Global Report on Human Settlements 2007 - PoA-ISS

Urban crime and violence: Policy responses
105
partners, and be pursued consistently over a period of time if
they are to make a significant difference.
INSTITUTIONAL AND
COMMUNITY RESPONSES
Institutional and community responses to problems of crime
and violence are integral to many of the policy activities
reviewed. This section identifies a few key points in this
regard. Institutional responses to crime and violence can
come from all levels of the hierarchy of governance, and very
often this is what is required in a comprehensive response to
problems of crime and violence. One of the challenges in
these situations is to get the whole range of responses to
work together in a coordinated manner, based upon a broad
strategy and programmes of action. For cities, a typical
problem might be that they do not control the police and
criminal justice systems, but want these systems to do
particular things to support a city-wide or more localized
initiative.
For higher levels of government, they can typically
find this kind of spatial differentiation difficult to achieve,
either because it challenges their broad policies or organizational
structures, or it would involve moving resources
around and giving priority to one location over another.
Thus, getting all levels of the hierarchy to focus in a coordinated
way on a city or more localized initiative can be
difficult. This, in turn, explains why the efforts of the various
arms of the public sector that are apparently contributing to
a project can appear to local people to be less well integrated
than would be desirable for the success of the project. This
is one of the reasons why the role of the local authority is
absolutely crucial in this process.
Local authorities are uniquely placed to take an
overview of their locality and its needs, to represent the
interests both of the city as a whole and of its individual
residents, and to work with others to ensure that an
integrated programme of action is drawn up, agreed and
implemented. They control many of the services that need
to be fully involved in this process, and they have good
working relationships with a range of other service
providers. Usually, there is no other key player in the process
of whom all this could be said, which is why leadership of
this process often falls to the local authority. Players should
also have one other asset that is fundamental in this process:
the strength of their links with local communities.
Many initiatives to combat crime and violence are
started and implemented by communities. Where this is the
case, the role of local authorities may be limited to issues
such as the granting of necessary permissions and offering
various forms of assistance. But many initiatives, by their
nature, are more likely to be initiated as part of a more
comprehensive programme and to be put into practice by
one or more partners of that programme. In this case, the
community role is more likely to be about any or all of the
following:
• consultation and the generation of community support
since it is very difficult to mount successful initiatives
in the face of community opposition;
• the provision of local information because the knowledge
base of local community members is potentially of
vital importance; and
• negotiation over the detail, including what the expectations
are of local communities and what kind of
contributions they are able and willing to make, because
even if communities are not project initiators, they can
often play important roles in helping projects to
succeed.
These are highly important to the success of initiatives in
their own right; but community involvement in, and support
for, projects is important in another sense as well. For
example, an initiative to encourage members of the public to
come forward and report crimes to the police depends upon
whether or not people are prepared to put aside the reasons
for not doing this previously and cooperate, which, in turn,
might depend upon many other issues (e.g. trust in the
police in relation to matters such as witness protection
schemes).
Many initiatives stand or fall based on their ability to
engage local communities as active participants or even as
passive participants. Sometimes, the way in which people
talk to each other about projects in their areas as part of
their daily conversations can make a difference to how
positively or negatively people feel about such projects.
Failure to engage local communities in the past has stopped
many ideas that in their own right may well have been good
ones from achieving their full potential. Community engagement
is central to initiatives in this field since community
members are the ultimate beneficiaries of such initiatives.
This being the case, the basic principle here which derives
from people’s rights as citizens is that initiatives should be
‘done with’ them rather than ‘done to’ them.
PARTNERSHIPS
Partnerships can be seen as both a specific mechanism that
can be used to encourage interested parties to work together
and a more philosophical approach that recognizes the multifaceted
nature of the problems of crime and violence. The
partnership approach in this latter sense is becoming more
frequently utilized in initiatives to tackle urban crime and
violence because experience has demonstrated that if such
initiatives are to succeed they need to acknowledge the
complex and multidimensional nature of the problems they
are seeking to address. This inevitably means that a wide
range of players will be involved in processes of this nature,
which, in turn, creates the requirement for mechanisms to
ensure that these contributions operate in integrated and
coherent ways.
Partnerships offer both a mechanism of this kind and
a framework within which individuals and organizations can
commit to holistic approaches. In addition, there is considerable
evidence to support the view that initiatives are more
likely to be successful if they are part of an integrated
Institutional
responses to crime
and violence can
come from all levels
of the hierarchy of
governance, and
very often this is
what is required in a
comprehensive
response to
problems of crime
and violence