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Counting the cost of safety: new study by University of Leicester criminologist

November 11, 2003

At a time when government is pushing for identity cards, increasing demand for 'community safety' is helping to create a Big Brother environment in which pockets of society may be excluded, warns a criminologist at the University of Leicester.

Growing regulation of public spaces - through CCTV surveillance, security personnel, anti-social behaviour legislation and local by-laws - means that, should you engage in non-criminal behaviour seen to be posing a 'nuisance', you run the risk of being excluded from important social settings.

That's the view of Dr Alison Wakefield, Lecturer in Security and Risk Management at the University's world-renowned Scarman Centre. Her published research is titled Selling Security: The Private Policing of Public Space.

Dr Wakefield's study draws comparisons between the private control of shopping centres and other similar, privately owned social settings, and the regulation of high streets and neighbourhoods.

She conducted a unique study of security officers operating in three locations:

a shopping centre
a retail and leisure complex
a cultural centre

Dr Wakefield reports: "My research takes account of the considerable and growing role being played by private security personnel within public social life, as teams of private security officers now routinely patrol facilities such as shopping centres, leisure parks and transport terminals, which rely commercially on free, safe and regular access by customers, service providers and the public at large."

She questions whether the owners of shopping centres and similar privately owned public settings should continue to hold legal rights originally designed to protect the individual landowner rather than the large corporate body, to determine who may enter and remain on their land and exclude arbitrarily those to whom they take exception. Dr Wakefield argues that these environments must be seen as extensions of the public streets in which all citizens are welcome.

In addition, she raises concerns about the governmental resort to similar strategies in relation to the control of the public streets. Dr Wakefield comments: "I can understand the appeal of the three centres under study and the reasons why local authorities may seek to emulate their ambience within town centre areas and residential neighbourhoods through anti-social behaviour legislation, by-laws, CCTV surveillance and the expansion of patrol by police or other agencies.

"However, one of the dangers applying to both the shopping centre and the high street contexts is that exclusive, maximum security settings will be engendered by this emphasis on security and control - with, crucially, standards defined by the conservative requirements of the popular majority, thereby closing off access to those seen as disruptive or just unseemly."

She argues that, with a government keen on the rhetoric of 'community safety', this is "likely to provide both opportunities and threats to democratic, accountable policing."

Dr Wakefield reports: "There are opportunities for increased systems integration between the police and local security teams, drawing on private sector tools such as CCTV, with strategic co-ordination of resources carried out between centre managers, police managers and other local agencies through inter-agency forums. The dangers are that such collaborations may focus on the extension of exclusion-based approaches and multi-agency surveillance strategies as a quick-fix alternative to addressing community safety concerns in more depth."

Leicester, University of