one of the new partnership experts, the community safety manager (CSM). In particular, the article involves an engagement with recent research findings from Britain together with the more abstract conceptual tools opened up by current debates in critical social and political theory. It begins with a brief history of the community safety occupation during which the key features of the ‘profession’ are explored. Next, the thesis of a hegemonic risk management governmental logic in the field of community safety is critically examined. By exploring specific sites and contexts of community safety ‘work’, doubt is cast on totalizing narratives of neo-liberal transformation currently popular in criminology and sociology. Finally, the possible futures of community safety and crime and disorder reduction when viewed from the contemporary experiences of CSMs are considered.

Reforming police governance in England and Wales: managerialisation and the politics of organisational regime Change

This article examines reforms to the governance of local policing in England and Wales over the last two decades, from the managerialisation of policing in the early 1990s through to recent plans for the introduction of Police and Crime Commissioners. This ‘long view’ facilitates an appreciation of politically driven shifts in organisational regimes, initially from bureau-professionalism to managerialism, and more recently from managerialism to a hybridised model of local governance that combines elements of consumerism, democratic localism and bureau-professionalism. These regimes, however, act less as determining structures, and more as unstable equilibria that are open to contestation and negotiation. Drawing upon insights from governmentality and governance studies, the article reviews the progress of reforms and shows that the ‘success’ of regime changes is contingent upon the translation of regimes into practice. More specifically, understanding regimes as discourses allows us to probe their internal coherence, and their achievements in influencing the strategies and subject positions adopted by actors in local policing policy networks. This enables us to appreciate both the limited successes of regime change reforms to date, and the prospects for the latest reform, namely the introduction of Police and Crime Commissioners in each police force area outside of London.

Powers, liabilities and expertise in community safety: Comparative lessons for ‘urban security’ from the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland

This paper begins by outlining and critiquing what we term the dominant anglophone model of neo-liberal community safety and crime prevention. As an alternative to this influential but flawed model, a comparative analysis is provided of the different constitutional-legal settlements in each of the five jurisdictions across the UK and the Republic of Ireland (ROI), and their uneven institutionalization of community safety. In the light of this it is argued that the nature of the anglophone community safety enterprise is actually subject to significant variation. Summarizing the contours of this variation facilitates our articulation of some core dimensions of community safety. Then, making use of Colebatch’s (2002) deconstruction of policy activity into categories of authority and expertise, and Brunsson’s (2002) distinction between policy talk, decisions and action, we put forward a way of understanding policy activity that avoids the twin dangers of ‘false particularism’ and ‘false universalism’ (Edwards and Hughes, 2005); that indicates a path for further empirical enquiry to assess the ‘reality’ of policy convergence; and that enables the engagement of researchers with normative questions about where community safety should be heading.

Celebrating a decade of the Crime and Disorder Act? A personal view

In this personal view of a decade of the Crime and Disorder Act (1998), Daniel Gilling argues that New Labour are to be congratulated for bringing about a radical reform in the landscape of local crime control. However, he is also critical of central governments high level of control over CDRP and local police business. His solution is a partnership approach built on stronger local accountability delivered through neighbourhood management structures and facilitated by CDRPs, with central government ‘speaking in a much quieter voice’.

The community safety ‘profession’: Towards a new expertise in the governance of crime, disorder and safety in the UK?

The role of the community safety practitioner is a newly emerging expertise in local government. A survey conducted with local authorities reveals a relatively fluid and unstructured profession of highly educated or experienced individuals with heavy workloads. Practitioners inhabit a contested policy terrain in which they express a preference for a social regeneration agenda rather than narrower crime specific strategies.

Dangers lurking in the deep: The transformative potential of the crime audit

The crime audit has become a major technology of local crime prevention and community safety. While most interest has been shown in its technical capacity and merits, this article focuses upon the impact of the crime audit as a governmental practice and political strategy. Like other forms of audit, the crime audit constitutes its subject and in so doing affords opportunities for its transformation, by colonizing the values and operating procedures of local practice. A case study of such colonization is explored in the encounters of local drug outreach agencies with the crime auditing process; the pressure exerted upon them to ‘make practice auditable’, and the implications that this holds for their future engagement with drug misusers.

Discovering Mental Ill Health: ‘Problem-Solving’ in an English Magistrates’ Court

In this chapter, we examine one particular approach to problem-solving in the English criminal justice system. The incorporation of problem-solving into Magistrates’ Courts for low-risk offenders has been called a ‘window of opportunity’ (Donoghue, 2014) insofar as it provides an opportunity to engage with ‘hard-to-reach’ social groups. It aims to identify any problems which are acting as barriers to a better life and signpost the person to services which can help address these problems. One of the aims of the project that we have been conducting on community justice is to examine how problem-solving works as a specific set of practices for those with mental ill health problems.

Reasons to be cheerful? Addressing public perceptions through National Tackling Drugs Week

This article presents the results of a research project exploring the impact on the public of National Tackling Drugs Week, a UK government communications initiative intended to inform about, and build public confidence in, the national drugs strategy. The research shows that the initiative had a limited reach and that its impact was variable: while it could raise confidence, it could also raise concerns about crime, and while it could inform, it could also elicit suspicions of ‘spin’. Acknowledging that the policy aim of building public confidence is now an international one, the discussion counsels against simplistic corporate communications-based solutions to the public confidence problem, suggesting instead that the impact of communication is dependent on other contextual contingencies, and that when communications are employed for confidence-building ends, their prospects would be enhanced if they were two-way rather than one-way, and part of a wider strategy of deliberative democracy.

Making a reality of rural community safety

This article subjects rural community safety to critical scrutiny. It reviews the background to this rural governmental infrastructure, considers how well it is working and identifies the barriers to the effective development of rural community safety. It concludes with an agenda for rural community safety.