Watching Police Watching Communities

After the major street riots in Britain in the early 1980s, the demands for more accountable and sensitive styles of policing were answered with a promise to embrace community policing ideals. The centrepiece of this commitment was Neighbourhood Watch. Official claims now portray it as an outstanding success in preventing crime, with over 90,000 schemes established across the country.

However, Watching Police, Watching Communities sets out to test the validity of such claims and ultimately reveals them to be myths. Basing their research on extensive interviews with police and the public, Mike McConville and Dan Shepherd show that the public have little commitment to Neighbourhood Watch.

Whilst crime and the fear of crime have special significance for old people and women, in general social issues such as employment, education and housing count for more. This lack of public commitment is matched by that of the police. There are only a small minority of officers who are dedicated to community beat work.

Review: The McConville and Shepherd analysis is based on a rich body of data collected between 1988 and 1990 in a number of neighborhoods located in the jurisdictions of three police forces in England and Wales. Within each research site, indepth interviews were conducted with community beat officers, relief officers (who have more traditional enforcement roles), and supervisors.

In addition, the authors systematically surveyed residents in NW [Neighborhood Watch] and non-NW neighborhoods located within each jurisdiction....Space limitations prevent my paying full justice to the richness of this superb book, which I think should be mandatory reading for anyone even slightly interested in crime prevention. - American Journal of Sociology