ABSTRACT
Crime prevention, which used to be all about burglar alarms and similar hardware, is now all about ‘community policing’. Glasgow's community ownership scheme which transferred council houses en bloc to their tenants seems to have been ‘sold’ simultaneously to a Labour council as a return to socialist principles, and to Conservative ministers as a form of privatization. Most community-based projects are specialized or functional agencies performing a fairly clearly defined task, usually for a clearly defined population. Community action projects typically have a turbulent history: internal and external conflicts and betrayals, threatened bankruptcy, allegations of fraud are all commonplace. Successful community based action calls for continuing, patient advice and support from within the bureaucracy - preferably with some help from the charitable foundations. Thus community-based action will frequently be contentious. Moreover, a sense of collective paranoia about the outside world is often deliberately fostered as a means of holding a potentially explosive group together.
