Sandra Walklate - Zero Tolerance or Community Tolerance?

In 1997 the new Labour government made clear its commitment to ensuring that crime prevention would become a statutory duty of local government (indeed this commitment had been pledged by the then Opposition spokesman on crime Jack Straw, at a conference, Crime the Local Solution, organised by the Local Government (LGA) Association in March 1997). In die light of this commitment local authority personnel up and down Britain were charged with the writing of corporate community safety strategies. At the same time the 1996 Intemationl Criminal Victimisation Survey suggested that these personnel will be working in a context of comparatively high national rates of crime which the British Crime Survey of 1996 estimated had risen 91% since 1985. This fast growing rate of crime has initiated much discussion in the public domain around law and order issues. Much of this discussion has revolved around the impact of such a high crime rate, and associated significant fear of crime, on the quality of life of people living in England and Wales. There has also been a great deal of debate on differing ways to manage die crime problem (Garland, 1996) with the significant emergence of the concept of community safety in die mid 1980s driven by the idea that the solution to an areas crime problems lay in co-operation between community and law-enforcement agencies. The 1990s, however, has seen the debate around the concept of Zero Tolerance policing exported from America to Britain, which arguably signals a move away from the emphasis on community solutions to crime problems. Although ostensibly closely linked to the idea of community safety, zero tolerance in fact substitutes the notion of a complete respite from crime and incivilities for the community, where no infringement of criminal or civil statutes is tolerated. The zero tolerance policing style is justified by reference to community wants and needs but, due to its blanket coverage, it cannot recognise different degrees of tolerance which exist within a community, or between one community and another. Zero Tolerance policing posits a crime-free environment as the goal of every law-abiding individual, without offering any degree of subtlety or attempting to understand the many dynamics of community relationships which are in existence or the diversity of responses to crime demonstrated by individuals.

The arguments put forward in this book look to introduce such a subtlety to the understanding of the management of crime in high crime communities and derive from a longitudinal research study which took place over a two and a half year period. From 1994 to 1996 researchers based at the University of Salford and the University of Keele embarked on research into two similarly structured neighbourhoods within the city of Salford in the North of England. This research set out to situate an understanding of the risk from and fear of crime in a comparative, urban context to uncover how people who live, work and go to school in designated high-crime areas manage their routine daily lives and construct their own responses to risk of and fear of crime. We were interested to document the personal and individual ways in which the research subjects managed their own fear of crime and to what extent these management practices were informed by their own perceptions as to which actions were risky and which were safe within a local context.