Citation

Hughes G. Crime Prev. Community Safety 2002; 4(2): 9-18.

Affiliation

Faculty of Social Sciences, Open University, UK

Copyright

(Copyright © 2002, Holtzbrinck Springer Nature Publishing Group -- Palgrave-Macmillan)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

There are few areas in criminal justice that have seen such a growth industry as that which has occurred of late in the UK around community safety and local crime and disorder reduction partnerships. In the wake of the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act, we have seen a massive proliferation in posts and teams in local authorities dedicated to the pursuit of the by no means easily reconcilable goals of community safety and of crime and disorder reduction. This overview of recent developments in the audit and strategy process of crime and disorder reduction partnerships (CDRPs) offers a critique of the closely intertwined dominant 'audit culture' and the 'what works' paradigm of policy and practice, whose influence is especially marked in the policy field of 'crime reduction'. Despite the manifest persistence of punitive populism and the logic of mass-deterrent incarceration in the politics of law and order, the adaptive strategies associated with auditable and managerialised reductive measures, realised through the multi-agency partnerships, are increasingly in the ascendancy in the contemporary UK crime control complex. In the first section of the paper the lessons of the post- Morgan agenda of the 1990s are outlined. In the next section the key findings of current academic research into the immediate post-1998 ('phase one') CDRP audits and strategies are summarised. In the final section the likely consequences of the post-2002 'phase two' processes of audit and strategy are outlined, in terms of a series of questions rather than of definite answers. Throughout this paper a central argument is that this new 'community'-based, multi-agency partnership approach to the governance of crime control is indissolubly linked to political and moral contestations about the nature of the relationship of the state, public authorities, the citizenry and communities in conditions of late modernity, and is accordingly not reducible to either good managerial practice or technical efficiency, however important these may be.