Fear and Everyday Urban Lives

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2001 38: 885Urban StudRichard Sparks, Evi Girling and Ian Loader

Fear and Everyday Urban Lives

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Urban Studies, Vol. 38, Nos 5–6, 885–898, 2001

Fear and Everyday Urban Lives

Richard Sparks, Evi Girling and Ian Loader

[Paper received in � nal form, January 2001]

The question of fear has a marked capacity toincite controversy. How could it not? Inmany accounts, fear features among our mostbasic emotional or dispositional states. Thesedays, there are many commentators (onethinks here � rst of practitioners of evolution-ary psychology and its associated enter-prises) on hand to remind us that the urge to� ght or � ee inhabits some part of ourselvesthat remains forever on the savannah, pro-grammed to defend our young and ward offpotential aggressors. Of course, such obser-vations—especially in their more sweepinglypopulist forms—descend almost instantlyinto bathetic truism. Nevertheless, it may beworth remembering, before we proceed, howpotent and durable a motivator in humanaffairs fear may be (Wrong, 1994). It is afundamental and often mortally powerfulmotor of politics: what sovereign power orwhat arrangement of physical or symbolicboundaries, walls and fences will ensure oursecurity? When political speech, supportedoften enough by the scripts and formulae ofthe culture industries, addresses us throughour fears, it touches our rawest nerves andoften calls upon some of our most visceralresponses: to defend our own, not to surren-der, to patrol our borders, to suspect thestranger; to exclude, reject and shun. Some-times these very dynamics call forth a coun-terstrategy (often a dissident one; but

sometimes the emollient and soothing voiceof the powerful) that seeks to anatomise theimagined, confected and ideological charac-ter of fears; their associations with the cen-sure of deviants and scapegoats and hencewith political projects and manoeuvres. Themost principled aim of such strategies is to‘forbid facile gestures’ (Cohen, 1985) by ex-posing the interests that they serve and theworkings of their construction (Best, 1999).Our point is just that discussion of fearfultopics is rarely still for long. It also has atendency to fall into polarities—between as-sertion and denial, hyping-up and cooling-out, and between an overcon� dent realismand a callow agnosticism.

Fear is, as Ewald (2000) nicely has it, a‘hinge’ concept. It at once reaches down intothe least illuminated details of the inner lifeand out towards the larger and ostensiblymore remote features of social organisation.Whom and what we fear, and how we ex-press and act upon our fearing, is in somequite important sense, as Durkheim long agorealised, constitutive of who we are. It is ataround this point that explanatory and inter-pretive problems crowd in. Whilst fear, likeother emotional states, may depend ulti-mately on a common underlying ethology, itis also irremediably and entirely social. Theapparent similarities between our currentquests for security and those characteristic of

Richard Sparks, Evi Girling and Ian Loader are in the Department of Criminology, Keele University, Keele, Staffordshire, ST5 5BG,UK. Fax: 01782 584 269. E-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]; and [email protected]. Thisresearch was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council under its ‘Crime and Social Order’ Research Programme(award no. L210252032). The authors are grateful to the ESRC and to the Programme’s Director Tim Hope.

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RICHARD SPARKS, EVI GIRLING AND IAN LOADER886

other times and places may prove mislead-ing. Here and now (just as then or there) weconfront particular con� gurations of risks;we experience distinctive fears, anxieties andenmities; we engage in these practices oftrusting or suspecting, meeting or avoiding.In this sense, the question ‘what are weafraid of?’ only ever has a local and pro-visional answer (Zedner, 1995, 2000). Fearmay shadow the most mundane of our every-day practices—our accustomed routines ofchild-care, travel, consumption and domesticarrangements. One thinks here (and see be-low) of the normalisation of the technologi-cal extensions of our capacity to watch,guard and defend: the cameras, bollards,grilles, passwords, alarms and bar-codes thatunobtrusively frame our routine transactions.Yet, at the same time, the very fearfulness ofthe objects of our worry may reside in oursense that they come to us from elsewhere;that they are indicative of changes and dis-ruptions that escape our understanding orcontrol; or perhaps that they pre� gure a fu-ture that we � nd unnerving and whose secur-ity and reliability we may have good reasonto doubt. In other words, we need to discovera vocabulary and a way of inquiry capable oftracing the connections between situated ex-periences of fear (or uncertainty or precari-ousness) and the larger transformations ofculture and economy that surround and pen-etrate the locale and render it more or lesssafe or dubious for us as a habitat.

In our view, the place of fear and insecu-rity in the structuration of everyday life canonly be grasped intensively and in situ. Thebest means of cutting through the staler po-larities into which the discussion of fear hasso often descended is to re� ect upon themodes of participation and avoidance thatpeople practise in the ordinary settings oftheir lives. One important precursor in thiskind of inquiry may be found in the work ofIan Taylor (Taylor, 1995, 1997, 1999; Tayloret al., 1996). Taylor and his co-workers intheir study of local practices and sensibilitiesin two northern English cities revise Ray-mond Williams’ (1964) notion of the ‘struc-ture of feeling’ to reference the ways in

which citizens’ current experiences connectwith an embedded set of understandings ofplace, of the laminated residues of local his-tory and of contemporary trajectories ofdevelopment (of aspiration or decline). Simi-larly Taylor et al. (1996, p. 314) apply Gid-dens’ notion of ‘practical consciousness’ toencompass not just everyday conduct in its‘automatic’ aspect but also a certain set ofimplicit meanings: “emotional scripts withtheir own speci� c temporal and spatial di-mensions”, and the ‘indicative maps’ held byspeci� c ‘publics’ such as women, the elderlyor ethnic minorities of the territories of safetyand danger within the city. At the same time,Taylor has been at pains to show that thisforegrounding of locality is in no sense aparochial concern. An apprehension of localspeci� city is a necessary preliminary to anylarger comparative enterprise. Moreover,what ‘place-talk’ narrates is often itself acomparative sense of the vicissitudes of thistown’s or city’s (region’s or country’s) jour-ney through modernity (see further, Ther-born, 1995). The study of local sensibilitiesand practices in their fullness and particular-ity is undertaken in the full knowledge thattoday place is “entirely penetrated by distan-ciated in� uences” (Giddens, 1991, p. 188).

In our own research, we have pursued asimilar line of inquiry by the (only su-per� cially paradoxical) means of investigat-ing the fears and feelings towards crime ofthe residents of one, middle-sized, Englishtown.1 Our purposes in doing this were ofseveral kinds. There were pragmatic con-cerns: for example, the sense that we couldcome to cover the ground more fully in thetime available than we could in some largerconurbation. We also began from a certainresistance to what we regarded as a habit ofmetropolitan condescension on the part ofmany intellectuals towards such places. Forreasons ranging from the sensible to themerely lazy, there is a weight of tradition incriminology and elsewhere in the social sci-ences that identi� es both crime and fear ex-clusively with the city—and with certainparts of it at that. There are political as wellas empirical grounds for rejecting any such



FEAR AND EVERYDAY URBAN LIVES 887

premise, and we will return to these by way ofconclusion. To the extent that we were con-cerned to explore the intrusion of fear intoeveryday life, we felt that there was somevirtue in exploring that question in a ratherundramatic and unglamorous kind of place.More importantly again, however, we wantedto vindicate the argument that the shocksand disruptions of late modernity (or at leasttheir reverberations and after-shocks) arefelt in some form everywhere. As Giddenshas it, contemporary anxieties “press in oneveryone … no-one escapes” (Giddens, 1991,p.124)—even if, importantly, there are manykinds of escape attempt, as we will shortlyshow. Before turning to what the people in thetown told us about the place of fear in theireveryday lives, let us brie� y revisit the theor-etical problems at the back of the enquiry.

Crime-talk and Place-talk

One of the main contentions of our work isthat when people talk about crime they areoften also talking about places. This mayseem obvious and rather innocuous. Wethink, to the contrary, that it is complicatedand rather important. That we think this alsohelps to explain why we adopted the researchstrategy of studying people’s responses tocrime just in one town.

The very term ‘crime’ notoriously evadesde� nition, beyond the circularity of sayingthat it comprises acts prohibited by criminallaw. For the most part, when we talk aboutcrime (in bus-stops, pubs, workplaces, atschool gates, in community centres, shops,living rooms) we are talking about events,happenings, stories (about what happened tome, you, your neighbour, on the street, roundthe corner, across town). Yet the open-textured and capacious nature of the category‘crime’ also means that such conversationshave no necessary stopping-off place. Wedeal with these proximate things also in theshadow of the knowledge that ‘crime’ doesnot only mean local nuisances, grievancesand troubles, but also means things that areextreme, bizarre, arcane, menacing. We mayalso sense that what happens here is echoed

elsewhere—or contrasts with what happenselsewhere—in ways that ‘stretch’ the prob-lem across time and distance and demandexplanation in more than just local and par-ticular terms. Moreover, our understandingof these matters is not con� ned to personalexperience, gossip or rumours; it also � owsfrom newspaper reports, television coverage,magazines, movies, political campaigns andso on. In these respects, crime � gures atalmost every point in our culture from themost general to the most intimate.

For reasons such as these, crime is a topicthat never quite stays still and submits itselffor dispassionate examination. Similarly,people’s talk about crime is dense and di-gressive. It slips from topic to topic, changesgear and direction. It talks in stories, in-stances and anecdotes, but then moves tospeculations, conjectures, theories. It roamsfrom the present, to the remembered past topossible wished-for or threatening futures. Itis heavy with experience and skips betweenabstractions. It makes sense of troubling andalarming events, but also expresses con-fusion and uncertainty. It effects connectionsbetween people, but also draws boundariesand distinctions and crystallises hostilities,suspicions and con� icts. It invokes authorityand demands order, yet voices criticism andmistrust of authorities and orders. There is adialectic in citizens’ crime talk between dis-tance and proximity, abstractness and partic-ularity, generic formats and localised stories,the known and the other which is, in ourestimation, an important aspect of the dif-fusion and circulation of public knowledgeabout crime and social order in late modernsocieties. Indeed, much ‘fear of crime’ dis-course is largely about the protection of cer-tain places or territories (homes, streets,communities, nations) against incursion, usu-ally seen as coming initially from elsewhere.Thus, whilst most of us are in some degreeused to the idea of ‘crime as metaphor’, andfamiliar with the deployment of crime andpunishment as resources of signi� cance andvalue in storytelling, we may not for the mostpart have understood very clearly howpowerfully those metaphors and meanings




are relayed through the representation ofplaces and the creation of ‘place myths’(Lash and Urry, 1994; Shields, 1991) andwith what consequences. There is a strongemphasis in much recent discussion on the‘criminology of place’ (Sherman et al., 1989;Eck and Weisburd, 1995). ‘Ecological’ con-cerns have come to enjoy a renewed promi-nence in recent US, UK and Scandinaviancriminology—perhaps especially in analysesof the concentration of poverty and/or socialdisorganisation in the work of Sampsonand Wilson (1995), Hagan (1994) andothers. Moreover, place-speci� c anxiety andfear have an evident bearing in many suchanalyses insofar as they relate to issues ofneighbourhood change, ‘white � ight’, ‘ghet-toisation’ and ‘disrepute’ (see generally,Skogan, 1990; Taub et al., 1984) and thesocially skewed distributions of victimisationrisks (Hope, 1997).

The development of reputations and place-myths, it is now clear, is materially crucial tothe declining or ascending paths of neigh-bourhoods and towns (a point made in differ-ing ways by writers as various as Bottomsand Wiles, 1986; Logan and Molotch, 1987;and of course Davis, 1990)—processes ofpolarisation which show every sign of havingintensi� ed in the US and in the UK in recentyears. But more generally, we will argue, ifwe wish to understand the � ltration of gen-eric social representations of crime, law en-forcement and punishment (and thehegemony which certain amongst them enjoyover others—see Melossi, 1994, p. 208) intoeveryday sensibility, we will also need tocomprehend the situated character of theirreception and appropriation by people in thepractical and mundane contexts of their dailylife. On the other hand, the omnipresence ofmass media and the ‘time–space com-pression’ (Harvey, 1989; Thompson, 1996)that they engender forces upon us as receiv-ers a re� exive awareness of place—an as-sessment of our own place in relation to (andsometimes expressly in defence from) others.In other words, place-awareness nowadaystends to be relational and comparative. Oneform that such awareness can assume—the

one that particularly interests us here—maybe a fretful awareness of the fragility of therelative peace and order of one’s own placeand hence the (sometimes literal) patrollingof its boundaries. As Doreen Massey (1994)points out, there is an element almost ofwishful thinking in the cosmopolitanism ofsome of those branches of social theorywhich seek to argue that place is necessarilyof diminishing importance. Insofar as theyinterpret attachments to and identi� cationswith places as wilfully nostalgic and politi-cally reactionary, they have an interest incontending that the future lies ‘elsewhere’.On the contrary, Massey argues, the fact thatplaces have become complicated, plural andreplete with cultural contradictions does notmean that they have ceased to matter or thatthey are about to do so. Rather:

If it is now recognised that people havemultiple identities then the same point canbe made in relation to places. Moreover,such multiple identities can be a source ofrichness, or a source of con� ict, or both(Massey, 1994, p. 153).

It should by now be apparent that the ‘fear ofcrime’, as this has conventionally been con-ceived and measured, is by no means ourprimary concern. Rather, we have been at-tempting to develop a place-sensitive soci-ology of public sensibilities towards crime ofsomewhat broader intent. However, we dopropose that some of the more perplexingand seemingly anomalous discoveries of the‘fear of crime’ literature (especially thosewhich have given rise to the extended and inthe main unhelpful debate on the rationalityor otherwise of public responses to the per-ceived risks of crime2) become substantiallymore intelligible in the light of a thickercontextual understanding of place. To posethe matter in this way does not suggest anylack of interest in the distribution of crimerisks or their relation to the traditionally stud-ied axes of social strati� cation. Neither is itto impute irrationality or gullibility to thosecitizens for whom the danger of crime hasbecome a besetting worry. As Douglas(1992, p. 29) comments, an interest in the




cultural analysis of risk perception is not anassertion of agnosticism about the reality ofrisks. It does, however, mean exploring thesocial and personal consequences of people’sfeelings about crime and justice and theirconnections with other dimensions of sociallife. As Douglas further suggests, a risk isanyway not a ‘thing’ but a way of thinking—not just the probability of an event “but alsothe probable magnitude of its outcome, andeverything depends on the value that is set onthe outcome” (1992, p. 31). In other words,crime is not just something that bashes usover the head out of ill-luck, like a fallingbranch. It is something for which we seekexplanation and accountability—and how weexplain it and whom we blame may behighly symptomatic of who we are and howwe organise our relations with others (Dou-glas, 1992, pp. 6–7). In this respect, crimemay be one of those forms of ‘danger on theborders’ which gives form to a community’ssense of itself and its distinctiveness fromothers. But it may also provoke anxieties thatturn inwards, towards a sense of divisionfrom others who are socially and geographi-cally close. In their discussions of crime, andof other matters of concern to them, peopledevelop their accounts of the past, presentand possible futures of their place in theworld. Such accounts inevitably inhabit dif-ferent registers of language and kinds ofdiction. They move from intimate, personaland particular stories and histories to largerobservations and speculations, thereby dip-ping into those more generically availablecultural resources that seem in some way toframe or lend sense to their own experi-ences—or on occasion to assert the dismay-ing feeling that such experiences lack sense,direction or hope of betterment. In suchways, we argue, people’s responses to crime(in its association with other matters of con-cern to them) inform not only their sense ofplace (where place refers to the immediatesettings and conditions of their daily life) butalso their sense of its place in a larger soci-etal set of stories, con� icts, troubles andinsecurities. Whilst it has long been assertedthat talk of crime is dense with metaphorical

association and pregnant with political ima-gery, such perspectives have too rarely beeninformed by patient empirical enquiry.

The News from ‘Middle England’

We have conducted a case study of publicfeeling about crime, place and security in onemiddle-sized and criminologically ordinaryEnglish town—namely, Maccles� eld inCheshire in north-west England about 15miles south of Manchester. Once a single-in-dustry, silk-weaving town, Maccles� eld hasfrom the 1960s onwards become host to anumber of multinational companies, es-pecially the pharmaceutical giants Zenecaand Ciba-Geigy. It thus embarked on a pe-riod of hitherto unknown prosperity and hasretained relatively high employment andcomparatively high property values eventhrough the recession of the late 1980s andearly 1990s. Although surrounded by yetmore af� uent places (the Manchester com-muter belt of Knutsford, Wilmslow, AlderleyEdge and, perhaps most elite of all, its im-mediate neighbour Prestbury), it increasinglyrepresents itself—for example, in the promo-tional literature produced by its moderatelyentrepreneurial local authority—as acomfortable place with an ‘enviable life-style’. It claims to combine the lifestyle at-tractions of modern amenities and transport(a mainline railway link with London, prox-imity to an international airport) with the‘heritage’ orientation of a former mill-townon the edge of the beautiful open spaces ofthe Pennine foothills. The in� uential HenleyCentre for Forecasting recently numberedMaccles� eld amongst the 30 British townswith the brightest economic prospects.

In the course of the past 3 decades, Mac-cles� eld has both spread geographically andbecome more socially diverse. About 50 000people live there now. In brief and summaryterms, it is possible to identify three primarygroupings:

(1) ‘old’, ‘born and bred’ families of 2 ormore generations’ standing (known lo-cally as ‘Maxonians’), a substantial pro-




portion of whom either live in one of thetown’s 5 public housing estates or oc-cupy the 19th-century terraced housesclose to the town centre;

(2) an in� ux of working people who sincethe 1960s have arrived to take up jobs inthe pharmaceutical industry or the bur-geoning service sector; and

(3) incoming professionals working in thenew industries or the administrative sec-tor or commuting to Manchester.

For some of the latter group, moving toMaccles� eld was merely a fact of occu-pational life and ‘company moves’; for oth-ers, it would have been a re� exive lifestyledecision—a � ight from Manchester and to-wards the countryside. In these respects, thetown has grown by the twin processes ofindustrial regeneration and suburbanisation.

Our research effort in this place has com-prised the following modes of enquiry: ananalysis of publicly available information oneconomic, social and demographic changewithin the town, and of patterns of crime anddemands for policing; an analysis of localrepresentations of crime-related matters ascontained in the local press and crime pre-vention literature; a series of focus groupdiscussions with different sections of the lo-cal population; individual and group discus-sions with criminal justice professionals andother local interest-groups and ‘opinion-formers’; a small number of biographicalinterviews; and numerous hours devoted toinformal conversations and observation, at-tending meetings, hanging around police sta-tions and travelling in police cars. Our aim ininterpreting the perspectives thus generatedis to construct a detailed and nuanced ac-count of the competing sensibilities towardscrime and insecurity prevalent within thisparticular English town. Here we enumeratevery brie� y certain of the locations and top-ics that seemed to us to focus the ordinaryanxieties of the people with whom we spoke.

Home and Away

Maccles� eld residents for the most part

believe the town to be a benign and ratherhomely place, appealing both for the positive‘quality of life’ that it offers and for thedetrimental aspects of contemporary Englishsociety it seeks to avoid (although youngpeople, it should be noted, are less likely toconcur with such sentiments). The evident‘liveability’ of the town should not, however,mask the social deprivation and emergentforms of marginalisation suffered by thoseliving on some of Maccles� eld’s � ve coun-cil-built estates, many of whom felt decid-edly ‘left behind’ by the town’s recentrestructuring and new-found prosperity.Thus, some of the keenest anxieties wereregistered by those who had bought theirformerly municipally owned homes or whoinhabited micro-locations of ‘marginal gen-tri� cation’ on the cusp between the moredisreputable and the more genteel parts oftown (Girling et al., 1998a, 1998b). Suchconcerns focused very largely on the corros-ive effect of persistent low-level street disor-ders, and connected overwhelmingly with the‘youth question’ (see below; see also Pain(this issue). However, many residents andprofessionals did not view Maccles� eld (orPrestbury) as having a signi� cant crimeproblem, or at least not an ‘indigenous’ one.Such concern as was expressed aboutspeci� c offences—mainly burglary and carcrime—tended to attribute these to (semi-professional) ‘outsiders’ from the nearbyconurbations of Manchester and Liverpool.This connects with a more diffuse tendencyamong residents to think of the local ‘crimeproblem’ in terms of the town struggling toprotect itself against the adverse conse-quences of national economic, social andcultural change—or, more speci� cally, de-cline (see Loader et al., 1998). This anxietyabout ‘travelling crime’, although a localdogma shared in many quarters of the town,was voiced most keenly by residents of theaf� uent enclave of Prestbury, many of whomfelt that their leafy ‘village’ represented aneasy and attractive target, a focus for the avidpredations of often vaguely sketched others.For some such people, their enjoyment oftheir own prosperity and the success of their




life-strategy in buying into the ‘village’ (atno small premium in terms of propertyprices, as several were unabashed to note)were compromised by such incursions. Inthis respect, the incompletely protectedcharacter of the enclave tended to exacerbatethe alarming character of the badlands lyingjust over the horizon and the sensed hostilityof their denizens (see Loader et al., 2000).

Inter-generational Tension and Worriesabout Youth

The most widely voiced worries expressedby adult residents of Maccles� eld and Prest-bury concerned the behaviour, safety andwell-being of children and young people.Such concerns focused upon the issue ofdrugs (viewed by young people, adults andprofessionals alike as having recently gotworse within the town), children’s safety anda generalised sense of threat attaching to thedisorderly behaviour of male and femaleteenagers in public spaces. Con� ict betweengenerations over the use of public space wasa feature of social relations across many ofthe town’s composite communities, teenagedisorder being variously interpreted as hav-ing to do with: the decline of parental auth-ority (and of ‘respect for authority’generally); the dearth of available facilitiesfor the young; and, youth unemployment.Among older, established residents es-pecially, teenage disorder was taken to sig-nify a decline of community, and the unrulyactivities of the rising generation were oftencompared unfavourably with a seeminglymore harmonious local and national past.The salience of concern about drugs ofcourse fuses with the worries of some about‘travelling crime’. Drugs always originate, inthis world-view, somewhere else. They areimported, conveyed, channelled and � nallyingested. Drugs therefore supply a key meta-phor for the subversion of the community byoutside in� uences—all the more so sincetheir impact is felt to fall principally on therising generation. They have become ubiqui-tous, but they are not local. This duality is insome sense echoed in a recurrent contradic-

tion between the obligations people acknow-ledge to troublesome local youth (and adesire to � nd ways of reincorporating theminto ‘the community’) and their more puni-tive, exclusionary utterances about ‘youth ingeneral’. This is an empirical demonstrationof an oft-repeated criminological claim to theeffect that people respond very differently toevents and issues in which they are person-ally implicated as distinct from those ofwhich they are more abstractly aware.

Demands and Expectations of Policing

It is clear that, while many (adult) residentsare strongly supportive of the police in ab-stract terms, they often view them as increas-ingly (and illegitimately) remote � gures intheir own experience and express an anxiousdemand for higher levels of visible protec-tion. This is often expressed in terms ofwanting the ‘return of’ a police of� cer who isreadily identi� able as belonging to a speci� ccommunity. There is some perception of thepolice as answering to priorities that are ei-ther obscure to the public or actively dis-puted by them; and a felt concern that thepolice fail to share people’s worries aboutproblems of low-level disorder. This lendspartial support to the view—increasinglytouted in academic and policy circles—thatpublic demands for policing services are ‘in-satiable’ (see, for instance, IndependentCommittee, 1996; see also Loader, 1997).However, it is also interpretable in a morecritical vein—i.e. that under the pressure tomeet quanti� able indicators of performance,the police are declining to satisfy these de-mands and preferring others more amenableto auditing and the production of favourablestatistics. We also suggest that such senti-ment is in part a call for a certain kind offondly remembered, publicly provided, pas-toral police patrolling (wherein of� cers areclosely involved in the social life of localcommunities), rather than a demand forforms of reactive crime-� ghting, or for theprovision of private security. Indeed, whileresidents evinced generally high levels ofenthusiasm for the installation of (more)




CCTV cameras in the town, they viewedwith some disquiet the prospect of policepatrols being supplemented/replaced with ei-ther local authority or commercially providedalternatives. In sum, public attachment to theservice and guardianship roles traditionallyattributed to English policing must be recog-nised. It seems implausible, on our evidence,that increased ef� ciency in crime-� ghtingalone can do much either to assuage publicconcerns or to sustain police legitimacy (seeLoader et al., 1999; Girling et al., 2000,ch. 6).

New Technologies and Everyday Security

We encountered numerous examples of se-curity-oriented practices that have come tobe embedded in the daily routines of individ-uals and families. (These surfaced mainlyamong our middle-class respondents, whowere both more likely to speak of theirproperties as potential targets of burglary andwere more explicitly attuned to matters ofhome security, than were those we spoke toon Maccles� eld’s council-built estates.) Con-sidered by our participants as sensible pre-cautions against (opportunist) crime, thesepractices ranged from locking the back doorwhen upstairs or in the garden and parkingthe car on the drive while away, to (moreunusually) keeping ‘a baseball bat in thebedroom’ and jotting down the registrationnumbers of unfamiliar/suspicious cars, ‘justin case’. Often, they appeared to entail at-tempts by some family members to encour-age others (‘She hardly ever locks the car up,never, ever’, as one Prestbury resident re-marked of his wife) to raise their levels ofeveryday security consciousness. Asigni� cant proportion of our discussants hadalso purchased various forms of physicalprotection for their property. These com-monly included ‘security locks on all thewindows and all the doors’, but also encom-passed ‘a fence [with] a bit of barbed-wireacross the top of it’; numerous instances ofdogs and double glazing being referred to ascrime prevention devices; and—mainlyamong our middle-class respondents in Mac-

cles� eld and Prestbury—security lights andhouse alarms (Cheshire County Council’s(1996) ‘quality of life’ survey found that 21per cent of households in Maccles� eld Bor-ough had burglar alarms and some 37 percent security lights.) In the main, such mea-sures—and some others, such as voluntaryparticipation in informal arrangements to ex-ercise some degree of guardianship overone’s immediate neighbours’ property—wereuncontentious, This no doubt arises in largemeasure from the fact that these forms ofsecurity relate to the protection of individualproperties rather than public spaces and loca-tions—something that for reasons of bothprudence (keeping intruders out, respondingto the incentives and stipulations of in-surance companies) and culture (‘An En-glishman’s home is his castle’) means thattaking steps to secure one’s property hascome to be accepted as the proper responsi-bility of individual home-owners.

While Maccles� eld’s residents take vari-ous measures to ensure the physical protec-tion of their persons and property, theforegoing observations hardly amount—evenin Prestbury—to what, in the southern Cali-fornian context, Mike Davis (1990) hascalled the voracious consumption of defens-ive hardware. This disparity is even moremarked in respect of security measures takento protect whole neighbourhoods. A numberof the housing developments built acrossMaccles� eld in recent years are enclosedbehind walls (though not—at present—gates)and this forms part of their appeal for somepurchasers—as a resident of one such devel-opment bluntly put it: ‘I like The Villasbecause it’s got a fence around it’. However,for the most part, residents of Maccles� eldand Prestbury not only evinced little interestin, but expressly recoiled from, the idea ofthe defended neighbourhood—a reluctancethat � ows both from their impression of thetown as having a currently modest, contain-able crime problem and, signi� cantly, fromtheir sense of the kind of place they wish tolive in. Thus, while Prestbury residents takeoften extensive steps to protect their ownproperty (the larger houses are walled and




gated), it is important to them that the sur-rounding space retains its English pastoralappearance—a sentiment no doubt madepossible by the fact that Prestbury’sboundaries (and the exclusion of ‘undesir-ables’) are secured through the operation ofthe housing market (see Hope, 1998).

At the time of our research, Maccles� eldBorough Council were, in collaboration withCheshire Police, in the process of trying tosecure funds to extend closed-circuit camerasurveillance in the town centre beyond thecar parks, where it was already in operation.Our respondents generally evinced supportfor the introduction of CCTV to the centre ofMaccles� eld, albeit that this was articulatedwith varying degrees of force. Among some,the embrace of CCTV appeared to be of arather pragmatic, even experimental, kind,best encapsulated in the phrase ‘it’s worth atry’. People here either pronounced them-selves as having ‘personally no objections’ toCCTV, or, in a more positive vein, expressedthe hope that as it had worked elsewhere(and it was often taken as read that CCTVhad worked elsewhere) there is no reason forit not to improve things in Maccles� eld towncentre (especially in relation to alcohol-related violence), thereby making people feel‘more comfortable’. As one male resident putit (recalling the security camera image oftoddler James Bulger’s abduction by two10-year-old boys from a Liverpool shoppingcentre in 1993): ‘I think it’s got to be betterthan nothing’.

Others, however, were much more pas-sionate and wholehearted in their enthusiasmfor CCTV, not only welcoming the towncentre scheme as ‘a brilliant idea’, but alsoexpressing next to no qualms about extend-ing camera surveillance more widely. As oneretired female resident of The Villas put it:‘I’m all for it. You can have as many as youwant, where you want. … It wouldn’t worryme where you put them’. Some even voicedsupport for extending CCTV surveillance toresidential areas, including their own. Whatis striking about this vein of more robustenthusiasm for CCTV is that it is couchednot so much in terms of the positive bene� ts

of camera surveillance (which are generallytaken to be self-evident), but as an attack onthose who oppose CCTV on the grounds thatit represents an unwarranted infringement ofindividual freedom. These utterances drawupon and reproduce a powerful (and in-suf� ciently understood) strand of Englishpopular orthodoxy about crime and justicewhich holds that ‘law-abiding citizens’ haveno legitimate cause for worrying about, orobjecting to, measures (presumably any ofthe measures) that are taken in the name ofcrime control. They acknowledge that—inthis case—CCTV is a matter of cultural con-test (hence the assorted references to an Or-wellian Big Brother) only to close the contestwith the suggestion that dissent is con� ned toparticular kinds of people: criminals, and thatsmall, unrepresentative lobby preoccupiedwith civil liberties. These tropes thus operatewithin people’s crime-talk as ‘trumps’, for,to offer a contrary response is necessarily tolocate oneself in one or other of these appar-ently dubious categories. We nonetheless didencounter people among our respondentswho risked such categorisation by failing toshare an unbridled enthusiasm for the onsetof CCTV. Many of these raised doubts of agenerally instrumental kind, concerned eitherthat CCTV would fail to deliver the hoped-for reductions in crime and disorder, or thatit was taking attention and resources awayfrom other, potentially more fruitful, crimeprevention measures. People thus predictedthat the cameras would ‘get vandalised’ orstolen (‘Frankly, I don’t think they’d be therea week’, one resident glumly remarked);raised some familiar criminological problemsto do with displacement (‘They’ll just do itsomewhere else won’t they?’, observed oneteenager); or else wondered why such faithwas being placed in a device that so obvi-ously deals in symptoms rather than causes:‘You’re just creating criminals all the time.You have the cameras and then you startcriminalising, making people criminals.What are you going to do with them whenyou’ve seen them on this camera? Why notsay what are they doing here, why do theyneed to come in here, get drunk and � ght?’.




For some, a more pressing anxiety attachedto the suspicion that CCTV is emerging asa remote, invisible (and, for these reasons,second-best) replacement for their preferredmode of protection—‘more policemen outwalking the streets’ (Loader et al. 1999).

Yet people’s worries about CCTV werenot solely concerned with whether or not itwill ‘work’; some among our discussants alsoraised matters of principle. These commonlydid include objections to what one resident ofthe High Street (who was otherwise preoccu-pied with worry about teenage disorder andwas vociferously pro-police) called ‘the BigBrother syndrome’. But they also encom-passed those who associated CCTV withother seemingly impending and undesirabledevelopments in social control (notablyidentity cards) and who viewed these as apotential ‘invasion’ of another valued—if, inthis context, legally unprotected—facet ofEnglish society and culture: an individual’sright to privacy. Such anxieties bring us to athird set of responses to the proliferationof CCTV (both in Maccles� eld and in thewider world); one best summed up by theterm ambivalence. Although this ambiv-alence can take various forms, it generallycouples a grudging acceptance of the ‘need’for video surveillance, with a range of (oftendiffuse) worries about how CCTV mightcome to be used and about the kind of worldit signi� es.

One variant of this combines a demandthat CCTV is regulated by proper safeguards(a particular concern being to prevent whatone resident described as ‘councils selling thetapes to be used on television programmes’),with a call for some judiciousness regardingwhere, for what purpose and against whom,CCTV cameras are deployed. Here, it seems,people’s sense of the appropriateness orotherwise of CCTV is mediated in importantways by their sense of place: while peoplewere relatively accepting of the need forCCTV to be used in speci� c locations (nota-bly, parts of the town centre) against particu-lar groups of people (what one teenagercalled ‘beer monsters’), they tended to recoilfrom the suggestion that camera surveillance

be extended any further across the localtownscape (‘I’d say outside some of the mainpubs. Things like that. The car parks, fairenough. But there’s no need for them all overMaccles� eld, no need for them. Just outsidea couple of pubs. I wouldn’t like them downthe street or anything like that, looking intome window or something like that. It’s noton’). Amongst the sceptics, particular resist-ance is apparent to the possibility of CCTVbeing deployed in residential settings (a pros-pect one described as ‘excessive’), either be-cause ‘nothing happens’ in ‘our streets’ orbecause the provision of surveillance tech-nology in such locations seems unfathomablyinappropriate and ‘out of place’.

A second type of ambivalence is less obvi-ously grounded in these local distinctions,referring instead to what are viewed as someunsettling aspects of the wider world. Amongsome, this worry is directed towards the ap-parent preponderance of crime and violencethat permeates English society at large, aproblem troubling enough to engender a cau-tious acceptance of CCTV: ‘I was a bit waryabout CCTV, until I saw this programme onChannel Four some months ago. Some of thefootage they caught, and some of the thingsthat I saw people do to other people, itappalled me. I thought well I don’t want thisto go on in society, I don’t want that tohappen, so CCTV in towns might actually bea small price to pay to reduce that kind ofcrime’. For others, however, the more urgentconcern is whether that price (and both theseaccounts assume that CCTV exacts somekind of—unspeci� ed—social cost) is toohigh. While CCTV may not be something toprotest about, it can still generate a consider-able degree of disquiet. Ambivalence towardsCCTV arises, then, from a sense people havethat the ‘condition of England’ (if not per-haps Maccles� eld) has become such as torender camera surveillance ‘necessary’ (whatwe have come to know as ‘fear of crime’),coupled with an anxiety about where contem-porary trends in social control (of whichCCTV is but one) might possibly beheaded—what we might rhetorically call‘fear of crime control’.




Conclusion: The Problem of Fear and theSense of One’s Place

Much of what we have written on the topicof fear and insecurity in everyday living,here and elsewhere, responds to what weconsider to be an insensitivity to place, a‘weakness’ that can all too easily attend at-tempts to map institutional and social changeon a grand scale, but one nonetheless forwhich there is a price to be paid. In part, thishas to do with the relative lack of attentionsuch an outlook evinces towards the contrast-ing ways in which crime and responses to itare constituted within the national politicalcultures and local ‘structures of feeling’ ofdifferent societies and of distinct localitieswithin them (Taylor et al., 1996). We are ofcourse entirely aware, as we have indicatedabove, that questions of place, belonging,security and fear require to be rethought inlight of the globalising tendencies of latemodernity. Nevertheless, there remainsigni� cant ways in which place continues tomatter to people—even, and perhaps pre-cisely, under the global conditions that nowobtain. People continue to live somewhere;go about much of their routine daily livessomewhere; and, within markedly differingcontexts of freedom and constraint, persist inacquiring and developing material and emo-tive attachments to particular places, whetherthat be their home, street, neighbourhood,town or nation. We also believe we havedemonstrated that crime and order � gure insome powerful, if uneven, ways in how theseplaces are experienced, imagined and de-fended. We have, therefore, tried to put in aword for another (albeit complementary) wayof making sense of our contemporary anxi-eties—one that tries to address these imbal-ances by investigating somewhat morestrenuously certain local sensibilities towardscrime, and their sources, supports and ef-fects. We have wanted to demonstrate, inparticular, that many of the con� icts thatpervade contemporary debates about crimeand its control—over justice and welfare,inclusion and exclusion, state and market andso forth—get played out in speci� c places to

particular and not entirely predictable con-clusions. And, in the face of some ho-mogenising global tendencies in societalresponses to crime, we have tried to indicatethe persistence of local resources that projectalternative crime control possibilities to thosethat currently prevail, and which may yetcontribute to making our late modern worldotherwise.

We began our work with an interest infurthering understanding of what hadcome—sometimes rather unquestioningly—to be called ‘fear of crime’. While we sharedwith others a series of dissatisfactions withthe way in which the ‘fear of crime debate’was constituted (not least in respect of thoseunhelpful terms of discussion concerning the‘rationality’ or otherwise of people’s fears),we were nonetheless concerned to accountfor the apparent (and certainly oft-noted)‘mismatch’ between people’s expressed lev-els of worry about crime and their antecedentlevels of ‘objective’ risk. Yet the longer thisproject has gone on and the more we havere� ected on the issues raised, the more wehave become convinced of the followingconclusion: traditions of research that treat‘fear of crime’ as a separate and discreteobject of social enquiry and policy interven-tion are exhausted.

This may seem a touch bold, so let us beclear. Plainly, we are not seeking to deny thatpeople worry about crimes and incivilities ofvarious kinds; we have seen that, among agood number of our respondents, such wor-ries are both intensely felt and capable oftaking their toll upon the quality of life. Nordo we wish to neglect entirely the connec-tions that exist between levels of anxiety andthose of measurable risk. We do want toinsist, however, that people’s worries andtalk about crime are rarely merely are� ection of behavioural change and ‘objec-tive’ risk (although they represent lay at-tempts to make sense of such changes andrisks), but are also ‘bound up in a context ofmeaning and signi� cance, involving the useof metaphors and narratives about socialchange’ (Sparks, 1992b, p. 131). We havesought in this paper to demonstrate this by




providing a grounded sociological account ofhow crime works in everyday life as a cul-tural theme and token of political exchange;of how it serves to condense, and makeintelligible, a variety of more-dif� cult-to-grasp troubles and insecurities—somethingthat tends to blur the boundary between wor-ries about crime and other kinds of anxietyand concern. We have attempted to showthat, in speaking of crime, people routinelyregister its entanglement with other aspectsof economic, social and moral life; attributeresponsibility and blame; demand account-ability and justice; and draw lines ofaf� liation and distance between ‘us’ andvarious categories of ‘them’. In short, wehave been arguing that ‘fear of crime’ re-search is at its most illuminating when itaddresses the various sources of in/securitythat pervade people’s lives (and the relation-ship between them) and when it makes ex-plicit (rather than suppresses) theconnections that the ‘crime-related’ anxietiesof citizens have with social con� ict and div-ision, social justice and solidarity.

In developing and re� ning this perspec-tive, our more particular concern has been topursue the idea that people’s everyday talkabout crime and order (its intensity, the vo-cabularies used, the imagery mobilised, theassociations that are made) both dependsupon, and helps to constitute, their sense ofplace; that it takes the form of stories andanecdotes that fold together elements of per-sonal biography, community career and per-ceptions of national change and decline.This, in turn, has enabled us to disclose someof the speci� c kinds of entanglement that areacknowledged, and the speci� c sorts of blam-ing and boundary-drawing that are engagedin, by the variously situated citizens in theeveryday settings of their lives; and thus toformulate a more nuanced analysis of theobjects and felt signi� cance of people’s wor-ries and the kinds of demands and actionsthey give rise to. We � nd within the sensibil-ities of citizens in a single English town anassortment of ways of apprehending andseeking to address the crime question, eachof which can be interpreted as ‘projecting’

(Ricoeur, 1981) a distinct vision of order, aparticular conception of what is required (bywhom) to bring it about, and a preferredmeans of responding to those who mightthreaten it.

This contrasts sharply both with the toneof much academic commentary and moreparticularly with the decidedly reductive driftof much party-political and media discourseabout crime. In part, this has to do with thetendency of contemporary politics to trans-late the questions of in/security that attendliving in a global risk society into “the appar-ently straightforward issue of ‘law and or-der’” (Bauman, 1998, p. 5). But it also arisesfrom the prevailing assumption that ‘publicopinion’ on crime is deeply and ineluctablypunitive in outlook and disposition. We re-gard this notion as unhelpfully sweeping anddismissive. Our enquiries in one small cornerof ‘Middle England’ indicate, we believe, theexistence of a more un� nished, complicatedand open set of responses to the problem oforder than is allowed for in the dominantscripts of media and political discourse. Theyalso suggest the possibility of a politics ofcrime control that strives to respond inalternative ways to public concerns and sen-sibilities. Of course, there is much here thatwould seem to lend support to the ‘tough oncrime’ stances that have dominated the re-cent politics of ‘law and order’, especially inthe US and in the UK. This is not, however,in our view the whole or only story. Not onlyhave we found among the citizens of Mac-cles� eld and Prestbury a decided ambiv-alence about certain aspects of this, perhapsthe most currently embedded of our twoscenarios (such as the blanket deployment ofCCTV or the advent of private policing), butalso these public sensibilities can be read as‘projecting’ a preference for the meaningfuland effective exercise of ‘voice’ (Hirschman,1970) in relation to criminal justice institu-tions, and for � nding more inclusive, partici-pative means of handling the con� icts(notably those between generations over theuse of public space) that bedevil local socialrelations. They suggest that the prospect ofbuilding institutions which enable all citizens




to articulate their experiences and concernsvis-a-vis crime and justice, and allow for thedemocratic deliberation of community ten-sions and disputes, remains an immanentrather than utopian one.

Notes

1. The fullest account of the work, aspects ofwhich are summarised here, can be found inGirling et al., 2000.

2. We outline some of our views on this literatureand its fractious disagreements in Girling etal., 2000, pp. 12–17 (see also Sparks, 1992a,1992b; Lewis and Salem, 1986; Hale, 1996).

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Fear and Everyday Urban Lives