Edwards, A., Hughes, G. and Lord, N. (2013) ‘Urban Security in Europe: Translating a concept in...

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Urban security in Europe: Translating a concept in public criminology

Adam Edwards, Gordon Hughes and Nicholas LordCardiff University, UK

AbstractA key challenge for public criminology is the translation between concepts employed in policy discourse and those used by social scientists. Given that concepts constitute social problems and they can have multiple meanings for policy-makers and social scientists, then deliberation about what they signify matters in understanding how these actors can talk to, rather than past, one another in framing policy discourse about crime and revealing alternative policy agendas. This challenge is accentuated in the comparative context of European criminology, which is characterized by competing tendencies to generalize about problems of ‘Freedom, Security and Justice’ and to recognize the variegated problems and cultures of control across Europe. In this context, the presumption of universality can mistranslate concepts of crime and control by obscuring contextual insight, while the presumption of particularity can inhibit cross-cultural dialogue and deliberation. The paper explores this challenge in relation to the concept of ‘urban security’, which is prevalent in the policy discourse on social crime prevention, particularly in Central and Southern Europe. To establish the provenance, prevalence and significance of this concept, the paper discusses findings from a policy Delphi that structured deliberation about the meaning of urban security among criminologists sampled from the European Society of Criminology and policy-makers sampled from the European Crime Prevention Network. It concludes with reflections on the value of deliberative methods, such as the policy Delphi, for the cross-cultural validation of criminological constructs in comparative research.

KeywordsComparative research, policy Delphi, politics of translation, public criminology, urban security

Corresponding author:Adam Edwards, Cardiff School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, Cardiff CF10 3WT, UK. Email: [email protected]

483386 EUC10310.1177/1477370813483386European Journal of CriminologyEdwards et al.2013

Article

Edwards et al. 261

Introduction

A significant current of thought in contemporary social science is the call for a ‘public sociology’ (Burawoy, 2005) in which social scientists seek to intervene in public life, using their particular knowledge and skills to inform and influence public discourse about social problems. In some countries this mission is also being driven by academic appraisal and performance management strategies requiring social scientists to demon-strate the ‘public engagement and impact’ of their work. However, although criminology has always had a very strong applied tradition, geared to an intense research relationship with government, commercial and not-for-profit users of social science, it is argued that ‘public criminology’ is confronted with exceptional problems given the party political and mass media interest in issues of crime control (Loader and Sparks, 2010). In addition to arguments over the inherently political qualities of criminological research (Hillyard et al., 2004), electoral and media interest generates a ‘hot’ policy environment that inhib-its the communicative rationality of social science; insofar as they adopt a scientific vocation, criminologists’ communication of their research findings is filtered, if not dis-torted, by the formative intentions of public policy-makers to advance manifestos, culti-vate electoral support, deliver policy successes within electoral cycles, manage pressure group and mass media criticism, and so on.1 In response to this, there is an increasing interest in deliberative methods that can structure dialogue between criminologists and policy-makers around experience of and expertise about what is, or could be, known about particular problems rather than around a priori political commitments (Edwards and Sheptycki, 2009). Deliberative methods offer the prospect of dialogue that is insu-lated from the more immediate, ad hominem, pressures on the policy process and conse-quently a more defensible ‘construct validation’ of criminological problems.

Such deliberation presumes, however, the translation of these problems between differ-ent kinds of social actors in ways that facilitate rather than debilitate dialogue. Opportunities for mistranslation abound given that the conceptual language of public policy and social science constitutes social problems in ways that signify different things to different actors, who can consequently (and often deliberately) talk at, or past, rather than with one another. More instrumentally, floating signifiers are particularly prevalent in public policy discourse as competing interests seek to interest, enrol and mobilize support for their version of ‘the problem’, so defined (see Callon, 1986). An exemplar of this is the policy discourse around the problem of ‘transnational organized crime’, which has been criticized as a political, arbitrary construct of post-Cold War foreign policy that obviates much of the social scien-tific understanding of how serious crimes are organized. Yet the official investment in this concept is such that the criminological community has been obliged to engage with it in order to maintain the interest of the policy community (Edwards and Gill, 2002; Edwards and Levi, 2008). As such, communication between social scientists and policy-makers (as one significant ‘public’ for social science) is laden with competing interests and dilemmas that need to be negotiated if dialogue is to continue. For, insofar as social scientists concede too much to the terms of debate as set by policy-makers, they inhibit their ability to influ-ence and inform public discourse – to be public criminologists. To not engage with policy-makers’ terms and concerns, however, runs the risk of disinteresting them and, again, inhibiting the capacity to influence and inform.

262 European Journal of Criminology 10(3)

To this end, the very terms of debate between academic and policy communities need to be established as a necessary precursor to constructive dialogue. This is especially the case in the cross-cultural comparative context of European criminology, which is charac-terized by competing tendencies to generalize about problems of ‘Freedom, Security and Justice’ and to recognize the variegated problems and cultures of control across Europe (Smith, 2004). In this context, the presumption of universality can mistranslate concepts of crime and control by obscuring contextual insight and ignoring the multiple significa-tions that general concepts of crime and control can have (Edwards and Hughes, 2005, 2012). In cross-cultural research, mistranslation may also occur as a consequence of treating concepts as idiographic (originating in a particular social context and only per-taining to that context) when they may share common referents with alternative concepts developed in other social contexts. If there are no common referents, there can be no argument (Bhaskar, 1979). So, in precluding the identification of common referents, idi-ographic accounts can inhibit cross-cultural dialogue and learning (Karstedt, 2012).

The problems of translation entailed in public criminology and encountered specifi-cally in the European context are explored in this paper through reference to ‘urban security’, a concept that has attracted a considerable following, particularly in Central and Southern Europe and primarily among policy-makers, but which has limited recog-nition in other European regions and in the social science community. Having estab-lished the provenance and prevalence of this concept, this paper discusses findings from a particular kind of deliberative method, a ‘policy Delphi’, which asked a panel of aca-demics, sampled from the European Society of Criminology (ESC) and a panel of national policy-makers, sampled from the European Crime Prevention Network (EUCPN), about the significance of this concept and thus its utility in organizing cross-national deliberation about crime and insecurity.

The provenance and prevalence of ‘urban security’ in Europe

The concept of urban security is most obviously associated with the European Forum for Urban Security (EFUS), established in Barcelona in 1987 on the initiative of Gilbert Bonnemaison, former French socialist mayor of Epinay-sur-Seine.2 As argued in its two manifestos, the Naples ‘Cities’ Manifesto’, agreed in 2000 (EFUS, 2000), and the more recent Aubervilliers and Saint Denis Manifesto on ‘Security, Democracy and Cities’, agreed in December 2012 (EFUS, 2012), the Forum exists to promote a particular under-standing of crime and its prevention, one associated with principles of social justice, interventions driven by social and economic policy as much as by criminal justice and risk management, and foregrounding the role of municipal authorities as much as police and criminal justice agencies. As such, the concept is a product of an explicitly political standpoint within public policy discourse on crime prevention in Europe, one that has garnered support particularly from Central and Southern Europe.3 The Aubervilliers and Saint Denis Manifesto reaffirms this commitment to ‘social prevention policies’, particu-larly ‘[a]t a time when Europe and the world are going through an economic crisis that may jeopardize the social and cultural heritage of the twentieth century’ and given that ‘Europe is experiencing imbalances and disparities, in particular an outburst of

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unemployment, which has plunged European citizens into a state of anxiety, weakening the social fabric and trust in the future . . . In each of its localities, the crisis threatens social cohesion and solidarity, making selfishness and individualism emerge’ (EFUS, 2012: 1–2).

The preoccupation specifically with urban security is further justified by EFUS on the grounds that ‘European and national institutions now recognise cities as essential part-ners. Being the closest to the citizens, they combine competencies in solidarity, preven-tion and sanction with expertise in the management of everyday problems’ (2012: 4). This modern idea of cities as the engines of civilization and progressive action as well as the fulcrum of social problems is reinforced by the concluding claims of the Aubervilliers and Saint Denis Manifesto that ‘[c]ities advocate a Europe that is open to the world, respecting regulations and laws, and taking full advantage of the diversity of their popu-lations’ and ‘express their desire to make security a public good, based on the respect of fundamental rights’ (2012: 4). However, in an interesting twist to an otherwise overtly political statement, the Manifesto calls for policies to be premised on the ‘latest technical and scientific knowledge’ and for cities ‘to find new ways to ensure that their policies are defined and guided by both qualitative and quantitative data, and not on prejudice or ideological stances’, with a commitment to ‘systematically assessing their prevention actions, in order to increase efficiency and therefore bring prevention to a new stage of professionalization’ (2012: 3).

Then again, the Manifesto qualifies this professionalization by identifying a need to address the alienation of citizens from elite policy actors, in particular from the institu-tions of the European Union, because ‘Europe does not elicit a strong sense of belong-ing from its citizens’ (2012: 2). It is argued that ‘[s]ecurity policies should be designed and constructed around the individual and collective needs of citizens, and not accord-ing to public institutions . . . participation is a cross-cutting principle of action, ena-bling civil society to be involved in all stages of design, implementation and evaluation’ (2012: 2).

In summary, EFUS has used the concept of urban security to reframe problems of crime and violence as problems of social justice, not just criminal justice, which are concentrated in cities but often have their origins elsewhere, for example in forms of financial and organized crime, but which can and ought to be prevented through social and economic policy interventions by partnerships of municipal authorities that are driven both by scientific insight and by popular democratic will. As such, the concept of urban security has come to express a number of key tensions, if not contradictions, in European thinking about crime and violence – between the importance of preven-tion and sanctioning as policy priorities established by ‘active citizens’ as well as scientific and political elites. Consequently, and like many concepts coined in policy discourse, urban security acts as a floating signifier with a multiplicity of referents, reflecting the ability of policy advocates to capture the concept for their particular interests.4 More generically, it can be argued that this politics of translation structures dialogue between policy actors and is therefore a concern for social scientists inter-ested in the public engagement and impact of their work; what does the adoption of a concept signal, what commitments can it imply and what thinking and action can it obviate?


A possible response to deliberately flexible, easily manipulated, concepts is to reject them, precisely for their imprecision. Why not simply frame policy discourse around concepts that are more familiar and more prevalent in the social scientific and policy communities? An exemplar of this argument is the reassertion of ‘crime prevention’ as a sufficiently precise concept for structuring dialogue between these communities (Pease, 1994). This is certainly the case in policy discourse at the level of the European Union and the current Stockholm Programme for creating an Area of Freedom, Security and Justice. The Stockholm Programme entails a commitment for the EUCPN to establish an Observatory for Crime Prevention, providing another focus for the professionalization of this policy area in Europe (European Commission, 2010: 4.3.2). In this policy network, national crime prevention strategies published by the EUCPN reveal only limited use of the concept of urban security,5 and this concept is also much less prevalent in the European-based English language criminology journals, including the journal of the ESC, the European Journal of Criminology.6

If crime prevention provides a more familiar and precise signifier for policy dis-course in Europe, it is liable, however, to alienate a significant public for public crimi-nology, in particular those defining their work in terms of ‘urban security’ (see the contributions by Frevel, Tominc et al., Racasens et al., Virta, and Xenakis and Cheliotis in this special issue) or analogous concepts of ‘community safety’ (Gilling et al., this issue) and ‘integral security’ (Devroe, this issue), as a means of locating crime preven-tion as a problem of social and economic policy as well as of criminal justice and risk management. There is a politics of translation underpinning the coining and use of these competing concepts that is further clarified through reference to the manifestos of those who would take policy in an opposite direction, advocating ‘crime science’ deliberately as a means of obviating the role of social and economic policy in the pre-vention of crime, delimiting it instead to the pursuit of pragmatic, situational, interven-tions (Clarke, 2004).

In establishing what these concepts do in privileging certain problems and policy responses while subordinating or obviating others, there is nonetheless a danger of depending on documentary sources alone, particularly the tendentious manifestos and mission statements of policy discourse. Textual analysis can promote a false universal-ity, where it is presumed that concepts such as ‘crime prevention’ signify the same things in different social groups and in different cultures of control. Conversely, this method can also promote a false particularity insofar as actual variegated cultures of control, such as the predilection of some Central and Southern European policy actors for ‘urban security’, are imputed from textual sources (see Stenson, 1998). In both these instances of mistranslation, the opportunity for debate, dialogue and learning across diverse social contexts can be lost and otherwise delimited. To better validate criminological constructs and support the kind of dialogue implied by public criminol-ogy, more deliberative methods are needed that can establish whether there are com-mon referents among different publics or else to clarify how dialogue is lost in translation. The remainder of the paper considers the contribution that one particular kind of deliberative method, the ‘policy Delphi’ (Turoff, 1970; Ziglio, 1996), can make to public criminology in Europe and how this method was used to clarify the signifi-cance of urban security.

Edwards et al. 265

The significance of ‘urban security’ in Europe

The policy Delphi method has its origins in attempts to identify areas of consensus and disagreement in forecasting public policy problems and possible responses where other methods, such as experiments, were deemed impossible or inappropriate.7 It is argued, however, that this method is also of relevance for arguments over the most appropri-ate methods for comparative research in cross-cultural contexts such as European criminology.8 The essence of the method is that key informants with established experi-ence of and expertise about the policy problem in question are recruited onto panels; dialogue between panellists is structured by questionnaires that individual panellists complete on their own and return to the coordinators of the panel. Coordinators summa-rize and report the responses of individual respondents back to all members of the panel and issue a further questionnaire (Q2) inviting individual panellists to concur or disagree both with arguments arising out of the initial questionnaire (Q1) and with the interpreta-tion placed on these in the coordinator’s reports. Through further iterations of question-naire–report–questionnaire (Q2 . . . Qn), the subjective accounts of panellists are transformed into the objective opinion of the panel, whether this objective opinion reveals a high consensus of agreement or disagreement. This iterative method of delib-eration across various questionnaires or ‘rounds’ facilities both respondent and construct validation of the problems in question (Ziglio, 1996). As such, the method is particularly apposite for establishing common referents in arguments across different cultural con-texts that might otherwise be lost in translation and through other research methods that do not admit collective respondent and construct validation of criminological problems.

Design of the ‘Urbis policy Delphi’

To further investigate the significance of urban security among social scientists and pol-icy-makers, three panels of key informants were recruited to a policy Delphi entitled ‘the Urbis policy Delphi’ after the broader project funded by the European Union (EU) of which it is a part.9 One panel was sampled from academic criminologists in the ESC and two panels of respondents were sampled from the European-wide policy networks dis-cussed above, the EFUS and the EUCPN. At the time of writing, the ESC and EUCPN panels had both completed, providing opportunities for a full comparison of the signifi-cance of urban security for social scientists and for policy-makers on these panels, and it is the results from these two panels that are considered here.

This Urbis policy Delphi consisted of three rounds of deliberation (Q1, Q2 and Q3), in which respondents were able to anonymously validate key issues and constructs from previous rounds. The ESC panel consisted of 15 experts from 15 different European countries, who were sampled from the European Society of Criminology on the basis of their reputation for conducting research, variously on crime prevention policies in North, South, West and East European countries. There was no attrition to this panel as all 15 panellists completed all three rounds of the Delphi process. The EUCPN panel had some attrition over the three rounds, with 15 responses in round one, 13 responses in round two and 9 responses in round three. Members of this panel were elicited from those who responded to a census sample of EU member state representatives on the EUCPN. The


breakdown of responses by country and by round can be seen in Table 1. A mixture of responses from countries across Europe was evident in both panels. Respondents dis-cussing seven countries (Belgium, the Republic of Ireland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Slovenia and Spain) featured in both panels. Each round of the Delphi was opened up to the full EUCPN membership (27 countries). For this reason, some respond-ents did not participate in the first round but did in subsequent rounds. Although the sample on both panels included respondents from all European regions and provides grounds for ‘moderatum generalization’ about usage of the concept of urban security,

Table 1. Urbis policy Delphi respondents by country, panel and questionnaire round completed.

Country ESC panel EUCPN panel

Q1 Q2 Q3 Q1 Q2 Q3

Austria Yes Belgium Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes YesBulgaria Yes Yes YesCyprus Yes Yes YesCzech Republic Yes Yes YesDenmark Yes Yes YesIreland Yes Yes Yes Yes Estonia Yes England & Wales (UK) Yes Yes Yes Finland Yes Yes Yes France Yes Yes Yes Germany Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes YesGreece Yes Yes Yes Hungary Yes Italy Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes YesLatvia Yes Lithuania Yes Luxembourg Yes Yes Netherlands Yes

(with Belgium)Yes (with Belgium)

Yes (with Belgium)

Yes Yes

Malta Yes Norway Yes Yes Yes Poland Portugal Yes Yes Yes Romania Yes Yes YesScotland Yes Yes Yes Slovenia Yes Yes Yes Yes Spain Yes Yes Yes YesSweden Yes Yes Yes Turkey Yes Yes Yes TOTAL 15 15 15 15 13 9

Edwards et al. 267

they are not intended to be representative samples of all social scientists with an interest in the prevention of crime and insecurity in Europe or of all official conceptions of this problem among EU member states or strategic partners of the EU. Rather, the sampling was purposive in recruiting respondents with reputed expertise about crime prevention but from different kinds of social group, in this instance social scientists and national government policy-makers, in order to establish any common referents for arguments about the prevention of crime and violence across Europe and the particular significance of urban security within these arguments.

A particular advantage of the Delphi method, however, is that it enables collective respondent validation of concepts through the iterative rounds of questionnaire–report–questionnaire. In this way it demonstrates whether it is possible for a group of expert informants to reach a consensus about the significance of concepts and the related con-struction of social problems. Insofar as any consensus is identified, it is plausible to argue that common referents exist and that, for our particular purposes here, these pro-vide a means of translating concepts across cultures of control. This iterative respondent and construct validation has particular benefits for the translation of concepts across different literal as well as conceptual language communities. Within the same literal language community, for example English in the British context, there is still a need for conceptual translation between the concepts that different subjects, for example policy-makers, practitioners and social scientists, may have about the ‘same’ social problem. As such, social science is confronted with the ‘double hermeneutic’ of researchers placing an interpretation on the interpretations of their respondents (Sayer, 2000: 17). Hence the importance and challenge of public criminology in facilitating dialogue between these multiple interpretations. In cross-national comparative contexts such as European crimi-nology, however, a further layer of interpretative complexity exists because translation occurs across literal, as well as conceptual, language communities.10

Key findings of the Urbis policy Delphi

The questionnaires put to members of each of these panels covered a breadth of issues arising out of the kinds of problems and preventive approaches signified by the concept of urban security, the multiplicity of actors given responsibility for prevention, and the different kinds of expertise these actors possess or ought to possess in undertaking this responsibility.

The first round (Q1) entailed the use of a qualitative, semi-structured, questionnaire that asked panellists the following questions about the regions they had knowledge of:

1. What can ‘managing urban security’ mean?2. What are the current challenges for managing urban security in your region?3. What are the potential challenges for managing urban security in your region in

the coming decade?4. Who is currently responsible for managing urban security?5. Who ought to be responsible for managing urban security?6. What expertise and training currently equips these authorities to respond to these

problems?


7. What expertise ought to be entailed in this response?8. How might this expertise be best developed in educational and training

programmes?

Given the particular focus of this paper on the problematization of urban security, the discussion here is limited to questions 1–3, where panellists’ responses distinguished between: (i) the problems of urban security; and (ii) different approaches to managing these problems. Between them, the ESC and EUCPN experts identified a total of 25 dif-ferent problems and 15 approaches, as summarized in Table 2.

Significantly, a number of respondents (from Northern Europe) observed that the con-cept of urban security currently had limited recognition in the countries they were famil-iar with, where concepts such as ‘community safety’ (the UK and the Republic of Ireland)

Table 2. Cross-panel identified problems and approaches in Q1.

Problems Approaches

1. Incivility and anti-social behaviour 2. Drug trafficking 3. Property crime (burglary, theft, robbery) 4. Criminal damage (vandalism, graffiti) 5. Fraud 6. Violence against the person (including

domestic violence) 7. Alcohol and drug misuse 8. Firearms-related crime 9. Environmental degradation

(e.g. illegal waste disposal, pollution)10. Knife-related crime11. Criminal gangs and organized crime12. Human trafficking13. Prostitution, illicit sexual services14. Corporate crime, including corruption15. Health and safety in the workplace16. Corruption of public administration17. State police violence18. Terrorism19. Tax evasion20. Climate change and natural disasters

(flooding, extreme weather)21. Protection of critical infrastructure

(water and food security, transport and communications systems, energy grids)

22. Immigration and social cohesion23. Mass demonstrations and civil unrest

associated with austerity24. Social exclusion and youth unemployment25. Degradation of governing capacity through

public expenditure

1. Enforcing the criminal law 2. Reducing social segregation and

promoting social cohesion 3. Repressing incivility 4. Increased use of imprisonment and

correctional facilities 5. Use of CCTV surveillance 6. Reassuring citizens about their security

and about their fear of crime 7. Reducing the opportunities for criminal

victimization 8. Reducing social inequalities in

household income, access to education, employment, healthcare and housing

9. Preventing the onset of offending behaviour and incivility

10. Punitive sentencing policies11. Requiring citizens to take responsibility

for their own security and equipping them with the capacity and resources to meet this responsibility

12. Restorative justice interventions with perpetrators and victims of criminal offences

13. Celebrating social diversity and promoting the rights of minority groups

14. Enhancing the democratic scrutiny and oversight of security strategies

15. Promoting greater health and safety in the workplace

Edwards et al. 269

and ‘integral security’ (Belgium and the Netherlands) were preferred signifiers of pre-vention. Even so, there was a reticence among many panellists simply to use the concept of ‘crime prevention’ because many were anxious to broaden the debate to include underlying or ‘generative’ causes of crime and insecurity, in particular the social exclu-sion and unemployment of young people, intergenerational tensions over resources and other challenges to social cohesion, including the rapid and mass migration of popula-tions into and around Europe. This suggested there were common referents behind these different signifiers, the validation of which became a key focus of the second round of the policy Delphi. Q1 produced narrative responses that were discursive and very rich in detail, varying between 1000 and 7000 words in length. To structure dialogue between panellists, we found it necessary, as coordinators, to place our own interpretation on the key themes arising out of these accounts in order to derive the 25 problems and 15 approaches. Of course, this resulted in a reduction in the complexity and subtlety of the original accounts, which could have been retained through the adoption of a more ethno-graphic commentary. In defence of this method, however, and in contrast to cross-sec-tional research designs,11 the iterative qualities of the Delphi method enabled panellists to validate the interpretation we placed on their accounts. A more fundamental point is that such reduction is unavoidable if the goal is to ascertain common referents and to enable cross-cultural dialogue – to better capture, in this instance, the ‘Europeanness’ of the problems and approaches signified by ‘urban security’.12

The second round (Q2) presented panellists with a structured questionnaire asking respondents to consider the range of problems and approaches that had been identified by the panels in Q1 and to rank them according to those they considered to be the five highest and the five lowest priorities. Requiring panellists to rank policy priorities in this way served the purpose of clarifying whether they agreed there was a core policy agenda for more expansive concepts of crime prevention, irrespective of whether these were coded as ‘urban security’, ‘community safety’ or ‘integral security’.

Both the ESC and EUCPN panels identified seven problems as ‘high priority prob-lems’ with varying levels of consensus (see Table 3). High consensus was defined as

Table 3. Problems prioritized in Q2 of the Urbis policy Delphi by panel.

Q2 ESC panel EUCPN panel

High consensus >75 – 100 percent

• Violence against the person (including domestic violence)

Moderate consensus >50 – <75 percent

• Social exclusion and youth unemployment

• Incivilities and anti-social behaviour• Property crime

• Violence against the person (including domestic violence)

• Social exclusion and youth unemployment

• Incivilities and anti-social behaviour

• Property crimeLow consensus >25 – <50 percent

• Alcohol and drug misuse• Immigration and social cohesion• Criminal gangs and organized crime

• Alcohol and drug misuse• Immigration and social

cohesion• Criminal gangs and organized

crime


more than or equal to 75 percent of the panel identifying a problem as a top five priority, moderate consensus as more than or equal to 50 percent but less than 75 percent of the panel identifying a problem, and low consensus as more than or equal to 25 percent but less than 50 percent of the panel. What is immediately striking about this ranking is the degree of cross-panel consensus; both panels identified a core agenda of problems of personal and property crime, incivilities and social exclusion, particularly of young peo-ple from gainful employment, with a significant minority of panellists also identifying problems of alcohol and drug misuse, immigration and social cohesion, and criminal gangs and organized crime.

The ranking of approaches to problems of urban security in Q2 revealed some inter-esting areas of inter-panel consensus and disagreement (see Table 4). There was a high consensus across the two panels about the need to reduce social segregation and promote social cohesion. Thereafter, however, the ESC panel placed a greater emphasis on reducing social inequalities whereas the EUCPN panel privileged the reduction of opportunities for

Table 4. Approaches prioritized in Q2 of the Urbis policy Delphi by panel.

Q2 ESC panel EUCPN panel

High consensus >75 – 100 percent

• Reducing social segregation and promoting social cohesion

• Reducing social inequalities in household income, access to education, employment, healthcare and housing

• Reducing social segregation and promoting social cohesion

• Reducing the opportunities for criminal victimization

Moderate consensus>50 – <75 percent

• Reassuring citizens about their security and about their fear of crime

• Preventing the onset of offending behaviour and incivility

• Requiring citizens to take responsibility for their own security and equipping them with the capacity and resources to meet this responsibility

• Restorative justice interventions with perpetrators and victims of criminal offences

• Reducing social inequalities in household income, access to education, employment, healthcare and housing

Low consensus >25 – <50 percent

• Enhancing the democratic scrutiny and oversight of security strategies

• Reducing the opportunities for criminal victimization

• Restorative justice interventions with perpetrators and victims of criminal offences

• Requiring citizens to take responsibility for their own security and equipping them with the capacity and resources to meet this responsibility

• Preventing the onset of offending behaviour and incivility

• Use of CCTV surveillance• Reassuring citizens about their

security and about their fear of crime

• Enforcing the criminal law

Edwards et al. 271

criminal victimization, reflecting a key argument in contemporary criminology about the place of ‘dispositional’ and ‘situational’ approaches to crime prevention in public policy (Clarke, 2004). Another key finding was the prioritization of CCTV surveillance and criminal law enforcement by the EUCPN panel and the absence of these approaches in the priorities identified by the ESC panel, reflecting the scepticism of much academic criminology about the benefits of surveillance and enforcement. The EUCPN panel also accorded a greater priority to the responsibility of citizens for their own security and to the role of restorative interventions with perpetrators and victims of criminal offences.

To further explore and corroborate these alternative policy agendas, we used Q3 to con-flate these approaches to prevention into four categories that are familiar to both academic and policy-oriented criminology in Europe and that are often counterpoised to one another in public discourse on crime and insecurity: criminal justice; restorative justice; social jus-tice; and risk management. A problem with this discourse, however, is a tendency to over-generalize the applicability of one or other of these approaches for preventing ‘crime’ per se (for example, Clarke, 2004; EFUS, 2012) or to infer the eclipse of one approach (for example, social justice) by others (for example, criminal justice and risk management) in grand narratives about social control (for example, Garland, 2001; Wacquant, 2009). Consequently, Q3 asked panellists to prioritize these approaches in relation to the specific problems they had prioritized in Q2. This decision also reflects our interest in the call for a more ‘problem-oriented’ approach to prevention in which deliberation proceeds from con-crete problems to institutional responses rather than the more familiar reversal of this chain of reasoning, which takes the institution (for example, the police, the prison, the courts) as the starting point for appropriate policy responses (see Goldstein, 1990). In turn, we are interested in how reorienting public discourse about crime and insecurity around problems rather than institutions affects the dialogue between social science and other publics; spe-cifically, whether it is possible to reach a consensus both about priority problems and about the most appropriate approaches to their prevention.

Given these interests, Q3 asked panellists to identify how severe and frequent they perceive the problems they had prioritized in Q2 to be. This follows recent work on the concept of the ‘seriousness’ of crime that differentiates crime problems in terms of their harmful effects, defined, in turn, in terms of their perceived severity and frequency (Greenfield and Paoli, 2012). Panellists were asked to consider each of the problems they had identified as current priorities, along with problems they had forecast as emerging problems over the next decade,13 according to a seven-point Likert scale (very severe/frequent; severe/frequent; moderately severe/frequent; uncertain; moderately innocuous/infrequent; innocuous/infrequent; very innocuous/infrequent). Consensus among panel-lists about the severity and frequency of these problems was ascertained through the use of two scales: ‘mean panel response’ and ‘consensus of panel’.14 The key findings are visualized in Figures 1 and 2, where the further out from the centre of the ‘radar diagram’ a marker is for a particular problem, the more severe and frequent the panel thought this problem to be, and the larger the size of the marker, the greater the consensus among panellists about the severity and frequency of a problem.

These metrics and this visualization reveal some interesting patterns of judgements about the harms of priority problems for urban security, both within and between the ESC and EUCPN panels. Most striking is the similarity in the overall pattern of


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judgements between both panels, signalling the possibilities for reaching agreement between academic criminologists and policy-makers. Both panels corroborated violence against the person, property crime and social exclusion and youth unemployment as policy priorities. We suggest this pattern of inter-panel agreement after three iterative rounds of deliberation provides strong evidence in support of the existence of common referents among academics and policy-makers sampled from around Europe about the problems for crime prevention and their connection to issues of social and economic policy.

These visualizations were also used to compare and contrast inter-panel consensus and disagreement about the appropriateness of criminal justice, risk management, restor-ative justice and social justice policy approaches to these problems. Space prohibits a full exposition of the revealing commonalities and divergences in the judgements of ESC and EUCPN panellists in this regard and so discussion is restricted to some of the more striking patterns of consensus and agreement and what, in conclusion, these tell us about the possibilities of translating concepts of crime prevention in Europe.

Figures 3 and 4 visualize the pattern of judgements about criminal justice as an appro-priate response to the problems prioritized by the ESC and EUCPN panels.15 Again, most striking is the common pattern of judgements, with both panels identifying a strong consensus in favour of criminal justice responses to problems of violence against the person, property crime and organized crime but not for problems of social exclusion. A clear divergence of opinion between the two panels, however, is the greater strength of consensus among the EUCPN panellists for these responses than among ESC panellists, arguably reflecting a greater scepticism among academic criminology about the efficacy of criminal justice policy responses for reducing the harms associated with these kinds of problems. Two further striking differences between the panels are over the use of crimi-nal justice responses to incivilities or ‘anti-social behaviour’ (ASB) and alcohol and drug misuse, with EUCPN panellists expressing a strong agreement in favour and the ESC panel expressing uncertainty. Again, we take this pattern of judgements as evidence of common referents around which a constructive dialogue between academic criminolo-gists and policy-makers in Europe can be organized.

Figures 5 and 6 visualize the pattern of judgements about the appropriateness of risk management responses to these problems, in particular measures to reduce the situational opportunities for their commission. Here there is an interesting divergence in the pattern between the two panels, with ESC panellists expressing a mostly high consensus of opin-ion in favour of using this approach, particularly in relation to property crimes, but less enthusiasm for this approach than their counterparts on the EUCPN panel, where there was again a mostly high consensus but with higher levels of agreement (except for inci-vilities/ASB, where agreement in the ESC panel was marginally stronger) about the applicability of this approach to all problems including issues of immigration and social cohesion.

The enthusiasm of the EUCPN panellists for alternatives to criminal justice responses was also borne out by the strength of their agreement in favour of social justice responses (those focusing on the reduction of social inequalities as a means of reducing crime and insecurity) to all of the problems other than organized crime and the degradation of gov-erning capacity. These judgements were also shared by ESC panellists, signalling a

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strong consensus among academic criminologists and policy-makers about the irrele-vance of social inequalities for understanding and acting against organized criminality. A remarkable difference of judgement between the panels about the issue of organized criminality, however, was the relevance of restorative justice responses, which ESC pan-ellists were uncertain about but which EUCPN panellists were strongly in favour of.

Conclusion: Deliberation and the translation of urban security

Of course, these patterns of judgement within and between the two panels invite more forensic discussion of the appropriateness of policy approaches to different kinds of problem than space permits here. Nonetheless, their illustration serves our purposes in this paper in considering how the challenges of translating concepts of crime prevention in Europe, through more expansive concepts such as urban security, might be addressed with the use of deliberative methodologies such as the policy Delphi. This method ena-bles the validation of constructs, within both academic and policy discourse, by different criminological actors, such as social scientists and national policy-makers. In addition to translating the meaning of these constructs between different social groups and across different cultures of control, the method provides a means of organizing deliberation and structuring dialogue. In this paper we have sought to demonstrate some aspects of the dialogue about urban security in Europe, in particular the advantages of organizing delib-eration around specific problems rather than particular institutions. This reorientation of the public discourse about crime and insecurity around specific problems rather than established forms of institutional ‘capture’ opens up a major challenge and opportunity for rethinking policy approaches. For example, findings from Q3 of the Urbis policy Delphi provoke further debate about the relative priority that ought to be accorded to criminal justice, risk management and social justice approaches to organized crime and what a restorative approach to this problem could entail. They also provoke further debate over ‘anti-social behaviour’ as a problem primarily for criminal justice, risk man-agement or social justice and, again, what contribution restorative policies could make to this problem. Further research employing the Delphi method could focus further on the particular problems that have been prioritized, seeking the informed opinion of other kinds of social groups. Even so, this initial use of the Delphi method suggests it is pos-sible to structure deliberation about criminological problems among key informants across different cultures of control in time to inform and influence public policy debates.16

This particular method remains, to our knowledge, under-used across social science and particularly within comparative criminology. There are good reasons for this because the Delphi method is labour intensive and, when used across diverse cultural and linguis-tic contexts, generates significant challenges of conceptual and literal translation. The method also generates significant challenges for defining and sampling expert panellists and reducing the attrition of panel members across the different rounds of deliberation. Even so, we have illustrated the potential of this deliberative method for addressing these challenges and developing a programme of empirical research capable of providing con-struct validation of the consensus and conflict that prevails among key informants and therefore how hegemonic are particular representations of criminological problems.


In relation to the wider politics of translation constituting ‘Freedom, Security and Justice’ in Europe, findings from the Urbis policy Delphi raise some important political and normative questions for further deliberation. They reveal a high degree of cross-panel consensus highlighting the persistence, rather than eclipse, of social policy inter-ventions focused on the generative causes of crime and insecurity and to the role of cities as engines of progressive action as well as the fulcrum of social problems. The pairing of urban security and social justice is not, in this sense, an oxymoron. Rather, this politics of translation is ‘an unfinished adventure’ (Bauman, 2004) with progressive potential despite widely recognized tendencies toward punitive populism.

Funding

The paper draws on research funded by the European Union’s Leonardo da Vinci Lifelong Learning Programme for ‘project Urbis’ (Reference: 518620-LLP-1-2011-1-IT-LEONARDO-LMP, see http://www.urbisproject.eu/index.php/en/), which the authors gratefully acknowledge.

Notes

1. For an exemplary case study of this, see the reflections of academic participants in the UK Home Office’s Crime Reduction Programme, 1999–2002 (2004, Volume 4, Issue 3, of Criminology and Criminal Justice, London, Sage).

2. See http://efus.eu/en/about-us/about-efus/public/1450/ (accessed 7 March 2013). 3. Of the current 300 local authority members of EFUS, less than 5 percent were from outside

these regions (see http://efus.eu/en/our-network/, accessed 7 March 2013). EFUS currently has seven national forums for urban security, in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, Portugal and Spain.

4. For a discussion of this phenomenon in relation to the analogous concept of ‘community safety’ in anglophone policy discourse on crime prevention, see Edwards and Hughes (2009).

5. Of the 17 national crime prevention strategies published on the EUCPN website, only 2 (Italy and Hungary) made any reference to urban security (see http://www.eucpn.org/strategies/index.asp, accessed 7 March 2013).

6. Six established English-language criminology journals based in Europe were searched, at the time of writing this paper, for references to ‘urban security’ over the past 10 years (or for as long as they had been in publication). This revealed limited usage of the concept: European Journal of Criminology (3 citations); European Journal of Crime, Criminal Law and Criminal Justice (4); Crime, Law and Social Change (2); British Journal of Criminology (4); Criminology and Criminal Justice (2); and Crime Prevention and Community Safety (2).

7. The Delphi method had its origins in the US RAND Corporation’s contribution to US defence strategy in the Cold War, given the absence of opportunities for gaining experimental cer-tainty about the outcomes of a nuclear missile exchange (Gordon and Helmer, 1964). In the less apocalyptic world of contemporary criminology, argument continues over the possibility and desirability of experimental knowledge about ‘what works’ in the prevention of crime (Sherman, 2008; Tilley, 2009; Hope, 2009; Young, 2011).

8. For a more developed account of this argument, see Edwards et al. (2013). 9. This research forms part of a broader project, ‘project Urbis’, funded by the European Union’s

Leonardo da Vinci Lifelong Learning Programme to recognize the ‘state of the art’ in manag-ing urban security in Europe; to identify any need for the further professionalization of this

Edwards et al. 281

role, specifically through higher educational qualifications; to design a higher educational pro-gramme of teaching and learning about managing urban security; and to pilot this programme among current and prospective urban security managers (http://www.urbisproject.eu/index.php/en/, accessed 7 March 2013). The Urbis policy Delphi forms part of Work Package 3 of this project, on the ‘state of the art’ in thinking about urban security, the problems signified by this concept, the policy responses it implies, who ought to be responsible for these responses and what kinds of experience and expertise are needed to fulfil this responsibility. All of which presumes, as discussed above, greater clarity about the provenance, prevalence and signifi-cance of the concept.

10. Respondents on the ESC and EUCPN panels, who were sampled from elite transnational policy networks for this research, were sufficiently comfortable with the use of English as the sole medium of communication. It must be acknowledged, however, that further research employing literal translation of questionnaires and reports in other languages may well improve response rates, particularly for comparative research at the local level. A particular advantage of iterative communication in the Delphi method is that this facilitates the validation of concepts translated between the first languages of respondents and of the Delphi coordinators.

11. For example, the European Crime and Safety Survey, see http://www.unicri.it/services/library_documentation/publications/icvs/ (accessed 7 March 2013).

12. Notwithstanding the subtle, contextualized, insights afforded by the kind of ethnographic immersion favoured by some comparative researchers in European criminology (Nelken, 2010), it is less clear how such intensive research strategies can facilitate a more extensive dialogue among social scientists, policy-makers and other informants and in keeping with the shorter time horizons of the policy process, which is surely central to a practically adequate form of public criminology in Europe.

13. Both panels identified the degradation of governing capacity (affected by the sovereign debt crises and acute pressures on public expenditure in many European states over the next dec-ade). In addition, the ESC panel identified the protection of critical infrastructure (including energy, food and water supplies) as a key emerging issue while the EUCPN panel identi-fied the growth of urban populations, particularly as a consequence of migration from poorer regions into wealthier cities, as an emerging priority.

14. Individual panellists’ responses were collated and the mean response calculated. These were plotted on a scale from 1 to 7 that corresponded to the Likert scales. This is visualized in Key 1 of Figures 1 and 2 and by the position of the markers either towards the outer rim of the ‘radar diagrams’ or towards their centre; the further out from the centre the marker, the more severe/frequent the problem in the collective judgement of the panel (where point 7, at the centre of the diagram, corresponds to ‘very innocuous/infrequent’ and point 1 indicates very severe/frequent). Of course, mean panel response scores can be skewed by the extreme judgements of a minority of panellists, particularly in small panels, so, to determine the strength of the consensus within the panel, a second layer of analysis examined whether panellists’ responses were concentrated or dispersed around the ‘mean panel response’. In turn, this concentration of panellists’ responses around the mean may be ‘high’ (75 percent or more of the panel), ‘moderate’ (more than or equal to half but less than three-quarters of the panel), ‘low’ (more than or equal to a quarter but less than a half of the panel) or ‘questionable’ (less than a quar-ter of the panel). For example, in Figure 1 (ESC panel), the severity of violence against the person (including domestic violence) had a mean score of 1.93 (indicating ‘severe’) and all 15


panellists (100 percent) chose either ‘highly severe’, ‘severe’ or ‘moderately severe’, therefore indicating a high concentration of opinion. The strength of consensus is visualized in Key 2 in Figures 1 and 2 and by the markers in the diagrams, where the larger the marker, the stronger the consensus among panellists.

15. As with severity and frequency, a seven-point Likert scale was used (from strongly agree to strongly disagree) in tandem with calculations of ‘mean panel response’ and ‘consensus of panel’ (see note 14).

16. For example, completion of the three rounds of the ESC and EUCPN panels took 11 months, which is well within the policy cycle of elected governments and local authorities in Europe.

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