The new local governance of community safety in England and Wales.

• Author: Hope, Tim

Cet article presente une vue d'ensemble et une evaluation, depuis 1977, des reformes et des politiques du gouvernement << New Labour >> en matiere de prevention du crime et de securite communautaire en Angleterre et au pays de Galles. On y passe en revue l'evolution de la situation depuis l'adoption, en 1998, de la Loi sur la prevention de la criminalite et des troubles de l'ordre public, et l'on y evalue l'impact de la strategie du gouvernement pour la reduction de la criminalite et sa campagne de lutte contre le comportement antisocial. L'argument avance est que, a force de vouloir reduire a tout prix la criminalite par la << modernisation >> des services publics, et de donner la priorite au rendement en la matiere, le gouvernement neglige de mettre en place la nouvelle gouvernance requise dans la collectivite en matiere de securite en renforcant les institutions. Cette negligence a peut-etre provoque une aggravation du sentiment d'insecurite dans la societe, lui-meme alimente par un regain d'apprehension du desordre. Cette tendance semble devoir se maintenir, compte tenu de l'approche adoptee par le gouvernement en matiere de reforme strategique. Le programme du << renouveau civil >> qui s'annonce est prometteur pour les politiques qui reconnaissent la contribution des citoyens a la securite communautaire. Mais les defavorises, qui ont un acces limite au capital social requis pour la participation, risquent d'en patir.

Introduction

Since it was first elected in 1997, the "New Labour" government, led by Prime Minister Tony Blair, has introduced a series of institutional and legislative reforms that have both raised the profile of crime prevention in the community and put in place some new structures of governance for bringing about community safety. With its 1997 election slogan "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime," New Labour set about overturning the "Nothing Works" pessimism that had grown up around the criminal justice system during the preceding decades with a new resolve in seeking out and implementing "what works" to raise delivery and performance--in criminal justice as elsewhere. This article looks at how New Labour, in its first and second terms, has sought to deliver on its mandate from the electorate in the context of a new politics of crime. It focuses on the way in which the government has sought to reduce crime and disorder in the community by seeking to improve the performance both of the traditional institutions of criminal justice assigned to the task--in particular, the public police service--and of newer institutions it has put in place, particularly the local Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnerships (CDRPs).

Responsibilization

In the run-up to the 1997 general election, the contending political parties colluded to preserve the belief that the state itself should remain the "sovereign" institution for the governance of law and order, even as a wider debate about law and order--expressing deeper cultural anxieties and structural social changes--served only to dramatize the weaknesses and failings of the institutions of its criminal justice system. Consequently, in this new culture of crime control, central government politicians would find themselves in a dilemma: on the one hand, a need to talk tough in public to assuage growing demands for safety and protection; on the other hand, a need to address, covertly and within the "system," the evident failures of criminal justice institutions to deliver that security, without undermining further the increasingly desperate trust placed in them by the public. As David Garland (2001) has argued, an apparent solution to this dilemma, instinctively appealing to central government politicians, has been the pursuit of a strategy of responsibilization--an effort to get the community, and civil society generally, to take primary responsibility for crime control, thereby relieving the state and its agencies of the burden of delivering crime reduction to society.

New Labour's investment in crime prevention is part of its general "modernizing agenda" for public services. In this article, an effort is made to chart some of the contradictions arising from the pursuit of the mandate to deliver law and order within the overall modernizing ambitions of New Labour. The article's central argument is that the first-term effort at constructing a new local governance of crime--expressed particularly in the government's Crime Reduction Strategy (United Kingdom, Home Office 1999)--has foundered upon the inherent contradictions of its responsibilization strategy, which have been exposed and exacerbated by the machinery of governance inherent in its modernizing agenda, particularly as the latter has become established during the second term. As a consequence, more far-reaching reforms have been hindered and obfuscated, particularly the reform of the function and governance of the police service in the provision of public safety. The article concludes with a review of some of the more recent prospects for the community governance of crime reduction and police reform.

Crime prevention

The principal way in which previous Conservative governments had sought to foster responsibilization for crime was by encouraging crime prevention activity in the community (Garland 2001). Ultimately, in this view, crime prevention should be a matter of individual responsibility--individuals, corporate actors, and other agencies of civil society are assumed to be willing and able to act rationally in their self-interest to protect themselves against crime. The sum total of individuals' pursuit of their own self-interest in attaining private security for themselves will aggregate into the common good--that is, a minimization of the "costs" of crime, both to individuals and to society at large--leading to a general reduction in crime.

What the Conservatives never acknowledged is that such a strategy of "crime prevention," resting primarily on private action, faces the same difficulty as all market-type solutions--that is, a range of market failures that lead to inequality and underprovision in the social distribution of both the substantive risk to be addressed and the means available to reduce it. The less well off members of society face not only higher risks but also a private security deficit that falls upon the state, if anywhere, to redress (Hope 2000). A strategy that relies on private provision to produce social goods is also likely to be underprovided if it fails to create institutional arrangements to counteract incentives for free-riding. Left to their own devices, those who can afford to purchase private security will have no incentive to contribute to the overall social need for security over and above what appears to them to meet their own risks, as they perceive them (Hope and Sparks, 2000); nor are they likely to support additional contributions to the cost of public policing, particularly if they see no benefit to their own immediate security needs. Finally, an emphasis on increasing the private consumption of security goods, particularly by emphasizing risk and insecurity, may set in train an insatiable demand (or cultural taste) for security that cannot be assuaged either by private consumption or by public provision (Loader 1997). New Labour thus faced the same problem as its predecessors: how to address the growing public demand for private security with the existing system of agencies and institutions at its disposal.

Partnership in crime prevention

The 1980s saw a conflict over democratic police accountability, particularly a set of political struggles involving local authorities, mainly representing inner-city and large metropolitan areas and controlled by a "municipal left" within the Labour Party in opposition to the Conservative central government of Margaret Thatcher. Following the defeat of this movement for a local government of policing, the idea emerged of the local multi-agency partnership as the preferred mode for delivering safety from crime (McLaughlin 2002a; Crawford 1997). As promoted by the central government, the essence of such an approach was primarily a voluntary, co-operative agreement among partner agencies based upon a common, consensual appraisal of community needs, drawing upon the analysis of specific, local crime problems to inform the selection and implementation of objectives, targets, and prevention measures (United Kingdom, Home Office 1990, 1984). Under the Conservatives, an ad hoc model for multi-agency local partnerships came to be preferred, comprising a wide range of local interests, including non-governmental business and community groups as well as the statutory authorities of local government and the police (United Kingdom, Home Office 1993). Throughout, though, the symbolic ownership of the crime problem remained firmly in the hands of the police, the aim being to develop partnerships between police and community so as to improve the effectiveness of the police service by creating a more cooperative relationship with the public.

As the cognitive basis for partnership strategies and activities, the official guidance under the...