We began this excursion into the field of community safety policy making with a series of questions about what may have been achieved in its name. We conclude, having reviewed many dimensions of this area of policy development, with a fairly substantial charge sheet against it. The ‘official’ history of community safety tells a story locating the origins of community safety policy development in a revitalisation of local democracy as municipal authorities sought to resist an increasingly centralised and increasingly punitive and largely situational response to problems of crime and disorder. At the same time, the renewed priority afforded to victims (the community of victims) and the broader academic legitimation provided by ‘left realism’ appeared to suggest that the prevention of crime and the maintenance of law and order could form part of a wider project of progressive and inclusive social reconstruction.

We have only fleetingly glimpsed such holistic ambitions on two previous occasions in the UK, each, perhaps not surprisingly, related to the coming to power of a seemingly left-inclined government. Thus, in 1946 Hermann Mannheim outlined a programme for criminal justice and social reconstruction (Mannheim, 1946) linking the ambitious post-war reforms that culminated in the welfare state with the central goals of a criminal justice system. Less than two decades later, the Labour Party Study Group convened by Lord Longford, produced its report, Crime: A Challenge to Us All (Labour Party, 1964), advocating a wholesale reform of juvenile justice based on viewing the welfare and support needs of young offenders as uppermost and their punishment as secondary. Two decades on, it is arguable that the emergence of the ‘community safety’ perspective can be understood in the context of a similar political sequence. However, it might be equally debateable just how ‘left-inclined’ the new Blair government really intended to be, but the scale of the government's ambition for a wholesale reorientation of criminal justice around crime prevention and community safety seems fairly clear (though always with a wary eye on what the Daily Mail might be saying, after all ‘tough on crime’ but also ‘tough on the causes of crime’: Muncie, 1999, 2000).