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Book Review: Crime, Risk and Insecurity. Law and Order in Everyday Life and Political Discourse

Document Cited in Related
Vincent
AuthorPat O’Malley
Date01 September 2002
DOI10.1177/096466390201100318
Published date01 September 2002
Subject MatterArticles
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SOCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES 11(3)
TIM HOPE AND RICHARD SPARKS (Eds), Crime, Risk and Insecurity. Law and Order
in Everyday Life and Political Discourse. London and New York: Routledge, 2000, xi
+ 275 pp., £18.99 (pbk).
Crime, Risk and Insecurity provides an intriguing and complex series of explorations
into discourses and policies grouped loosely around the ‘fear of crime’. The editors’
explicit and prominent focus on the fear of crime in their introductory essay at first
raises a key question: why does risk figure so prominently in the title, yet fear so
dominate the content? Is this merely cashing in on the current obsession with risk,
and avoiding a possibility that fear of crime is a topic whose use-by date has passed?
I started with this uncharitable assumption, but now am convinced otherwise. It is
rather that ‘fear of crime’, as constituted in this collection, is a category that predomi-
nantly is used to disrupt or question general theories of risk and the risk society, either
refusing their utility or (most often) arguing the need for a rather looser articulation
between the claims of the general theories and the particular conditions of specific
times and places.
While the chapters are difficult to group tightly within one rubric, they do, as the
editors suggest, mostly share one or two critical features relevant to this question of
‘fear’ versus ‘risk’ as academic categories. In particular, they all analyse fear of crime
and crime policies in particular settings, rather than as universals. For the most part,
they resist highly abstract models and stress the ways in which the local and specific
are more than simply settings in which grand universal processes work themselves
out. Thus, for example, most deal with fear of crime not as a generality stripped of
particular meaning, such that we may simply register ‘rates’ or ‘scores’ and chart the
increasing fearfulness of life in the ‘risk society’. Rather their concerns are with some-
thing that is contextualized as...

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