Recent Trends in Policing in Europe Reports from Denmark, the Netherlands and the UK
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Working Paper Nr. 11 Andreas Kohl (Ed.) Recent Trends in Policing in Europe Reports from Denmark, The Netherlands and the UK Kooperative Sicherheitspolitik in der Stadt (KoSiPol) e i n V e r b u n d f o r s c h u n g s p r o j e k t d e r u n d d e m i n Z u s a m m e n a r b e i t m i t : E r n s t M o r i t z A r n d t U n i v e r s i t ä t G r e i f s w a l d H e s s i s c h e H o c h s c h u l e f ü r P o l i z e i u n d V e r w a l t u n g I m p r e s s u m R e i h e n h e r a u s g e b e r P r o f . D r . B e r n h a r d F r e v e l , P r o j e k t k o o r d i n a t o r K o S i P o l c / o I n s t i t u t f ü r P o l i t i k w i s s e n s c h a f t W e s t f ä l i s c h e W i l h e l m s - U n i v e r s i t ä t M ü n s t e r S c h a r n h o r s t s t r a ß e 1 0 0 , 4 8 1 5 1 M ü n s t e r h t t p : / / w w w . u n i - m u e n s t e r . d e / I f P o l / f o r s c h e n / r e g i e r e n / k o s i p o l . h t m l H e r a u s g e b e r A n d r e a s K o h l A u t o r e n M a r i a B i s l e v , L e x C a c h e t , P e t e r K r u i z e , P e t e r M a r k s , R u t h P r i n s , C o l i n R o g e r s a n d A r i e v a n S l u i s M ü n s t e r , S e p t e m b e r 2 0 1 2 Contents Contents Introduction (Andreas Kohl) 3 Recent Historical Trends in Policing and Crime Prevention in the UK (Colin Rogers) 7 Recent Trends in Policing and Managing Urban Security in Denmark (Peter Kruize and Maria Bislev) 24 Living Apart Together. The Dutch Community Officer and his Laborious Relation with Local Government (Arie van Sluis, Lex Cachet, Ruth Prins and Peter Marks) 37 1 2 Introduction Introduction Andreas Kohl This paper is part of the research project ―Cooperative security policy in the city‖ (KoSiPol) financed by the Federal Ministry of Education and Re- search (BMBF) in Germany, which has been carried out from 2010 to 2012. Within this project the different partners have – from a social scienc- es perspective - looked at multi-agency policing concepts in selected fields of local security and tried to identify the conditions under which coopera- tive work is successfull. Another aim was to improve the cooperation be- tween the main public actors in this policy field – the local police forces, the local administration, social services, local business and other societal groups. There have been numerous policing concepts since the 1970s which not only aimed at a more effective policing but also tried to focus on the police working more closely together with the citizens. The concepts also con- tained a focus on general preventive action rather than on repressive police work. Community policing, broken windows/zero tolerance, problem- oriented policing, intelligence-led policing and other concepts have been studied and some of them have been implemented in different national po- lice forces - more or less successfully. Nevertheless the trend reached the Western European countries (and not only them) and crime prevention be- came an important part of the local safety infrastructure. This - positive - development is especially important because of recent problems which evolved in community crime prevention in Germany with- in the last years. Since the 1990s the contents, processes and structures of creating local security have been undergoing enormous changes. During what can be called a prevention ―boom‖, the number of prevention coun- cils, organizations and institutions in Germany has enormously increased within the last 15 years. Although it is impossible to count all these activi- ties, a rough estimate shows about 1000 to 2000 different prevention pro- jects spread all over the country. Thus, organizations working in coopera- tion (crime prevention boards, law-enforcement or other public-private- partnerships in various forms) in crime prevention are becoming increas- ingly significant to the creating of local security. But there is also a down- side – this rather unprepared and uncontrolled growth has led not only to numerous different and sometimes failing institutional forms, but also has 3 Andreas Kohl created some problems which often slow down or even stop the local actors and their activities. One of these problems is to identify suitable aims which the local preven- tion activities should be targeted at. A good topic to work on should meet a set of criteria: it should meet the requirements of the participating parties, it must be clearly defined, all participators should be able to handle it, and it must be politically accepted. If there is no realistic target (or no target or problem at all, because the cooperation was built only because of political pressure), the cooperation is likely to end in frustration. The absence of an analytical basis can also create problems for preventive co-operations, because it is crucial to analyze the local situation before tak- ing action and to learn about the local situation and the specific problems. These can be crime hot-spots, citizens fear of crime, groups of people or problems with specific offences. All this has to be thoroughly looked at before any activities are developed. If not, all preventive work is based on- ly on perceived knowledge, which likely leads to failure. In Germany a lot of preventive projects lack also regular and proper evaluation. This is not only a problem for the projects but also leads to the fact that good or bad examples are not documented and cannot be used by other crime preven- tion actors or criminologists. Although a lot of actors and groups cooperate in crime prevention in Ger- many, the so–called ordinary citizen without any attachment to the before mentioned groups is still underrepresented. Police, community or social services are dominating the co-operation, the participation of citizens is not yet achieved. More incentives are necessary to integrate citizens into local crime prevention to broaden the basis on which the work is done and to en- hance legitimation of the preventive process. The authors of the following articles all deal with their national policing strategies, based on the abovementioned policing concepts, and they demonstrate the difficulties of adapting these concepts to national realities. Especially the police forces had to react to these developments, which is exemplarily shown here for the UK, Denmark and the Netherlands. Colin Rogers describes the „paradigmatic change― of policing in England and Wales in the past 15 to 20 years. The traditional way of repressive and reactive policing was considered unfit to solve the problems of modern communities. Starting with the community policing concept, the partner- ship approach more and more became the standard model of policing. Sup- ported by the government, especially through the Crime and Disorder Act 4 Introduction in 1998, responsibility for the community safety was given to the local lev- el and the organizations working on that level, e.g. the local police and fire authorities, but also to non-governmental organizations and private busi- nesses. Rogers also describes the rise of other ideas and models in crime prevention, such as situational crime prevention, which led to the wide- spread use of CCTV in the UK. Recently the UK government promotes a ―Big Society‖ concept: Citizens, community and local government should work in close partnerships to solve local problems and enhance the social cohesion. Finally Rogers discusses the evolution of policing concepts in the UK such as community policing, problem-oriented policing or the neigh- borhood policing teams and their performance. Actual trends within the police, for example a new focus on enforcement, or the partnership ap- proach are recently discussed, and it is not clear which concept will domi- nate the future of policing in the UK. Peter Kruize and Maria Bislev deal with the Danish police system, which is part of the Scandinavian police culture. After explaining the police organi- zation from state to local level, they show that recently the figures for vio- lent and property crime went up in Denmark.