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Introduction: Security in the City
Paul von Kodolitsch
Introduction: Security in the City
Providing security within and without is among the oldest and most important tasks of every polity (Neuffer 1973: 115). Also of cities. But since city walls have lost their function (1), external security has no longer been a municipal matter, and since the transfer of the Munich police to the state in 1975, the last remaining urban police force re-established after 1945 (Lange 1998: 83), internal security has finally become the task of the state. This is not to say that local authorities have no role to play in performing security functions:
- Their regulatory authorities grant or withdraw trading licenses for restaurants, bars, and amusement arcades, designate no-go areas for prostitution, monitor associations of foreigners, provide shelter for the homeless, regulate pub closing times, enforce legal protection for youth in public places and the law relating to assembly. This far from exhaustive list shows the considerable extent to which municipalities, together with the police, are involved in protecting public security and order.(2)
- With their urban development policy and instruments, especially building permission and development planning, they determine urban space and its use structures. They thus create or defuse opportunities for crime (cf. LKA Rheinland-Pfalz 2002: 4) (3), or, it has occasionally been suspected, encourage "urban-structural" violence (4).
- hey do much to combat social and economic deprivation, especially through their social, youth, family, and housing policy, as well as policy on education, culture and employment, and by promoting economic development. If one accepts the often cited view - now almost a platitude - that the best crime policy is good social policy (Franz von Liszt) and the best social policy is good economic policy (Ludwig Erhard), it is clear that with all these activities local authorities make an essential contribution to crime prevention and thus to security in the city.(5)
Local authorities have been performing these tasks from time immemorial or at least for a very long time indeed. But the impact their activities has on security and crime prevention was, except in a few subsidiary areas,(6) not the explicit aim of local government practice, and was often enough not even perceived as a side-effect of the actual function performed. It was believed that local security was ensured and was in any case the responsibility of the state - with the result that local party platforms in the mid-1970s saw no reason to mention security and crime prevention (Bretscheider/Göbel 1976).
It was not until the early 1990s that local authorities discovered security as a cross-sectional task concerning society as a whole, which, in keeping with current views (cf. Deutscher Städtetag 2003: 12 und Witte 2002: 10), had to be organised across narrow departmental boundaries and in joint responsibility with the primarily competent state and societal forces. This change took place under the heading local crime prevention, finding expression particularly in the establishment of prevention councils, and became integrated in initiatives launched by Land governments and in the new police strategy of community policing inspired by developments in Britain and the United States (cf. Heinz 1997: 69 ff.). But when local authorities actually began to take action, they did so mostly under pressure from the local security situation, as revealed by local crime figures,(7) signs of civil disorder,(8) the fears of the public,(9) media reports, the attitudes of political parties and associations (10) and - not least of all - the image problems of the locality.(11)
These aspects continue to play the main role in initiating and planning security activities in cities. However, local authorities' readiness to act is dampened by their disinclination to take on state tasks that engender cost creep (cf. Witte 2002: 9) (12) and by uncertainty about what which measures bring success and which do not, i.e., which are merely self-reassuring or give a pre-election signal that action is being taken. Such uncertainty is due primarily to the paucity of both effects research on local crime prevention and security policy and comparative work on the subject in this country.
This is the context for the five articles in this issue of the German Journal of Urban Studies:
- Walter Siebel and Jan Wehrheim examine a widespread thesis that currently dominates the spatially-oriented debate on "security in the city" - the question of privatization of the city and the loss of public space. They focus on the new surveillance systems that are often regarded as a threat to the publicness of urban space. The authors conclude that, although shifts are taking place between the public and private spheres, it cannot simply be concluded that the polarity between the two spheres - constitutive for the European city - is deteriorating.
- Dietrich Oberwittler analyses recent criminological findings on developments in objective and subjective security in Germany. Although recorded juvenile violence is increasing, he concludes that there is no cause to dramatise the situation as a whole. He recommends concentrating efforts on the target group of children and adolescents and, from a spatial point of view, on so-called hot spots. He advocates more intensive effects research, because, without such control, crime prevention risks being reduced to a merely symbolic policy.
- Britta Banneberg analyses national and especially international effects research - where it exists - and attempts to derive guidelines for local crime prevention. She is not concerned with unspecific measures designed to shape structural conditions in society whose impact is difficult to verify; she focuses on specific crime prevention to be implemented in the family or at school, in sport, or in the local neighbourhood. The most promising approaches prove to be multi-level and interlinked.
- Werner Leonhardt looks at the organisation and scope of integrated community security policy, taking the state capital of North Rhine-Westphalia, Düsseldorf, as his example. Düsseldorf relies on a systematic combination of prevention and repression, consistent coordination of the activities of all the relevant authorities and agencies, on the integration of both police and private security services - and on municipal enforcement personnel (which, in view of the other functions the police are required to perform, is certainly a useful but costly solution).
- Silke Pies and Christian Schrapper examine one of many areas of community security policy, juvenile delinquency. They analyse the available data, evaluating it in the light of the often too "agitated" public debate, and consider the consequences for preventative youth and social policy at the local level. In conclusion, they call for the old polarities between punishment and understanding, sanctions and support to be addressed productively instead of playing them off against one another.
Notes
(1) In "Il Principe," Machiavelli writing in 1513 about German cities and their direct subordination to the Reich, noted that they obeyed the emperor only when it suited them, for, being both well fortified and armed and well provisioned for a good year, they feared neither him nor any other ruler in their neighbourhood (cited from Ribhegge 2002: 28). (back)
(2) Municipalities, as lower tier general regulatory authorities, perform delegated functions either pursuant to special legislation (such as the Industrial Code) or general Land police and regulatory legislation (on the terminology of the law relating to danger avoidance and on the distribution of competence between regulatory authorities and the police in separated and mixed systems see Lange 1998 and Krajewski 2002). (back)
(3) Under the heading "nightmares" this theme has been espoused in particular by the new women's movement that arose in the wake of the 1968 movement and by the local government equal opportunities positions it initiated (cf. Schreyögg 1989: 196 ff.). (back)
(4) This thesis was advanced in the 1970s in connection with juvenile vandalism (cf. Keim 1981) and in the early 1980s in the context of the squatters' movement. Meanwhile, however, it is assumed that crime arises only if certain forms of settlement and construction coincide with serious social problems, the buzzwords being "problem areas" and "hot spots" (cf. Göschel 1994: 1337). (back)
(5) These aspects are dealt with in sociology under the headings integration/disintegration (cf. thematic focus DfK 2001/1), deprivation and anomy. It is assumed that not so much value changes as economic conditions are decisive for societal integration. In essence, there is an effect chain beginning with the pluralisation and delegitimation of values leading to anomy, i.e., the breach of norms or deviant behaviour, where individuals or groups compete for scarce resources and the public sector fails to satisfy aspirations (cf. Friedrichs 1994: 124 ff.). (back)
(6) According to a survey published in the late 1980s, the areas in question were drug aid, legal protection for youth in public places, and services for women (cf. Vahlenkamp 1989). (back)
(7) Police crime statistics currently classify the spatial distribution of crime by community size classes, Länder, by East-West comparison, and by individual cities with a population of over 100,000. A large number of cities, like Heidelberg, break these data down in collaboration with the police in the form of a crime atlas into small-scale units, i.e., districts or even individual neighbourhoods that are under special observation. (back)
(8) This term covers the concepts of disorder (unsocial behaviours) and incivilities (physical decay). Most offences are below the penal threshold and are now often classified in municipal danger prevention regulations as administrative offences, being enforced by municipal agencies - from drinking in public and aggressive begging to graffiti and littering. Such approaches are based on the conviction - stemming form American broken-window and zero-tolerance notions and reflecting public fear of crime and the withdrawal of the police from the cities - that cleanliness and order in the streets and squares are an important preliminary step towards public security (Deutscher Städtetag 2003: 12). (back)
(9) Surveys regularly show that the public give high, if not the highest priority to protection against crime and violence, harassment and threats (cf., for instance, Bundesamt für Bauwesen und Raumordnung 2002). However, local authorities themselves give nothing like the same weight to these issues. In the regular surveys conducted by the German Institute of Urban Affairs on the main problems in urban development and local government policy, "public security/fear of crime" always rank very low (Bretschneider 2001: 106 f.). (back)
(10) Especially active in this regard is the retail trade, which has long been particularly badly hit by shoplifting and manifestations of disorder (cf. 1998 member survey of the Association of German Retailers). In the seventh of their "11 components of sustainable urban and retail trade development" the Federal Association of Medium and Large-Scale Retail Enterprises (BAG) therefore demanded that an end be put to playing down, hushing up, and looking the other way - a culture of internal security needed to be created "which develops a new basic pattern of synthesis between freedom and security." (back)
(11) Over and again it is presumed that security policy and crime prevention are integral parts of primarily economically oriented local government enhancement and locational strategies. But it can also be argued that these strategies would thus be supplemented by the social components so far claimed to have been lacking - at least if the relevant approaches combine repressive with preventive and integrative elements (for example, in the sense of concurrent displacement pressure on the drug scene and the offer of help with drug problems). (back)
(12) Many mayors refuse to act as chair of the local prevention council on the grounds that this would signal that they bear responsibility for an area which is primarily the province of the state, as was made clear at the request of local government umbrella organisations in the joint circular order of the Land of North Rhine-Westphalia of August 2002 (3.5) (cf. Witte 2002: 10). (back)
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