Crime And Urban Insecurity In Europe

This publication takes an integrated approach to combating urban crime and insecurity. Favouring long-term preventive measures over repressive ones, it promotes partnerships designed to tackle crime prevention on several fronts, bringing together the police, the media, schools, the business community, urban planners and local communities. The guide highlights the fact that effective crime prevention is the domain of local authorities, and finds that the consultation and participation of local inhabitants in social and environmental development schemes is particularly important, in order to promote a sense of social cohesion within the community and help to restore lost confidence in the ability of public authorities to deal with crime.

This volume contains the main papers presented to an international conference of delegates from across Europe, representing the police, local authorities, professionals and community organisations. The papers highlight the fact that crime is not just a problem for the police or any one agency alone. The problems experienced across Europe and the methods employed to combat crime are discussed. The aim is to raise awareness of best practice and exchange experience between participants, by examining current activities within regions, and international collaboration between regions.

Concerns over insecurity and questions of safety have become central issues in social and political debates across Europe and the western world. Crucial changes have followed as a result, such as a redefinition of the role of the state in relation to policing - a central theme of this book - and an explosion in the growth of private policing. These developments have, in their turn, heightened feelings of insecurity and safety, particularly where populations have become increasingly mobile and societies more socially fragmented, culturally diverse and economically fragmented. Responses to insecurity now increasingly inform decisions made by governments, organisations and ordinary people in their social interactions. This book makes a key contribution to an understanding of these developments, approaching the subject from a range of perspectives, across several different disciplines. The three parts of the book look at broader theoretical and thematic issues, then at cross-national and pan-European developments and debates in European governance, and finally explore specific examples of local issues of community safety and the broader implications these have. Leading figures in the field draw upon criminological, legal, social, and political theory to shed new light on what has become one of the most intractable problems facing western societies.

Understanding the politics of security in city-regions is increasingly important for the study of contemporary policing. This book argues that national and international governing arrangements are being outflanked by various transnational threats, including the cross-border terrorism of the attacks on Paris in 2015 and Brussels in 2016; trafficking in people, narcotics and armaments; cybercrime; the deregulation of global financial services; and environmental crime. Metropolises are the focal points of the transnational networks through which policing problems are exported and imported across national borders, as they provide much of the demand for illicit markets and are the principal engines generating other policing challenges including political protest and civil unrest. This edited collection examines whether and how governing arrangements rooted in older systems of national sovereignty are adapting to these transnational challenges, and considers problems of and for policing in city-regions in the European Union and its single market. Bringing together experts from across the continent, Policing European Metropolises develops a sociology of urban policing in Europe and a unique methodology for comparing the experiences of different metropolises in the same country. This book will be of value to police researchers in Europe and abroad, as well as postgraduate students with an interest in policing and urban policy.

First published in 2006, as numerous local authorities of European cities invest in the attractiveness of their urban areas in the hope of attracting new inhabitants and economic activities, safety has become a topical subject. Perceived safety is a major factor in a city's attractiveness and fear of crime can have a large impact on location decisions, with ensuing economic consequences. This book examines the role of security in urban development and its local policy implications. Comparing eleven European cities, it analyses how actual and perceived security is evolving, and what the economic, social and spatial consequences are of a changing perceived security. While crime has decreased in eight of the eleven cities, fear of crime has increased in all of them. This book discusses the factors influencing this fear, including the role of the media, the quality and maintenance of the built environment, socio-economic inequality and terrorism.

Victimisation and insecurity surveys are today one of the major ways to generate data usable for the measurement and study crime. Still, across European countries, they are carried out and put to use in a variety of ways. This report compares practices across some major European countries to map the situation and identify the good - as well as the bad - practices within the European zone.

The report submitted here concludes a European research project titled: "Insecurities in European Cities. Crime-Related Fears Within the Context of New Anxieties and Community-Based Crime Prevention" (INSEC). The project was supported by the European Commission within its 5th Framework Programme (1998-2002) "Key Action: Improving the Socio-economic Knowledge base". Among the seven "Research Tasks" as they were called, the following were relevant for our own plans: Task 2: "Individual and collective strategies in a changing society", Task 4: "Towards social cohesion in Europe"; and Task 6: "Governance, citizenship and the dynamics of European integration". The scientific positioning of the study is in criminology and urban sociology and it has an applied side by involving community crime prevention and community safety, as well as an orientation to comparing cultural patterns of insecurity, anxiety and fear by the parallel study of five large European cities: Amsterdam, Budapest, Hamburg, Kraków and Vienna. Put in a sentence the research project is about insecurity of cities from the perspective of their inhabitants and what can be done about it. To obtain information both in the individual cities and for comparing them to each other, the formulation of the methods and instruments applied were standardised as far as possible.

This publication is part of a series linked to the Council of Europe's project "Responses to violence in everyday life in democratic society" which considers various aspects of policy making and law enforcement to combat crime and violence in society. Aspects discussed include: the need for reliable statistics to qualify and quantify crime; institutional responses; violence and personal responsibility; active citizenship; mediation; and links to wider issues of freedom and security.