Towards Safe City Centres? by Gesa Helms

Author:Gesa Helms [Helms, Gesa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781317008866
Google: IAmgCwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-02-24T06:01:18+00:00

The Policy Field of Community Safety in Glasgow

Since its establishment in 1999, Glasgow’s Community Safety Partnership (CSP) has been the official agent for community safety at local authority level. It is preceded by some fifteen years of community safety work on behalf of the old regional council of Strathclyde, which took up community safety as a policy field for local authorities in the late 1970s following experiments by NACRO, an English crime reduction charity, in several London boroughs. Whereas the work of the regional council had been instigated by key local agents, namely at senior level in the Strathclyde Police Force and the Council, the recent rediscovery of community safety as a field for local authorities followed national government initiatives. Whereas the CDA 1998 made local community safety (or crime reduction) partnerships mandatory for English and Welsh local authorities, this does not apply in the Scottish context. Across Scotland, guidelines of how to introduce and to operate successful community safety partnerships were issued along with the CDA 1998 (Scotland). Apart from the difference in compulsion across the UK, community safety partnerships are expected to provide local solutions to local problems that are now being classified as community safety.

The guidance by the Scottish Executive set outs with the statement that ‘[c]ommunity safety is a strategic priority for a range of key players who collectively can build safer, more inclusive, healthier and more vibrant, economically attractive communities’ (Scottish Executive 1999, p. 8). The key emphasis rests on the notion of locally defined problems which are to be addressed from within that respective locality. This is even more pronounced when looking at the existing community safety forums across the city, as discussed below.

A second emphasis lies in the mode of how to address problems of community safety. As with other fields of policy, partnership working is regarded as the best practice to achieve complex goals. This being said, whereas government guidelines and acts emphasise the leading role of the local authorities, the driving force on a local level in Glasgow (and probably elsewhere) still lies mainly with the police force, dating back from their driving role with the earlier Community Safety Initiative throughout the 1980s.

As a Police officer of the Community Safety Departments outlines the key to understanding the police’s involvement in community safety: ‘They [the community safety forums] are a good method of getting the local community to work with your crime prevention issues.’ This observation entails a crucial dilemma of police work: crime rates have risen significantly over the past 30 years, and hence the workload of the police has multiplied but without a similar rise in police resources (Garland 2001). While the continuing dilemma for the police is expressed by officers as lying in people always turning to them for essentially non-police matters, the current policy initiative seems to offer an opportunity for the police to get those agencies involved that should, statutorily, already be dealing with safety bound up in housing, health and education (paraphrased, Police Officer, C Division, Strathclyde Police).

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