Citation

Hughes G. Crime Prev. Community Safety 2000; 2(4): 47-60.

Affiliation

Faculty of Social Sciences, Open University; e-mail: g.h.hughes@open.ac.uk

Copyright

(Copyright © 2000, Holtzbrinck Springer Nature Publishing Group -- Palgrave-Macmillan)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Community safety is a 'wicked issue', not just for the challenges it raises as not easily compartmentalized practices and policies about harm reduction, but also for the theoretical, moral and political challenges associated with its nascent and contested agenda in the new governance of crimes and harms. A key contention in this paper is that community safety should not be viewed as being synonymous with crime reduction and the control of social disorder, but rather that it needs to be linked to wider concerns about both hazards and safety in communities from both criminal and non-criminalized harms. This paper is organized in terms of the following sections: first, it explores the silence, until very recently, regarding the issue of community safety in criminology, and the latter's current conflation of community safety with crime reduction. Second, the paper maps the recent history of this notoriously 'free-floating signifier', arguing that there have been to date three key moments to its changing place in the fields of crime control and social regeneration. In the third and most substantive section, the question is explored of how the meaning and practice of community safety are being re-shaped in the wake of 'New' Labour's Crime and Disorder Act 1998. In the fourth section some sociological speculations are presented on the possible and probable 'career' of the new occupation of community safety officer, in the context of the seemingly hegemonic 'audit culture' in the UK. Finally, the paper argues for a 'replacement discourse', based on a 'pan-hazard' harm reduction paradigm, which latter would move us beyond the dominant, negative one of crime and disorder reduction.