ABSTRACT
David Garland reflects that high crime rates have become a ‘normal social fact’ and that the ‘threat of crime has become a routine part of modem consciousness’. He argues that successive governments have taken a dualistic, ambivalent and often contradictory approach to crime control. The problem for governments, asserts Garland, is the need to ‘withdraw or at least qualify their claim to be the primary and effective provider of security and crime control’, while at the same time minimising the political costs of such action. A Safer Cities Programme in England was announced in March 1988 as part of Action for Cities. 20 Safer Cities Projects were established by the Home Office in areas which had been identified as suffering from high levels of deprivation. In Scotland, the Scottish Office announced its own Safer Cities Programme in 1989 and after a phased introduction four projects were established in Central Edinburgh, Castlemilk, Greater Easterhouse and Dundee.
