ABSTRACT
Safety crimes are a significant crime problem, as we have sought to demonstrate throughout this text. Yet, despite this, we have also indicated various ways in which political, social, legal and regulatory processes combine to obscure their nature, extent, scale and consequences. This social construction of safety crimes as something other than a crime problem extends to the discipline of criminology which, through its definitions of ‘crime’, ‘violence’ and ‘policing’ further marginalise such phenomena — yet a central theme of this book is that safety crimes are a proper and legitimate focus of analysis for criminology. Indeed, it is a remarkable feature of criminology that this is the first text in the discipline devoted to this subject. It remains for us to consider the extent to which, theoretically and empirically, safety crimes might be placed upon the criminological agenda.
