Introduction

The role of local authorities in community safety policy development has a long and varied history. The aim of this chapter is to provide an overview of this history, incorporating findings from some recent research fieldwork. The chapter will attempt to show that many local authorities have for some time understood their own contributions to local crime and disorder management, certainly predating the statutory role given them by the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act (CDA). Alongside this review of community safety policy development, from the 1980s to the CDA, consideration will be given to a number of critical criminological approaches to community safety. This is especially important, for it is from these critical perspectives that the greatest criminological illumination of community safety has tended to come. Beyond this, however, the chapter will go on to argue that in order to understand the role of local authorities in community safety, one also has to have a good understanding of the working of local government itself. In turn, this entails incorporating analyses from the field of local government studies into any examination of the role of local authorities in community safety policy making.

Of course, one key issue that has featured in both local government studies and critical criminology regarding community safety is the role of central government itself. More precisely, this refers to the influence of New Public Management (NPM), by which is meant the drive towards economic efficiency utilising accounting procedures such as statistical performance indicators. It is the NPM framework that provides a ‘governing context’ for much local authority activity in the community safety field. Indeed, this is where much critical thinking has applied itself to debates over new forms of crime management and the ‘governance’ of disorder. However, this ‘governing context’ has also brought with it a new role for elected representatives, primarily involving an expansion of central government demands, leaving those at the local level to fill in the details. In this way, rather more space may have been created for local interpretation in local policy making.

Drawing on recent research, this chapter will argue that this ‘space’ is now being increasingly contested by elected representatives in ways that directly affect the nature and direction of local community safety policies.