Neighbourhood policing and community safety
| Author | Michael Rowe,Gordon Hughes |
| DOI | 10.1177/1748895807082059 |
| Published date | 01 November 2007 |
| Date | 01 November 2007 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Criminology & Criminal Justice
© 2007 SAGE Publications
(Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore)
and the British Society of Criminology.
www.sagepublications.com
ISSN 1748–8958; Vol: 7(4): 317–346
DOI: 10.1177/1748895807082059
317
Neighbourhood policing and
community safety:
Researching the instabilities of the local governance of
crime, disorder and security in contemporary UK
GORDON HUGHES AND MICHAEL ROWE
Cardiff University, Wales, UK and Victoria University, Wellington,
New Zealand
Abstract
‘Community’ continues to be at the heart of political and policy
discourses surrounding policing, security and community safety.
While recognizing that there are powerful retrogressive and
repressive elements to such contemporary debates, it is argued
here that this is an unstable and contestable policy terrain and
that there are opportunities to develop notions of community that
offer more progressive possibilities. This article examines policy
developments relating to Neighbourhood Policing and Crime and
Disorder Reduction Partnerships in Britain to explore these issues.
The latter developments emphasize that community engagement
and co-production are centrally important. However, it is clear that
there are dangers that already identified tensions will persist. The
need to meet performance targets will continue to detract from
community-oriented work, unless the two coincide. Additionally
cultural and institutional factors are likely to prove inimical to efforts
to respond effectively to community needs. None of this ought to
be taken as an argument in favour of jettisoning the idea of
community, but it does mean that the participation of publics needs
to be couched in broad, inclusive and often conflictual terms and
understood that such efforts offer only limited guarantees in terms
of establishing progressive agendas for community safety and
neighbourhood policing.
SPECIAL ISSUE ARTICLES
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Key Words
communitarianism • community safety • crime and disorder
reduction partnerships • neighbourhood policing • security
The mobilisation of local knowledge is fundamental to the construction of
just and democratic forms of security governance.
(Johnston and Shearing, 2003: 140)
Socially situated, imperfectly knowledgeable actors stumble upon ways of
doing things that seem to work, and seem to fit with their other concerns.
Authorities patch together workable solutions to problems that they see and
can get to grips with. Agencies struggle to cope with their workload, please
their political masters, and do the best job they can in the circumstances.
There is no omnipotent strategist, no abstract system, no all-seeing actor
with perfect knowledge and unlimited powers. Every ‘solution’ is based
upon a situated perception of the problem it addresses, of the interests that
are at stake and of the values that ought to guide action and distribute con-
sequences.
(Garland, 2001: 26)
Introduction
Criminologists, like sociologists before them, continue to fret over the
nature, and the normative and political effects, of community as a govern-
mental appeal and technique and in particular its articulation in debates on
policing, security and community safety. Within contemporary criminology
community has been variously understood as a ‘free-floating signifier’
(McLaughlin, 1994), an idea characterized by ‘extreme vagueness’ (Pease,
1994), ‘a capacious category’ (Hughes, 2002), while its ideological and pol-
icy deployment risks ‘the fallacy of privileging community’ (Young, 2007:
181), and can result in uncertain consequences as a ‘calamity or catalyst’ for
change (Carson, 2007 forthcoming). These quasi-canonical observations
point clearly to the danger of debating such a contested and elastic topic
like community: namely that it may risk trying to cover everything and end
up covering nothing. In this article we begin by noting a major paradox in
community-based approaches to crime prevention and policing: on one
hand there are the dystopian dangers of unreflexive communitarianism and
on the other the potentially progressive potential of approaches to policing,
crime prevention and community safety that focus on the communal and
the local in an ‘age of diversity’ (as articulated by Johnston and Shearing at
the beginning of this article, and see Hughes, 2007). Of late we should add to
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