Crime prevention and public safety in Europe: challenges for comparative criminology

Abstract

Alongside crime prevention, the notion of public safety has been deployed increasingly in the last two decades in both policy and academic circles to describe a local, multi-agency or ‘partnership’ approach to the reduction of crime and disorder, and, more nebulously, the promotion of ‘urban security’, ‘community safety’ and ‘quality of life’. Significantly, the International Centre for the Prevention of Crime’s international report (ibid.) encourages us to broaden the problem as a means of understanding and investigating the tensions between and opportunities opened up by the different concepts of prevention, safety and security. Having noted the contemporary ‘coupling’ of the concepts of crime prevention and public safety in both criminological and policy discourses, let us pose a seemingly straightforward question for criminologists: How can we know about crime prevention and public safety across Europe? Such a question necessarily prompts thinking about theory, methodology and evidence in criminological inquiry and more especially the nature of the comparative method in the social sciences. What lessons can be drawn from existing comparisons of crime prevention across Europe? In the discussion that follows we begin by delineating in brief the main traditions of criminological research which have examined the evolution of crime prevention and public safety policies and practices in recent decades. Having mapped these traditions and summarized their major contributions inthe first two sections of the chapter, we then consider how else knowledge about crime prevention and public safety in Europe can be gained. It is argued that we need to cultivate theoretically driven comparative methods of research which prompt dialogue and argument across the countries, regions and cities of Europe. Accordingly the third and fourth sections of the chapter present several theoretical and methodological arguments for taking the comparative study of crime prevention and public safety forward. This entails reflection about what it means to be a comparativist and builds on previous work (Heidensohn, 2007: 219; Edwards and Hughes, 2005).