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COMMUNITY AND THE PROBLEM
OF CRIME

This book offers a useful theoretical overview of key approaches to the subject of
crime and community and considers the ways in which these have been applied in
more practical settings. Written by an expert in the field and drawing on a range of
international case studies from Europe, North America, Australia and Asia, this
book explores both why and how crime and community have been linked and the
implications of their relationship within criminology and crime prevention policy.
Topics covered in the book include:

� the different crime prevention paradigms which have been utilized in the
‘fight against crime’
� the turn to community in crime prevention policy, which took place during
the 1980s in the UK and US, and its subsequent development
� the theoretical and ideological underpinnings to crime prevention work in and
with different communities
� the significance and impact of fear of crime on crime prevention policy
� different institutional responses to working with community in crime prevention
and community safety
� the ways in which the experiences of the UK and US have been translated
into the European context
� a comparison between traditional western responses to the growing interest in
restorative and community-based approaches in other regions.

The new edition has been fully revised and updated to include discussion of the
rise of populist politics and the centrality of ‘crime’ and ‘disorder’ as a divisive
element used in populist political rhetoric; the politics of austerity and the man­
agement of crises – economic, environmental and COVID-19 and the subsequent
lockdowns; the impact of Black Lives Matter, MeToo and Extinction Rebellion;
the significance of social media and virtual community; the further erosion of civil
liberties and the right to protest; and racialized US policing practices and police-
related deaths. This book offers essential reading for students taking courses on
crime and community, crime prevention and community safety and community
corrections.

Karen Evans is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the Department of

Sociology, Social Policy and Criminology at the University of Liverpool, UK.
COMMUNITY AND THE
PROBLEM OF CRIME
Second Edition

Karen Evans
Designed cover image: © Getty Images / Peepo
Second edition published 2024
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2024 Karen Evans
The right of Karen Evans to be identified as author of this work has been asserted
in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act
1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to
infringe.
First edition published by Routledge 2015
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-032-16253-9 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-032-16254-6 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-24775-3 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003247753

Typeset in Bembo
by Taylor & Francis Books
For Florence and Dylan
CONTENTS

List of boxes viii

Introduction 1
1 The meaning and uses of community 9
2 Community and crime 36
3 Disorderly communities 61
4 Regenerating communities 85
5 Fractured communities 107
6 Suspect and profiled communities 132
7 Policing communities 154
8 The problem of community 178

Index 194
BOXES

Case study: Rural depopulation and repopulation in Spain 90

Case study: Regenerating the shrinking cities of Japan 91
Case-study: The northern mill towns of England 112
Case study: Community and fragmentation in ‘Oldtown’ 122
Case study: Women Waging Peace: Women’s activism in
Cape Town 126
Case study: Community cohesion in the UK 140
Case study: Community Safety Partnerships in the UK 165
Case study: Keeping safe in unsafe communities – DuBois
Towers, Philadelphia 180
Case study: The promise of inclusion and the maintenance of
exclusion – the governance of public space in Bogotá,
Colombia 183
Case study: When Tesco came to town – community protests
against corporate power 186
INTRODUCTION

On criminological realism
The first edition of Community and the Problem of Crime was published by Routle­
dge in 2016. As with this edition, that first iteration of the work charted the con­
nections which have been made between the often-linked concepts of ‘crime’ and
‘community’ in criminological thought. It explored the ways in which theory in
this area developed from early sociological approaches to the city and urbanization,
the approaches to crime and its prevention developed by the Chicago sociologists
in the early twentieth century and the various crime prevention perspectives which
have predominated through to the first decade of the twenty-first century. Taking
a critical perspective, the book was based around several chapters focusing on
contemporary themes such as social disorder, regeneration, suspect communities
and racial and social profiling, using contemporary examples and case-studies to
illustrate the development of theory, policy and politics in this key area of study
and practice. By the end of 2021, however, it was clear that a second edition was
necessary to account for key developments within and outside the academy which
have taken place in recent years which should inform theory and practice differ­
ently over the next period. While this current edition takes the same basic shape
and chapter outline as the first, each chapter is updated to include pivotal
moments, movements and ideas which have produced significant shifts in thinking
and developed our understanding of equality, division, discrimination and their
links to crime. Many of these ideas have emerged from outside criminology, as
fractures in society which are key to understanding contemporary understandings
of crime and societal responses to particular forms of law-breaking, are further
exposed.
The world is in crisis, inequality is deepening, the solidity of the world – its
economic stability and democratic structures – are crumbling and it would be more

DOI: 10.4324/9781003247753-1
2 Introduction

than remiss of us to ignore in our scholarship the seismic events which are shaping,
and destroying, lives and to go on as if nothing much has changed. During this
period multiple voices have been raised outside the academy, emerging from those
whose lives have been most catastrophically limited and brutalized under this late
period of capitalism. These voices have railed against inequality, racism, the bru­
tality of the state and the impotence of political systems in the face of crises. New
terrains of knowledge are opening up within the academy too as writing from the
academic margins has begun to penetrate the western-centric views of the world
which have dominated for centuries and which are so closely associated with
power, imperialism and oppression. Within mainstream criminological thought and
policy-making, however, the old voices are still prominent and traditional, wes­
tern-style criminology still retains its dominance in the field. These entrenched
ideas have brought a mindset which is remarkably resistant to a social justice nar­
rative and which doggedly pursues a narrow perspective which sees social issues
through the lens of crime and which offers more criminalization, punitive respon­
ses and incarceration as its solutions. Never mind that, since it emerged in the
1960s, critical criminology has exposed the double standards, ineffective nature and
socially destructive outcomes of this particular lens; it continues to persist and hold
hegemonic sway. Following Fisher (2009) we might call this ‘criminological rea­
lism’ – the reality that this worldview has become so embedded in the minds of
law-makers, politicians and the general public alike, that those who pose alternative
perspectives are so often held to ridicule and their alternative views met with
incredulity. However, there is much in the assumptions and perspectives that have
been built in the west that needs to be rethought or stripped away entirely, espe­
cially as the voices raised from the margins are growing in stature and recognition
and as movements such as Black Lives Matter, Defund the Police, Reclaim the
Streets and Extinction Rebellion begin to find some purchase.
However, challenges to deep-seated ways of thinking are being met with distrust
and opposition. In the 1980s those who posed an alternative worldview were
charged with the sin of being ‘politically correct’; today, enabled by social media
and its trolls, being ‘woke’ – aware of and concerned not to replicate global and
local social divisions – is similarly vilified. Nevertheless the focus of criminology
remains firmly on those with the lowest status in society whilst the super-rich and
the powerful are redrawing the social and physical landscape, withdrawing any
support that might alleviate the social conditions under which the many live and
continually reconstructing the world to protect their own interests and to guard
against the destructive forces which they themselves have manufactured. Govern­
ments, unable or unwilling to intervene to prevent or reverse deterioration in
social conditions, have instead sought to isolate countries, regions and neighbour­
hoods from each other, placing much responsibility on the ‘outsider’ who lies
outside their boundaries and borders. Walls have been built in an attempt to con­
tain the problems which have been created by governments’ and states’ abrogation
of their responsibility to others. This book also explores the creation of the ‘out­
sider’ within whilst acknowledging the impact of recent political rhetoric which
 Introduction 3

has returned to the old trope of the dangerous and uncivilized foreigner. Many of
the walls which have been constructed are extremely tangible and take a physical
form in bricks, cement and razor-wire but others are less concrete, although equally
substantial. Borders have been closed and refugees and migrants fleeing poverty have
been denied safety and asylum – returned, deported and detained. Populist move­
ments have dragged politics onto a different terrain in many countries, a terrain which
has nurtured and thrived on division and hatred. Such populism relies on the promo­
tion of idealized and ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson 1991) which means it is as
important as ever to reflect on the significance of the concept of community and the
ways that it can be used as a social glue or as a point of separation.
This last period has seen crises build upon crises which are economic, political
and ecological in nature and then in 2020 a new global catastrophe – generated by
a coronavirus – created a global health emergency which further exposed deep and
deadly social divisions. It soon became apparent that Black, Asian and minority
ethnic communities were dying at a disproportionate rate and as Baroness Doreen
Lawrence so aptly explained:

Black, Asian and minority ethnic people have been overexposed, under pro­
tected, stigmatised and overlooked during this pandemic – and this has been
generations in the making. The impact of Covid is not random, but foresee­
able and inevitable – the consequence of decades of structural injustice,
inequality and discrimination that blights our society.
(Lawrence 2020:3)

We have all become familiar with a new vocabulary of pandemic, social distancing,
lockdown and hybridity which has changed the way that we experience and
understand the social world but some communities have been affected more than
others. Ethnic minorities are more likely to be the poorly housed, frontline
workers, clinically vulnerable and in jobs that meant that they could not work
from home and suffered greater rates of infection and numbers of deaths as a result.
Socially too, these groups were under more scrutiny and surveillance and therefore
over-policed during the pandemic (Luscombe and McClelland 2020). Initial
responses to the rapid spread of COVID-19 demonstrated that many people were
prepared to make great sacrifices to protect their families and neighbourhoods, to
withdraw from physical and social contact with others and to endure huge emo­
tional privations even while those they loved suffered and died alone (Tekin et al.
2021). Criminological realism predominated, however, and rather than tapping in
to this upswell of social action and care towards others, it provided a heavy-
handed, top-down and authoritarian blueprint for containment. New legislation
was enacted to enforce the health message to isolate and stay at home and state
agents were armed with emergency powers to enforce social isolation. All this was
cloaked in populist slogans designed to make the populace feel that they were
protected and considered by the political classes. Once again it was the margin­
alized communities who bore the brunt of state enforcement powers.
4 Introduction

Criminology as a discipline must take some responsibility for the authoritarian

and punitive responses which have been crafted by governments across the globe.
After all, criminology has been closely linked to the state and its imperative to
control. Many of its scholars have been content to drill down on the actions of the
poorest and least powerful and not to see the larger picture which condemns
increasing numbers of people to hopeless futures. Community and the Problem of
Crime is not a book about crime prevention so much as an exploration of the ways
in which the state uses the term ‘community’ to confer rights upon some groups
and to exclude others from exercising those rights. I hope that this updated edition
of Community and the Problem of Crime will again highlight some of the flawed logic
of the discipline which has to be challenged, if not discarded.

The organization of the book

The book is organized around the following chapters. Chapter One looks at the
meaning and uses of community and the various ways in which academics and
policy-makers have worked with the concept of ‘community’ over different peri­
ods. It explores the classic community studies of the early to mid-twentieth century
and how these have informed understandings of community. It considers the
enduring power of traditional concepts of community in social and political dis­
course despite whole-scale economic, social and political upheaval. This chapter
is an introduction to community studies in sociology, philosophy, social policy
and geography and lays the basis for analysis of the concept of community and its
many uses. It has been updated to consider the significance of social media and
virtual communities. It explores the impact of COVID-19 and those lockdowns
which raised the centrality of the local and community (both physical and online)
in ways and circumstances which were little anticipated when the book was
initially conceived.
Chapter Two explores the different ways in which ‘community’ has been
incorporated into crime control and prevention, from the initial discussion of
criminogenic and socially disorganized neighbourhood formations which char­
acterized the perspective of the Chicago School, to the replacement of offender-
centred strategies with situational and place-based approaches and the development
of social and community-based prevention which emerged from the 1970s
onwards. It looks at the emergence of the ‘problem neighbourhood’ and how
discourses of ‘fear’, ‘disorder’ and ‘disintegration’ have shaped approaches to crime
prevention. The impact of the current discourse of dysfunctionality and difference
and fear of the criminal ‘other’ is fully explained and further explored. The chapter
recounts the move from community-centred to state control of the problem of
crime and the various interventions which the state has deployed in its struggle to
reduce and contain recorded crime-rates. From the 1980s, however, communities
have increasingly been brought into the crime control arsenal and have been called
upon to play a significant role in crime prevention. This chapter has been updated
to explore the re-emergence of community as an organizing principle in the first
 Introduction 5

two decades of the twenty-first century, as a consequence of the rise of neo-liberal

politics. It looks at the populist rhetoric and return to nationalism which has been
an increasing feature of political organizing in the US and in parts of South
America, Europe and Asia during recent years.
Chapter Three on ‘disorderly communities’ looks at ways that the problem of
‘disorder’ has been conceived. It explains the ways in which earlier debates around
the social disorganization of communities have developed into a rhetoric of
‘broken’ society, exploring the political and theoretical rationale behind these
developments. It explores in particular the construction of the ‘problem commu­
nity’ and the different ways in which this ‘problem’ has been perceived and acted
upon. The chapter considers the range of policies which have been used to ‘fix’ the
broken society, to maintain order at the local level and to manage crime and ‘anti­
social behaviour’. The chapter therefore charts the emergence of interventions into
high-crime neighbourhoods from situational and social crime prevention strategies,
to urban regeneration, zero tolerance, community efficacy and subsequent appeals
to the active citizen. The centrality of ‘crime’ and ‘disorder’ as a divisive element
used in populist political rhetoric, in contemporary and historical periods, is further
explored.
Chapter Four explores attempts which have been made to ‘regenerate’ com­
munities, interrogating policy responses to tackling the problems of ‘high-crime’
neighbourhoods, which have focused on social, economic and physical regenera­
tion of struggling localities. It explores the debates which shaped the ways in which
communities and neighbourhoods were rebuilt after the Second World War. The
chapter looks at ways in which neighbourhood policies have been increasingly
‘managed’ from above and ‘micro-managed’ at a local level to result in ‘compliant’
(Karn 2007) and ‘responsibilized’ communities (Crawford 1998). This chapter has
been updated to consider the impact of the politics of austerity and the (mis)man­
agement of crises – economic, environmental and now medical – and how these
have affected the discourse of regeneration and renewal.
With much of the work done in sketching out the theories which have been
significant in shaping understandings of both community and the problem of crime
in previous chapters, the remainder of the book looks at the ways that these the­
ories have informed the more substantive and policy-based agendas which have
developed as a consequence. Chapter Five explores the divisions and fractures
which have been created within segregated and unequal societies. The chapter
looks at the increasing diversity within and between neighbourhoods and com­
munities which has characterized many places as a result of recent patterns of
migration and at responses to these changes. It has been updated to include the
emergence of ‘hostile environments’ in many states’ policies and the rejection of
care and welfare towards migrants and refugees. It looks at emerging social move­
ments and critiques of the politics of division which have taken on worldwide
significance very recently. It looks at the complex networks of inclusion and
exclusion which shape our experiences and have to be acknowledged and under­
stood if any positive changes are to be made to improve access to the city and the
6 Introduction

right to the city for all. Three case-studies are introduced in this chapter which
address the different issues faced by ethnic minority groups and women in the city
as well as the presence of what have been viewed as ‘illegitimate’ communities.
Chapter Six sets out the context and background to the control and contain­
ment of what have come to be known as ‘suspect’ communities (Hillyard 1993). It
considers ways in which, not only the state, but also popular discourse has
increasingly coalesced around suspicion of certain minority groups, cultures and
ways of life. This suspicion, rather than culminating in a myriad of ‘communities’
living side by side, has created tensions at a national and a local level. The chapter
looks at the ghettoization and stigmatization experienced by groups from the Jews
in medieval Europe to Black and Muslim populations today. The chapter also asks
whether the concept of ‘suspect community’ could be further extended to aid our
understanding of the state’s treatment of the poor in neo-liberal economies.
Included in this chapter is discussion of responses to ‘riot’, civil disorder and protest
where the further erosion of civil liberties and the right to protest have become
even more central to conversations around social control and social disorder in
many national polities.
Chapter Seven reflects on the policing of communities – their monitoring, reg­
ulation and control – which is carried out at a number of different levels and by
various organizations. The chapter looks at the ways in which the state interacts
with communities through the formal organization of the Police but then moves
on to include more recent insights into governance which have created the
expectation that communities will monitor, regulate and control themselves. This
chapter introduces in more detail the strategy of responsibilization which helped
the state to co-opt communities into the crime control agenda in the late twentieth
century. It looks further, to the increasing militarization of policing local neigh­
bourhoods perceived as troublesome, and the gap between the rhetoric of com­
munity involvement and the reality of communities which are coerced into order
through targeted state surveillance and over-policing. It also explores ways in
which communities’ commitment to the prevention of crime has been increasingly
policed through micro-management and audit of community organizations and
local governance. The privatization of security arrangements is also discussed as
well as the rapid growth of CCTV and other forms of surveillance of communities
from the mid-1990s. The chapter uses more contemporary examples to highlight
the significance of Black Lives Matter, calls to defund the police and the emer­
gence of a strengthened abolitionist discourse.
The final chapter returns to the theme of ‘community’ itself. It explores the
limitations of ‘community’ as an organizing concept while arguing that the concept
still has relevance today, especially in those areas which are increasingly abandoned
by the welfare arm of the state. The chapter also considers the inherently exclu­
sionary qualities of community and the tendency of communities to separate as
well as to unite. While ‘community’ is held up as a positive social formation, this
chapter uses case-studies from the UK and abroad to demonstrate how the building
of communities can produce barriers to progressive policy-making. This chapter
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