As the various chapters in this book make clear, the emergence of a substantive concern with what became known as ‘community safety’ policy marked a significant shift in forms of local and national governance. This shift had far-reaching implications for local authorities, for crime and disorder management, for the politics of community, for social policy and for the variety of agencies (the police, local authorities, probation, Drug Action Teams, witness support services and so on) that, following the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act, came to form the Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnerships (CDRPs) charged with the responsibility of delivering local crime and disorder reduction strategy.

For some, the new ways of working embodied in the community safety agenda entailed a certain ‘breaking of the mould’ of traditional forms of local government. For others, the new policy development and evaluation arrangements were instrumental in ushering in the forms of ‘New Public Management’ endorsed by the New Labour administration (Rhodes, 1997; Stoker, 1999). Some commentators saw community safety policy as a new field of action in which more progressive social policy objectives, informed by ‘left realist’ social crime prevention thinking (Gilling and Barton, 1997), might be inserted into Britain's overwhelmingly ‘situational’ (and neo-classicist) approaches to crime prevention (Hughes et al, 2002). Others, by contrast, perceived a threat summed up in the phrase ‘the criminalisation of social policy’ (Muncie, 2000; Crawford, 2002). By this was meant a concern that social policy priorities might become distorted around crime prevention objectives and that, whatever the intrinsic merits of given social policies (housing, education, youth services, for example), policies would gain preferment according to their ability to advance the cause of crime reduction, irrespective of their other merits.

Finally, other commentators detected, in the new policy development arrangements, forms of priority setting, risk analysis and modes of intervention, legitimation, audit and evaluation, the arrival of a new phase in late modern governance, namely ‘governance through crime’ (Simon, 1997; Stenson and Edwards, 2003). In short, many important debates and controversies are caught up in the attempt to understand, interpret and come to terms with the discourse and practice of community safety policy making.