Community safety and economic crime
| Author | Hazel Croall |
| Published date | 01 May 2009 |
| Date | 01 May 2009 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1748895809102551 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
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ISSN 1748–8958; Vol: 9(2): 165–185
DOI: 10.1177/1748895809102551
Community safety and economic crime
H A Z E L C R O A L L
Glasgow Caledonian University, UK
Abstract
The contemporary focus of crime reduction and community
safety policies on youth crime, anti-social behaviour and forms of
conventionally defined property and violent crime excludes many
hazards, in particular those associated with economic and corporate
crime, which, despite their considerable impact, have a contested
‘criminal’ status and have not generally been considered relevant
to community safety. Drawing on work on the impact of economic
crime, this article will map out the economic and physical harms
associated with a selected range of economic and business offences.
It will also argue that they pose a threat to citizens’ quality of life
and will explore their relevance to community safety. It will include
activities that involve physical dangers and intrusions of privacy
in the home and others that have an impact on consumers, the
local neighbourhood and the quality of life. It will conclude with
an analysis of the extent to which these crimes can and should be
incorporated into a broader construction of community safety.
Key Words
community safety • corporate crime • economic crime • regulation
Introduction
Economic crime, often associated with concepts such as business, white collar
or corporate crime, is generally excluded from discussions of community
safety, and its global as opposed to its local nature is often emphasized.
Despite its absence from crime audits and victimization surveys a major
theme in criminological analyses of this kind of crime is that its toll exceeds
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Criminology & Criminal Justice 9(2)
that of so-called ‘conventional crime’. This article seeks to illustrate some
of the many ways in which economic crime has an extensive impact on the
everyday lives of individuals and communities and is therefore significant
for theoretical and practical considerations of community safety. It will
start by considering what is meant by the phrases community safety and
economic crime.
The phrase ‘community safety’ is capable of a number of interpretations.
The use of the term ‘community’ in relation to policing and other crime
control initiatives has been associated with both right and left wing political
connotations, with nostalgia implying a regret of some ‘lost’ community
and a desire to reinstate it, or, rather more vaguely, as a generally ‘good’
thing (Hughes, 2002a; McLaughlin, 2002; Walklate, 2006). In theory,
com munity safety, in what some commentators have identified as ‘holistic’
or ‘pan hazard’ approaches (Hughes, 2002a; Pease, 2002), can imply the
involve ment of a broad spectrum of groups within the community dealing
with a wide range of harms, which might include transport, health or the
environment. On the other hand, it can be more narrowly tied to govern-
mental policies which, while using the phrase ‘community safety’ in effect
focus on a narrower agenda of ‘crime prevention’ or ‘crime reduction’
(Byrne and Pease, 2003). Thus while, argues Stenson (2005: 266), there
is no internationally accepted definition of community safety it generally
refers to: ‘public order, the management of fear and insecurity, inter-ethnic
vio lence, routine violent and pecuniary crimes against the person, personal
and public property, women, children and elderly’.
It has also been related to a preventative turn in crime control, which has
involved its ‘localization’ through the growth of locally organized partner-
ships. The focus has shifted from ‘crime’ towards notions of ‘safety’ and
‘security’ which encompass what are often described as ‘low level’ crimes or
forms of ‘anti-social behaviour’ and ‘incivility’ which, while not ‘notifiable
offences against criminal legal codes … jeopardize citizens’ quality of life
and are therefore legitimate objects of control’ (Edwards and Hughes, 2005:
261). To critics this amounts to ‘defining deviance up’ (McLaughlin, 2002;
Stenson, 2005) and reflects the association of community safety with the
social control or management of deviant populations. This focus is widely
acknow ledged to neglect, among other offences, corporate, white collar or
economic crime (Croall, 1998, 2004; Coleman et al., 2002; Hughes, 2002a,
2002b; Tombs and Whyte, 2006; Walklate, 2006).
The term economic crime, used in this article, also requires definition. It
can refer to all crime committed for economic gain but is more normally used
in relation to a range of offences associated with white collar and organized
crime—terms which are themselves problematic, particularly in view of
what some see as an increasingly blurred line between legitimate commercial
activities (criminologically associated with corporate or white collar crime)
and illegitimate economies and economic transactions (criminologically
related to organized or professional crime) (Ruggiero, 1996; Croall, 2001a).
The phrase economic crime can be justified on the grounds of inclusiveness
Croall—Community safety and economic crime
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and is appropriate for the present article, which aims to illustrate the impact
of a range of crimes associated with economic activity on individuals and
com munities. It is also more widely used in many European countries where
the term ‘white collar crime’ is less familiar. The definition employed in this
article is that of Korsell (2002: 201), who defines it as ‘crimes of profit that
take place within the framework of commercial activity’.
Until recently, these kinds of crime have not been related to community
safety (Coleman et al., 2005; Alvesalo et al., 2006; Tombs and Whyte,
2006), and many emphasize the increasingly global, rather than local nature
of white collar and corporate crime and stress the threat of ‘serious’, trans-
national organized crime (TNC) involving global economic activities such
as money laundering or people and drug trafficking (Croall, 2005a). Issues
of criminalization, control and regulation tend to dominate analyses and,
despite the long tradition following Sutherland’s (1945, 1949) pion eer ing
work exposing vast amounts of ‘human misery’, victimization remains
characterized as ‘diffuse’, ‘indirect’ and as lacking the personal confronta-
tional nature of conventional crime victimization (Croall, 2001a, 2001b).
Victims are often described in aggregate terms as ‘consumers’, ‘workers’,
‘governments’ or the ‘general public’, which depersonalizes the impact of
offences and masks their ‘real’ effects on individuals and in communities.
Moreover much work has focused on exposing mass harms such as deaths,
serious injuries or major pollution incidents and has not focused on the
less serious, more everyday effects of many illegal activities (Croall, 2001b,
2004).
It can nonetheless be argued that economic crime does have individual
and ‘local’ effects and, like conventional crime, does affect the ‘everyday
lives’ and quality of life of citizens. ‘Global’ trades, involving legitimate
and illegitimate organizations have local markets. The goods involved, for
example, in transnational trades in drugs, contraband cigarettes, bootleg
alcohol, counterfeit and unsafe goods are sold in local communities by a
plethora of small local enterprises, often operating on the fringes of legality
and illegality. Corporate crimes involving breaches of health, safety, environ-
mental, consumer or food legislation committed by both large multi-national
corporations and local businesses are experienced by individuals in their
homes, workplaces and local areas—and are subject to enforcement by local,
non-police enforcement agencies such as Environmental Health or Trading
Standards Officers. Many products are now widely marketed, sometimes
fraudulently or ‘aggressively’, through the Internet, postal marketing cam-
paigns and ‘telesales’ directly to consumers in their own homes.
Many of these offences have a serious, physical impact. As Box (1983)
fam ously argued ‘corporate crime kills’, is not ‘merely economic’ and a
high toll of deaths and injuries are associated with health and safety in the
workplace, transport safety, food poisoning and pollution (Slapper and
Tombs, 1999; Croall, 2001b). While generally omitted from conventional
crime surveys, occupational health and safety cases alone have been argued
to exceed the toll of homicide (Tombs, 1999).
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Criminology & Criminal Justice 9(2)
Not all economic crimes have such dramatic and fatal consequences
and many others, such as consumer offences, which less often involve mass
deaths or injuries, may appear trivial. Yet, as South (1998: 444) points out
in relation to environmental crime, an accumulation of seemingly small
scale local pollution incidents can lead to ‘modest to devastating changes
in people’s experience of the environment and conditions of life’. Indeed,
while some offences have a less direct financial or physical impact they
can nonetheless be conceptualized as a threat to people’s ‘quality of life’
(Croall, 2004) and as equivalent to the ‘low level’ disorder, incivilities or
‘anti-social behaviour’ which feature in the discourse of community safety.
Noisy and dirty business operations, breaches of food regulations, selling
unsafe, shoddy or counterfeit goods or invading householders’...
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