ABSTRACT
A great deal can happen in the career of a concept, and the 25-year story of ‘community safety policy’ is no exception. Many commentators identified the 1991 Morgan Report – entitled Safer Communities: The Local Delivery of Crime Prevention through the partnership approach (Home Office, 1991) – as the catalyst for the emergence of this new field of integrated and developed crime prevention activity in the UK (for example, Crawford, 1994a; Loveday, 1994; Squires, 1997; Hughes, 2002). At the outset, it was widely presumed that the new concept could not fail to fundamentally change British approaches to crime prevention, it announced the opening up of an entire new field of policy intervention and practice (Gilling and Barton, 1997; Gilling, 2007). But a lot can happen in 25 years. This discussion focuses primarily upon developments and changes in the UK, but there are certainly wider resonances. Although the chapter makes reference to relatively few non-British sources, similar changes have impacted in many other western neo-liberal societies. Through a more theoretical lens, these recent British experiences also echo some of the issues first outlined by Edwin Schur in Radical Non-Intervention (1973) and Stanley Cohen in Visions of Social Control (1985).
