Community Cohesiveness and Incidence of Crime Essay

Abstract

A high rate of crime in the UK, relative to other nations in the European Union, compels defensive reactions from the Home Office but forces a re-examination as well of what afflicts community crime prevention programmes. Over a period of three decades, academic research has suggested that community cohesion, among others, helps strengthen the tripartite mechanisms of private, parochial, and public social control and ought to help close the social divides that engender distrust and close off the possibility of cooperation to make neighbourhoods crime-free.

Disturbances in the northwest during the summer of 2001 impelled a fresh look at racial resentment that erupted in violence. Subsequent enquiries by four Ministerial panels underlined the urgency of community cohesion as a social good.

A local areas booster to the Home Office Citizenship Survey of 2003 provided the opportunity to measure multiple dimensions of community cohesion and assess the relationship with mitigating crime rate. As it turned out, the 32 items measuring cohesion could be grouped into five factors which collectively explained around one-third of the variance in the dependent variable, crime rate. Correlation and regression analysis suggests that high sense of community, belongingness, and trust in political institutions bear measurable effects in ameliorating total crime, as well as common index crimes like violence against persons, residential burglaries and motor vehicle theft.

Introduction

Crime throughout the country remains comparatively high, leaving the Home Office and police trying one actionable measure after another whilst pondering the socio-economic, immigration and community cohesion wellsprings of unlawful activity.

Home Office ministers appear pleased that crime in the UK has reached its lowest level in 40 years after peaking in 1995 and declining steadily since then. However, a cross-EU, 18-nation survey by Gallup Europe (Travis and Traynor, 2007, p. 1) labelled the country a “high crime” nation and showed that the odds of falling victim to the ten index crimes was highest in Ireland, followed by the UK. The nation topped the league table in burglary and was above-average for hate crimes and assault. London itself posed the highest risk of crime victimization amongst all European capitals, with fully a third of Londoners claiming to have been victimised, and was ahead of even New York (significantly lower with a 23% incidence) in this dubious honour.

The Home Office and Gallup findings are not even irreconcilable. Crime has truly fallen all across the Continent since 1996, despite sentencing policies that Gallup observes are characteristically more lenient than in America. The polling firm speculates that two possible correlates might be the fall in the population segment of young males and advances in anti-burglary/anti-theft devices.

In part, the discrepancy arises from the fact that the Home Office uses two sets of statistics. Keeping faith with police records, the Home Office could report that total crime fell 5% from 2007-08 and 2008-09, broken down into 6% fewer assaults, a 10% drop in vandalism and car theft but with burglaries constant (a 1% annual change). On the other hand, the British Crime Survey for England and Wales for 2008-2009 revealed that total crime victimisation incidence had inched up marginally from the 22% finding in 2007-2008 (Home Office, 2009a, p. 1).

Prior research and an outbreak of violence at the start of the decade in Bradford, Oldham and Burnley suggest that community participation, social control, and community cohesion are potential mitigating factors. In respect of a socially disadvantaged community where efforts to implement community crime prevention (CCP) programmes failed to generate consensus and mass-based participation, Schneider (1997) had shown that, despite widespread concern about elevated crime rates, the absence of community cohesion counted for as much as socio-demographic factors, community diversity, ineffective anti-crime organisation, unsuccessful community outreach, dependence on the state for social control, and structural obstacles such as the Western propensity for individualism in hampering CCP programmes.

Al Hunter showed the relationship of community cohesion to social control by dividing the latter into private, parochial, and public forms of control. In a cohesive community, all three partner to minimise crime. But when sphere of social control may need to be dominant – such as when a political apparatus and the police go into action when the private sector and “parochial” community groups such as citizen patrols are ineffective. This was the case in Chicago’s Beltway around the turn of the century when the overwhelmingly white community continued to shut out Blacks and blamed an upsurge of gang violence on ‘encroaching’ Hispanics (Hagedorn 2006).

In the summer of 2001, disturbances erupted across north-west England, in Bradford, Oldham, Leeds and Burnley. In Burnley, police laid the violence at the foot of gang warfare between whites and Asians, though intensified by poverty in the population at large. Hundreds were injured and dozens were called to account for wilful destruction of shops and vehicles. Muslims in Bradford denounced religious discrimination. In Bradford, Lord Ouseley authored a report laying the blame on schools that did not do enough to develop ethnic tolerance (BBC, 2001; BBC News, 2001).

Given the undercurrents of racial tensions that preceded and seemed to underlie the worst instances of community violence the UK had seen in over four decades, the Blair government commissioned a Ministerial Group on Public Order and Community Cohesion to make enquiries. Beyond blaming ‘far-right extremists’ for exploiting ethnic conflict, the ‘Community Cohesion Review’ observed that the four communities were deeply divided along racial, religious, and cultural lines, and called for new community cohesion drives to bring about greater contact and respect.

After more consultations, the Local Government Association subsequently formulated a working definition of community cohesion in aid of local authority planning. This described a cohesive community as promoting equal opportunity, belongingness for all, a common vision, acknowledging and valuing diversity of background as well as socio-economic circumstances, and fostering amicable relationships among diverse people wherever they interact.

Methods

As it happens, the periodic Home Office Citizenship Survey (HOCS) of active citizenship came to incorporate measures of community cohesion and thereby enabled analysis against violent and neighbourhood-level crime as reported to police. This report is based on the 2003 run in England and Wales.

That year, the Main HOCS polled a nationally representative base of 9,486, a quota sample of 4,571 adults to cover ethnic minorities, and a Local Areas booster sample of 10,138 respondents to enable reliable readings of 20 local areas (defined as two contiguous wards). In keeping with the thrust of measuring progress towards active citizenship, HOCS consistently covered:

• ‘Rights and responsibilities, influencing political decisions, and institutional trust;
• Perceptions of racial prejudice and discrimination;
• People’s involvement in their neighbourhood;
• Social networks;
• Active community participation; and,
• Family networks’ (Home Office Research, Development and Statistics Directorate, 2004, p. vii)

The independent variable (IV) in this analysis consists of community cohesion, measured in two ways:

1. As a single item indicator and baseline measure of community cohesion: ‘the proportion of people who feel that their local area is a place where people from different backgrounds get on well together’; and,
2. A compound variable to tap the key elements of community cohesion: equal opportunity at all life stages, belongingness, sense of community, trust in political institutions and other organisations, and respect for diversity.

In total, the Community Cohesion item set contained 32 items, such as the three shown below:

Since full coverage of all 32 items is over-ambitious for an essay of moderate length such as this, one makes use of a factor analysis that identified the above-mentioned themes and two others: ‘Respecting diversity’ (whether ethnic differences are respected by their neighbors) and ‘Political trust’ (trust in local politicians and councillors and believing that these officials truly represent their views. Individually, the five factors proved to correlate strongly with the aforementioned single-item measure of community cohesion (Wedlock, 2004).

In turn, the dependent variable (DV) consisted of crime data as reported to police in half the local areas covered by the booster sample.

Findings

A correlation between each of the five community cohesion factors and reported total crime in the ward representing the local area (see Table 1 overleaf) highlights, first of all, the negative relationship between total crimes and sense of community, political trust and sense of belonging. At -0.76, the Pearson’s r value for ‘sense of community’ factors as a group explains the largest share of variance in the ‘movement of the total crime’ measure.

Table 1: Correlation between Total Crime Level and Community Cohesion Factors

Graphing the data points from the compiled database (Figure 1 below), one sees that there is proportionately more rapid rise in total crime rate per 1,000 residents beginning when sense of community drops below 70% of those surveyed.

Test runs on multiple and stepwise regression revealed that the latter was more productive. When the five community cohesion factors were inputted as predictor variables one by one (hence the term ‘stepwise’), starting with those that correlated highly (positively or negatively) with the total crime DV, the results (Table below) suggest that for the ten local areas as a group, sense of community is the comparatively stronger ‘deterrent’.

Table 2: Predicted Percentage Decline in Total Crime and Leading Index Crime When ‘Sense of Community’ Improve by One Unit

Sense of community also predicts declines in burglary from dwellings, theft of motor vehicles and breaking into motor vehicles.

Discussion

This short analysis suggests that, quite apart from the social control expected from community cohesion, this factor per se has mitigating effects on crime rate as reported to police. Nonetheless, examination of component items for sense of community as the strongest predictor (albeit in inverse fashion) does comprise aspects of social control. This is exemplified by questionnaire items asking about whether respondents believe that neighbours cooperate to improve the area, whether survey subjects feel safe roaming the area at night, whether residents look out for, and trust. each other.

That belongingness is not a significant predictor may imply that being attached to one’s place of residence is not a necessary condition for deterring crime; sense of community is more vital in the practical sense.

Given the strong alienation that drove the disturbances of 2001, another conclusion one may draw from this analysis is that community crime prevention programmes (CCP) need to be recast to include empowerment of disadvantages racial/ethnic, cultural and religious sub-segments of the population. There is value, as well, in accounting for social control, community mobilisation, and undistorted communication across the social divides that degrade mutual concern about cooperating to reduce crime.

Bibliography

BBC (2001) 2001: Race violence erupts in Burnley.

BBC News (2001) Summer of discontent.

Hagedorn, J. M. (2006) Clean streets: Controlling crime, maintaining order, and building community activism. Contemporary Sociology. 35(4) 407-8.

Home Office (2009a) Crime statistics. Web.

Home Office Research, Development and Statistics Directorate (2004) 2003 Home Office Citizenship Survey: People, families and communities. Crown Copyright: Home Office.

Schneider, S. R., Ph.D. (1997) Obstacles to collective action in socially disadvantaged neighbourhoods: Toward a radical planning theory of community crime prevention. Ph.D. Thesis: The University of British Columbia.

Travis, A. & Traynor, I. (2007) Britain named as one of Europe’s crime hotspots: Survey finds highest rate of burglary in the EU, assaults and hate crime also near top of league. The Guardian.

Wedlock, E., (2004) Crime and cohesive communities.