Standing at the crossroads: Community Safety Partnerships

This paper discusses some of the main challenges facing Community Safety Partnerships (CSPs) and local strategies in the wake of a number of central government-orchestrated initiatives in the last year, but most crucially for my purposes here the Home Office's Crime and Disorder Act Review published in January 2006 (of which I was a working group member). It is beyond the scope of this brief paper to: provide an academic audit of the past achievements and limitations of community safety partnerships and their local strategies; make the important distinctions between community safety, crime reduction and crime prevention; or to draw attention to the comparative geo-historical contexts of local safety strategies and their politics and a concomitant over-reliance on a national frame of reference. The following discussion plots in brief some of the main strategic dilemmas, tensions and opportunities facing local community safety institutions and their strategic and operational practices following the Crime and Disorder Act Review 2006 (CDAR) and related national policing initiatives discussed elsewhere in this edition of CJM. Five challenges are presented which are intended to stimulate further and fuller debate elsewhere. There are doubtless other challenges that I have missed in this brief provocation in the name of public debate across the worlds of policy, practice and academic research.