ABSTRACT
This paper offers a preliminary attempt to conceptualise a perspective on the ‘multi-agency’ approach as it can be seen to operate in a specific number of localities, paying particular attention to the role of the local state. It is based on two years of fieldwork in four localities, three in inner London and one in a northern town, Milltown, which was undertaken as part of an ESRCfunded project ‘Crime, Community and the Inter-Agency Dimension’.1 The broad argument is that, at base, there is a fundamental set of conflicts between the state agencies we have focused on in our research, namely, the police, social services and the probation service.2 This structural conflict is either exaggerated or mediated by our other clear finding that there are structured power relations between the state agencies. In other words, in locally based crime prevention initiatives, some agencies are consistently more powerful than others.
