Author: Elizabeth Burney (Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge)
ISBN No: 978-1-84392-69
Review date: 05/12/2025
No of pages: 256
Publisher: Willan
Year of publication: 11/09/2012
Brief:
Anti-social behaviour (ASB) and the ASBO became a high-profile plank of the Labour Government’s laws and work against crime. A new book reviews the last dozen years.
Like many books by criminologists, Making People Behave, by Elizabeth Burney, concentrates on the public sector, what the politicians and law enforcers say and do. That’s a shame, because, as the book does mention, much of the leg-work to enforce good behaviour and to gather evidence for ASBOs is done by the private sector. And public spaces partly or largely guarded by private security are where ASB is most obvious – and off-putting, if it’s a car park or town centre. For instance, professional witnesses watch – for days, even – offenders because residents are too frightened to give evidence. On-street CCTV is of use to the authorities too, though interestingly it doesn’t deter bad behaviour. To be fair, Burney does mention a 2003 book that’s looking with time to be quite significant – Alison Wakefield’s Selling Security: The Private Policing of Public Space, about guarding teams in shopping centres. You do get the impression of the sheer vastness and variety of ASB – begging, binge-drinking, airgun-firing, graffiti, youths just hanging around. Local government and police struggle with an essentially impossible issue. Surely as interesting is how a mall, a cinema, a stadium, enforces rules so that the law-abiding are happy customers, the disorderly are kept in line, and the business turns in a profit. The job comes down to security teams who may be pulled various ways (as Wakefield and others such as Dr Mark Button have showed).
