Dangers lurking in the deep
| Published date | 01 May 2005 |
| Author | Daniel Gilling,Adrian Barton |
| Date | 01 May 2005 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1466802505053496 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Dangers lurking in the deep:
The transformative potential of the
crime audit
DANIEL GILLING AND ADRIAN BARTON
University of Plymouth, UK
Abstract
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.
Key Words
colonization • community safety • crime and disorder reduction
partnerships • crime audit • crime prevention
Introduction
This article examines the impact of crime auditing upon the local govern-
ance of crime. It does so first by examining the practice of crime auditing.
Next it moves on to look at the wider significance of the crime audit, which
like other forms of auditing and evaluation can be seen as a technical
process, but importantly also as a governmental practice, and a political
strategy (Clarke, 2004). Third, the article goes on to illustrate one aspect of
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DOI: 10.1177/1466802505053496
the crime audit’s transformative potential by reference to a brief case study
of drug outreach agencies’ encounters with their local Crime and Disorder
Reduction Partnership (CDRP) in the course of the auditing process.
The crime audit is a requirement of the UK’s 1998 Crime and Disorder
Act, conceived by the first New Labour government. It is identified in that
Act as the principal means of collecting and analysing information about
crime that can be used subsequently to inform three-yearly local crime
reduction strategies. As such it sits at the fulcrum of a problem-oriented
and evidence-based approach to crime that has become widespread not
only in the UK but also across a range of advanced liberal states, even if the
term ‘audit’ has not been so widely adopted.
For many onlookers, the crime audit is of rather less interest that the
crime reduction strategy. The audit, after all, is only a technical tool, the
means and not the end. Such a perception has probably contributed to its
relative neglect both in the academic literature and among practitioners,
who understandably feel the weight of public concern and Home Office
expectation to ‘deliver’ on crime problems. However, it would be wrong to
suggest that the crime audit has received no attention at all. Rather, there
have been a few studies that have examined the form and content of the
crime audit and the wider process (Tierney, 2001; Bowers et al., 2002;
Phillips et al., 2002), while a number of parallel guidance documents have
produced advice on how to go about the business of crime auditing (Hough
and Tilley, 1998; Home Office, 1999; NACRO, 1999). While such publica-
tions cover somewhat different ground between them, at the risk of over-
generalization we might say that they are all infused with a certain
instrumental logic. Either they seek to contribute to the identification of
best practice, or they seek to measure the extent to which audits do what
they are supposed to do.
There is nothing necessarily wrong with such an approach: the identi-
fication of best audit practice may be highly desirable, particularly so when
a cursory glance at the content and quality of individual audit documents
shows them to be so variable (many are published electronically via district
local authority Web pages). However, this is not the only way to approach
the crime audit. It is at least equally valid (if less urgent from the policy
maker’s viewpoint), to take a step backwards and to cast a more critical eye
at the audit’s programmatic underpinnings, as well as its technical applica-
tion. Indeed, such a critical eye is rendered even more important by the
seductive appeal of audit. Audits possess an aura of neutrality and technic-
ality that really should not be taken for granted. As some commentators
have noted (Power, 1997), we need to turn the spotlight back on the audit
itself, in a way that adherents of the new public management, who see
audits as being overwhelmingly a good thing, manifestly have not done
so.
While the focus of this article is upon the crime audit, it is important to
stress, as is implied by its status as a political strategy, that the crime audit
is not hermetically sealed from the wider context in which it exists. This
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