Policing and Changing Perceptions of Neighbourhood Security

Abstract

This chapter adopts a longitudinal perspective to track the impacts of the delivery of Neighbourhood Policing over an extended period of time. Working with the Safer Neighbourhood Teams in the London Borough of Sutton for over a decade, the delivery and impacts of Neighbourhood Policing in the area were tracked longitudinally, generating a unique empirically informed perspective that measures public perceptions and experiences of crime, disorder, and policing in fine-grained detail. The data show how the number of concerns being raised by the public reduced significantly over the monitoring period, and whilst the type of problem varied from year to year, some ‘wicked’ problems proved more persistent. Respondents also talked far less often about issues in their immediate neighbourhoods, recalibrating their concerns to more generic public spaces with high footfall. Taken together, these data provide some sense of what Neighbourhood Policing can and cannot accomplish in terms of its impacts upon often complex social problems and situations.