The Howard Journal Val 26 No I . Feb 87 ISSN 02655527

Law and Order and the Causes of Crime: Some Police and Public

Per spec tives

SANDRA JONES and MICHAEL LEV1 Sandra Jones is Research Fellow a t the Centre for the Study of Community

and Race Relations, Brunel University Michael Levi is Lecturer in Criminology, Department of Social

Administration, University College, Cardi f f

Abstract: The degree of congruence among the public and between ‘police’ and ‘public’ in attitudes to law and order has been a matter of considerable debate in England and Wales. This article presents some previously unpublished survey data in the context of a general review of research on this topic, and goes on to discuss police and public views about crime causation as a rejlection of ideological ‘domain assumptions’ about the nature of o f f ding. It concludes that although there are broad similarities in perspective between police and public, this homogeneity begins to break down when the data are disaggregated at a local level. I t also questions the revival of a pureb reactive model of policing as an ‘ideal type’for the inner city.

As the ‘official’ agents of order maintenance, crime prevention, and detection, the police are often at the forefront of the political debate about law and order. Much of the concern about the growing influence of the police has focused upon relationships between chief officers, politicians, and the media (Hall 1979; Norton 1984; Pearson 1983; Reiner 1985). However, without denying the significance of these changes, this article will concentrate upon the lower ground in reviewing two aspects of the law and order issue: public and police views about policing; and public and police views about crime causation. The justification for reviewing police-public disparities of views about policing is that they are critical not only to those who advocate greater accountability but also because even the most ‘independent-minded’ police officer would recognise that their existence creates a ‘communications problem’. The justification for analysing views about crime causation is that they reflect the way different sectors of society allocate blame for ‘the crime problem’. Irrespective of the ‘correctness’ of public (or police) opinions about crime causation, the blaming process both is the product of and influences responses to crime.

Ideology and Public Opinion: Use and Misuse

Great rhetorical significance is attached by politicians, criminal justice professionals, and radical activists to the importance of public views in

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justifying particular policies. I t is a fact that both ‘the public’ and ‘the police’ do share a genuine concern about the causes, effects, and treatment of crime, and if we are serious about giving public views a role in influencing policy - rather than simply using them like ‘principles of punishment’, as a mere justificatory device,, to be ‘followed’ when ‘appropriate’ and discredited when inconvenient - then some hard questions have to be asked about the conditions under which ‘public opinion’ is to be treated as meaningful.

Many on the left argue that the ‘law and order crisis’ is an artefact of the ‘need’ of capitalism to manage an increasingly disaffected series of ‘deviant populations’. Lea and Young (1984) argue that we ought to take public concern about crime seriously, but they share the view that the manipulation of public opinion is an important part of official responses to the legitimation crisis. Yet although this perspective may overestimate the malleability of public views, it is hard to see some surveys of public opinion as anything more than a reflection of media-inspired folk wisdoms. For example, it is fascinating to note the results of a nationwide Gallup Poll conducted after the 1985 riots, which found that a staggering 67% of the public (compared with 30% after the 1981 riots) considered the use of drugs to be ‘very important’ (rather than ‘fairly’ or ‘of little importance’) as a cause of crime and violence (The D a i l y Telegraph, 23 October 1985). Racial conflict, too, went up in the causation stakes. O n the other hand, the same poll found unemployment, bad parental example, media coverage, general sex and violence on screen, and trouble in Ireland, to be less important than in 1981. Where do these views come from? What purpose do they serve? What value do they have?

Levels of Analysis and Problems of Interpretation

It is here that we encounter some of the fundamental problems in levels of analysis and interpretation. One problem with these surveys - apart from the wording of some of the questions - is that we are presented simply with a global national snapshot. Any differences by geographical area or by housing group are seldom revealed or discussed. The Merseyside Crime Survey (Kinsey 1985), whilst raising (in our minds) several issues about the purpose and interpretation of survey data, shows how vital and useful it is to supplement broad canvas surveys with small area comparisons, particularly if one wishes to take operational decisions on the basis of surveys.’ Furthermore, in the light of the criminological and policy significance of interaction between police and public, i t is important to explore in a more refined manner differences both between police and public and within ‘the police’ and ‘the public’, to guard against an over-coherent (and metropolitan) perspective. This point is most readily accepted in the case of ‘within public’ differences and some of these are becoming standard ‘facts’ in the burgeoning literature on police- public relations. There is growing acceptance, too, except among the dedicated stereotypers of policing, that the police service is a composite organisation within which various roles may ascribe different priorities,

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which in turn may be underpinned by divergent attitudes and philos- ophies (Punch 1985; Reiner 1985). However, at both the global and local level, there is a relative dearth of information available about the respective views of police and public.

The value of disaggregated analysis at the local level is demonstrated by our work on judgments of crime seriousness in England and Wales. The police - who were more homogeneous than the public, as may be seen from their lower standard deviation figures - rated more highly than the public all the violent offences, theft by a police office, and burglary. However, their ratings were lower than the public for all the fraud offences (including social security fraud), as well as for offences of bag-snatching, reckless driving leading to property damage, marijuana sale, and under- age sex. As regards the relative rank ordering of offences, the police were similar to the public, except that they ranked burglary much higher and the fraud offences a little lower in the offence seriousness stakes. The implications of these differences have been discussed elsewhere (Levi and Jones 1985).

In this article, we examine police and public views about law and order and about crime causation, to see just how much consensus exists both within and between ‘the public’ and ‘the police’, and to compare these views with the sorts of assertions commonly made about the state of public opinion. From this point of view, our own work is interesting not only because it took place in a Northern and Southern force area, mainly just prior to the 1981 riots - though we do not consider the survey to have been a ‘very important’ cause of these riots! - but also because we can compare police and public views at that time.

We do not claim that attitude research by survey method is the onb meaningful way of exploring issues of police-public relations: on the contrary, the ethnographic work of Chatterton (1976, 1983), the Policy Studies Institute (1983) and Southgate (1986), as well as the earlier work on police-public encounters in the United States such as that by Piliavin and Briar (1964), is critical in helping us understand how police-public relations unfold rather than simply taking them as given. Our research team did include police officers from the two forces (who interviewed the police), and we were careful to explore public sentiments ‘on the ground’ during the piloting of the extensive questionnaire. However, we are convinced that locally-based survey data are illuminating in their own right, and are particularly useful in complementing and in helping to validate ethnographic interpretations. Provided that the interpretation of data takes account of the limitations of survey technique - as ours seeks to do - given the labour intensiveness of ethnography, the more usual economic arguments about the benefits of sample surveys apply.

The research on which this article is based focused primarily on the relationship between the public and their Local police, though it was concerned also with factors such as (i) public usage and expectations of, and demands for, police services, and (ii) public and police perceptions of crime and policing in general. Our sample consisted of 960 members of the public aged 14 and upwards, (in inner-city, small town, and semi-

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rural areas), drawn on an area household basis, and 372 police officers drawn at random from the same territorial divisions and representative of all ranks up to superintendent (Jones and Levi 1983a). Our choice of geographical locations allowed for a wide spread of public and police experiences of both crime and policing. An interesting point of difference in our choice of areas to survey was not only the degree of urbanisation but also the policing style adopted by the chief officers of the two forces. This allowed us to explore the relationship between the level of proactivity in police-community contacts and the congruence of attitudes, the most obvious hypothesis being that greater proactive contact is associated with greater accuracy in police estimates of public anxieties and opinions about policing issues.

Following a series of unstructured preliminary interviews with members of the public and the police, an interviewer-administered questionnaire was designed and piloted on a sample of 200 public and 50 police. The final questionnaire included a mixture of attitudinal state- ments about crime and policing (as measured by Likert scales); and both closed and open-ended questions about levels of contact, service expecta- tions, and policy preferences. Our questionnaire was similar in many respects to that used subsequently by Kinsey (1985) and some of the data from it are discussed in Jones and Levi (1983b) and in Levi and Jones ( 1985).

Law and Order, General Anxiety, and Personal Safety

We first asked both groups about three general statements on law and order, one of which was similar to that used in the first British Crime Survey (Hough and Mayhew 1983, p. 23) as an assessment of ‘fear of crime’. These generated some interesting comparisons. To the proposition that ‘there is a general decline in moral standards these days’, public and police responses were almost identical: 80% of the public and 82% of the police agreed. So though there was a tendency for the northern public and police to hold this view more strongly than their southern counterparts and for agreement to increase with age, the familiar Golden Age-ism that underlies much of the crime and the anti-permissiveness debate (taken up most recently by Norman Tebbit in his 1985 Disraeli Lecture) is an almost universal perspective, shared by police and public alike.

However, when the questions become more concrete, massive police- public disparities begin to appear. For example, almost half (48%) of the southern and two-thirds of the northern public agree that ‘there is a near breakdown of law and order in this country’ - a difference which, though not statistically significant, may be related to the degree of urbanisation - compared with only 15% of the southern and 17% of the northern police forces. What is interesting is not so much the strength of public sentiment - the survey was after all conducted at about the time of the 1981 riots, when public disorder was hardly a myth invented by the right to justify tough policing - but the difference - significant at the 0.001 level - between police and public perceptions of breakdown. To highlight these,

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we should note the results of our pilot survey, conducted a year earlier in an urban western police force area. This found a less pronounced but similar sort of difference, with 35% of the public but only 12% of the police agreed that there is a near breakdown of law and order. Taken as a whole, the data suggest that the public are susceptible to changes - real or mythological - in public order problems, whereas the police take a far less apocalyptic position regardless of any such variations in their environ- ment.

Similarly, in response to the proposition that ‘it is not safe to walk the streets at night around here’, there were large police-public differences. In the south, 42% of the public but only 7% of the police agreed with the proposition (significant at the 0.001 level). In the northern area - where one of the riots occurred - 5 1 ‘/o of the public but 3 1 ‘/o of the police officers felt this way, again a difference significant at the 0.001 level. Clearly, there are significant differences within public (at the 0.01 level) and within police (at the 0.001 level) between the two force areas. (The inter-police regional difference on this issue only resulted from the inner-city police being as willing as the public there to state that their area was unsafe). In short, there was a generally high level of anxiety among the public in both force areas which was nowhere near matched by police views in either area.

In general, perceptions of social breakdown and unsafety were related positively to the degree of urbanisation, with one important exception: more people (70%) in the northern small town than in the nearby disturbed inner city area (6lY0) agreed that law and order had nearly broken down. Perhaps being on the sidelines’and within earshot of public disorder is more anxiety-provoking than being in the eye of the storm: there is an analogy here with survey findings of disparities - though the rank ordering of beliefs is often correct - between actual victimisation levels, on the one hand, and fear of crime and perceptions of crime prevalence and crime seriousness, on the other (Hough and Mayhew 1983, 1985; Maxfield 1984). The findings of the Merseyside Crime Survey (Kinsey 1985), based as they are upon even smaller housing group comparisons, serve to emphasise these points about local variability and urbanisation.

As we indicated earlier, some global ‘conventional wisdoms’ are beginning to emerge from criminological surveys. These include the lack of support for the police from certain groups, most notably young males (Belson 1975; Jones and Levi 1983b; P. S. I. 1983) and some minority ethnic groups (Tuck and Southgate 1981; P. S. I. 1983); the relationship between degree of support for the police and age, gender, and occupa- tional group (Belson 1975; Garafalo 1976; Jones and Levi 1983a; P. S. I. 1983), with older people, women, and those of higher social status being more supportive. Similarly, the fear of crime is higher among older groups and women (Hough and Mayhew 1983, 1985; Kinsey 1985; Maxfield 1984). Our study, too, found older people were more prone to subscribe to the imagery of incipient social chaos with, for example, 60% of those aged 55 years and over, compared with 35% of 14-24 year olds, believing that it is not safe to walk the streets at night. However, an adequate

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understanding of the anxieties of communities requires a more sophisti- cated and localised level of analysis. So although it is undoubtedly the case that anxiety about crime - on behalf of oneself and others - is a widespread phenomenon, any given area will contain a large range of public views and experiences. I t may be that housing type will prove just as modest a predictor of anxieties about crime as architectural deter- minism in the form of ‘defensible space’ has been of vandalism, but certainly, ACORN housing type‘ and specific locality seem to have taken root among the more heavily ringed oaks of gender and age.

Further dimensions are suggested by the evidence of disparity between police and public views, both within and across locations. Whilst it may be the case that as ‘law and order professionals’, the police might be expected to have a more realistic view about the degree of risk or safety than the public, one is bound to wonder how accurate the police are at assessing these levels of risk. Perhaps the police may want to tell others that they are the thin blue line keeping chaos at bay, while wanting to believe themselves that crime is not that bad? Perhaps, too, except for the few who get involved in local crime analysis, their new amuent suburbanisation may estrange them further and make them ignorant of the levels and fears of crime in particular areas where they have little ‘proactive’ public contact? Unfortunately, we are unable to provide any definitive answer to these speculations, in accounting for disparities in levels of agreement either on the breakdown of law and order ‘in this country’ or on local safety. The inter-area rank order of both public and police perceptions of safety ‘around here’ did correspond to variations in crime rates; and the high-crime inner-city area was the only one in which the police did not make a significantly lower estimate of the degree of unsafety. But this does not enable us to assess whether any of these responses were ‘correct’. Indeed, we are not sure whether, except in very high and low crime areas, a question about how safe it is to walk the streets at night around here is capable of having a ‘correct’ answer. What would count objectively as ‘safe’?

I t is here that we return to the question of interpretation and the use of this kind of material. Hough and Mayhew (1983, p. 27) suggest that the way forward is ‘improving the quality of information’ (or, in police parlance, ‘educating the public’), thereby reducing public anxieties. Better communication should produce more congruence between police and public perceptions - something we found in other areas of our survey, where the police in ‘community policing’ areas were better at estimating public satisfaction with them than were the police in other areas UOnes and Levi 398310) - but it will not necessarily reduce public anxiety. Our findings confirm those of other studies (for example Kinsey 1985, p. 40) that in areas of low crime, beliefs about the prevalence of crime are quite out of proportion to the real risks of crime. This may be the case even if those who take crime-avoiding measures cease to do so. In this sense, information campaigns may be beneficial, though as in arguments over releasing the ‘dangerous offender’, who will take the responsibility for reas- suring the public that there is little to worry about? However, in some inner-

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city areas, levels of crime are extremely high, and for the police (or anyone else) to try a ‘tell the truth’ campaign with the aim of reassuring the public might well be seen - not unfairly - as an example of the police being out of touch with reality (see also MacClean, Cowell and Young 1986).

The solution preferred by Kinsey (1985) and MacClean, et ul. (1986) is not so much better police-public communication but rather more efficient, reactiue policing. ‘The premises upon which this is based are that:

(i) what the public want is better protection from crime; (ii) detection and consequent deterrence are achievable by such reactive policing; and (iii) these are the most likely means of reducing anxiety (at least in high crime areas, for the self-proclaimed ‘Left Realists’ such as Kinsey and Lea and Young surely do not want this to apply to lower crime areas?).

However, whereas it may be the case that some police officers use ‘community relations’ - self-consciously or not - as a substitute rationale to hide their ineffectiveness in fighting crime, there is a certain crudity in the bi-polar models of crime versus service policing implicit in the ‘Left Realist’ analysis, which may be a reflection of the ‘hidden agenda’ preference for a narrower and less politically intrusive police role. Whether the ill-spelled-out sort of reactive policing they envisage will be able to deliver the crime-control goods seems doubtful.

There is a certain irony in the fact that whatever the ideological differences between the ‘Left Realists’ and the police, their prescriptions for crime reduction are based on the same ‘thief-taking deters and incapacitates’ model favoured by most front-line police officers. Whatever happened to the view that ‘proactive’ contact between police and public was the only method by which the police could perform their law- enforcement role effectively? Or to the finding that thoughtful and concerned conduct by police in their interaction with members of the public rather than their crime-fighting ability was a prime reason for satisfaction with the police (Jones and Levi 1983b)? We agree that clearing up crime ought to be (and is) a central police objective - specialised social and community workers are a lot cheaper! - but the revival of principally reactive goals of policing may turn out to be own- goals in terms of both the actual protection the public receive and the satisfaction victims obtain from their contacts with the police.

We are suggesting that preference for ‘reactive’ and ‘proactive’ policing depends not only on broader ideological perspectives but also on how they are carried into effect. Thus, in our inner-city area where relations with the police were disastrous, the policing style was predominantly fire- brigade: the public were reluctant to use anything but the emergency and the law-enforcement services of the police; while almost the only contacts initiated by the police themselves were law-enforcement oriented ones of an adversarial nature. Furthermore, the police professional self-image was derived almost exclusively from their crime-busting role and they had a very poor idea of public feelings or the reasons for public satisfaction and

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dissatisfaction with them. As with Kinsey’s sample of Merseyside police officers, no doubt the inner-city officers we interviewed would have felt that ‘service work does not fall within their domain of competence’ (Kinsey 1985, p. 65). But though it should be emphasised that the policing of the area at that time lacked any discernible significant dimension of consultation, still less accountability, neither we nor the people who lived in the areas were over-enthusiastic about this type of reactive, law-enforcement policing. (The question of whether greater accountability would lead to safeguarding of civil rights is gone into elsewhere: Levi 1985).

So a static one-shot approach to survey research would reveal an alliance between the police and the public in high crime areas over their objectives, both wanting crime to be the central police orientation but neither knowing how i t can be reduced or, for that matter, how in practical terms the clear-up rate can be improved without engaging in a style of policing that provokes riots. I t is hardly surprising that the police blame the public, the public blame the police (along with drugs and decline of family life, etc.) and this intensifies the reactive nature of policing and the pressures on the police to ‘get tough’ with target groups of ‘the public’. As a reverse image of the proactively policed citizens in Orwell’s (1949) Nineteen Eighty-Four there is a danger that police and public alike may become so trapped in a reactive, law-enforcement mode that what they are currently doing becomes the only vision of policing of which they can conceive. In other words, current practice resocialises police and public alike: like a cultural word-processing package, what you see is what you get is what you want!

Perceptions of the Causes of Crime

If people within whose direct or indirect experience crime often lies do not have accurate perceptions of safety and levels of crime, crime causation is an area where one would not expect very much expert knowledge, either among the public or the police. After all, criminologists have enough problems in agreeing on what counts as knowledge! Nevertheless, beliefs about aetiology are interesting as a guide to prevailing ideologies (including tender or tough-mindedness), and because of their implications for different ways of reacting to crime. On the ideological front, views about crime causation measure and refine notions about the extent to which ‘authoritarian populism’ has penetrated public and police views about the blameworthiness of ‘criminals’ as contrasted with particular features of their social and economic environment which might mitigate such individualised blame. On the policy front, the view that deprivation of parental affection is a major cause of delinquency would dictate a different set of solutions from the view that it is caused by inherent wickedness or poverty. Moreover, the general lack of success of diversionary initiatives in juvenile (and adult) justice may owe something to the feeling of front-line police (as well as magistrates) that the welfare/ labelling approach is based on a misguided conception of crime causation

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(or ‘human nature’). Punishments based on retributivist grounds pre- sumably should be lighter if personal blameworthiness is less.

In a modest attempt to tap these issues, we asked both police and public to select from a pre-piloted list of twelve those three factors which they felt were most important as causes of crime. The range was an attempt to translate criminological theories into more popular terms of discourse. Again, we were concerned to examine ‘within group’ and ‘between group’ differences and similarities in this ‘Top of the Criminological Pops’ rather than to arrive at a ‘correct’ multifactorial theory: democratic theory has its limits, at least for us.

Among the public, the most favoured causes were ‘lack of discipline in the home’ (57%), ‘unemployment’ (51 YO), and ‘boredom because there isn’t enough to do’ (37%). So although parental laxity came top of the list - confirming many criminological accounts of within-group variations in the propensity to crime - the critics of government policy do not go away empty-handed (though in the light of the low rating of opportunity theory, it seems likely that this is less radicalism than a reflection of the view that ‘the devil makes work for idle hands’). For both police and public in each area and overall, the correlation in the rank order of causes was very high (significant at the 0.01 level), but there was more consistency in the choices made by the police samples (rs = 0.98) and the public samples (rs = 0.88) in the two force areas than between the police and the public in either area.

The reason for this appears to be that the police attached different weight to some of the causal factors. Thus, almost 81% of the police (compared with 57% of the public) attribute crime to ‘lack of discipline in the home’. Their next most favoured theory was ‘lack of discipline in schools’, which came only sixth highest among the public: 40% of the police and 27% of the public gave it their vote. There is no doubt of the police view that defective socialisation is the critical variable in crime causation. At the other end of the scale, Lombroso and Eysenck receive the thumbs down from both police and public, though 10% of the former and 5% of the latter think that ‘some people are born criminals’ is one of the top three causes of crime. (We did not ask them who they had in mind!). Rather interesting is the fact that more police think that being born criminal is important than think ‘not enough opportunities in life’ is important. Despite the generally low support for the impact of blocked opportunities, there is much greater belief in the criminogenic effects of consumer capitalism: 16% of the public and 21% of the police think ‘living in a selfish and materialistic society’ to be significant. If the heredity strain in Eysenck lacks credibility, so does the caring social work welfare ethos: only 12% of public and police respectively think that ‘not enough love and attention’ is important as a cause of crime. The three causes that received the least support from both police and public were ‘not enough opportunities in life’, ‘people and police treat you like criminals if you come from an area with a bad reputation’, and ‘some people are born criminals’.

The police did share the public’s concern about unemployment, but

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Table 1

Public and Police Rank Orders of the Causes of Crime in the Separate Survey Analysis

Causes of Crime Southern Southern Southern Northern Northern ‘Soft City’ ‘Medium Semi-Rural Small Town Inner-City

Hard C i o ’ ~ ~ ~~~

Rank order Rank order Rank order Rank order Rank order Public Police Public Police Public Police Public Police Public Police

I.ack of discipline in thc homc l I I 1 1 1 1 l 2 1

Bad influcnccs from films, ncws- papers and telc- vision 4 6 5 8 4 1 0 6 9 4 = Y

Thc courts arc too lenient 6 5 4 4 5 6 4 5 7 2

Not cnough oppor- tunitics in lifc 10 I l = 10 I I 10 I I 10 I I 6 1u=

Uncmploymcnt 2 3 2 2 2 2 2 2 1 3 =

Borcdom becausc thcrc is not cnough to do 3 8 3 6 = 3 7 3 7 3 6 =

Not cnough love and attcntion 8 9 9 9 = 8 = 9 8 8 1 0 = 8

Lack ofdiscipline in s c b l s 5 2 6 5 6 4 5 3 = 4 = 3 =

Pcoplc and police trcat you likc a criminal ifyou comc from an area with a bad rcputa- tion 11 11= 12 12 12 12 1 1 12 8 12

Influcnccd by people who arc criminals’ 9 4 8 3 8= 4 9 3 = 1 0 = 5

Living in a selfish and materialistic society 7 7 7 6 = 7 4 7 6 9 6 =

~ ~~ ~~ ~~~ ~ ~~ -

Some pcoplc arc born criminals 12 10 1 1 9= 1 1 8 12 10 12 10

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that was their sole concession to tender-mindedness, for next on their aetiological hit-list came the leniency of the courts, which also was viewed as quite important by the public. Hough and Moxon (1985) and Hough and Mayhew (1985) suggest that public demands for ‘tougher sentencing’ may result mainly from public underestimation of actual levels of sentencing. Could this not be equally true of the police, with their folk culture about lack of support from the courts? Interestingly, in the light of current concerns about violence in the media, the public accorded bad influences from this source - not necessarily restricted to violence - much greater significance than did the police. (We did not ask them about the media contribution to distorting their views about crime causation!). On the other hand, the police were much more likely than the public to think contamination by bad company to be important. This is consistent with what one might term the ‘C. I. D. mentality’, whereby we could get rid of ‘crime’ if only we could ensure that the ‘law abiding majority’ were not at risk of coming into contact with ‘criminals’. Given the incidence of criminal convictions, let alone self-reported criminality, among the under- 30s (Central Statistical Office 1986), the courts would have to become very tough indeed to achieve this aim!

The biggest difference between police and public choices occurred in the inner-city area (rs = 0.46). Some interesting ‘within-public’ differences from the other localities sampled were also apparent (see Table I ) . Thus - well before the Scarman analysis - amongst inner-city dwellers, ‘unem- ployment’ was the first choice and ‘not enough opportunities in life’ was ranked sixth (compared with eleventh by the public in all areas combined). The inner-city residents did not downplay the significance of lack of discipline in home and school: indeed, they ranked the latter higher than residents in other areas. However, they considered the leniency of the courts and the influence of people who are criminals to be much less important, and stigma because of one’s area of residence to be much mare important than did either the police in their own area or the public and police in all areas. For them, crime was as much the result of their being ‘victims of circumstance’ as it was the result of the ‘indiscipline’ factors given prominence by politicians and the media and echoed by residents in more amuent and lower-crime areas.

Whether there is any greater foundation for this stigmatisation view in the inner-city than elsewhere, it certainly reflected its image (documented elsewhere: see Jones and Levi 1983) as an aggressively policed deviant ghetto, many of whose problems were seen as the creation of generalised ‘others’. In the light of their subscription to the deterrence model, the unwillingness of the police in any area to give significant support to the ‘labelling’ view that police and public stigma may intensify crime may not be surprising. However, it provides an interesting contrast with ethno- graphic studies of police-juvenile encounters, with the police focus upon ‘symbolic locations’, and with the now notorious (and possibly regretted) advice of the former Deputy Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police (Powis 1977) that:

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who is to say that an apparently unsuccessful stop is not a crime prevented? Real effort will give your police area the reputation that it is a hot place. . . activity by uniformed officers by speaking to loiterers and suspicious persons is what is required to reduce the incidence of serious crime. (p. 104)

Conclusions

The data presented here - like all data - are limited by the purpose for which they were collated: in this case, by the confines of a survey designed to collect views on a large variety of policing topics. Existing public attitudes may be regarded as a suitable case for correction rather than as opinions that deserve to be translated straight into action: there are few who are so populist as to believe consistently in conducting criminal policy by opinion poll. We have been unable to explore the way in which these views about law and order and crime causation were formed or about the relative salience of different factors in their manufacture (see Council of Europe 198 1). However, whatever one’s preferences regarding ‘What Is To Be Done’, it is our contention that the analysis of disaggregated data is an important supplement to the nationwide British Crime Surveys in evaluating the truth of claims about the opinions of that mysterious collectivity often referred to as ‘the public’ by police and politicians seeking sanctification for their policies. Such data from local surveys are (or should be) valuable also in making us think more self- critically about conventional wisdoms such as the view that greater police accountability to the local public - whoever and whatever that is! - will lead necessarily to less harassment of youths on the streets (or, to put it another way, to the creation of ‘lawless areas’ because the working-class/ ethnic public are tolerant of crime). Wishful thinking should be tested, however uncomfortable the results.

Even within the limitations of our method, we are able to begin constructing hypotheses regarding local variations. There were great disparities in the levels of agreement about the safety of the streets - though insofar as the question was specific enough to relate to the incidence of crime, the public overpredicted risk - but public and police views roughly corresponded to the rank order of ‘safety’ between the different areas we surveyed. Nostalgia, in the form of perceptions of the decline in moral standards these days, appeared to be a cultural universal among the public, though there were great variations among the police on this issue. As in the crime seriousness survey (Levi and Jones 1985), the police were more homogeneous than the public in their rankings of what causes crime, but the inner-city police ranked the leniency of the courts second: higher than did their colleagues in other areas. So the police generally, and the inner-city police a fortiori, tend to espouse a view of crime causation consistent with the notion of the thin blue line (or, in the inner-city case, a Maginot line!) struggling to protect society from the , consequences of its permissiveness. Crime, for them, may be likened to a socio-pathological condition which calls for a cure by a combination of Skinnerian sanctions in the form of discipline and deterrence. Life

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opportunities (other than employment as a crime incapacitation and social training device), the absence of love and attention, and social stigma are viewed as being comparatively unimportant factors in the creation of the crime problem. This is true for police and public alike, even in the inner city. The plea of the juvenile delinquent in ‘West Side Story’ - that ‘I’m depraved on account of I’m deprived’ - finds few echoes among popular or police sentiments. A harsh, pragmatic world indeed and, with the exception of the causal significance attached to unemploy- ment, there seems to be more political mileage in this anti-permissive message for the Conservative party than those who would prefer to see a more empathetic and generous attitude to criminal^.^

Notes

An analogous point might be made also about some American - though not, in our view, British - crime seriousness surveys: Miethe (1984), notes that surveys which find social consensus about crime seriousness on the basis of crime examples dominated by items of high and low seriouesness may overstate consensus, because it is in areas of medium seriousness that there is greatest disagreement. This is an important qualification, and should make us look more carefully at assertions of support for ‘the law’ and for existing punishment levels. (For some thoughts on the latter, see Hough and Moxon 1985: it would be interesting to examine local and class-related variations in the relationship between actual, desired, and expected punishments). ACORN stands for ‘A Classification of Residential Neighbourhoods’. It is a system of classifying households according to the demographic, employment, and housing characteristics of their immediate area. The principle on which this is based is that people who live in the same neighbourhood generally share characteristics of class, income, and lifestyle. This is considered to be a more sensitive composite measure than the Registrar-General’s classification of socio-economic status. The authors would like to thank the Home Office and the two police forces for funding the research on which this article is based.

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