The Success of Community Safety Partnerships in the Arena of Crime Prevention - Research Paper Example

I made some comments about those you highlighted. The references that were used prior to the 1998 Act are actually very important because they form the basis of the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act. The 1998 Act is in fact a response to the evaluation of past scholars of the strengths and weaknesses of community policing and the role of the police in community safety. For instance, Smith (1987) argued how an adversarial approach to community policing is detrimental in the long-term. He is in fact promoting a consensus-based policing, which becomes the core foundation of the 1998 Act. Your professor specifically recommended a discussion of the failures and successes of community policing in the UK, and so these earlier arguments are relevant. I just clarified some of the arguments and added explanations. I hope you will find everything to your satisfaction. Thank you. Introduction An important change in policies in relation to crime prevention and reduction has been the increase in approaches to community safety. The Crime and Disorder Act of 1998 in England and Wales obliged every local official to build Crime and Disorder Partnerships, who should perform inspections of crime and disorder and formulate plans for the mitigation of robbery, burglary, and vehicle offence under the Crime Reduction Programme of the government (Hughes & Gilling, 2004). Scholars like Peter Squires (2006) were concerned that these integrated goals will hold back the capacity of partnerships to concentrate on local matters and others like Daniel Gilling (2013) were cynical of the manner in which community safety has been dictated by a focus on crime and disorder. Nick Tilley (2005) and other critics claim that community safety can be linked to the trivialisation of important public concerns. Moreover, community safety is also associated with the heightening interest in antisocial behaviour, a concept very hard to characterise, but which has become a ‘moral panic’ (Mooney & Scott, 2005, p. 190). This essay explains and discusses the role of partnership working for the police to address community safety issues. Overview In the paper published by the Scottish Executive in 1998, Safer communities through partnerships—A strategy for action, community safety is described as “protecting people’s right to live in confidence and without fear for their own safety or the safety of other people” (Mooney & Scott, 2005, p. 191). It states that crime prevention should occupy a major portion of community safety but it also includes prevention of petty antisocial activities and fire and road safety. Not like England and Wales, partnerships are not obligatory. Although widely visualised, community safety partnerships (CSPs) would seem, just like in England and Wales, to be ruled by issues relating to crime (Hughes & Rowe, 2007). A particular investigation of the Glasgow CSP in 2003 discovered that it was mostly governed by the police and, although more general safety matters were part of its responsibilities, crimes were prominent in its description of major issues. Glasgow CSP identifies safety concerns alongside ‘street people’, pointing to components of social policy criminalisation (Mooney & Scott, 2005, pp. 191-192). Other indications of this are the popularity of dialogues about community safety and the formation of antisocial behaviour agencies and the introduction of community wardens. Addressing crime and building safer communities lies in the core of current government legislation. It is a major yardstick against which the success or failure of the government will be assessed. The Crime and Disorder Act (1998) is designed to build a governmental proposal for local cooperative measures and to launch a new period of partnership in crime reduction and prevention. The ratification of the Act has progressed rapidly onto the formation of local CSPs, through local crime inspections authorised by the legislation to the execution of the initial phases of the crime reduction programme of the government (Gilling, 2000). On the training arena, the Community Justice Training Organisation has introduced its professional criteria for community safety and crime prevention (Ballintyne et al., 2000, p. 3). The police are creating its training organisation. Monitoring and assessment occupy an important position in the move towards crime reduction and community safety (Cullen & Wilcox, 2013). HM Inspectorate of Constabulary is carrying out a continuation of their assessment of partnership working in 1997, known as Beating Crime. The new regional assessment, Calling Time on Crime (2000), examines community safety agreement across police organisations in England and Wales (Cullen & Wilcox, 2013). The Home Office Policing and Reducing Crime Unit are carrying out an investigation of crime and disorder partnerships, as well as investigation of dialogues with remote communities. However, how community safety is envisioned and practiced under the perspective of the Crime and Disorder Act (1998) could generate currents outside the prevalent debates over criminological theory and practice. It has been observed that there is an expansion in emphasis and activity on community safety and crime prevention which co-existed with the Crime and Disorder policy of the government (Henry, 2012). Some scholars like Ballintyne and colleagues (2000) emphasised the actual possibility that the increase in local activity could be scattered, useless, and hard to maintain. Professor Adam Crawford (1998) and legislators saw prospects to build up and expand community safety actions and objectives across an array of partners. However, they also noticed an absence of useful abilities and mutual understanding which may weaken the capacity of the new policy route. An increasing number of individuals and organisations, such as the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) and Metropolitan Police Authority (MPA), are being obliged to take part in community safety programmes. Home Office guidance has been published on developing local partnership plans and carrying out local community safety inspections. The national training organisations which have been formed or currently being formed can begin to place a wider skills base for professionals, provided that they can unite and eliminate long-standing inter-agency training obstacles (Squires, 2006). However, preliminary findings indicate that successful partnership working remains absent. As reported by Tilley (2005), the 1998 Audit Commission research shows quite extensive weaknesses in the quality of local inspections and a broad discrepancy in local partnership working. Crime and Disorder Act 1998 and Police Role in Community Safety The extent of dissimilarity between the Conservative administration and the new Labour government with respect to community safety was clearly demonstrated in the first clauses of the consultation paper, Getting to Grips with Crime (Home Office, 1997). This paper showed a significant change in the government’s perception of the role of the police in community safety. The paper began with an overview of the Morgan Report (1991) and, especially, the most important strategic task of the local police. The paper stated that (Hughes, McLaughlin, & Muncie, 2002, p. 106): Even though the previous administration chose not to implement the Report, many of Morgan’s key findings have in fact been taken on board spontaneously by partnership all over the country, to their benefit and--- most importantly—that of local communities... The years which have elapsed since Morgan have seen a complete acceptance of the partnership concept at all levels of the police service. The service now explicitly recognises that it cannot cope with crime and disorder issues on its own... Nevertheless, what it really wants to say is that in its impending 1997 Crime and Disorder Bill the administration advised to add guidance for the new responsibilities of the police and local authorities to create constitutional partnerships for the prevention and reduction of crime. This strategy clearly bypassed the question of a ‘lead’ department in the prevention of crime (Hughes et al., 2002). The government admitted that it was not convinced that the Morgan technique of furnishing local officials with a lead role would be feasible in reality. Instead, according to Hughes and Rowe (2007), its assumptions were that the rules of partnership involved shared responsibility and mutual working. Therefore, they suggested that obligation must lie equally with the district or London borough and the chief constable. These issues largely encouraged the development of the Crime and Disorder Act of 1998. The new provisions and procedures are specified in the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act. Sections 5 and 6 assign the constitutional responsibility to local officials and chief police authorities, alongside health officials, probation teams, and police authorities, to develop and execute a ‘strategy for the reduction of crime and disorder in the area’ (Hughes et al., 2002, p. 164). Moreover, the 1998 Act is explicit about what the plan must include. The stated top priorities are “objectives to be pursued by the responsible authorities” and “long-term and short-term performance targets for measuring the extent to which such objectives are achieved” (Hughes et al., 2002, p. 107). The developed plan is to be issued by the assigned officials. The publication must cover information about objectives and performance targets, the findings of the local inspection, and the agencies involved in the plan. According to Newburn (2001), in this manner it greatly resembles the feature of local policing strategies, issued yearly by local police officials since the implementation of the 1994 Courts Act of the Police and Magistrates. Community safety has three major components. It has a tendency to be limited to a small area, to have a wide focus on social issues outside mere crime and disorder and to be conveyed through partnership. Crawford (1998), in his theory of partnership, differentiates between ‘inter-agency’ and ‘multi-agency’ relations. Multi-agency relations refer to agencies coalescing with regard to a specific issue without this overly influencing the manner in which they operate. On the contrary, inter-agency relations “interpenetrate and thus affect normal internal working practices of the agencies involved” (Crawford, 1998, p. 175). The tasks in inter-agency relations are more difficult for the police than they are in multi-agency relations. Due to the outcome-oriented quality of the 1998 Act the police are pressured to take part not just in concerted but in mutually dependent activity. Nevertheless, this will once more emphasise several of the conflicts and problems in this work (McLaughlin, 2001). It is important to reassess several of these issues because the repercussion of the 1998 Act is that the police will be obliged to tackle them and to try to find out ways to mitigate or resolve them. Above all, there is the issue of inter-organisational disagreement. It may occur over interests, objectives, principles and, regardless of the planning procedure specified by the 1998 Act priorities. It is also likely that disagreements over priorities and objectives may be worsened by several attributes of managerialism— refers to the use of managerial practices of business organizations in the supervision of other forms of organisations, such as the police-- presently governing a large part of the public service sector. The dilemma with New Public Management—refers to the government policies that sought to improve and increase the effectiveness of the public sector-- is that it could promote an ‘intra-organisational’ emphasis instead of creating processes for the supervision of ‘inter-organisational’ systems (Crawford, 1998). Moreover, there is the problem of unbalanced power distribution between the partners. This could be revealed in legal powers, access to knowledge and information, and human and material resources. In addition, there is the issue of unclear distinctions between the responsibilities of partners with a potential loss of independence (Rowe, 2008). And ultimately, there is the risk of uncertainty over accountability and responsibility. Specifically, responsibility could become disjointed and hence accountability vague (Hughes & Edwards, 2002). This could be especially severe with regard to the core objective of this activity, namely, alleviation in the prevalence of crime and disorder. A case in point is the failure of the senior social worker to assist Victoria Climbie—the young girl who died in February 2000 after being maltreated by her great aunt and her spouse-- in a public investigation (Mail Online, 2013). Clearly, there was some confusion in the responsibilities of key agencies in the Climbie case. The 1998 Act gives much importance to partnership working and community consultation. It would seem that one of the suggestions of the Act is that the role of the police should be the core of public discourse and scrutiny, thereby modifying the basic role of the police. What appears apparent is that the public police will generally be shoved towards ‘community policing’. Even though hard to characterise or identify, ‘community policing’ depends on reorganisation of policing and organizational decentralisation so as to enable joint communication between the citizens and the police (Rowe, 2008). It requires engagement in a comprehensively guided, problem-focused policing, and obliges the police to be sensitive to the needs and demands of citizens when they determine what the local issues are and establish their priorities. Moreover, it requires engagement in training neighbourhoods in resolving crime issues on their own, through crime prevention activities and community associations. However, as numerous scholars have emphasised prior to the implementation of the Crime and Disorder Act of 1998, it is quite obvious that this not a perfect approach to policing. Smith (1987) identified several difficulties related to the model of community policing that are as relevant to policing after the 1998 Act as they were at that time. Primarily, police-oriented action is largely adversarial. Consensus-based actions are difficult to formulate. Police actions that are most readily formulated are largely adversarial or, at best confrontational. Hence, one of the questions that the 1998 Act is trying to answer is how can the police equip itself for further participation in consensus-building actions? Also, policing influences various parts of the community, or various communities, in different ways and this could be a major cause of disagreement and tension. For instance, there are still black communities that refuse to cooperate with the police because of a long history of racial discrimination (Maxwell, 2000). Persuading the community does not automatically resolve the issue (Squires, 1999). As claimed by Crawford (1997), “An assertion of community at a local level can be beautifully conciliatory, socially nuanced and constructive but it can also be parochial, intolerant, oppressive and unjust” (as cited in Hughes et al., 2002, p. 114). This poses the issue of how the opposing expectations of the police are to be reconciled in a fair, peaceful, and democratic way. Thus the subject of police judgment surfaces in community policy approaches towards appropriate democratic administration of policing. The Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) is an autonomous, expertly governed strategic policing unit. Senior police, such as commanders, assistant chief constables, and chief constables, are its members (Gibson, 2008). Its objective is to serve the interest of the public and build dynamic partnership with the Association of Police Authorities (APA) and the government; to guide and coordinate the course and progress of policing in Northern Ireland, Wales, and England (ACPO, 2013). During national exigencies, the purposes of ACPO comprise administering “strong and visible leadership [and] inspiring confidence in those we lead, our partners and the diverse communities we serve” (Gibson, 2008, p. 49). ACPO aims “to ensure, with [its] partners, that the development of doctrine for the service is conducted in a professional and coordinated manner, supporting the continuous improvement of policing for the benefit of the communities that [it serves]” (Gibson, 2008, p. 49). In essence, ACPO guides the nation towards a citizen-oriented police service. In a similar vein, the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) and the Metropolitan Police Authority (MPA) are responsible for partnership working and community consultation. Specifically, these authorities are tasked to consult with strategic partners and communities in London (Metropolitan Police Authority, 2013). The MPS is specifically tasked to enhance their knowledge of communities in London, to counsel and educate them about security concerns, and to observe any conflicts within London’s communities (Metropolitan Police, 2013). On the other hand, MPA is specifically tasked to engage in local strategic partnerships, to vigorously take part in Crime and Disorder Partnerships, and to strongly support police and community involvement (Metropolitan Police Authority, 2013). These duties ensure that police service within the framework of community safety partnership is oriented towards consensus building. In order to facilitate consensus building, these authorities are obliged—ACPO, MPS, MPA—to obtain public opinion about issues in relation to their policing and encouraging community involvement in crime prevention and reduction; to make sure that the opinion of local people on the priorities of crime and disorder are integrated into the formulation and implementation of the crime and disorder partnership scheme; and to collaborate in establishing objectives for local community development and relate these objectives to the crime reduction and prevention efforts that they carry out in boroughs. Social Disorganisation Theory and Community Safety Partnership Community safety partnership may be better understood and justified within the framework of key criminological theories. The revival of social disorganisation theory by Shaw and McKay in the latter part of the 20th century co-existed with a growing concern for community-based policing (Cullen & Wilcox, 2013). Since both concepts—social disorganisation and community partnership-- place emphasis on communities, they were usually combined in a way that encourages community members to become involved in the implementation of informal social control. As argued by Hughes (2001), although police contribute significantly to the implementation of social control, the degree to which the role of the police is the primary against secondary or tertiary degree of control in communities seems to have an implication for both theoretical knowledge of community practices associated with crime control and consequently for frameworks of justice. The principles of social disorganisation theory by Shaw and McKay can be definitely discerned in the components of the policies and initiatives they formulated based on their perception of crime and can be considered as an initial stage in distinguishing between established models of justice and what are currently known as community models of justice (Cullen & Wilcox, 2013). The role of social communication and community relations, although less relevant in established justice models, are mandatory for community models of justice (Home Office, 1998). Therefore, from a theoretical perspective, community relations are an important component in social disorganisation’s account of the formation of community crime prevention and social control, and this framework is obviously distinct from deterrence approaches that depend on formal social control. Nevertheless, current policies related to modern theory of social disorganisation have placed emphasis on informal surveillance as a form of social control. Although this form of supervision is definitely essential, especially as regards major crimes, it is certainly distinct from the primary emphasis in social disorganisation theory. However, these activities are hard to effectively implement in communities where there is weak confidence in the police or weak commitment in the community to strengthen this form of social control (Ballintyne et al., 2000). This form of supervision, which depends largely on the police, is also impractical for improper actions that, although not unlawful, may ultimately result in riskier conflicts among community members. Making the police the most important form of social control could also have unfavourable implications for the community (Hughes & Gilling, 2004). According to Christie (1977 as cited in Cullen & Wilcox, 2013, p. 346) and other scholars, the use of the police to deal with problems in the community may eventually destabilise the community. Christie (1977 as cited in Cullen & Wilcox, 2013, p. 346) has observed that when members of the community hand over their problems to the police, they lose the chance to participate and interact within the community. Likewise, as pointed out by DeLeon-Granados (1999), “Official crime prevention can swallow up informal community-based responses, can alienate segments of the population, and can chew up police resources by focusing on arrest instead of strategies that can potentially stabilise a community’s social ecology” (as cited in Cullen & Wilcox, 2013, p. 347). Therefore, the form of justice models applied by communities seems likely to be somewhat reliant on the level of social interaction and relations within the community. In fact, according to McLaughlin (2001), few initiatives have been formulated to promote social interaction in UK communities. The Safer Westminster Partnership (SWP) is a good example of a community safety partnership that prioritises community participation over police involvement. SWP unifies senior authorities from London Fire & Emergency Planning Authority, Primary Care Trust, Probation Service, Westminster City Council, and Metropolitan Police. The SWP performs a yearly assessment of antisocial behaviour, substance abuse, disorder, and crime in Westminster to formulate a three-year plan to advance community safety in the borough (Westminster City Council, 2011, p. 22). In order to strongly encourage community involvement, the SWP launched several focused committees. It also formed a commissioning team to facilitate the realisation of the partnership’s objectives and purposes (Westminster City Council, 2011, p. 22). This is in accordance with the stronger model of community policing, that is, less involvement of the police in the direct provision of services and greater participation of the community in the overall delivery plan. The SWP, in essence, employs a locality-based framework. Within this model, members of the community are encouraged to actively take part in strategic decision making. This local strategy guarantees more efficient and effective provision of services (Westminster City Council, 2011, p. 22). Clarity and transparency, in this case, are an integral element of partnership growth as is the establishment of a suitable system. There is a significant possibility for misunderstanding in this form of partnership. This can be over tasks, duties, and commitment levels. The structure of roles and responsibilities must be clarified from the very beginning. Since the SWP largely prioritises community involvement, the police may feel unimportant in the actual process of decision making. Conclusions The core of the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act, which obliges the police to consider crime prevention matters in all areas of their profession, should be defined and planned more comprehensively and broadened to incorporate communities, NGOs, businesses, and major government agencies. Community safety may also have to adopt community and social justice if it is to deviate from the limited path which have governed community policing in the UK for many years. The success of community safety partnerships in the arena of crime prevention and reduction and, possibly more significantly, strengthening those developments necessitates a socially inclusive approach. The police can leave out communities in partnership or restrict their involvement. Hence, it is important for community safety partnerships to clarify the rules of engagement and the structure of roles and responsibilities beforehand. References Association of Chief Police Officers, 2013, Local Policing and Partnerships. 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