ABSTRACT
The recruitment of active citizens for law and order, by the engagement of communities in crime prevention, became the Government's primary law and order innovation in the Eighties. Neighbourhoods were not to take the law into their own hands, but they were to be the eyes and ears whose vigilance would be rewarded by a rapid response from the police, and whose cooperation would help catch criminals. Like community care, a way of emptying hospitals, its ideological force was its anti-Statism. Its economic merit was that it cut costs, or rather that it redistributed costs from Government-funded institutions to individuals citizens who were increasing driven to fortify their own homes. In the year before the 1991 riots, despite the impressive four million households covered by schemes, there was the sharpest increase in recorded crime since records began in 1857.
