ABSTRACT
The community safety policy field initially opened up whole new fields of community life to the processes of crime and disorder management. Continuing with the structural or institutional theme referred, a second area of tension within community safety policy concerned the forms in which the various interventions were delivered and the strings attached. An often cited anecdote about community safety planning might illustrate the dilemma: the university researcher might turn up at the ‘community crime prevention’ meeting, being held in the ‘community centre’. Politicians of both parties referred to streamlined due processes in positive terms as promoting the needs of victims and favouring the law abiding majority: speeding up justice, ensuring more offenders were brought to justice and ‘rebalancing’ the system as a whole. Blairite aspirations towards a ‘rebalancing’ and ‘modernisation’ of criminal justice went part of the way to achieving some of the changes; the Coalition’s reforms have reinforced and extended these innovations.
