the late twentieth century.23 Blair’s speeches have encapsulated this:
Looking back, of all the public services in 1997, the one that was most unfit
for purpose was the criminal justice system . . . there was a resigned tolerance of failure, a culture of fragmentation and an absence of any sense of
forward purpose . . . We halved the time to bring persistent juvenile
offenders to justice. We introduced the first testing and treatment orders
for drug offenders. We introduced and implemented a radical strategy on
burglary and car crime which cut both dramatically. We toughened the
law. As a result, on the statistics we are the first Government since the war
to have crime lower than when we took office . . . Building on these foundations, we started to become a lot more radical in our thinking. We introduced the first legislation specifically geared to Anti-Social Behaviour. We
asked the police what powers they wanted and gave them to them . . . We
have introduced mandatory drug testing . . . We have established the first
DNA database . . . a new framework for sentencing. Probation and prisons
are to be run under one service. Community penalties are being radically
re-structured. And we have 12,500 more police than in 1997.24
High-crime society normalised
Popular culture and routine activities have become increasingly focused
on crime risks and the perception that we live in a ‘high-crime society’.25
22 Speech launching the Home Office Five-Year Strategy for Criminal Justice, 19 July 2004, at:
www.number-10.gov.uk/output/page6129.asp.
23 Franklin Zimring, The Great American Crime Decline (New York: Oxford University Press,
2007), ch. 2.
24 Speech launching the Home Office Five-Year Strategy for Criminal Justice.
25 David Garland, The Culture of Control (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 161–3.
Crime concerns have penetrated everyday life,26 paradoxically enhancing
fear rather than security.
The home owner who sets her alarm each time she leaves the house is constantly reminded of the possibility of burglary during her absence.
Likewise the ubiquitous signs warning that . . . CCTV cameras are in operation, or guards patrolling are akin to anxiety makers advertising the risks
of crime at every turn . . . The more provision for security is made, the
more people regard as normal or necessary, and the greater their anxiety
when it is not available.27
Backing the bobbies
Despite the many scandals that have beset them, and survey evidence
about declining public trust, the police remain a bedrock mantra of security,28 and all parties have to support and strengthen them to demonstrate
their tough-on-crime credentials. There has been a remorseless growth of
police powers, without corresponding safeguards, the Human Rights Act
of 1998 constituting the only – increasingly beleaguered – balance. New
powers to intercept communications, conduct covert operations, stop
and search and arrest, and new public order offences were created in the
early years of New Labour by the Police Act 1997, the Crime and Disorder
Act 1998, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, the Terrorism
Act 2000, and the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 2001. In 2002 the
Home Office conducted a review of PACE, to provide a ‘useful tool supporting the police and providing them with the powers they need to
combat crime’. Accordingly safeguards for suspects have been eroded.
The Criminal Justice Act 2003 authorised detention for thirty-six hours
for all (not just ‘serious’) arrestable offences, and added criminal damage
to the possible grounds for stop and search. The Serious Organised Crime
and Police Act 2005 created a power of arrest for all offences, enhanced
powers of search and fingerprinting, and allowed for civilian custody
officers, overturning the PACE requirement that they should normally be
police sergeants. In Blair’s last month as Prime Minister new proposals
have been floated to create a power for police to stop and question
26 Jonathan Simon, Governing Through Crime (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
27 Lucia Zedner, ‘Too Much Security?’, International Journal of the Sociology of Law, 31(1),
2003: 165.
28 Robert Reiner, The Politics of the Police, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000),
chs. 2 and 7; Ian Loader and Aoghan Mulcahy, Policing and the Condition of England
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
anyone, without any requirement of ‘reasonable suspicion’.29 The pressures on the police to achieve results have intensified in the new crime
control climate, and they are armed with new powers unfettered by safeguards. This reduces the legal accountability of the police, despite the
enhancement of the complaints process represented by the Independent
Police Complaints Commission that became operational in 2004.
Serious and organised crime control
In common with other governments around the world, New Labour has
been concerned about a perceived growing threat of serious and organised crime, seen increasingly as linked with terrorism, although the definition, measurement and character of organised crime remains elusive and
controversial.30 This has been a major stimulus to police reorganisation,
accentuating a long-standing trend towards the centralisation of core
detective functions. The main measure has been the creation of the
Serious and Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) by the Serious Organised
Crime and Policing Act 2005. The Agency, established initially with 4,200
staff, amalgamated the functions of the earlier National Criminal
Intelligence Service (NCIS) and National Crime Squad (NCS), together
with the investigative branches of the Immigration Service and HM
Customs and Excise (now the Revenue and Customs Service), arguably
representing ‘a paradigm shift in British policing’.31 SOCA has a number
of other important characteristics that set it apart from the main UK constabularies. SOCA’s first director-general was drawn from the police
service, having previously led the NCS, but the first chair of the SOCA
board, Sir Stephen Lander, was ex-Director-General of MI5, indicating
the emergence of a hybrid agency, working as a policing body but specialising in covert and intelligence-gathering activity. SOCA will have officers
permanently stationed abroad working with and within intelligence
agencies in other jurisdictions, and will include investigators from other
UK agencies. SOCA is a non-departmental public body, not a police force,
and its staff are civilians not police officers, although they have considerable designated powers. As an NDPB (non-departmental public body) it
29 ‘Minister’s Plan for New Stop-And-Question Powers Takes Senior Officers by Surprise’,
The Guardian, 28 May 2007, p. 4.
30 Michael Levi, ‘Organised Crime and Terrorism’, in Maguire et al., The Oxford Handbook of
Criminology.
31 Clive Harfield, ‘SOCA: A Paradigm Shift in British Policing’, British Journal of
Criminology, 46(4), 2006: 743–61.
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is governed by a board with a majority of non-executive members and,
unlike the majority of police forces, is answerable directly to the Home
Secretary rather than to a police authority. It thus consolidates the trend
towards increasing central control of policing at the expense of the local
authority element of the traditional tripartite accountability structure, as
well as the growing populism of policy-making – ‘public concern’ about
issues will be ascertained by analysing ‘the amount of column inches in
the press’.32 These centralising and pluralising trends are evident in relation to policing generally, encapsulated above all in the 2002 Police
Reform Act, and the (as yet abortive) amalgamation programme.33
New times, new crimes
New Labour has been repeatedly jolted into new ‘tough’ laws and initiatives
by media-driven moral panics, and since 2001 – and a fortiori 2005 – the
threat of terrorism. Michael Tonry has documented no less than thirtythree such get-tough-on-crime initiatives announced between June 2001
and May 2003 alone, with thirteen ‘crime summits’between 1999 and 2003.34
So far has New Labour gone in prioritising ‘tough on crime’ over
‘tough on the causes of crime’ – let alone civil liberties – that in recent
years the Conservatives have (perhaps opportunistically) resurrected
some Old Labour nostrums. During the 2005 general election, for
example, they pledged to reinvigorate local police accountability with
elected police commissioners – reversing the party’s 1980s positions. In
the 2005 parliamentary debate on government proposals to allow ninety
days’ detention for terror suspects, the Conservatives joined with Labour
rebels to defeat the measures on civil liberties grounds, arguing they
undermined ‘Britain’s freedoms’.35 They also criticised Labour for politicising the police by encouraging the Metropolitan Commissioner, Ian
Blair, and other chief officers to lobby in support of the government proposals – a remarkable switchover of positions from the 1980s. Since
David Cameron became Conservative leader this political cross-dressing
has become even more marked, with Cameron repeatedly emphasising
the social roots of crime – above all in his keynote ‘hug a hoodie’ speech,36
32 Sir Stephen Lander, Chair of SOCA, interview in The Independent, 10 January 2005, p. 29.
33 Tim Newburn and Robert Reiner, ‘Policing and the Police’, in Maguire et al., The Oxford
Handbook of Criminology.
34 Michael Tonry, Punishment and Politics (Cullompton: Willan, 2004), pp. 41–7.
35 ‘Blair Defeated on Terror Bill’, The Guardian, 9 November 2005.
36 ‘Show More Understanding of Hoodies, Urges Cameron’, The Guardian, 10 July 2006.
though he has more recently sought to distance himself from that
sentiment.37
‘Tough, with immediate bite’: criminal justice policy-making
Criminal justice policy-making under Blair has had a number of hallmarks. First, and very much in contrast with ‘Old’ Labour policy, the
overriding tendency has been to define deviance up. Second, there has
been a profound shift in which the centre of government – No. 10, the
Cabinet Office and special advisers – has become increasingly important
in the framing of policy. Finally, crime has been used – almost more
than any other public policy issue – as a means of constructing and managing the image of government generally, and the Prime Minister more
particularly.
Defining deviancy up?
In 1993, New York Senator Daniel Moynihan published an influential
report in which he talked of ‘defining deviancy down’:38 rising crime and
deviance led to such behaviour being generally viewed as ‘normal’, so
that the public (and police) had become overly tolerant of previously
unacceptable forms of conduct. Despite Margaret Thatcher’s hard-line
rhetoric, the criminal justice policies pursued by her Home Secretaries
had been something of a phoney war, certainly compared to New
Labour’s crime policy, which has defined deviancy up since 1997 (a trend
already under way with the Major government’s reaction to Blair’s post1993 seizure of the toughness agenda).39
This can be seen in the sheer weight of criminal justice legislation since
1997. Ignoring laws containing crime-related provisions but primarily
aimed at other matters, there were well over forty major Acts of
Parliament on criminal justice and penal policy between 1997 and 2006.
It has been estimated that more than 3,000 new criminal offences have
been created since 1997, one for every day the Blair government has been
in power.40
37 ‘Don’t Hug a Hoodie, Says Cameron’, BBC News 17 May 2007, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/
uk_politics/6665017.stm (accessed 20 May 2007).
38 Daniel Patrick Moynihan, ‘Defining Deviancy Down: How We’ve Become Accustomed to
Alarming Levels of Crime and Destructive Behaviour’, American Scholar, 62(Winter),
1993: 17–30.
39 Reiner, Law and Order, pp. 129–39.
40 Nigel Morris, ‘Blair’s “Frenzied Law-Making” ’, The Independent, 16 August 2006.
Defining deviancy up is also visible in the criminalisation of social
policy. Matters previously defined as ‘social problems’ are defined as
‘crime problems’, and crime prevention or reduction becomes a central,
sometimes overriding, goal of social policy.41 This is perhaps most visible
in the areas of asylum and immigration, where government policy is now
inextricably tied to crime and security. Similar observations, however,
might be made about housing, education and welfare policy, each of
which is increasingly permeated by crime control concerns. Thus, a
central goal of local government and housing policy is now the creation
of ‘safe and sustainable communities’42 and a core aim of education
policy has become the reduction of failure in adult life as indicated by
such risk factors as repeat offending and drug use.43
New Labour’s most substantial policy developments in this regard are
what have become known as its anti-social behaviour and Respect
agendas. From his earliest days as Shadow Home Secretary Blair appeared
convinced that tackling ‘incivilities’ as well as crime should be a core government responsibility, much influenced by James Q. Wilson and George
Kelling’s ‘Broken Windows’ arguments.44 In 1997, in response to a question about his view of zero tolerance by the editor of the Big Issue, Blair
said, ‘It is important that you say we don’t tolerate the small crimes. It
says you don’t tolerate the graffiti on the wall . . . Obviously, some people
will interpret this in a way which is harsh and unpleasant, but I think the
basic principle is here to say: yes it is right to be intolerant of people
homeless on the streets.’45
It was New Labour’s initial flagship law-and-order legislation – the
1998 Crime and Disorder Act – which introduced ASBOs. Their reach
has subsequently been extended by the Criminal Justice
and Police Act
2001, the Police Reform Act 2002 and, crucially, by the Anti-Social
Behaviour Act 2003, adding substantially to the powers available to the
courts, the police and local authorities. The establishment of an AntiSocial Behaviour Unit and a ‘Respect Task Force’ under the direction of
the outspoken Louise Casey – previously the government’s ‘homelessness
41 Adam Crawford, Crime Prevention and Community Safety (Harlow: Longman, 1998).
42 HM Government, Five Year Plan. Sustainable Communities: People, Places and Prosperity
(London: ODPM, 2005).
43 Department for Education and Skills, Five Year Strategy for Children and Learners
(London: DfES, 2004).
44 James Q. Wilson and George Kelling, ‘Broken Windows: The Police and Neighbourhood
Safety’, Atlantic Monthly, March 1982, pp. 29–38.
45 ‘Clear Beggars from Streets, Says Blair’, The Times, 7 January 1997.
czar’ – ensured that the issue became, and remained, a high-profile
one. In a short period, ‘ASBO’ became part of everyday vocabulary.
Government priority has clearly been to increase the use of such measures. In a speech to Anti-Social Behaviour Co-ordinators in 2004, Blair
said, ‘The challenge I gave you last year was to make sure you used [your
legal powers]. You have risen to the challenge in a hugely impressive way.
And I want to thank you all.’46
Labour has not neglected its pledge to be tough on the causes of crime.
Initiatives such as Sure Start and child-poverty-related policies, the various
community regeneration programmes, and the attempts to improve
support for working parents and for early years education, attack some of
the social conditions conducive to offending, and should not be underestimated. Yet the overwhelming message from government on law and order
has remained that tough crime-fighting policies are key. In its concern to
jettison Old Labour’s tendency to ‘define deviance down’, New Labour has
swung inexorably in the other direction: redefining social ills as problems
of crime and social order, and extending the reach of the criminal justice
system into ever greater parts of community and family life.
‘Yes, Prime Minister’
BLAIR’S BRITAIN, 1997–2007 Page 53