Author: Edited by Adam Crawford
ISBN No: 978-0-415-62759-7
Review date: 05/05/2024
No of pages: 336
Publisher: Routledge
Publisher URL:
http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415627597/
Year of publication: 07/10/2014
Brief:
Crime and Insecurity
Why bring out in paperback a 12-year-old collection of essays about crime and security? Is it that the essays are so good and have lasted the test of time, or isn’t there anything better on the publisher’s plate? We do have to ask, because so much has happened since the original Crime and Insecurity book came out in 2002. 9-11 had just happened; but the book arose from a seminar in 2000, and much of the writing and research dates from the late 1990s. Much has happened in the dozen or so years since.
That said, much inside has stood the test of time, and the topics and the authors have weathered well. At the risk of singling some out to unfairly leave out others, some to mention are Tim Newburn’s chapter on introduction of CCTV in a custody suite in Kilburn in north London; Clive Walker and Martina McGuinness’ on commercial risk, political violence (the IRA in those times) and policing of the City of London; community safety and the ‘question of trust’ in rural Cheshire, by Sandra Walklate; and for the more philosophic among you, a piece on ‘violence in the age of uncertainty’ by the continental thinker Zygmunt Bauman.
And as for David Wall’s chapter on cyberspace, we have to wonder how far we have progressed; how little we know about the amount of crime online, or who is doing it, or where. We know now as then how much crime is done over cyberspace, and how much is simply old crime done online: fraud, stalking, hate speech, intellectual property theft, hacktivism, trade in drugs.
