Crime, Risk and Insecurity

Law and Order in Everyday Life and Political Discourse

Tim Hope, Richard Sparks

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135131166
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Criminal Law
• Index: Law

This book presents new empirical and conceptual work on the questions of fear, anxiety, risk and trust - both as problems of everyday living and as key themes in the culture and politics of contemporary Western societies. The volume includes contributions from distinguished social researchers from Britain, the United States, Germany and Italy and will be of interest to academics and students in the areas of criminology and sociology.

Part I

PRIVATE TROUBLES

Risk, crime and everyday life

1
VICTIMS R US

The life history of ‘fear of crime’ and the politicisation of violence

Elizabeth A. Stanko

For most people, crime is no longer an aberration or an expected, abnormal event. Instead, the threat of crime has become a routine part of modern consciousness, an everyday risk to be assessed and managed in much the same way that we deal with road traffic.

(Garland 1996: 2)

Also typical is the swerving away from the central target that requires systematic change, and instead, focusing in on the individual affected. The ultimate effect is always to distract attention from the basic causes and to leave the primary social injustice untouched. And, most telling, the proposed remedy for the problem is, of course, to work on the victim himself.

(Ryan 1976: 24)

The purpose of this chapter is to reflect on the origins of the concept ‘fear of crime’. Created through the developments in the crime survey, fear of crime has become the dominant popular tool in conceptualising vulnerability, assessing risk to victimisation and measuring anxiety about the possibility of encountering violence. A review of the origins of this concept reminds the reader how structural contexts about citizens’ worry about safety and everyday life are consigned to the background of political discourses about law and order. As the criminological genre of the crime survey took the foreground of scientific inquiry, I argue, commentary about structural inequalities – that underpin people's day-today existence as well as contributing much to people's fear of crime – grew silent, only to be replaced by warnings about the danger of generic violence to generic, individual victims. We are told to minimise danger from crime, as Ryan suggests above, by mustering our own individual resources for self-protection.

Ironically, the crime survey has become one of the tools for groups campaigning for civil rights. Indeed, surveys highlighting high rates of fear and violence against women or sexual minorities, for example, have been vehicles for demonstrating structural inequalities experienced by some groups. This chapter explores these tensions hidden in the origins and uses of the concept of fear of crime. The crime survey, as the main tool that documents victimisation, fails to engage in any dynamic way with the commentary on collective harm of particularised forms of discrimination manifest by targeted victimisation. Rather than remind us of the special collective impact of criminal harm, the crime survey, I suggest, transforms any socially excluded citizen into a generic potential crime victim, muting the special impact of social exclusion by ignoring the shared anxiety of being targeted for criminal harm because of who one is. Consigned to the background – rarely explicit in law and order discourse – is the politics of social inequalities. In the foreground is law and order discourse wrapped around concern for criminal violent victimisation and citizens’ confidence in the police. These continue to overshadow the social relations of difference that often contribute to people's perceptions and experiences of unsafety. In short, there are contradictions in the way politics is borne out in the use of the concept of fear of crime.

A methodology for the generic victim: the birth and growth of the crime survey

During the early 1960s, concern for the victim of violent crime focused around the creation of mechanisms for state compensation to victims of violent crime (Miers 1978). In the United States, the death of J.F. Kennedy in 1963 and the heated, often extremely tense struggles around civil rights set the scene for the national anxiety about disorder. Barry Goldwater – although he lost the 1964 election – pushed law and order into the spotlight of his presidential campaign. Some twenty US inner-city ‘ghettos’ flared into riots in the summers of 1964, 1965 and 1966. Findings of the McCone Commission (1966), set up to analyse the cause of widespread unrest in US cities, and a UCLA study exploring the Watts riot of 1965 in particular, summarised by the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice, made explicit a link between civil rights and fear of crime. Emphasised was the UCLA survey which found

the riot had a ‘purpose ... hostility, resentment, revenge’ ... The implication is evident that many Negroes [sic] believe that if only the white community realised what the ghetto was like and how its residents felt, the ghetto would not be permitted to exist.

(President's Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice 1967: 121–2).

In other words, if we really knew about how the structural conditions of poverty, fed by racial exclusion, fostered victimisation and its fear, we would find a way of tackling the causes of crime.

Connecting racial dissent with crime victimisation, and wider anxiety about crime with institutionalised racism, was an explicit theme of this landmark report on the state of law, crime and justice in the USA. The President's Commission clearly located people's dread about crime within anxieties about race. To what extent the research arm of criminology, launched by the President's Commission through the newly created Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (see Quinney 1974), made any inroads into restoring the legitimacy of US legal order to local Afro-American communities today remains to be seen. The President's Commission, though, served as a cornerstone for bringing research about day-to-day criminal justice into the foreground of policy debates (see Feeley and Simon 1994).

It is, I feel, important to be reminded of this context within which the analytic mainstay of victimisation – the crime survey – was spawned. What is interesting to me, as a reader of this earlier material now, is the primacy and seriousness with which the Commission connected the unhappiness of those excluded by race from the American dream. Stated the Commission: ‘anger, violence, despair and cynicism prevail in the Negro ghettos of America and these conditions contribute both to everyday crime and to protest riots’ (President's Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice 1967: 116).

Upheaval in Afro-American communities in the mid-1960s was explicitly linked by the Commission to experiences of racist treatment by the majority, white society. So too was black fear of crime. Anxiety of white Americans, moreover, was also linked to their fear of crime and to white Americans’ fear that crime is committed by black people (Skogan 1995).

The President's Commission built upon this concern through its commissioned surveys that asked people directly about their experiences of crime. Identified as crucial to the development of better services and attention to the ‘plight’ of the victim of crime, the US President's Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice (1967) set an agenda for the inquiry into victims of crime that was to change research on crime dramatically. An instrument of social science and for rational policy-making, the crime survey provides an opportunity to gain a wider picture of crime by allowing the public to give their own account of criminal harm and express anxiety about its potential.

At the time of the hearings of the President's Commission (the late 1960s), police statistics comprised the core of knowledge about crime, which were, admittedly, a poor reflection of what really happened to people. Speculation about the kinds of people who inhabited police files as victims led to the development of theories of culpability (Wolfgang 1958). Victims’ behaviour (as recorded by the police) was scrutinised for any contribution to offenders’ actions. The foundation for this speculation was laid through the theorising of the ‘founding’ fathers of victimology, who were lawyers by trade and concerned about the way offenders’ crime could be characterised by the defence (Schafer 1968). The crime survey, it was felt, held a key to public policy about crime because it analysed victims’ own experiences of crime unfiltered by the actions of the police. (The police were, of course, under scrutiny by these inquiries. Criticism was well founded about the racist manner of policing ‘ghettos’. The police's contribution to the urban riots of the 1960s was indeed acknowledged by the President's Commission reports.)

Through the discovery of what is still called ‘the dark figure of crime’, crime survey respondents specified those incidents which, if known to police, would be considered to be crime. These early surveys also exposed the police's own bureaucratic processes which filtered what the public reported as crime away from its books: not all incidents that came to police attention were treated as crime. This continues to be a consistent observation of crime surveys today (Maguire 1994). Today, national and international surveys, neighbourhood, campus or special topics crime surveys abound. The prominence of the crime survey within criminological policy-making is now well established. If a problem of crime is to be taken ‘seriously’, it seems that a crime survey is one of the major devices used to demonstrate the pervasiveness of an issue and to advocate for sympathetic treatment of newly identified ‘victims’. The virtual dominance of crime surveys in providing the data for debate and discussion about a wide range of topics, from the people's confidence in the criminal justice system to the relationship between offenders and victims, has homogenised international debates about comparative crime (van Dijk et al. 1990). These debates are about crime and not the social contexts of inequalities that exist in different nations and jurisdictions.

The prime advantage of the crime survey, we are told, is that it estimates the impact of criminal victimisation by asking individuals themselves. In some ways, the crime survey has become the ‘voice’ of the people rather than a bureaucratic statistical exercise controlled by criminal justice agents. Jock Young has even suggested that ‘the victimisation study, in the sense that it attempts to encompass all the victims in the community, is more democratic in its brief, however imperfect it may be in its accomplishment’ (1988: 169).

But in many ways the social tensions that gave rise to the creation of the crime survey initially – that of white American anxiety about personal safety within a climate of racialised frustration — have been forgotten in the rush to embrace the democratic possibilities of the crime survey. Anxiety about the ability of the state to protect citizens from criminal victimisation began (and continues) to bubble over into the daily conversation. But the language of concern inevitably turns to the plight of victims of crime, especially of personal crime and usually of violent crime. Citizens’ risks to crime merged with various civil rights claims about discrimination – to women, minorities, the disabled, sexual minorities and others. Commentary about structural inequalities or the wider climates of social disadvantage, though, became submerged to the discourses of ‘victim’.

Undifferentiated fears and generic victims

We could now say that the crime survey has become the key tool for criminologists of all persuasions to explore the impact of crime from the perspective of its recipients. While the crime survey continues to have its critics, those of us who wish to say anything about victims and victimisation must, it seems, find some way of accounting for the problem. This general approach used by survey researchers is the following. Identify households systematically across an area (whether it is national, regional or neighbourhood-based). Select members of those households to answer a number of questions about a wide range of questions on experiences of crime (actual or attempts). At the same time, ask people about their concern or fear about crime and about precautionary behaviour aimed to minimise exposure to crime. Note the impact of such avoidance and/or actual experience. Include information on the lifestyle and living circumstances of those interviewed.

No doubt, the crime surveys serve to illustrate graphically how little crime comes to the attention of the police. The centrality of crime surveys, in measuring the kinds of crime victims encounter and their subsequent needs, fears and expectations, have drawn our attention to these annual findings – we wonder whether crime is up, down or just the same. Although victim surveys offer criminologists a wider picture of crime and victimisation, there are still a number of limitations to this method of ‘counting victims’ (see, most recently, Maguire 1999). For instance, people fail to recall or choose not to report crime to the researchers; questions may be misinterpreted, or not be specific enough to elicit the appropriate information (Young 1988). These limitations, Maguire suggests, are as much directed to the survey's methodological as well as its analytic deficiencies. While there is always a long list of caveats accompanying the publication of any crime survey results, the findings are analysed as ‘truer’ reflections of the incidence of crime. As we now know, individuals who report encounters with a variety of criminal events to survey researchers are most likely to manage these potentially criminal circumstances without the aid of law, with one notable exception. Thefts of and from cars are usually reported to the police. Other forms of crime, especially personal violence, are more likely to be kept away from police attention.

Maguire's (1994) recent analysis of the impact of crime surveys on the picture of crime suggests we have indeed experienced a massive shift in our thinking, influenced by the dominance of the victim survey in measuring crime. Maguire's analogy, using Rumpelstiltskin as a slumbering criminologist waking after a thirty-five-year sleep, is instructive: making sense of crime and victimisation has undergone a sea change, with victim surveys providing the new template, leading to a process of re-def...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction Risk, insecurity and the politics of law and order
• Private Troubles Risk, crime and everyday life
• Public Issues The new politics of order
• Notes
• Index