Vol. 12 No. 11 (November 2002)

 

CRIME CONTROL AND COMMUNITY: THE NEW POLITICS OF PUBLIC SAFETY by Gordon Hughes and Adam Edwards (Editors).  Portland, OR: Willan Publishing, 2002.  224pp.  Cloth $55.  ISBN: 1-903240-54-9. 

 

Reviewed by Lisa L. Miller, Crime, Law and Justice and Political Science.  The Pennsylvania State University.  Email: llm16@psu.edu.

 

This is one of the few books on the topic of communities and crime control that privileges a self-consciously POLITICAL analysis.  As such, it offers a refreshing perspective on the contexts that drive interactions among political and legal institutions, private associations and informal community organizations.  Edited by Adam Edwards, Senior Lecturer in Criminology at Nottingham Trent University and Gordon Hughes, Senior Lecturer in Social Policy at Open University, the book is a collection of nine essays, each of which is clearly an off-shoot of work by scholars engaged in long-term endeavors to situate community crime control politics in broader intellectual traditions of sociology, political science and criminology.  While the empirical contributions are somewhat limited in my view, the theoretical frames are complex and well grounded in a range of literatures.  The book offers some useful mid-range theorizing about the politics of community crime prevention, successfully (and thankfully) avoiding both the broad-brush approach of meta-narratives, as well as the more technical, empirical debates about whether these partnerships simply reduce some targeted offense.  Although each chapter raises unique questions, my review focuses on the book’s two main themes that are common to all the contributions.

 

Community involvement in crime control became a popular rallying cry in the 1990s in both the U.S. and Britain, though after reading this volume, it is clear that the community mandate has been even more sweeping and uniformly applied in Britain than in the U.S., where is has been more episodic.  There is little research in Britain and almost none in the U.S., however, that systematically explores how political environments structure the community involvement mandate or how actual relationships between political and legal institutions and private citizens determine the possibilities for and understandings of local empowerment, community development and public safety.  This book lays out a number of axes on which researchers can (and should) explore these arenas.

 

The book has two key themes.  The first – that “appeals to the community for crime control are irreducibly political in nature” (p. 11) – has at its core an interest in understanding the political arrangements and institutional structures that promote particular goals and strategies.  This is not only important for crime control politics generally, it is essential for community strategies in particular because the dominant discourses and even much academic research emphasizes a technocratic ‘what works’ approach which implies political neutrality and objective analysis.  The chapters in this book make it clear, as Eugene McLaughlin notes, that “‘what works’ does not reflect some unproblematic, unmediated reality out there but rather is an outcome of particular discursive practices” (p. 59).  Similarly, Roy Coleman, Joe Sim and Dave Whyte’s chapter, “Power, Politics And Partnerships: The State Of Crime Prevention On Merseyside,” notes that “the legitimate area of local law and order maintenance is ALWAYS A CONTESTED ONE” (p. 101, emphasis added).  These authors note how community-based strategies can reify existing power dynamics by constructing problems and solutions in ways that privilege already dominant institutions such as local business elites.  Avoiding broad macro-level theories that tend to oversimplify power relations, but not shying away from connections between the community crime control mandate and post-welfarist politics, this chapter nicely situates the push for community involvement in broader socio-economic contexts.  Kevin Stenson, in “Community Safety in Middle England – The Local Politics of Crime Control,” pays more attention to the centrality of questions of governance and political arrangements, privileging them over neo-Marxist explanations that focus on community-based strategies as mere reassertions of state authority.   His analysis raises some interesting questions about the function that community crime control serves in a broader reorganization of governmental power and purpose.

 

One of the more interesting points to emerge from this emphasis on political struggle is in Adam Edwards’ chapter, “Learning from Diversity: The Strategic Dilemmas of Community-Based Control.”  Edwards makes explicit an implicit theme of the book that deserves more empirical attention than it receives here or anywhere else, for that matter.  “To understand the process of governing complex social problems like crime and disorder is to examine how political action is practiced at different, supranational, national, regional, local and sub local/neighborhood, tiers and across different, statutory, private and voluntary, spheres of governing” (p. 142).  Edwards describes trade-offs between cooperation and competition, openness and closure, governability and flexibility, and accountability and efficiency that operate differently in large and small political environments.  Indeed, a common theme of the chapters in this volume is the tension between the national priorities on law and order, situational crime prevention and uniform policymaking, and the nature of local crime problems, socio-economic contexts, and interests of local community residents. This is an extremely important political context for policy development and implementation in general but one that appears to have particularly important consequences for crime control because of the great temptation for tough law and order politics at regional, national and supranational levels and more complex, contingent strategies at local levels. 

 

A related point, raised by Janet Foster in her chapter, “‘People Pieces’: The Neglected but Essential Elements of Community Crime Prevention,” concerns the virtual absence of local residents of high-crime areas in policymaking.  Foster notes that, “The people who live in high crime neighbourhoods have often been incidental rather than central to crime prevention efforts” (p. 167).  As a result, agencies charged with crafting community-based programs ignore the core constituency and then determine that it cannot be relied upon as an agent of change. Foster also notes that this core is absent from much scholarly literature on crime control politics as well, making it difficult to gain a complete understanding of the array of problems and solutions.

 

A second theme of the book is the exploration of the “locally particular expression of this politics” (p. 11). This theme is at the core of each chapter: only locally-derived data about the actual implementation of community-based strategies can create a knowledge base that provides sufficient insights into the origins, nature and consequences of community-based crime control. Hughes and Edwards note in their introduction that “taken together…local case studies suggest that what is most insightful about the actual conduct of community governance is its diversity” (p. 11).  The editors suggest that while the community-based strategy is portrayed as a ‘third way,’ in response to perceived failures of governance through massive bureaucracies or quasi-markets, the key questions are how each of these potentialities actually plays out in particular political contexts.  “In reality partnership practice is more chaotic and ‘labyrinthine’ because it is characterized by a ‘deficit’ of the political resources that would be needed to deliver either the empowerment or coercion of local communities” (p. 13).

 

This emphasis on the local is echoed in several chapters that argue for contingent and specific understandings of community crime control in practice.  In “Same Bed, Different Dreams: Postmodern Reflections on Crime Prevention and Community Safety,” Eugene McLaughlin advocates researching and theorizing “the little nooks and crannies where crime prevention and community safety are and are not being performed in a multitude of ways” (p. 59).  In another chapter, “The Rediscovery of Learning: Crime Prevention and Scientific Realism,” Nick Tilley suggests that researchers should concentrate on “what works for whom in what circumstances and how?” (p. 72); and in “Representations and Realities in Local Crime Prevention: Some Lessons from London and Lessons for Criminology,” Simon Hallsworth emphasizes the importance of local decision-making and accountability.  Each of these chapters demonstrates the contingent and ever-shifting arrangements that constitute community crime control strategies.

 

In my view, the book succeeds better with the first theme than the second.  The political struggles over the meaning of community involvement come through quite clearly in the case studies.  However, how and why each locality is unique and needs intense, ethnographic attention in order to understand it is less clear.  While the authors are mindful of the challenge of avoiding false particular accounts, they admittedly jettison the ‘administrative criminology’ approach that emphasizes universal ‘what works’ analyses for the anthropological approach that “draws lessons about public policy that distinguishes what is particular about a certain practice in a specific place and time from that which can, consequently, be seen as genuinely universal” (p. 13).  This methodological choice has its advantages and they are revealed in the rich details offered by each chapter.  This choice also has its shortcomings, however, namely that each case study has its own set of actors, contexts, institutions and outcomes that seem unique and almost idiosyncratic in this volume, when there may, in fact, be common themes that would appear in an aggregate analysis.  In fact, the chapters that include case studies are heavy on theoretical frames and light on empirical observations.  They primarily offer descriptions of events and processes, which are interesting in their own right but less persuasive in terms of traditional empirical expectations.

 

For example, many of the chapters in the volume note that people living with high-crime on a regular basis have understandings of the origin and nature of the crime problem that are grounded in the structural conditions of neighborhoods, rather than the pathologies of individuals.  While the particulars may vary from community to community, this common thread is an important and stark contrast to the police-centered, tough on crime perspective that emanates from regional and national governments and/or local law enforcement bureaucracies.  If this is accurate, then understanding the particulars of a given locality does not become irrelevant, but it does suggest that there is some important common ground ACROSS localities that could contribute to both theoretical and empirical understandings of the politics of community crime control.

 

On a final note, the book is ambitious in addressing academic questions of politics and society in the context of communities and crime control, but it also raises questions about the sociology of knowledge production.  In “Plotting The Rise of Community Safety: Critical Reflections on Research, Theory and Politics,” Gordon Hughes suggests that changing definitions of community, public safety and crime control in the public discourse are paralleled in the academic literature. This chapter and the subtexts of a few others (McLaughlin and Tilly in particular) raise questions about the ways in which academic research has sometimes failed to expose the conditional and subjective uses of terms such as ‘community’ and ‘public safety’ and has thus contributed to our limited understanding of the power dimensions that necessarily structure crime control programs in the community.   Each of these themes is worthy of considerable attention on its own; by offering them all in one volume, the editors have undertaken a formidable task with some success.

 

************************************************************************
Copyright 2002 by the author, Lisa L. Miller.