Criminal Justice
© 2004 SAGE Publications
London, Thousand Oaks
and New Delhi.
www.sagepublications.com
1466–8025; Vol: 4(3): 239–253
DOI: 10.1177/1466802504048464
Modernization, scientific
rationalism and the Crime
Reduction Programme
MIKE HOUGH
ICPR, King’s College London, UK
Abstract
This article examines the Home Office Crime Reduction
Programme, mounted in England and Wales between 1999 and
2002. The programme failed fully to meet the expectations that it
would substantially improve the knowledge-base about crime
control, and the article considers possible reasons. There were
problems of implementation limiting what could be learnt.
Underlying this poor implementation was an oversimplified view of
order maintenance that was implicit in the design of the
programme. Those programme strands that were concerned with
policing overemphasized the crime control function and
underemphasized other features of policing that preoccupy middlelevel police managers, such as organizational legitimacy. As the
programme failed to engage with these everyday preoccupations,
the projects funded under it tended to receive little priority from
those who were in a position to determine their success.
Key Words
burglary • crime reduction • police legitimacy • policing
Introduction
This article offers some reflections on the Home Office Crime Reduction
Programme (CRP), mounted in England and Wales between 1999 and
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2002. I was closely involved in evaluating parts of the programme, and the
experience left me with a sense of unease. My colleagues and I consumed a
large amount of public money1 to mount research that yielded lower
benefits than expected either by ourselves or our funders. Certainly I have
conducted several studies that achieved greater impact on policy at a
fraction of the cost. This article examines some possible reasons for this
underachievement.
I want to suggest that there were two sorts of mismatches involved in the
enterprise. The first is that the research strategies that we and our funders
collectively adopted often turned out to be poorly suited to the programmes under evaluation. I do not intend to go into any depth in
developing the arguments here. Other articles in this volume do so (especially Hope, Maguire and Tilley) and we have also discussed this elsewhere
(Hough et al., 2004). In brief:
•
•
•
•
•
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The projects that we evaluated suffered from high levels of implementation
failure;
This reflected factors such as the nature and timetable of the programme,
the capacity of the programme managers and the priorities of local managers in the police and Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnerships
(CDRPs);
The quality of statistics collated by the police was much poorer than
expected;
The commitment to evaluation among project staff was lower than expected;
Where implementation was successful, attributing cause and effect was
difficult;
This was partly because projects comprised several simultaneously applied
strands of preventive action, and partly because comparison areas often ran
similar preventive schemes in parallel.
The upshot was that in our reports to the Home Office (Hearnden et al.,
2004; Hough et al., 2004; Millie and Hough, 2004; Millie et al., 2004), we
were able to say a great deal about ways of improving implementation, but
very much less about precisely what to implement. With the benefit of
hindsight, our research strategy should have placed more emphasis on
selectivity, restricting detailed evaluation to properly implemented schemes
designed with evaluation in mind. Alternatively – or additionally – we could
have adopted more of an action research approach, whereby researchers
collaborated with project staff to maximize the project’s impact.
The second mismatch is a more complex one, upon which this article
focuses. Reduced to its core, it is that the scientific rationalism implicit in
the CRP tends to get subverted into a sort of scientific reductionism. Those
designing initiatives of this sort either fail to appreciate the complex world
of order maintenance occupied by middle-level police managers and their
partners in local CDRPs, or else are constrained to ignore this complexity
as a result of the political environments in which they operate. In the
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Hough: Modernization, scientific rationalism and the CRP
language of Tilley (this issue), the ‘Supposed to do’ theories implicit in the
CRP were grounded in an oversimplified version of what local crime
control is about.
What I aim to do is to locate the CRP within the Government’s broader
‘modernization’ agenda and to identify features of the modernization
enterprise that make it hard to apply effectively to the delivery of highly
complex social goods such as the maintenance of order. I hope to show
that, as a consequence, central government and local crime control agencies
tend to talk past each other. They fail to engage with each other effectively;
and by the same token, the research commissioned by central government
fails to address the real concern of local police managers and CDRPs.
The arguments in this article are especially relevant to those components
of the CRP that were to do with policing, defined in broad terms. They are
probably less applicable to those elements of the programme that were
concerned with the rehabilitation of offenders, about which theory is
relatively well developed (Raynor, this volume).
The modernization agenda
Over the last two decades British governments of both hues have shared a
‘modernization’ agenda for public services. From 1979 onward the Conservative government aimed to get better ‘value for money’ out of the
public sector, through a mixture of ‘modern’ management methods and
downward pressure on budgets. The favoured solutions included budgetary
cuts, applying private sector management methods to the public sector, and
increasing choice over the providers of these services.
Many aspects of this approach were retained – indeed developed and
extended – by New Labour from 1997 onward. Reform of public services
is now a key government priority, as reflected by the establishment of the
Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit, the Performance Management Unit and
the Office of Public Services Reform. As with the previous Conservative
administration, their basic approach has been to secure greater accountability through performance management regimes that rely on quantitative
performance indicators and target-setting. The concept of competition as a
lever on performance has also been retained, though the language of
privatization and ‘market testing’ has now been replaced by that of
‘contestability’.2
This new form of public sector governance – government at a distance –
emerged in the late twentieth century in many developed countries. Under
some administrations, there was a strong ideological commitment to paring
down the public sector, which can be traced to neo-liberal political
philosophies about the virtues of small government. Others have judged
pragmatically that the best way to drive up public sector performance is for
central government to set broad objectives and for local agencies to have
the freedom to choose how best they should set about achieving the
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nationally set objectives. In other words, there is tight central control over
the ends to be pursued by public services, but local control over the means
by which the ends are achieved. A metaphor often deployed and enjoyed by
central government politicians and administrators – but appreciated less
by their local government counterparts – is that the centre takes responsibility for ‘steering’ but leaves ‘rowing’ to local agencies. This model of
governance is often supported by reference to private sector organizations
whose success is built on radically decentralized decision making to local
managers, within a central framework of simple performance targets.3
Stated in these terms, the new governance has plenty to capture the
imaginations not only of central government but also those entrepreneurial
local providers to whom ‘earned autonomy’ is attractive.4 As we shall see,
in politically sensitive policy areas such as law and order, central government finds it hard in practice to set coherent targets. It also finds it hard to
risk loosening its control over local delivery. The promise of localism in
principle tends to be negated by forms of centralized micro-management
in practice: the centre not only ‘steers’ policy but succumbs to the temptation of ‘rowing’, in the hope of speeding things on a little and securing
some visible successes.
The new governance emerged not by accident but in response to real
problems in conventional post-war public administration. As the size of
both the central and local state grew in the second half of the twentieth
century, monolithic public service bureaucracies grew into powerful, selfserving bodies that could define the terms of their own success. Not
surprisingly, some developed inflexibilities both in their management and
their workforces. These problems began to emerge at the same time as new
technologies which promised to solve them: the new style of governance
was made possible by considerable advances in information technology,
without which quantitative performance management from ‘the centre’
would be impossible, even as an aspiration.
Features of modernization
If the key feature of the modernization agenda is the centralized definition
of ends and the decentralization of decisions about means, various further
features emerge as a consequence. The linking of funding to performance is
an important one, providing the incentive to agencies to achieve targets – or
a disincentive to miss them. A corollary of this is the splitting of monolithic
bureaucracies into purchasers and providers, to allow greater ‘incentivization’ within the agency. This simplifies the introduction of competition or
‘contestability’, both between public, voluntary and private sectors and
within sector, through competitive bidding for ‘challenge funds’.
These features of modernization relate to the nature of funding. Modernization’s logic also points inevitably to a particular form of scientific
rationalism. By this I mean management approaches that advocate an
iterative process involving:
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Hough: Modernization, scientific rationalism and the CRP
• the systematic scanning for problems;
• detailed problem analysis, once these have been located;
• the planning of responses to the identified problems;
• and some form of assessment of the impact.5
The modernization agenda is not, of course, implied by scientific rationalism, but it is hard to imagine how the former could be embarked upon
without resort to the latter. Within criminal justice, the clearest example of
scientific rationalism is to be found in the provisions of the 1998 Crime and
Disorder Act that relate to CDRPs. The Act established these bodies,
and required them to pursue a cyclical triennial process involving:
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•
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auditing problems of crime and disorder;
validating the results through consultation;
devising a strategy for tackling the problems;
and implementing the strategy and monitoring the results.
There are other examples of rational, iterative problem solving in tackling
neighbourhood problems. Problem-oriented policing (Goldstein, 1990) is
premised on the idea that the police should be less reactive to demands made
on them and more proactive in analysing systematically the factors that create
demand; once problems have been identified, their root cause can then be
properly addressed. Another example is worth mentioning precisely because its
origins are in the voluntary rather than the state sector. The ‘Communities that
Care (CtC)’ programme originated in the US, but has been promoted in this
country by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. It involves intervention in tightly
defined neighbourhoods, in which action is preceded by lengthy and formal
problem analysis (CtC, 1997).
It is hard to quarrel with the basic premise of scientific rationalism. It is selfevidently important to be clear about the problems that one needs to tackle, to
be systematic in the way one tackles them, and to monitor the impact one
achieves on the problems.6 The risk is that systematic and focussed action
against misidentified or poorly identified problems can have worse consequences than poorly marshalled and ineptly implemented action against wellspecified problems.7
To anticipate arguments that I shall develop later in the article, there are
features of ‘law and order’ politics that tend to transform scientific rationalism
into scientific reductionism. The factors that lead people to treat each other
badly are complex; political and media debate cannot handle this complexity,
and thus uses an oversimplified discourse about crime. The modernization
agenda feeds on this simplified discourse to develop and impose inappropriate
targets on the public services that it seeks to improve.
Modernization and the Crime Reduction Programme
The CRP was centrally a product of the modernization agenda. As Maguire
describes more fully in this volume, the aims of the programme were:
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•
•
•
•
to stimulate capacity at local level;
to extend the knowledge base of effective practice;
giving local agencies the best available ‘tools to do the job’;
and as a consequence to reduce crime.
The first phase of the Reducing Burglary Initiative carried several of the
hallmarks of modernization. The ‘centre’ defined the problem to be tackled
but not the means by which they should be tackled; there was competitive
local bidding for funds; bids had to demonstrate rational analysis of the
local crime problem, and to offer evidenced solutions to the problems.
There was a technocratic vision in which this process would be supported
by thorough evaluation: the task of the evaluators was to assess what
had worked, and to ‘mainstream’ effective solutions in subsequent phases
of the programme. The refined knowledge base would be located in central
government ‘tool-kits’, which would be made available to local practitioners.
Modernization of policing in practice
There are two features of policing in developed industrialized countries that
subvert attempts to apply scientific rationalism to police management, and
transform it into scientific reductionism. The first is the complexity of order
maintenance, and the second is the pressure towards populism that besets
government when tackling issues of great public concern. It is the interaction of these two features that creates the risk of reductionism, but to
start with let us consider them separately.
Complexity
Common-sense discourse is that the police and the rest of the criminal
justice system exist to control crime. It matters little to most people that
‘crime’ is a product of the system, and not a set of problems independent of
the system. (To make this point another way, crime exists only in societies
where there is a formal criminal justice system; by contrast, illness exists in
all societies, whether or not they have an organized health service.) For
analytic clarity, it is essential to define the function of the police and the rest
of the justice system in terms external to the system – such as security and
the maintenance of order, or the preservation of rights.
The criminal law, and its enforcement, is a tool to achieve these ends,
and it does so in ways that have important institutional characteristics.
Two sorts of institutional feature are worth emphasizing. First, policing
systems work well only when they can command institutional legitimacy.
As Egon Bittner (1970) famously observed, the police alone are ‘equipped
to deal with every exigency in which force may have to be used’. While
their capacity to use physical force may define the scope of police work,
only the most inept police officer would actually have to deploy physical
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Hough: Modernization, scientific rationalism and the CRP
force on a daily basis. Rather, the police secure compliance by drawing on
the authority of their office – or on their institutional legitimacy. Without
legitimacy, they have power but no authority; without authority they must
police by force rather than by consent. This proposition is hardly contentious, rather, it has been a fundamental principle of British policing since
the establishment of the Metropolitan Police.8 Seen through this lens,
however, it is easy to see what is important to good policing, and equally
easy to see that good policing skills cannot easily be packaged into ‘toolkits’. The building blocks of police legitimacy are:
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fair procedures (or procedural justice);
fair outcomes (or outcome justice);
helpfulness and concern for the policed;
civil and even-handed treatment.
The factors that corrode legitimacy are, of course, the obverse of these: lack
of respect for those passing through the system, arbitrariness, unfairness,
high-handedness, rudeness and corruption.
The second institutional feature worth emphasizing is the capacity of the
police to communicate social meaning – to symbolize characteristics of
the state and the level and nature of security that it offers (Manning, 1977;
Loader and Walker, 2001). Precisely what is symbolized, and how this is
done, will vary from country to country, and over different historical
periods. But any analysis of policing which ignores this symbolic function
will be a very partial one. Any theory about policing that takes a narrowly
instrumental view about controlling criminal behaviour will mislead. In
particular, police legitimacy is built and consolidated partly through dayto-day encounters between the police and the public, and partly through
public representations of the police – largely through the mass media – as
an institution.
The modernization project is ill-equipped to handle complexity of this
sort. It is not that any competent politician or civil servant would deny that
policing displays these forms of complexity. It is just that the managerialist
performance indicators at their disposal cannot capture the subtleties of
police legitimacy, or the nuances of police symbolism.
There is growing evidence that the ‘modernization’ of the police in the
1990s damaged their institutional legitimacy. Crime in Britain fell in
the late 1990s; so too did ‘confidence’ in the police, as measured by surveys
such as the British Crime Survey (BCS) and the Metropolitan Police series
of public attitude surveys9 (FitzGerald et al., 2002). The fall in confidence
could reflect several other factors beyond the increasing salience of modernization. For example, the highly publicized inquiry into the death of
Stephen Lawrence probably caused damage to the standing not only of the
Metropolitan Police but of other forces in England and Wales (Macpherson, 1999). However, with colleagues I carried out a detailed largescale study of the Metropolitan Police Service, the Policing for London
Study, that strongly suggested that the processes of prioritization and
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specialization were key factors underlying the fall in confidence. It appeared from what both members of the public and the police said that the
MPS response to governmental priorities had stripped uniformed officers at
borough level of their capacity to respond effectively to non-priority
demands that were a key source of police legitimacy – and this prompted
growing public dissatisfaction (FitzGerald et al., 2002).
It is doubtful whether research could ever establish beyond doubt that
modernization has contributed to falls in public confidence. It is more
realistic to think in terms of circumstantial evidence, that has to be
interpreted and weighed up. My own view, drawing substantially on the
Policing for London Study, is that police forces across the country were
exposed to unintended and damaging effects of managerialist performance
management regimes.
Whatever the case, the Association of Chief Police Officers has reached
somewhat similar conclusions. It has developed a ‘Reassurance Policing’
strategy designed to rebuild public confidence in the police. Implicit in this
is the need to respond more effectively to local concerns, whatever they
might be. The government has also launched an anti-social behaviour
strategy, which essentially elevates the policing of low-priority incivilities
into priority police work (see www.together.gov.uk). The Home Secretary
has also personally identified himself with a ‘civil renewal’ agenda in which
communities are helped to develop their capacity to self-police (Blunkett,
2003). However, the challenge that these initiatives pose to the concept of
police work implicit in the CRP has generally gone unnoticed. Part of the
reason is that politicians are increasingly locked into a simplified and
populist discourse about law and order, to which we shall now turn.
Pressures to populism
The increasingly populist nature of law-and-order politics (Beckett, 1997;
Roberts and Hough, 2002; Roberts et al., 2003) is the second feature of
policing that subverts scientific rationalism when it is applied to policing.
There are several possible renditions of this process.10 The first is that in an
era of mass-media communication the electoral system serves to select
politicians whose understanding of complex social issues is about as subtle
as the coverage of these issues in tabloid newspapers. This can and does
occur,11 but, to date, it remains the exception rather than the rule in British
politics. The second is that politicians exploit the possibilities offered by the
mass media to frame policy issues in ways that suit their political agenda
(Beckett, 1997). In other words, politicians lead the mass media to present
policy issues in particular ways.12 The third is that the media exert such
power in the politics of late-modern societies that politicians have little
alternative except to engage publicly with complex social issues in mediadefined terms.
In a complex world all three of these interpretations of populist processes carry some force. In particular, politicians can exercise a degree of
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control over the way that the mass-media present events and issues – and
vice versa. The end product is that – whether by design or constraint –
politicians simplify the policy issues they grapple with, and with regard to
law-and-order politics this involves:
•
Over-emphasizing crime control as a primary police function in contrast to
order maintenance;
• Over-claiming on central government capacity to control crime;
• Over-promising on crime control targets;
• Over-claiming on target achievements.
Police elites – the chief constables and other senior managers in British
police forces – are in a position to challenge political representations of
crime and disorder problems, but rarely do so. In reality, they often tend to
judge it to be in their organizational interests to acquiesce to the political
rhetoric about crime fighting. Politicians control purse strings and can
exercise powerful patronage. Leaving this aside, statements by senior police
about the complexity of their task will resonate less well with the public
than ones which stress the urgency and importance of tackling crime.
The available statistics amplify these processes of distortion. The nature
of policing is such that much better statistics are available on crime than on
other – equally important – aspects of police function; moreover, there are
much better statistics on crime events than on perpetrators. We know how
many burglaries are recorded by the police in the country, or in a police
force, or in any Basic Command Unit (BCU), for example, but it is much
harder to say how many active burglars are known to the authorities. These
biases to crime on the one hand, and to crime events on the other, is
amplified by the BCS, which can say a great deal about under-reporting and
under-recording of events, but adds little to our knowledge about offenders.13
The consequence of this imbalance is that media and political debate
about policing is focussed on crime, and debate about crime is focussed on
crime events, and not on offenders. Several things have been ignored in this
debate – at least until very recently:14
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A small minority of offenders account for a large majority of crime;
Offenders tend to be generalist rather than specialist;
They tend to be concentrated in local areas of intense social deprivation;
They are socially excluded and highly disaffected.
It is hard to say whether at local (CDRP) level the definition of crime
problems is shaped more by media and political discourse or the available
statistical information. Whatever the case, the crime audits mounted by
CDRPs are typically long on statistics on crime events and short on
textured information about offenders. Similarly, when CDRPs submitted
bids for funds under Phase 1 of the Reducing Burglary Initiative (RBI),
information was typically lacking on the numbers and characteristics of
active burglars.
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One consequence of this imbalance is that some preventive solutions
tend to be privileged, and others ignored or downplayed. The privileged
ones include target-hardening strategies and those involving deterrence and
incapacitation. The least favoured ones were those operating to longer
timescales, aiming to address the disaffection and social exclusion of those
most at risk of persistent offending.15
The preoccupations of police management
Political and media discourse about crime implies that middle managers in
the police are – and should be – engaged in a cyclical process of scanning
for emerging crime problems, analysis, response and monitoring. This is
not the reality. A rise in street robbery, for example, should certainly be
a source of concern for BCU commanders, but it may not be their
top priority – unless they are exposed to intense pressure from central
government.
Whether they use the terms or not, the central preoccupations of
effective police middle managers are those that relate to the maintenance
of organizational legitimacy in a complex and unpredictable environment.
They need to demonstrate to a range of local stakeholders that their
institution deserves legitimacy. The issues of legitimacy are likely to vary at
different levels of police organization, and the issues may vary by stakeholder group. But police managers at all levels face a tricky task of
weighing up the competing demands of different stakeholders, and assessing how to strike a balance that will do least harm collectively to their
organizational legitimacy.
Of course there are good and bad police managers, and some have a
much clearer grasp of what their work is about than others. Nor is there
a single best way to consolidate police legitimacy. Doing a good job in
controlling local crime problems clearly offers one route to securing
legitimacy, but it does not have absolute centrality in the list of BCU
commanders’ preoccupations that is assumed either in political discourse
about policing or by the CRP. The ‘day job’ of police middle managers,
reflected in their everyday preoccupations, is about meeting a range of
public expectations while maintaining professional standards of behaviour
among a large, dispersed workforce of action-orientated young men and
women. Issues to the fore will include:
•
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•
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Concerns about staff morale and commitment;
Monitoring levels of professionalism in bringing offenders to justice;
Concerns about complaints, corruption and malpractice;
Maintaining tolerable geographical coverage in the face of unpredictable
risk;
Readiness to handle major incidents;
Representing the police in a range of partnership and community forums.
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This is not to suggest that police managers are indifferent to their performance in meeting the quantitative performance target that have been set for
them. On the contrary, they attach a great deal of importance to them.
However, this is not because they regard the targets as reflecting accurately
what the job is about, but because they expose themselves to criticism and
possible sanction if their performance against targets is poor.
If this analysis is right, it explains why in the real world of everyday
policing, managers do not routinely engage in iterative problem-solving
analysis routines relating to crime. Rather, their job is to keep a complex
social system in balance, and they have to pay close attention to issues that
range well beyond the crime-focussed performance indicators that may
have been set for them. Examining the RBI through this lens, one can see
why local police managers rarely accorded their burglary projects the
priority that was needed to give them a fighting chance of success.
Certainly, it was attractive to local police commanders and their CDRP
partners to secure money for these pilot projects. CRP grants were valuable
in conferring status on the recipients, and in demonstrating their capacity
for innovation. However, the payoff was achieved in securing the grant, not
in concluding the project successfully in the terms that were originally
proposed (Maguire, this issue).
It was for these reasons that in the burglary projects that we evaluated,
there was typically little more than lukewarm engagement on the part of
local police managers and their CDRP partners in making things happen.
We found very little real innovation, and only marginal interest in our
results.
Conclusion
I have argued that the RBI fell victim to a form of scientific reductionism
arising from the over-simplified model of police function that is embedded
in the ‘modernization agenda’. My argument is not with the principle of
scientific rationalism, but with the way in which this rationalism becomes
debased into reductionism when it grapples with complex social institutions that are the focus of populist political and media debate.
Are we to turn our backs on the ideal of ‘evidence-led practice’ and on
knowledge-building enterprises such as the CRP? Of course not. It is
important to know what tactics work under what circumstances when
tackling particular forms of crime. For example, CDRPs and their police
partners need to know whether CCTV is a better investment than visible
police patrol or DNA testing when tackling burglary or street robbery.
They have to make real investment decisions of this sort. However, it is
important not to confuse these questions with the central policy issues
about the ways in which we want our police to maintain order and
security.
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I have suggested that the modernization agenda gave rise to a narrowing
of the definition of police function, over-focussing on the crime-fighting
function. By the mid-1990s the legal and administrative framework of
current police management was largely in place – with an emphasis on
priorities, objective setting and performance management using statistical
indicators. Almost by default, the assumptions that were required when
populating this system with targets were related to crime. The focus on
crime-fighting had a ‘taken for granted’ quality to it. Once politicians and
senior police officers were committed to setting out publicly what their
targets were, they had to find targets that were plausible and comprehensible. Crime-fighting objectives have the appearance, at least, of being
readily quantifiable; they are also capable of commanding public assent
because they are simple, comprehensible and appear to offer the public
protection from specific, identifiable threats.
The upshot is that important political issues about policing style and
strategy have been ignored or at least marginalized. Questions about
policing philosophy – which should attract more intellectual attention than
questions about police tactics – have been displaced by discussion about
politicians’ and senior police officers’ success in meeting targets that are
poorly conceptualized and often poorly measured.
It is possible that with time, the modernization agenda will mature, and
will correct for the perverse effects of crudely set targets. There are signs
that this is starting to happen, as exemplified by the reassurance policing
agenda, which substantially broadens the crime-fighting perspective on
policing. Certainly there is a pressing need to secure more engagement
amongst politicians and their advisors, among the police elite and academic
criminologists with the ‘big’ policing issues about the best ways of securing
public order and security. These relate to policing style more than policing
tactics, and demand qualitative answers to qualitative questions. Central
government is now making some attempt to develop various statistical
indices that relate to issues of organizational legitimacy within the criminal
justice system. This is obviously to be welcomed. It may well turn out that
over the next decade, those who have to ‘steer’ criminal policy will develop
a much subtler appreciation of what is involved in steering, and resist the
pressures imposed by the media, for example, to over-simplify. It remains
an open question whether central government will ever – in populist times
– exercise sufficient self-restraint in holding back from ‘rowing’ – getting
involved in local micro-management – whenever publicly stated statistical
targets are at risk.
One can envisage another approach to the governance of policing in
which central government defined the shape of systems and structures for
accountability and performance management, but not the content of these
systems. There could be radical decentralization to local level, whereby
targets were set locally. This is, of course, already an aspiration of the
modernization agenda – ‘local solutions for local problems’ – but it is only
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an aspiration in those areas of social policy, like law and order, which can
be an electoral liability.
One can also envisage an approach to the governance of policing in
which explicit recognition is given to the fact that the leverage that the local
state can exert on problems of crime and disorder is probably somewhat
limited and certainly still unknown. Setting precise crime reduction targets
may be an unavoidable consequence of populist debate about law and
order, but it is an undesirable one. It would be better if local police
managers and their CDRP partners were shackled less to targets that are
often somewhat arbitrary, and were freed to devote more time to consideration of the professional standards of all those involved in the production of
‘security’ and of issues relating to policing style and policing philosophy. If
this was achievable, one might even contemplate an approach to the
governance of policing in which justice16 rather than crime control was the
organizing principle of the criminal justice system and its partner
agencies.
Notes
1 For example, the three evaluations of the Burglary Reduction Initiative had
a total budget of £3 million. This article draws heavily on the experience
of the research consortium which evaluated 20 schemes in the south of
England.
2 See, for example, the Carter Review of the correctional services (Home
Office, 2003).
3 For example, some companies let local managers have extensive freedom
over their operations – provided that they meet a single target specified in
terms of growth of profits.
4 The idea of earned autonomy is best exemplified in the system whereby
hospitals can achieve foundation status if they achieve a given level of
performance.
5 There are several renditions of linear, iterative, problem-solving approaches
that include a feedback loop. Readers will recognize SARA (scanning,
analysis, response, assessment) in the way that I have characterized it.
6 In fact, I enthusiastically promoted the auditing process when it was
introduced, co-writing guidance (Hough and Tilley, 1998) and training
CDRP members in the auditing process.
7 Good illustrations of this – on a grand scale – can be found in the ‘war
against terror’, in which American and British initiatives seem consistently
more likely to amplify grassroots ideological hostility to Western values
than to calm it. There are interesting parallels between the ‘war on
terrorism’ and the ‘war on crime’. In both cases politicians get locked into
an oversimplified discourse about the problem to be tackled, which impels
them to firm and decisive – but not necessarily effective – intervention.
8 See, for example, the fourth of Rowan and Mayne’s nine principles of
policing: ‘To recognise always that the extent to which the co-operation
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of the public can be secured diminishes proportionately the necessity of the
use of physical force and compulsion for achieving police objectives’
(quoted in Reith, 1956).
And the drop is only marginal against some indices. For example, the
proportion of the British public who said that the local police do either a
‘very good’ or ‘fairly good’ job is almost stable. It is the proportion of the
population awarding the police the highest rating that has fallen.
A full explanation of the pressures to populism is well beyond the scope of
this article; but it would need to take account of the shrinking capacity of
the sovereign state in late-modern industrialized societies, and that paradoxical response to this process that involves reaffirmation by the state of
its crime control capabilities (Young, 1999; Garland, 2001).
The ‘One Nation’ party in Australia under Pauline Hanson’s leadership is a
possible example.
Katherine Beckett’s thesis is that the US political rhetoric about criminals as
outsiders was politically led, and served to support a separate policy agenda
of paring down public expenditure on social security and welfare programmes.
Although its self-reported offending components, and especially that which
relates to drug use, have made significant contributions to knowledge.
The Home Office launched a Prolific and Other Priority Offenders Strategy
in July 2004 (see www.crimereduction.gov.uk/ppo).
Other strands of the Crime Reduction Programme placed greater emphasis
both on social crime prevention and on rehabilitative work with offenders,
of course.
This is not to be confused with the recent set of Government policies to
convict a larger proportion of offenders, which have the collective title of
‘narrowing the justice gap’.
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MIKE HOUGH is Professor of Criminal Policy at the School of Law, King’s
College London, and Director of the Institute for Criminal Policy Research.
He set up the unit, originally at the London South Bank University, in 1994
and moved to King’s College London in 2003.
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