Flotilla or armada? Interpreting the practices and politics of three Community Safety Partnerships

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the practices and politics of three community safety1 partnerships. Community safety has been developing in England and Wales since the late 1980s, but was recently formalized by the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 and the Police Reform Act 2002. The paper is based on observation of meetings and interviews undertaken in three partnerships between April 2002 and February 2004. I assess the utility of the typologies employed by Liddle and Bottoms, and Belbin, and argue that they cannot take account of changes in the socio-political context of the CSPs. Instead, the paper develops a nine-pronged typology, based on a nautical analogy, which takes account of the likely impact of changes in governance, managerialism, funding and performance monitoring arrangements. The nautical analogy implies that roles and responsibilities within the CSPs are in need of reform and that there are continuities and changes within the CSPs, which are illustrative of the shift towards late modernity. In addition, the analogy suggests that CSPs are more of a collection of loosely affiliated agencies, that is, a flotilla rather than an armada.