Neighbourhood crime and anti-social behaviour

The Audit Commission report on neighbourhood crime and anti-social behaviour, published today, says that crime and disorder reduction partnerships (CDRPs) and community safety partnerships (CSPs) need to have a better understanding of their individual neighbourhoods and the problems that matter to local people if they are to succeed in making people feel safer.

The point that the report makes is that people's perceptions of their own safety in their neighbourhood tends to be very local; but the information that comes to them about crime, and the policies adopted in many local areas, are based on a wider local area and can be very misleading, overlooking 'pockets of low level disorder and anti-social behaviour.'

So there are two factors in our thinking that need to be refined: the geographical scale to which CDRPs and CSPs pay attention; and the relation between fear of crime on the one hand, and disorder and anti-social behaviour on the other.

I'm often thinking about the question of neighbourhood scale, and today I was re-reading one of the key papers on informal social control, Order born of chaos, published in Policy and politics in 2004. It offers various insights. From their findings Rowland Atkinson and John Flint suggest that 'some residents conceptualise a geographical range of intervention within which they are willing to enact control' (and, it seems, beyond which they are not willing to exercise it). They go on:

'informal social control at the level of the wider neighbourhood, which government policy seeks to enhance, is the very social and spatial scale at which residents are least willing to intervene in the governance of others.'

These remarks remind me of discussions that occurred when I travelled with some residents from the Havelock estate (which comprises about 850 units) to visit the Pembroke Street estate (about 160 units) back in January. In particular they heard about the advantages of locally-based estate management and the transformed social relations associated with greater stability and a strong sense of neighbourhood identity.

The visitors felt that their estate was just too large to effect the kinds of change that they could see operating successfully on Pembroke Street.

As for the relation between the perception of low level disorder and anti-social behaviour in relation to crime - without wishing to double-glaze over broken window theory - it's worth making the point that research and policy have long been preoccupied with crime and have neglected people's experience of incivility, disrespect and disorder. (And there are some looming questions about civil relations between fast-moving people in dense urban situations that need to be thought about)...

So the Audit Commission's approach is to be welcomed, and needs to be built on. Press release is here, report is here.