Community Safety and Crime Prevention Partnerships: Challenges and Opportunities

P Shepherdson, Garner Clancey, Murray Lee, Thomas Crofts

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

8 Citations (Scopus)
22 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

In many jurisdictions around the world, community safety and crime prevention activity is supported by interagency committees. In the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW), local government Community Safety Officers (CSOs) lead, support or participate in a range of interagency and ‘whole of government’ networks, most of which were established to support central NSW state government crime prevention and community safety initiatives. Research was conducted with the aim of exploring the CSOs’ experience of the ‘whole of government’ partnerships established to support community safety and crime prevention in NSW.[i] The findings support international research which suggests that central-local partnerships are inhibited by different agendas, responsibilities and power dynamics across different levels of government. Some of the key contextual challenges for this work include concerns about costs shifting from State to local government and about shifting State government priorities; barriers to funding and to accessing crime (and other) data; and various administrative burdens. Consequently, we argued that there is a need for formal engagement and negotiation between, on the one hand, State government agencies that steer NSW crime prevention and, on the other, community safety policy initiatives and local government. Such engagement could help overcome the perception, indeed the reality, that shifting and dumping costs and responsibilities to local government is creating a range of burdens for CSOs.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)107-120
Number of pages14
JournalInternational Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy
Volume3
Issue number1
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2 Apr 2014
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • local government
  • Community safety
  • crime prevention
  • partnerships
  • community safety officers
  • central government

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