Informal Criminal Justice by Dermot Feenan

Author:Dermot Feenan [Feenan, Dermot]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138742710
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2018-12-31T00:00:00+00:00

Whose Partners in Crime?

At the time this research was conducted in Bankhill there was a great willingness on the part of the community to work for change. Such willingness was expressed in both the desire to work with the ‘authorities’ and the trust and expectation invested in them to be able to make things happen. In return, people in Bankhill wanted their concerns, which may appear petty and trivial (criminal damage and vandalism), to be taken seriously by the ‘authorities’. Consequently, in an area like this, the local authority and the police may be able to take a lead in local developments and will find support for such in the local community. Such support may be best harnessed by exploring interpretations of the notion of partnership above and beyond the more normatively prescribed multi-agency approach.

This kind of strategy implies the view that crime is a local problem to be managed locally, not necessarily prevented or reduced. So the result may not be crime prevention or even crime reduction, but management; that is, ensuring that people feel better about, and more in control of, what is going on in their area. By implication this vision of the relationship between partnership and crime embraces the importance of managing incivilities as highlighted by the much maligned ‘broken windows’ thesis (Wilson and Kelling, 1982), with perhaps a rather different focus on who is responsible for that process.

The construction of young people as ‘people to be feared’ in Bankhill might demand a different response again. On a longer-term basis this is, arguably, the most pressing problem in this area. At present Bankhill offers little to young people and they in return are hesitant to go out of ‘their area’ to use what facilities there are. This may well be the space in which partnerships between teachers, youth workers, private enterprise, parents and the young people themselves (and other relevant agencies) might work most effectively.

On the other hand, in Oldtown the crime problem is already being managed, not by a community safety partnership strategy, but through the (fragile) equilibrium between the police, the local community, and the organized nature of crime in that area. A very different conception of what might constitute a partnership! Yet, the processes underpinning these relationships, in allowing people to feel alright about living in their locality, seems to work for most of the people living there most of the time. Of course, relationships such as these make agency-led interventions a difficult prospect in areas like Oldtown. Moreover in different localities in this ward, very local problems have been managed by local residents working together, sometimes with official aid coming afterwards, sometimes with that aid not being forthcoming at all.

In other words, partnerships in areas like Oldtown might well be formed but they may not have any of the characteristics of conventional organizational (voluntary or otherwise) allegiances; such partnerships may be with strategically placed individual residents, for example. Again, understanding the problem to be managed may be primarily about that, management; the

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