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This chapter summarises findings from research into the work of community safety managers in Wales, entailing responses to anti-social behaviour (ASB) in each of the 22 community safety partnerships in the country. The data are used to question prevailing assumptions about the problematisation of this signal issue in popular concerns about crime and disorder. The chapter challenges two diametrically opposed but equally ‘smooth’ narratives: that governing ASB is either a morally righteous, enlightened and commonsensical campaign against a feral minority, or else that it represents a moral panic manufactured to support an increasingly punitive and intolerant state. The chapter considers the complex and hybrid narratives of disorder which underpin the problem-solving work undertaken by community safety practitioners. The resilient Fabianism of community safety managers' accounts of their own work disturbs narratives of social control in critical social science, which are in danger of believing the hype of the very political projects they seek to challenge.

This chapter reviews theoretical and empirical studies on the impact of incarceration on community safety and it also notes that these studies sought to test empirically the coercive mobility hypothesis. It explains that this hypothesis holds that high rates of incarceration, especially concentrated in poor communities, will lead to more crime. It suggests that there is good evidence that high rates of incarceration destabilize families, increase rates of delinquency, increase rates of teenage births, foster alienation of youth from pro-social norms, damage frail social networks, and weaken labor markets.

This chapter focuses on the current and potential roles that victims might play in managing prisoner reentry. It discusses the legal rights of victims to be notified of a parolee's release and to testify at parole hearings. It also discusses the crucial role they might play in enhancing community safety and offender rehabilitation.

This chapter suggests an analysis of the mechanisms underlying the processes associated with the rise of victimhood and its impact. It offers a critical understanding of the current imagining of the crime victim in the discourse of community safety. It considers what is meant by community in the context of community safety. It further considers what is meant by safety in this same context. It offers a perspective on the nature of the crime victim presumed by the community safety discourse by considering the concept of protection in understanding who the victim of community safety might be. It gives a few words on images of the community in relation to crime and safety.

This chapter observes that the emergence of a substantive concern with what became known as ‘community safety’ policy marked a significant shift in forms of local and national governance. It notes that this shift had far-reaching implications for local authorities, for crime and disorder management, for the politics of community, for social policy, and for the variety of agencies (the police, local authorities, probation, Drug Action Teams, witness support services, and so on) that following the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act, came to form the Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnership (CDRPs), charged with the responsibility of delivering local crime and disorder reduction strategy.

This chapter concludes, having reviewed many dimensions of this area of policy development, with a fairly substantial charge sheet against it. It notes that the ‘official’ history of community safety tells a story locating the origins of community safety policy development in a revitalisation of local democracy, as municipal authorities sought to resist an increasingly centralised and increasingly punitive and largely situational response to problems of crime and disorder. It observes that the renewed priority afforded to victims and the broader academic legitimation provided by ‘left realism’ appeared to suggest that the prevention of crime and the maintenance of law and order could form part of a wider project of progressive and inclusive social reconstruction.

This chapter considers the following questions: first, the balance, or, more properly, the relationships between enforcement and support in anti-social behaviour management work; second, the extent to which anti-social behaviour enforcement action is a genuinely ‘last’ resort of community safety practitioners; and third, the position and perspective of the ‘victim’ in anti-social behaviour management work. Here, not least, lies the further question of how we might conceive of the status of ‘victimhood’ in relation to anti-social behaviour. Finally, there are questions about ‘outcomes’ at the level of real neighbourhoods and communities, and the processes and relationships of citizenship (forms of social capital) established and sustained (or not) within them.

This chapter focuses on the social and political climate in which hate crimes, whether racially motivated or as a result of homophobia, are increasingly being taken seriously by local authorities and police forces in England and Wales. It explores the special place hate crimes occupy in the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act ‘community safety’ ethos, with particular attention being paid to how police forces, especially Hampshire Constabulary, have been attempting to win the trust of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) communities in Southampton. It argues that police forces in England and Wales are at the forefront of the project of increasing the ‘civic participation’ and ‘active citizenship’ of the members of LGBT communities in England and Wales.

This chapter looks at the historical development of initiatives against ‘domestic violence’ (which have largely resulted from feminist organising), examining the influence of community safety discourse and activity. It explores why community safety approaches have been less influential in relation to ‘domestic violence’ than feminist approaches. It considers feminist theory on the family and women's safety and how this has impacted on feminist initiatives against male violence. It examines community safety initiatives, and the deconstruction of ‘community’ and ‘safety’. It examines how Western understandings of ‘domestic violence’ have led to a focus on state/agency responses, and how this has been underpinned by gendered discourses of caring.

The purpose of this chapter is to analyse the actors who are involved in Community regulation. It finds out how these actors operate and interrelate, the nature of the controls to which each is subject, and the weaknesses in their constitutional legitimacy or ability to deliver product safety. This analysis begins by summarizing the actors who have been identified in the first two parts of the book. It then confirms the theoretical tests for the constitutional legitimacy of rules, before applying these tests to each actor. The findings of this chapter suggest that arguments for the creation of a single Community Safety Agency are compelling. If this were to be created, there would be a need to balance accountability and judicial review mechanisms, the former through public scrutiny in a Parliamentary committee, plus a clear administrative appeal mechanism on substantive decisions in view of the abrogation by the courts of oversight on technical issues.

This chapter explores the implications that community safety policies have for young women. It does not aim to offer a broad analysis of all the gender implications of the shift to community safety approaches. It is based on one research study of young women who live in a particularly deprived area, where they perceive the risks to their safety and their well-being to be high. It focuses on data that indicate the strategies adopted by some of them.

The final chapter documents the wide range of Black-led activist efforts to reform the police at the end of the 1960s and in the early 1970s. The launching point is the assassination of Fred Hampton, Deputy Chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party, in a 1969 killing orchestrated by the Chicago Police Department, the Cook County State’s Attorney, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In the aftermath of his killing, a wave of community organizations mobilized or expanded their protests about Chicago’s police. This included groups like the Afro-American Patrolman’s League, comprised of Black CPD officers seeking to end police brutality and ensure better police services for Black Chicago. It included U.S. Congressman Ralph Metcalfe using the power of his office to expose police violence and harassment, and the fight for community control of the police led by the Black Panthers. Some activists who advocated for police reform sought more responsive police services to better community safety from escalating gun violence; others, such as those involved in the push for community control, pursued visions of semi-abolition of the police as currently constituted. Binding them together was a common understanding that the CPD was not working for Black Chicago.

This chapter reviews the direction that ‘community safety’ and ‘social inclusion’ has taken since the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act and the Social Exclusion Unit's recommendation that a National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal be developed the same year. It considers the assumptions underpinning, and the tensions and contradictions that have emerged between, ‘community safety’ and ‘social inclusion’ strategies and approaches. It argues that there has been a reconfiguration of inequalities in cities, which has profound implications for victimisation, criminalisation, and criminality. It notes that the most marginal sections of working-class communities are bearing the brunt of these changes.

This chapter examines the concept of ‘community safety’. It notes that its origins lie in politicians from the left seeking to widen the ownership of the problem of crime to organisations other than the police. It examines the scope and activities of the private security sector in community safety. It uses George and Button's (2000) definition of private security, which comprises manned security services (static manned guarding, cash-in-transit services, door supervision and stewarding services, close protection services); private sector detention services; security storage and destruction services; professional security services and the security products sector.

This chapter explores the impact of the now dominant aspect of community safety policy: the management of ‘antisocial behaviour’ through ‘early interventions’. It firmly sets the tone for this critical exegesis of community safety and young people's place therein. It argues that instead of objective judgement, justice, and inclusion, community safety has become a tool of partiality and exclusion through ‘precautionary injustice’ techniques that increasingly demonise, and consequentially deny justice to, children and young people. It notes that as Goldson observes insightfully, the ideologies and domain assumptions that underpin ‘risk’ based early interventions are both intrinsically authoritarian and antithetical to long established principles of youth justice.

This chapter approaches the issue of addressing anti-social behaviour (ASB) in the United Kingdom from the perspective of practitioners and policy makers operating at a local level. It focuses on three aspects: practice and policy as applied in one local authority area (Leeds); the key issues for practitioners around the country (as identified by research undertaken by the National Community Safety Network); and new moves to address the causes, as well as the symptoms, of ASB (the government's Respect Agenda and the Positive Approaches group). The first section examines the strategic approach to ASB adopted in Leeds and the establishment and operation of policies and interventions to address ASB through a dedicated unit and multi-agency problem-solving panels. It describes the experiment in multiple Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs) of Operation Cape and its mutation into smaller, rolling multi-agency programmes. The second section examines the findings of the National Community Safety Network's research. The third section looks at the proposals coming out of the Positive Approaches alliance.

This chapter examines community safety officers (CSOs), transitional agents who are linked to public police, and more broadly considers community policing frontiers. CSOs have been prominent local security providers in the UK, Australia, and elsewhere for two decades. In the UK, CSOs and related neighbourhood policing emerged from reassurance policing that was partially influenced by earlier US ideas on community policing. Currently in the UK, austerity is challenging the continuation of these kinds of policing, and yet these models are influencing developments beyond its borders. Examining recent establishment of CSOs in cities in Western Canada, the chapter then engages in international comparative research at the frontier of community policing. It analyses freedom of information disclosures and policy documents to demonstrate that CSO establishment in Canada has not involved a straightforward transfer of criminal justice policy from the UK.

This chapter examines the relevance of identity formations for criminology and their significance in a criminal justice context. Conceptualising today's society as late modernity, it argues that when writing about the nature of social identities in contemporary western society, it is important to consider the interplay, tensions and contradictions between modernity's ‘imperative of order’, including the expression of collective identities and interests, and the fragmentation, individualisation and fluidity of identities associated with conditions of late modernity. It also suggests that within a criminal justice context, the identities of both offenders and victims are relevant, as are identities in relation to gender, ‘race’/ethnicity, religion/spirituality, sexual orientation, disability and ageing. Turning specifically to a criminal justice and community safety context, the chapter shows how the subject of identities is relevant in many ways. Finally, it provides a few examples of the ways in which identity is socially constructed and enacted within prisons.

This chapter deals with two main topics both of which were key recommendations of the Independent Commission – the establishment of district policing partnerships (DPPs) and the introduction of policing with the community. It sets out the legislation and the appointment of the first DPPs by the Policing Board (in Northern Ireland’s largest ever public appointment exercise), their roll-out, their work and the support provided to them by the Policing Board, challenges to their members in terms of personal security, and their successive reconstitutions. The second half of the chapter deals with policing with the community which the Commission defined as the police participating in the community and the community participating in its own policing and supporting the police. The chapter again brings out the role of the Board in promoting policing with the community in a variety of ways. It looks at the relationship between DPPs and Community Safety Partnerships and makes comparisons with Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnerships in England and Wales.