NCJ Number
204140
Journal
Crime Prevention and Community Safety: An International Journal Volume: 6 Issue: 1 Dated: 2004 Pages: 53-63
Editor(s)
Rob Mawby
Date Published
2004
Length
11 pages
Annotation
The paper addresses the extent to which particular serious environmental criminal threats to community safety posed by or committed by powerful actors have been included in local crime prevention strategies.
Abstract
In recent years, knowledge production in the field of criminology has been expanding at an ever increasing rate. There are renewed prospects for the flourishing of criminological knowledge as to the incidence of crimes committed by corporate and state actors of environmental crimes. In light of the current boom in local criminological knowledge production, this paper examines this prospect, specifically discussing the degree to which community safety agendas have taken account of more general crime/safety threats to community populations posed by powerful corporate and state actors. The focus is on highly visible categories of unambiguous law-breaking. Regarding the production of local criminological knowledge, this paper begins with a discussion of the research output of a key site of the criminological knowledge industry: the Home Office Research, Development and Statistics Department. The paper continues with an analysis of crime and disorder audits and strategies which seeks to provide an indication of the extent to which the Crime and Disorder Act (CDA) has actually encouraged local crime reduction partnerships to break the traditional crime control mold. To the extent that the CDC actually represented an opportunity for imagining new possibilities for crime control beyond its traditional preoccupations with relatively powerless groups of offenders, it appears on the evidence presented in this paper to have failed. The criminological knowledge industry borders on ignoring some of the greatest threats to the safety of communities. Notes, references