Community Crime Prevention: the New Zealand Experience

Abstract

Over the past fourteen years in New Zealand, and in the wake of the radical restructure of both its territory and machinery of state, new local strategies of, and structures for, crime control have emerged, developed, and over time, have become institutionalised. Under the rhetorical banner of partnership, the state has enlisted local communities to take ownership of and responsibility for the identification and resolution of their own local crime and safety problems. In New Zealand the partnership approach and the new strategies and structures for crime prevention, in and by the community, are manifested in a national crime prevention, and more recently crime reduction, strategy and a national network of local safer community councils. The question of how New Zealand came to acquire and import and then develop and institutionalise this new approach represents one of two principal objectives of this thesis. What were the major factors and contexts, particularly political and bureaucratic, that drove and facilitated the adoption of community crime prevention? A significant component of this thesis is thus made up of a 'genealogy' of crime prevention and community safety in New Zealand. Based upon archival material drawn from a number of official and unofficial sources, and beginning with its 'genesis', this thesis traces the lineage of crime prevention and community safety in this country and its often-contingent developmental journey to the present. The second principal objective of the thesis is to capture and document the local experience with the practical application of the key principles and features of the New Zealand 'model'. In broad terms, the thesis explores conceptualisations and applications of 'community', 'crime prevention' and 'community safety' and the local practical experience of both the partnership with Government and its agencies and the local solutions to local problems approach. This thesis argues that the adoption and institutionalisation of the recent, and still unfolding, local strategies and structures for crime prevention, community safety and crime reduction are not a reflection of recent theoretical or conceptual breakthroughs, faithful replications of successful international models or a more general reflection of evidence-based practice and 'what works'. Neither are they neutral, scientific, and hence apolitical, technical fixes for the problem of crime. Rather they should instead be understood primarily as political and bureaucratic strategies that attempt to enrol and devolve responsibility to a broadened cast of crime prevention stakeholders or partners. As such these have been and will continue to be, particularly at the local level, the focus of political struggles centred on the meaning of and control over local strategies of crime prevention. In New Zealand, in common with the international experience, the genesis, development and institutionalisation of crime prevention and community safety, along with their practical applications, need to be located within wider political and bureaucratic frameworks.