Some of the research quoted looks vaguely familiar, though .......
Thursday 29 April 2010
More police = less confidence = more fear?
Lots of interesting points made here, but there is a rather lazy conflation of confidence in the police and fear of crime in the later part. These two phenomena are likely to be related in very complex ways, but however you look at it I think it's hard to believe that less confidence in the police automatically means more fear of crime. Especially if the loss of confidence stems from personal contact with the police and is therefore most likely to be down to the experience of unfairness on the part of the officers involved.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
This article is very lazy not only with regard to confidence and fear of crime, but also by confusing the impact of more bobbies on the beat with the impact of direct contact - two very different things with very different effects on public confidence.
ReplyDeleteInteresting, however, is the mentioned connection between election cycles, politicians drawing attention to increasing(??) crime rates, and the promise of getting more police on the streets and being tough on crime.
That is exactly Beckett's (1997) explanation of the continuous increase in imprisonment rate in the States (the same holds for the U.K.). According to her research, this is neither driven by crime rates (no correlation between the two), nor by the public in the first place, but initiated by political actors with a political agenda in mind(executed using the mass media who are all to willing to pick up the topic and sensationalise crime), stirring up the public's fear of crime and insecurities...the public need for reassurance and tougher crime control play into the hands of those that promote conservative, authoritarian policies and the need to preserve or even enforce current power structures by promise to fight what they created themselves - at least within the media.
Well indeed. This is one reason why process-based policing and similar approaches are so politically useful to those us of who are outside - and wish to remain outside - such spiralling cycles of hype-reaction-punitivity.
ReplyDeleteSuch approaches largely bypass 'fear of crime'; although there is a risk they can be co-opted by interest groups who wish to target others and/or can lead to us-and-them situations. But more positively, while no-one can (publicaly/politically) disagree with the idea that police/judges/prison wardens etc. should treat people fairly and with respect, and there is the carrot of enhanced compliance for the organisations involved, what is actually being suggested is a quite radical change to the way criminal justice is 'done'. One which doesn't automatically mean more prison, more punishiment, more of the time, and which doesn't need to rely on shock-horror rhetorics to garner public support.
That's the theory, anyway :-)
I like this blog, Ben!
ReplyDelete