Deviance in football: An organised fraud and regulatory bias?

Pete Duncan is a current MRes Criminology student at The University of Manchester. He has widespread criminological interests, including political economy, drug policy, drug markets, deviance in sport, residential burglary and research methods.

 

In 2011, UEFA – the governing body of European football – introduced Financial Fair Play (FFP) regulations to reduce unsustainable investment in football clubs by billionaire owners. Clubs were only allowed to spend money that was earned through footballing endeavours. It is alleged that Manchester City Football Club (MCFC) contravened FFP regulations at least twice. This post will use criminological theory to analyse these alleged acts of deviance and UEFA’s regulatory response.

In a recent article, investigatory newspaper Der Spiegel published documents from Football Leaks to provide insight into the methods MCFC are purported to have used to bypass FFP regulations. It is alleged that MCFC’s owners – Abu Dhabi United Group Investment and Development Limited (ADUG) – injected funds into MCFC via hidden payments processed through the accounts of their sponsors, thereby making extra funds available for expenditure whilst appearing to abide by FFP regulations. Figure 1 depicts how this agreement differs from the usual club-sponsor relationship.

Figure 1: Disparity between usual club-sponsor relations and those allegedly manipulated by ADUG

The Action Fraud website defines fraud as ‘when trickery is used to gain a dishonest advantage, which is often financial’. If the allegations are true, it seems clear ADUG utilised trickery to increase the funds available for expenditure by their subsidiary MCFC. As expenditure is positively associated with footballing success (see page 112 of this UEFA benchmarking report), and success brings further revenue which can be legitimately reinvested, the ability to increase expenditure would clearly have given MCFC a dishonest financial advantage.

The well-known routine activities theory stipulates that offending requires the temporal and spatial convergence of a motivated offender and a suitable target. When co-offenders are required for an offence, they similarly must meet offenders in time and space.

Co-offenders must be trustworthy and possess the required skillset or status to fill the gap in a motivated offender’s ability to offend on their own. In this case, the implicated sponsors represented suitable co-offenders. For example, the Chairman of Etihad – MCFC’s main shirt and stadium sponsor – is also a member of the MCFC Board, and therefore presumably trustworthy, and all sponsors made legitimate payments to MCFC within which ADUG could hide their own funds.

The ease with which motivated offenders can locate suitable co-offenders in a network is a measure of that network’s organisation. The convergence of motivated offender (MCFC) and suitable co-offenders (some sponsors) was facilitated by pre-existing personal and working relationships (a number of other sponsors implicated are also Abu Dhabi-based) suggesting this deviant network was tightly organised. Furthermore, the use of sponsors as ‘corporate vehicles’ is additional evidence of organised deviance.

A prerequisite of any deviant act is the opportunity to deviate, and it has been suggested that opportunities are more likely to be taken when they are encountered in a familiar environment. MCFC’s ability to manipulate pre-existing relationships to agree sponsorship contracts with familiar and willing entities provided a suitable opportunity to circumvent FFP regulations.

Other explanations for the alleged deviance relate to the notions of ‘amoral calculators’ and ‘techniques of neutralisation’. Both suggest that deviant behaviour may be explained by moral variation. The former suggests the deviant cares not for the immoral nature of their behaviour, whereas the latter (specifically the ‘appeal to higher loyalties’) suggests deviant decisions may be justified as loyalty to the goals or norms of a subgroup (MCFC in this case) outweighs the necessity of conformity. When a colleague questioned whether MCFC’s deviance was acceptable conduct, it is alleged an executive simply responded ‘of course, we can do what we want’. An ‘appeal to higher loyalties’?

UEFA investigated, and on 16 May 2014 a settlement agreement with MCFC was published. MCFC were fined €60m, although €40m of this would be waived if they met various terms. MCFC were also restricted to entering a squad four players smaller than usual for the following season’s UEFA Champions League. This sanction would also apply to the subsequent season should MCFC fail to comply with certain terms.

Whilst this may seem to be a relatively open-and-shut case, it is alleged that MCFC received lenient treatment from UEFA. Leniency can be problematic as the effect of punishment is insufficient to deter future deviance. It seems hard to believe that a €20m fine (€60m minus the suspended €40m) and reduction in permitted Champions League squad size constituted a substantial enough punishment to come close to outweighing the potential benefits brought by substantial overinvestment in playing staff.

UEFA had more severe punishments available to them, principally excluding MCFC from participation in future UEFA competitions (see page 9 of the FFP regulations), but they elected not to apply this sanction. In this regard, UEFA may be seen to have followed due regulatory process as scholars have suggested regulation may be most effective when heavy sanctions are available but not used. Another justification for leniency is that severe sanctions can have significant negative consequences for many innocent individuals within an organisation, with revocation of a licence having been likened to a ‘corporate death penalty’ capable of rendering thousands of jobs obsolete.

Unfortunately for UEFA, these defences fall apart under closer scrutiny: their responses to FFP violations by economically lesser European teams of the time were more severe. UEFA excluded Romania’s FC Astra from European competitions for the following three seasons because of overdue payments totalling approximately €1.5m. For a club with financial difficulties, as UEFA acknowledged, exclusion from European competitions can be more of a corporate death penalty than it would have been for MCFC, as these clubs rely on the revenue that participation in these competitions provides. Four out of the five other cases closed at the time involved exclusion of the offender from UEFA competitions. Clearly UEFA were not averse to applying the heaviest sanction available.

Der Spiegel allege Gianni Infantino, UEFA General Secretary at the time and current FIFA President, acted as an intermediary between UEFA’s investigatory division and MCFC, helping the latter to propose an agreement that would be accepted by UEFA. These were not Infantino’s duties, and the investigatory team is supposed to be independent (see page 3 of the FFP regulations).

This behaviour could be argued to constitute a clear example of a problem termed ‘regulatory capture’: when a regulator ceases serving their controlling purpose and instead serves the interests of those they are supposed to regulate. Infantino apparently did not intervene in cases involving the likes of FC Astra, suggesting that the term ‘regulatory bias’ may be more appropriate.

Issues of insufficient and disproportionate sanctioning and regulatory bias could perhaps be at least partially understood if they had fostered FFP compliance on the part of MCFC; it has been argued that promoting compliance is the main aim of regulatory systems. However, leaked emails from 2015 allege MCFC remained uncompliant despite their settlement agreement with UEFA and continued to circumvent FFP.

UEFA may have fallen into the ‘compliance trap’, whereby attempts to coerce compliance through moral reasoning instead produce defiance as the regulated feel unfairly stigmatised. Regardless of this, the 2015 allegations suggest that UEFA’s earlier regulation attempt was ineffective.

The criminological literature can provide guidance regarding how UEFA could improve their regulatory practice. Opportunities for deviance could be targeted for situational crime prevention (SCP); removing criminogenic opportunities through environmental manipulation. SCP concepts could be used to supplement UEFA’s attempts to coerce FFP compliance through regulation.

In this case, scrutiny of sponsor structures at the point of contract agreement would give UEFA more insight into potential opportunities for deviance. However, this would be a costly undertaking and may also be limited by jurisdictional issues. Consideration of the other possible opportunities that clubs may utilise to circumvent FFP would give UEFA the chance to take a more proactive approach to prevention.

UEFA could also consider utilising a method of deterrence known as ‘naming and shaming’, which has been suggested to deter organisations that fear reputational damage and shame. UEFA’s current practices more closely reflect ‘naming without shaming’: violators are publicly named but their behaviour is not condemned. For a club with an allegedly substantial interest in promoting a positive image, the threat of being named and shamed could have a significant deterrent effect.

If MCFC are judged to have circumvented FFP a second time, UEFA have a chance to learn from their mistakes and enact effective regulation. Recent reports suggest their response may be more severe this time around.

 

Contact

Peter Duncan, The University of Manchester

Email: peter.duncan-2@manchester.ac.uk

 

Images: courtesy of the author

Critical Conversations on Criminology and Gender: Innovations in Research

 

Dr Marian Duggan is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Kent and the new Chair of the British Society of Criminology Women, Crime and Criminal Justice Network.

 

 

British Society of Criminology Women, Crime and Criminal Justice Network’s 3rd Annual Event.

Inspired by burgeoning developments in creative and innovative methodologies in criminology, 2019’s annual WCCJ ‘critical conversations’ event showcased an array of innovative ways of doing and communicating criminological research via visual methods, arts and multi-media methods, documents and the positioning of the researcher. While we fore-fronted methodological innovations, the conference reflected a rich feminist tradition of attending to critical issues of power and politics in research. As well as offering opportunities to share knowledge and experiences of using innovative methodologies, we intended that the day also offer opportunities for networking. As the incoming Chair of the BSC’s Women, Crime and Criminal Justice Network I am delighted to share my reflections on the day’s events with you in this blog.

Approximately 65 attendees congregated at City, University of London, in April 2019. Speakers were invited to step outside of the confines of PowerPoint and were given around 15 minutes to share their research. We were delighted that all accepted the challenge, bringing along films, photos and art-works connected to ongoing projects. Our invited speakers included a mix of committed criminologists and those working in cognate disciplines, as well as a mix of established and early career researchers.

The day was divided into four thematic panels: 1) Film and photo, 2) Arts and multi-media, 3) Words and documents, and 4) Researchers and selves, before finishing up with a critical insight from our Keynote Listener, Dr Emma Wincup (University of Leeds). The day’s events were tweeted out (with presenters’ permission) under the #wccj2019 hashtag to @bsc_wccjn followers. Using these and others’ tweets (particularly those by Stigmatised Sexualities & Sexual Harm Research, @SSSH_research), we bring you this round-up of the day.

In the first panel (film and photo), Dr Wendy Fitzgibbon (University of Leicester) and Dr Camille Stengel (University of Greenwich) shared photos and discussed their use of Photovoice as a research methodology in their respective research projects. The synergies between their studies led them to co-author a journal article which was awarded the WCCJ 2018 Best Paper Prize, so a great start to the day indeed. Photovoice is the method of choice in the project currently being undertaken by Dr Tara Young (Kent) and Dr Susie Hulley (Cambridge) into how joint enterprise is affecting young people. The audience learnt how this creative method was shown to give voice to individuals while increasing their self-worth, proving to be transformative for participants and others who see similar experiences represented in the images. We were also guided on how best to employ the method, with advice including limiting the number of images per participant (to around 10) and having them think carefully when composing the photos. The ethics of such innovations were also covered by speakers, particularly in terms of representation, ownership and respecting anonymity. The final presentation was by Dr Shona Minson (Oxford) who has produced a series of excellent video resources on the impact on children whose mothers are sentenced to prison. Demonstrating how film offers instant communication with target audiences, the presentation was interwoven with snippets from one of the film to indicate how, where, when and why particular strategies had been employed throughout. Ethical considerations were as relevant here too, with issues of power, politics and positionality (of both the researcher and researched) discussed in some depth throughout. Shona highlighted the importance of having ‘buy in’ from participants, particularly those with significant status and authority, to elicit the maximum impact in disseminating the message.

Continuing with the interactive theme, Panel 2 (arts and multi-media) began with Dr Jo Deakin (Manchester) outlining the classroom dynamics of her arts-based research with young people and their thoughts on the Prevent Agenda. This method involved employing poetry writing, drawing, drama and physical games with school-aged young people to gain their trust and foster more open means of communication. Jo showcased several of the drawings produced by participants alongside the narratives they provided before signposting attendees to the online resource: Extremely Safe Radical Preventions. Next up was Dr Magali Peyrefitte (Middlesex) who reflected on her work using objects to open up narratives about migration, belonging and identity. Drawing out the importance of intimacy to her method, Magali described the story circle format she employed and participated in, while also providing pictures of some of the objects which featured in the research. Finally, Dr Fay Dennis (Goldsmiths) provided an interactive presentation whereby she played audio clips of her research participants alongside the pictures they had drawn to explain their experiences of drug taking. This powerful representation of emotion and sensation using image and colour excellently illustrated the additional understanding that can be gleaned beyond text.

After a delicious lunch, Panel 3 (words and documents) began with Dr Alpa Parmer (Oxford) and Dr Coretta Phillips (LSE) outlining their use of oral life history methods to explore race in relation to culture, structure and agency. Important points of note were being aware of what information stays with the researcher once the interview is done, and how sensory experiences can shed greater light on the data being gathered. Next was Dr Tanya Serisier (Birkbeck) who drew on her recently published book about feminism, rape and narrative politics to highlight the prevalence of fairy-tales in published rape memoirs. Finally, Dr Jennifer Fleetwood (Goldsmiths) introduced the audience to innovative research using podcasts, in particular My Favourite Murder, to explore routine, repetition and meaning in women’s first person narratives.

Presenters in panel 4 (researchers and selves) adopted a different approach, reflecting on their positionality in relation to their research and chosen methods. Dr Hannah Mason-Bish (Sussex) drew her recently published paper in which she outlined methodological issues relating to elitism, power and identity in what she termed the ‘elite delusion’. Returning to the earlier discussion of researching with people in positions of authority, Hannah reflected on the insider/outsider dichotomy and how this shapes the research according to how one’s status is interpreted by participants. Discussions of status and transitions in and out of identities and spaces were also key theme in Dr Ross McGarry’s (Liverpool) work on militarised identities and the meaning given to key sites that formed part of the celebrations of Armed Forces Day. The use of public space was also relevant to Dr Alex Fanghanel’s (Greenwich) presentation, which drew on her recently published book into the use of the sexualised female activist body in women’s and animal rights protests. Alex’s reflection on her own ethnographic participation in the research invoked questions about gender, rape culture and positionality. Finally, Rachel Stuart (Kent) ended on a similarly feminist note by discussing her research into webcammers and the access issues that come with researching stigmatised communities.

Dr Emma Wincup accepted our request to close the conference as our Keynote Listener. Emma is a long-standing network member and an expert in qualitative methods and feminist methods. She artfully drew together some of the latent themes and questions of the day, challenging us to think critically about the use of innovative methodologies for doing and communicating research. She reminded us that feminist research approaches, research on women and methodological innovation haven’t always been valued in criminology. Emma especially thanked our presenters for their candid accounts of their work, and sharing what happens when things don’t quite go to plan, as well as the personal commitments, and emotional impacts of doing criminological research. She made two observations about the potential of innovative methods in particular: firstly, their usefulness in ‘making the familiar strange’, both to respondents and ourselves, and secondly, their capacity to open up the seemingly banal or mundane for analysis. Emma concluded by reflecting on some pragmatic considerations in innovative methodologies – these are time consuming modes of data collection and communicating research, demanding new skills, training and collaboration. Furthermore, ethical issues become magnified and more complex. But, as the day’s presentations demonstrate, the kinds of data that can be generated have the capacity to communicate critical issues in novel and important ways.

This event was made possible thanks to the British Society of Criminology’s annual funding of the women’s network and a significant sponsorship from City, University of London’s Centre for Crime and Justice Research. Planning is already under-way for next year’s events. If you would like to join the Women, Crime and Criminal Justice Network, please email our Membership Secretary Dr Emma Milne on e.milne@mdx.ac.uk and provide your details (including up to five research interests) to be added to the WCCJ network database (overseen by Dr Gemma Birkett). Alternatively, to stay in touch and hear news from WCCJ and our members, join the Jisc-mail list. Finally, do take the time to visit our website.

Contact

Dr Marian Duggan,  University of Kent

Email: m.c.duggan@kent.ac.uk

Twitter: @marian_duggan

Images: courtesy of the author

The Grenfell 72 – Two Years On: Remember the dead and fight for the living!

Sharon Hartles is a MA Postgraduate Crime and Justice student with the Open University.  She has an interest in crimes of the powerful, including state and state-corporate crime.  In an explicit attempt to move beyond criminology, she draws upon a zemiological approach to evidence the social, political and economic context in which crime is produced and interwoven into society via socio-economic inequalities.

The Grenfell Tragedy is an account that needs to be chronologically told to uncover the state and corporate subterfuge which orchestrated untold harms. Cutting corners, unresponsive local authority bodies and capitalist/aesthetic concerns will reveal the contempt to which this community was shown, elevating the scale of injustice. Drawing upon a counter hegemony approach, are there any lessons that can be learned to prevent such negligent disasters from re-occurring?

Wednesday 14^th June 2017, is a date which is etched into the memory and hearts of thousands. A date which resonates loss and grief so painful that no amount of selected words will ever be able to offer any more than a symbolic gesture of empathetic comfort to the Grenfell community affected by the events which took place on that day have since unfolded and are still unravelling.

The 14^th June 2017, was not going to be another ordinary day for the residents of Grenfell Tower, a twenty-three storey residential block of flats in West London, Kensington, or for the wider Grenfell community. Instead, the 14^th June 2017 was going to be the day in which one of the UK’s worst, modern, avoidable disasters was going to take place. Just before 1:00am, a fire broke out in the kitchen of flat 16 which was situated on the fourth floor. An inferno soon took hold and Grenfell Tower burned. Despite the heroic efforts of the fire-fighters, the untenable situation meant that the Grenfell Tower burned for 24 hours before the blaze burnt itself out.

What was known as ‘home’ to approximately 350 people, had been engulfed in flames and smouldered until all that remained was a devoured, burnt-out carcass. In the immediate aftermath, the range of readily visible harms such as the loss of homes and possessions was apparent. However, this became interlaced with the realisation that along with the physical harms in the forms of injuries to approximately 107 individuals, this preventable tragedy had claimed the lives of 72 people. Seventy-two human beings had their lives stolen away from them in a horrific and inhumane traumatic event.

The realm of academia challenges the ball and chain approach (gate-keeping of knowledge) dares to defy the status quo imposed and governed by the powerful elite, such as state and corporations. By adopting a resistance perspective, this articulates how these ‘uncomfortable truths’ can be brought into the mainstream public domain. In remembrance of the Grenfell 72, in solidarity for the fight for the living, and through counter hegemony the truth will continue to be revealed.

In November 2018, at a public inquiry, Dr Glover, an electrical fire expert, concluded that a probable cause of the Grenfell Tower fire was a poor crimp connection. This led to an overheating within the compressor relay compartment of a Hotpoint fridge-freezer (Model FF176BP). What is startling is that plastic back casings which are combustible, contributing to the fire, comply with safety requirements in the UK. In contrast, the same appliances made in the US are required by Underwriters Laboratory Standards to be fitted with metallic steel casings as a preventative measure because they are non-combustible and they also help to contain internal fires for a longer amount of time.

The Grenfell Tragedy was certainly an event which caused and is still provoking great suffering, destruction and distress, but it was so much more than just a situated event. The Grenfell Tragedy was avoidable, preventable and foreseeable, it was not an accident and there was nothing natural about the systematic layering of failures which led to the catalyst moment that sparked the fire. The 72 residents of Grenfell Tower who had their lives snatched away should not be passed off as ‘fire-related fatalities’. The faulty malfunctioning appliance (that posed a so called ‘low risk’ – which might have posed an even ‘lower risk’ had it been fitted with a metallic steel casing instead of a plastic casing) was merely the tip of an iceberg in relation to the series of political and economic facilitated failures which led to the Grenfell Tragedy. The 72 deaths were a direct result of crimes of the powerful, and as such form part of the ever-increasing death toll of state-corporate-related fatalities.

To the detriment of the residents of the Grenfell Tower, like the vast majority of high-rise buildings in the UK, it was not fitted with a sprinkler system. Nick Paget-Brown, the Tory leader of Kensington and Chelsea Council, stated “There was not a collective view that all the flats should be fitted with sprinklers because that would have delayed and made the refurbishment of the block more disruptive”. The British Automatic Fire Sprinkler Association estimated the cost of installing a sprinkler system in Grenfell Tower to be £200,000.

Summerland (1973), Knowsley Heights (1991), Garnock Court (1999), Harrow Court (2005) and Lakenal House (2009) were the locations where five fire disasters took place, all of which preceded Grenfell.  The Fires That Foretold Grenfell as they are now referred to, predicted a Grenfell-type inferno happening in Britain. More harrowingly, in November 2016, seven months prior to the Grenfell fire, the Grenfell Action Group predicted that a fire would take place in one of the tower blocks managed by the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation (KCTMO) due to what it referred to as the poor safety record encompassing dangerous living conditions and neglect of health and safety legislation. “We have blogged many times on the subject of fire safety at Grenfell Tower” “showing the poor safety record of the KCTMO should a fire affect any other of their properties and cause the loss of life that we are predicting.”

In July 2016, KCTMO’s capitalist fuelled mindset, absolute disregard for health and safety legislation and therefore contempt for the Grenfell Tower residents, (their tenants and leaseholders) was captured “We need good costs for Cllr Feilding-Mellen and the planner tomorrow at 8.45am!“. The ‘good costs’ referred to was a saving of £293,368. KCTMO allegedly gave in to pressure from the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Council (RBKCC) to save money and cost cutting measures led to Rydon (instead of D+B Facades) securing the Grenfell Tower cladding contract. In addition to this, subsequent haggling of a £293,368 saving reflected a further downgrade of the cladding selected for installation. In order to make this saving, the zinc cladding approved by residents was replaced, after tender, with cheaper aluminium. Despite this alleged ‘pressure’ KCTMO designed and delivered the Grenfell Tower refurbishment with consent and blessing from the RBKCC via their shared common interests, taking the form of health and safety regulation breaches. In this regard it is clearer to see how the capitalist modus operandi approach was championed – instead of a safety driven decision-making strategy – which inevitably led to the Grenfell Towering Inferno.

Life is priceless and no price should ever be put on the value of a life, yet it can be claimed that the RBKCC and KCTMO profit interests came before health and safety considerations, illustrating how the value each of the 72 residents who lost their life based on the £293,368 saving to be worth £4,074. Furthermore, in retrospect this equates to a valued life worth £838 when calculated between the approximate 350 residents who resided in Grenfell Tower at the time these cost cutting savings were agreed.

The cladding signed off for use by the RBKCC (suspected of fuelling the deadly conflagration), failed to meet the governments ‘A’ rating safety standards. By the time the cladding had been installed and due to the panel type (cassette system) fitted, the cladding panel rating varied from a ‘B’ and ‘E’ classification. An industry source discerned that “you wouldn’t put E on a dog kennel“. If KCTMO or the RBKCC had spent a little time looking into the cladding from a health and safety perspective, instead of a capitalist standpoint they would have been aware of this information.

In an interim report commissioned by the Department for Communities and Local Government, (published on December 2017) Dame Judith Hackitt advised “the whole system of regulation, covering what is written down and the way in which it is enacted in practice, is not fit for purpose, leaving room for those who want to take shortcuts to do so.” Therefore, it is contemptible to know that the building control managers at RBKCC approved the Grenfell cladding system, proposed by Rydon, without being in receipt of proof that relevant and up-to-date testing (BS 8414) had been carried out. Moreover, they were never going to get confirmation because it would have failed the standards process. In a nutshell, what this meant is that the responsibility for compliance (duty of care) with the Building Regulations rested with those carrying out work and building control bodies. Consequently, the complex chain of companies involved in the Grenfell Tower refurbishment project should not be used as a “problem of many hands” excuse resulting in a defence of  “diffusion of responsibility” for health and safety negligence. Within the process of outsourcing a chain of companies, who share a common goal, such as refurbishing Grenfell Tower, in effect, were authorised to act as a single entity, ultimately on behalf of the RBKCC. With that said, any and all attempts made by RBKCC to deny responsibility for the group of companies authorised in law to act as a ‘corporation of sorts’ through their signed contracts, only adds insult to injury.

What is even more senseless, is the fact that cladding was never part of the original refurbishment plans for Grenfell Tower. The cladding company D+B Facades provided a quote of £3.3 million, a figure based on “A1 non-combustible” cladding system, solid aluminium sheets, backed with mineral wool insulation which does not burn. It is ironic that KCTMO put the cladding contract out to tender and yet ended up “agreeing to an overall budget that put the cost for the cladding and insulation at £3.5 million – £200,000 more than D+B Facades’ quote for the noncombustible materials.” So, had the KCTMO not deviated from the original refurbishment planning for Grenfell Tower, it could have saved the RBKCC £3.5 million because the cladding was not mandatory.

With this in mind, it begs the question, why was the cladding included at a later date as part of the Grenfell Tower refurbishment? The answer and reason why cladding was added to the external faces of the Grenfell Tower, only adds to the disbelief and fuelled anger shared with the bereaved families and the Grenfell survivors. 72 Grenfell residents lost their lives, notwithstanding the subsequent multitude of harms that have followed, so that the “character and appearance of the area are preserved and living conditions of those living near the development suitably protected.” So the ‘uncomfortable truth’ of the matter is that the home of the Grenfell Tower residents was insulated in cladding, that was not fit for purpose, by RBKCC, (which is the wealthiest constituency in England) to improve its appearance when viewed by the  conservation areas and luxury flats that surround north Kensington. Clearly, this is distressing to know that the lives and health and safety of the residents who resided in the Grenfell Tower was of no concern to KCTMO and RBKCC, while ensuring it looked aesthetically pleasing was paramount.

Whether RBKCC is recognised as a representative of the state or as a corporate entity in its own right, its relationship with KCTMO facilitated the Grenfell Tower tragedy, of which there can be little doubt. As such, this event can be re-labelled as a state-corporate crime, which can be understood through the acts or omissions which resulted from deliberate decision-making committed in pursuit of its common goals such as profitability. Alternative labelling includes harms of capitalism, which have been socially mediated within harmful societies, or social murder, resulting in unnatural death as an inevitable consequence of conditions imposed by state and corporations. Regardless of the critical criminological framing lens, the focus remains on the visible and invisible, known and unknown harms which have manifested, and other harms which may not become clear for decades to come.

If this preventable loss of lives was not appalling enough, the bereaved families, survivors and the wider Grenfell community battle through daily barriers of contempt in their pursuit for Truth, Justice and Accountability for the Grenfell 72. The promise of a swift inquiry is broken and replaced with delays possibly extending to 2022, as detectives continue the investigation into a range of offences from corporate manslaughter to health and safety breaches. We can only hold out hope that the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007, is able to bring some form of accountability for the Grenfell community. Sadly, the reality is that no large organisation such as RBKCC or KCTMO has been successfully convicted of deaths resulting from gross breaches of a duty of care, it seems very unlikely that the bereaved families will get justice for the Grenfell 72.

This is merely the latest unfolding harm, to be added to a series of failings, broken promises and contempt that have manifested and have been inflicted upon the survivors, bereaved families and immediate Grenfell community since Wednesday 14^th June 2017. These harms extend beyond the physical to include social, economic, psychological and environmental harms as the following five examples demonstrate:

• Grenfell Tower survivors could be deported in 12 months despite government immigration amnesty
• Grenfell Tower: Almost 100 families still without own home this Christmas, 18 months after fire
• Most Grenfell Tower survivors show signs of PTSD – council study
• Grenfell: toxic contamination found in nearby homes and soil
• Grenfell families urge government to ‘listen to their voices’

In the wake of the cladding scandal and the knowledge that this cladding was the popular choice selected in cost-conscious council refurbishment schemes, Theresa May pledged £400 million towards the removal of flammable cladding, in particular Aluminium Composite Material (ACM) cladding, (aluminium cladding panels containing a plastic filling) from social housing such as councils and housing association properties. In November 2018, Housing Secretary, James Brokenshire, gave authorities power to remove panels from private blocks of flats and bill landlords, but these “are proving largely useless”.  In May 2019, a welcomed allocation of £200 million has been confirmed by Theresa May to remove combustible cladding from privately owned tower blocks. However, this small step will not cover all the costs.

According to the Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government’s Building Safety Programme (as at 31^st March 2019), only 89 buildings in England (comprising of both social and private sector) have had remediation work to remove Aluminium Composite Material (ACM) cladding systems out of 434 identified. The remedial work on buildings has been laboriously slow. The 345 buildings, yet to be remediated (this number does not include 15 private sector buildings where the cladding status is still to be confirmed) are unlikely to meet Building Regulations. Therefore, the residents occupying these properties are living in fear, as the latest fire in Vallea Court, a private block in Manchester with Grenfell style cladding on the 4^th May 2019 has proven.

Despite losing their loved ones, neighbours and homes in the Grenfell Tower fire, and facing a daily battle against contempt, Grenfell United, a registered family association, made up exclusively of Grenfell Tower survivors and bereaved families, have drawn upon their grief and experiences and channelled this into a campaign which actively calls for the Government to create a new housing regulator that works for tenants. The aim of their campaign is to send a clear message to the government that all “people living in social housing deserve to be treated with dignity and respect.” Two years on from 14^th June 2017, the Grenfell survivors, bereaved families and community stand united in solidarity to ensure that Grenfell will not be forgotten and will remain forever in our hearts; as they work together for their community and campaign for safe homes, justice and real change for people across the country.

For those who want to show their support you are warmly invited to attend an evening of remembrance, entailing: Wreath Laying at the Tower, Multi Faith Vigil and a Silent Walk. Alternatively, why not take action by holding a Green 4 Grenfell Day between 14 June and 28 June 2019 and do something good for your community by supporting a local cause? Or simply wear green as a mark of respect for the bereaved families, survivors, the Grenfell community and in remembrance of the Grenfell 72 who lost their lives:

Tony Disson, Ali Yawar Jafari, Abdeslam Sebbar, Denis Murphy, Zainab Deen, Jeremiah Deen, Mohammad Alhajali, Steve Power, Hamid Kani, Debbie Lamprell, Majorie Vital, Ernie Vital, Joseph Daniels, Sheila Smith, Kamru Miah, Rabeya Begum, Husna Begum, Mohammed Hanif, Mohammed Hamid, Khadija Khaloufi, Vincent Chiejina, Isaac Paulos,  Birkti Haftom, Biruk Haftom, Sakina Afrasehabi, Fatemeh Afrasiabi, Mohamednur Tuccu, Amal Ahmedin, Amaya Tuccu-Ahmedin, Eslah Elgwahry, Mariem Elgwahry, Mary Mendy, Khadija M Saye, Jessica Urbano Ramirez, Farah Hamdan, Omar Belkadi, Leena Belkadi, Malak Belkadi, Abdulaziz El Wahabi, Faouzia El Wahabi, Yasin El Wahabi, Nur Huda El Wahabi, Medhi El Wahabi, Logan Gomes, Raymond ‘Moses’ Bernard, Ligaya Moore, Nura Jemal, Hashim Kedir, Yahya Hashim, Firdaws Hashim, Yaqub Hashim, Sirria Choucair, Bassem Choukair, Nadia Choukair, Fatima Choukair, Mierna Choukair, Zainab Choucair, Marco Gottardi, Gloria Trevisan, Hesham Rahman, Mohamed Neda, Gary Maunders, Abufars Mohamed Ibrahim, Isra Ibrahim, Rania Ibrahim, Fethia Hassan, Hania Hassan, Victoria King, Alexandra Atala, Maria Del Pilar Burton,  Fathia Ali Ahmed Elsanosi, Amna Mahmud Idris.

 

Contact

Sharon Hartles, MA Postgraduate Crime and Justice student with the Open University

Email: sh28739@ou.ac.uk

Twitter: @shartles1

Images: courtesy of the author

Towards an urbanised criminology for a world of cities

Rowland Atkinson is Research Chair in Inclusive Societies at the University of Sheffield, he is the author (with Sarah Blandy) of Domestic Fortress: Fear and the New Home Front (Manchester University Press).

 

 

Gareth Millington is Senior Lecturer at the University of York, he is the author of ‘Race’, Culture and the Right to the City (Palgrave).

 

 

The fact of the majority of humanity moving into a globalised urban condition has sparked much discussion among urbanists – where and how will people live in dignity? How will they be governed? How will such living be sustainable in economic and environmental terms? We might equally ask – how will this condition generate new rounds of victimisation and why? How will questions of crime, safety and control be resolved in new and existing urban arenas?

We came to these issues as urban sociologists with a strong interest in the question of crime and harm, but also with the realisation that we could fruitfully engage a more formal dialogue between urban studies and criminology. Criminology of course is in many ways an ‘urban’ discipline – who did not know their Chicago school and its concentric rings, who had not been exposed to the maps of Mayhew? Moving beyond this we tried to think about why would we not also want to engage more deeply with the often unacknowledged links between the city, political economy and the development of a critical approach to urban life today. We were particularly keen to explore how urban conditions, characterised by intensifying inequalities in wealth, around housing and access to core services were immensely relevant to criminological thinking. What kind of shared canon, ideas and cities themselves might be foregrounded in a more explicit dialogue of relevance to scholars of the city, as well as those interested in crime and harm?

Urban Criminology starts with an observation, that there is much going on in urban studies that is neither recognised nor considered in criminology, but also that reverse is true. This problematic led us to consider a range of domains in which the conceptual armoury and studies of both disciplines might be engaged in a rewarding exchange of ideas. We organised these areas in terms of questions about more traditional forms of crime and harm, such as those clustered in deprived neighbourhoods or in forms of explicit interpersonal violence, on the one hand, while also thinking about new, emerging or less recognised forms of harm that have become of more widespread concern in recent years. Here we might consider the move from white collar to grander crimes within finance, the use of new technologies and aggressive methods for control in cities, the operation of housing systems that produce new social geographies and stresses or the adoption of new tactics for terrorism in urban arenas around the world.

While these various issues seem immediately relevant to thinking within and across urban and criminological studies arguably none are emphatically new. Our contribution lay in trying to offer a fresh synthesis that highlighted the need for a clearer dialogue between urbanists and criminologists. At the back of these concerns was a challenge to the reader – that to understand many forms of crime today we need to understand how the city itself ‘works’ and indeed, does not work. Such operations include of course a wide range of social, political and economic structures that themselves vary according to national and urban contexts but which are also influenced by global economic forces that generate new and mutating forms of harm.

To offer some sense of how these new combinations of factors and outcomes are coming into view we examine such issues as the relationship between neoliberal governance regimes and the deregulation of safety implicated in the Grenfell tower disaster and creation of more precariously employed city labour forces more generally. Global capital is now also more entwined with the unhousing and trauma associated with demolition, housing displacement and continued mobility of many around the world as capital looks for new spaces to gentrify and appropriate. New forms of boundary making, around gated communities and affluent enclaves with private modes of policing, also appear as a kind of security ‘foam’, complex physical and urban governance structures that raise new questions about how inequality, crime and (in)security are distributed and related through the contemporary city.

We might ask, what is ‘urban’ about crime? We suggest in the book that what binds much of the varied concerns of criminology and urban studies today is the need for a deepened critical perspective. Such a perspective should recognise the primacy of the urban condition and its manifold form. It should also avoid naivety in understanding that, at root, power and inequality produce more aggressive responses to the question of crime (while sidelining others forms of harm), but also that these same conditions are themselves generative of harm in cities around the world today. In addition, the relationship between national and global political management of economies can be linked to new forms of risk, value extraction (from labour and nature) and the expansion of financial services. All of this generates significant questions for how we should understand to the question of how urban systems are producing new and different forms of crime and harm. Fraud, manipulation and laundering among global and urban elites seem particularly important areas for further investigation.

Where to from here? We hope that Urban Criminology offers the means of galvanising critical criminology in attempts at seeing the city as a site in which harm may be produced and indeed mitigated. Urban life is replete with examples of violence, harm and aggressive political actions towards vulnerable populations. But it is also a site of hope, social action and movements that are increasingly conscious of and antagonistic toward question of inequality, power and unfair modes of social control. Cities may be key sites of harm as we move forward, but they may also offer the crucibles within which fairer and more just social conditions may be formed. We hope that the book may offer some contribution to such discussions, between urbanists and criminologists in the future.

Urban Criminology is published by Routledge

 

Contact

Rowland Atkinson, University of Sheffield

Email: rowland.atkinson@sheffield.ac.uk

Twitter: @qurbanist

 

Gareth Millington, University of York

Email: g.millington@york.ac.uk

Twitter: @GRMillington

 

Images: courtesy of the authors

 

The ESRC and the Futures of Criminological Research: A BSC/CCJ Symposium

 

Dr Charlotte Harris and Dr Helen Jones, British Society of Criminology

The futures (nature, funding and publishing) of criminological research was the topic of a day event at the beautiful Adam Lecture Theatre, Old College at the Edinburgh Law School, University of Edinburgh at the beginning of April 2019. The event was organised by ourselves at the BSC, in conjunction with the editorial team from our journal Criminology & Criminal Justice.

What came most clearly from the day and the range of discussions and discussion topics (charismatically chaired by 2015 BSC Policing Network article prize winner Dr Genevieve Lennon, Strathclyde University) will come as no surprise to many of our members – the wide sphere and reach of the criminology discipline and its practitioners’ interests, insights and concerns. For contemporaneous observations please see the Twitter comments

Professor Richard Sparks began the event with a presenation based on his Crime and Justice ‘think piece’ commissioned by the ESRC to ‘inform decision-making around potential future investment in strategic research initiatives and related research activities’ (see the original guidance notes here).  This was one of 13 such ‘think pieces’ covering various aspects of the research remit of the funding body from Ageing to Sustainable and equitable (big) data infrastructure.

You may remember that Richard spent some time garnering views from the criminological community last year helped in part by the BSC and his eventual report covered many bases, though finally settling on three ‘propositions’ (and if you have better eyesight than mine you might make out from the slide above Richard’s head), Violence (a new look taking in the multi-faceted nature of modern, individual and group, physical and technological violence); Punishment Conviction and Beyond; and Global Challenges and Global Harms.

Professor Sandra Walklate, President Elect of the BSC, and Professor Pamela Davies, Vice President of the BSC responded to the talk offering more perspectives on criminology, the community, research, focus and methodology.

Sandra spoke about the impact of the REF/TEF administrative context to criminological research, a misplaced focus on the concerns of the global north, and the positives and negatives of slow and fast – reactive? – criminology.  She spoke additionally from the perspective as Editor-in-Chief of the British Journal of Criminology (BJC) which the BSC historically supports by giving all full members access. She also spoke with interesting insight into the work of the winners of the Radzinowicz prize, awarded by the editors of the BJC for ‘contribution to knowledge of criminal justice issues and the development of criminology’: none of which was ESRC-funded, or seemingly funded outwith university employment at all.  Sandra also spoke about ‘Plan S’, the proposal by the European-wide Coalition S of funding bodies including UKRI,  for all publicly-funded research to be published only in ‘compliant’ open access journals – those where all articles published are without embargo fully available to read without payment – into which number neither Criminology & Criminal Justice nor BJC currently fall.

Pam followed up with comments about further aspects of criminology and the criminological community. She spoke about the inhabitants of that community in terms of the contract recently won by Northumbria University, to offer degree programmes to police recruits and the nature and procedures of recruiting new criminology lecturers. She also discussed some emerging insights from the BSC National Criminology Survey undertaken last year, and to be the subject of a paper at this year’s BSC annual conference at Lincoln, about how widely public funds are spread within that research community, specifically the proportions between post- and pre-92 institutions.

The last of the formal presentations came from Criminology & Criminal Justice editors-in-chief: Dr Sarah Armstrong, Professor Michele Burman and Professor Laura Piacentini.  The team, who have made inroads on further internationalising the journal (not least by making the submission process supportive), spoke about the need to be transparent about academic workload pressures. They also highlighted the relative dearth of submissions about technology that go beyond the local and evaluative, and similarly the need to be more theoretically challenging within governance research than small scale policy implementation, with a concomitant restraint about the merits of international policy transfer.

Dr Jacqui Karn, Head of Policy and Practice Impact at the ESRC, responded by saying the ESRC had to put limited resources where they will ‘make most difference’, adding that it is the responsibility of academics to make this case.  While Jacqui said she was not in a position to guarantee funding, she did point out that the ESRC had commissioned the think piece knowing that there were gaps in the field while acknowledging that criminology ‘was a strong community who put in strong bids’.  One promising area for funding she did highlight was working in partnership using administrative datasets. Dr Linda Cusworth from Lancaster University presented details about a ‘good news story’ from the family justice field where this approach has recently resulted in a research project funded by the Nuffield Foundation.

A panel then led discussion within the room. The panel members included Professor Allan Brimicombe, BSC Crime and Justice Statistics Network (Chair); Dr Teresa Degenhardt, Queen’s University Belfast; Anita Dockley, Research Director of The Howard League for Penal Reform (and user member of REF 2021 sub panel for social work and social policy and 2014 REF law sub panel); and Rachel Tuffin, Director of Knowledge and Innovation, College of Policing). Unfortunately, Professor Fiona Brookman, University of South Wales was unable to attend.  While, understandably, a large proportion of attendees were from Scotland, mainly from universities but also from HMICS, Police Scotland and the Scottish government, other participants ranged from professors, early career researchers and postgraduates, from as far afield as the University of Bangor, Derby University and the University of Oxford, as well as some independent researchers and writers.

Topics covered included:

• the desirability of restoring the ESRC small grant scheme which was accessible to early career researchers who do not have the wherewithal to put together a 6-figure bid, and which encouraged exploratory work;
• The need to support early career researchers in general in healthy work environments;
• Dissemination is not Impact. Impact is Change;
• Northern Ireland is not just about conflict;
• The possibility of involving practitioners in research without them having to do a PhD to encourage dissemination;
• The need to include writing time in funding;
• The problems of job security in three-year funding patterns where researchers are out of a job each time the money runs out;
• The problems in funding bodies not wanting to do anything risky while claiming to value innovation;
• The intricacies of secondary data use – who has collected the data, how is it used, the dangers of algorithms; and
• The managerialism of workplace targets being international, with larger student numbers, publication targets and journal specification widespread.

Richard’s think piece has not yet been published by the ESRC.

 

Contact

BSC Office: info@britsoccrim.org

 

Images: courtesy of LWYang from USA – University of Edinburgh, CC BY 2.0, and Diana Miranda via Twitter @DanaOHara

A closing space for civil society?

Francesca Kilpatrick reports from a roundtable discussion on the criminalisation of dissent held at the University of Brighton.

 

 

 

On 1 March 2019, the Centre for Spatial, Environmental, and Cultural Politics (SECP) at the University of Brighton, financially supported by the British Society of Criminology, hosted a seminar and roundtable discussion entitled Criminalising Dissent: A Closing Space for Civil Society. The event was organised by BSC members Roxana Cavalcanti and Raphael Schlembach, as well as Deanna Dadusc and myself.

The conference gathered lawyers specialising in protest law, activists and academics to consider the growing trend of the criminalisation of protest and activism, and the relationship between protest and criminal justice. This trend has been researched extensively in North America and Europe, but the research capacity in the UK is more limited. This area is particularly deserving of renewed attention since the past decade saw the UN Special Rapporteur for the Rights to Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and of Association identify a ‘closing space for civil society’ in the UK, with specific concerns raised about counter-extremism strategies, surveillance of political activists, policing of protests and the Trade Union Act.

Event attendees heard about the ongoing undercover policing inquiry, the police role in defining acceptable dissent in the anti-fracking protests, and the legislation battles surrounding the Stansted 15 trial.

Lydia Dagostino, Director of Kellys Solicitors in Brighton and an experienced civil liberties lawyer, led the first discussion. Her talk on the undercover policing inquiry set out the current status of the almost 10-year investigation into police spying activities on over 1,000 groups, some of which are still unknown, including grieving families for justice, trade unions and activist collectives. She detailed the public dissatisfaction with the legal proceedings, and the resistance of the police to public scrutiny. This transitioned into a discussion on the constructed narratives of the inquiry; ‘good’ core participants (grieving families) versus ‘bad’ core participants (direct action protestors), and the police as victims of the inquiry suffering more than those spied upon.

Valerie Aston (University of East Anglia) and Will Jackson (Liverpool John Moores University) led a spirited second discussion on police responses to anti-fracking protests. Their research, some of it in collaboration with the Network for Police Monitoring, to track anti-fracking policing revealed that academic work suggesting an increase in human-rights based policing behaviour does not universally reflect protestors’ experiences. They discussed how anti-fracking protest is constructed as violent and criminal, with large arrest numbers being cited as proof of police necessity, when closer examination reveals most arrests were for non-violent behaviour. They also outlined various police methods of defining and punishing ‘unacceptable’ protest, including involving counterterrorist forces, as well as restraining orders on acquittal even for not-guilty verdicts.

Following and building upon discussion of these concerning developments, Graeme Hayes (Aston University) led a third session on the Stansted 15 trial and the new ways legislation is being used against activists. He explained how the Aviation and Maritime Security Act (AMSA) 1990 introduced after the Lockerbie bombing was used to construct airports as sites of democratic exception, as being airside without authorisation was argued to be inherently risky and endangering life by taking up police resources. He also discussed attempted use of a ‘necessity defence’ by the Stansted 15 as a depoliticised defence, and raised the question of how to critique wider practices and structures.

This provoked a wider discussion on the implications of certain legal defences, for example the ‘frack-free three’ successful use of a ‘good character defence’. Issues over Extinction Rebellion’s use of the ‘necessity’ guilty plea were also raised in relation to the youth climate strikes, as the child legal system is designed to be escaped via a not-guilty plea.

The afternoon sessions began with a workshop, with small groups of 2-4 identifying emergent themes and questions, which were then collated into displays that informed a wider group discussion. Emergent themes included:

• Legitimacy in protest and policing
• Constructing the activist as ‘good’ or ‘bad’
• Surveillance/monitoring and data collection on protestors
• The legal process as a disruption or punishment
• Construction of protest as inherently violent
• Use of counterterrorist forces
• New use/abuse/misuse of existing laws and defences
• Case law designed for crime being used for activism

These themes provoked discussion surrounding the political roles of the police and the diffusion and hybridisation of police functions throughout the state; disabled activists referred to the DWP, youth activists and mothers with children referred to social services, the NHS as a border force in data collection and so on. Finally, it was concluded that police-academic partnerships make it difficult to write and teach critically about police behaviour. These partnerships are common in the field of policing studies and provide increased data access, but this collaboration can be restrictive as any critique by the researcher risks damaging the relationship and preventing further study.

The last session of the conference addressed outcomes and potential for further collaboration between attendees.

Finally, the event’s collection of abstracts and short articles was highlighted as particularly useful.

All of the discussions throughout the day highlighted the need for combined expertise in addressing this important trend in contemporary criminal justice and protest behaviour. We hope all attendees found the promise of further collaboration to answer these questions as exciting as we did.

 

Also published on the SECP blog.

Contact

Francesca Kilpatrick is a PhD student at Brighton University, looking at the securitisation trend in UK climate change policy and how this impacts climate activism and protests.

Email: F.Kilpatrick1@uni.brighton.ac.uk

Twitter: https://twitter.com/ecofrancesca

Images: courtesy of the author and Flickr

Examining Crime Through a Security Lens: The Case for a BSC Specialist Network on Security

Dr Alison Wakefield is based at the University of Portsmouth where she runs the Professional Doctorate programme in Security Risk Management. She is also Chair of the Security Institute, the UK’s main professional association for security practitioners, and an Associate Fellow of the Royal United Services Institute.

Security is a significant theme of the research and innovation programmes of governments, inter-governmental organisations, think tanks and research foundations. It is likely that it will only become more significant. The latest edition of the Ministry of Defence (MoD) strategic intelligence report Global Strategic Trends opens with the statement that ‘the world is becoming ever more complex and volatile’, whereby ‘the only certainty about the future is its inherent uncertainty’. Among the numerous and interconnected challenges discussed in the report, it predicts an increasing threat from crime and extremism, and increasingly fragmented societies along with decreasing social cohesion. Criminology has much to contribute to our understanding of those multiple challenges and how we should deal with them, on topics ranging from social crime prevention to the relationship between crime, criminal justice and future technologies.

Most, if not all, criminological research can arguably be placed under a ‘security’ heading, especially if one takes an expansive view of the concept as depicted in the word cloud below. Yet ‘security’ has no obvious disciplinary home, as a cross-cutting research theme that spans many, if not most, academic disciplines. It is a foundational concept of international relations, which evolved as a field of study after the First World War as scholars sought to explain the causes of war and conditions for peace, and in which ‘security studies’ is a substantial sub-field. The relationship of security with criminology is not made obvious in a discipline that has traditionally made crime, as opposed to security, its conceptual focus, although conceptions of crime as harm perhaps bring criminology closer to security studies, and specifically to its schools of thought that favour a ‘human security’ perspective over a state-centric view of security. Today, priority areas for security research and policy development cut across the sciences, social sciences, humanities and business studies. These include the need to understand human behaviour better, the intersection of security with development as well as other areas of public policy, scientific and technological security solutions, the interactions of humans with such solutions, and the development of the risk management-based approaches that underpin these. Many of such areas require interdisciplinary teams and perspectives that are equipped to address the multiple facets of complex security problems.

The MoD report demonstrates that most of the risks and uncertainties facing the world in the twenty-first century can be conceptualised as security challenges. As a concept, ‘security’ is better suited than ‘crime’ both to considering the range of threats and response strategies at the global level, and to micro-managing risk in the most specific and localised of contexts. It embraces a much broader range of threats, associated with a wide variety of social, political, economic, technological, demographic and environmental conditions. It also presents enormous challenges, conceptually, analytically and practically. As a result, its study needs to draw on the expertise of multiple disciplines, at the multiple layers of strategy, policy and practice from the global to the local. Most academic disciplines and learned societies would benefit from making their contribution to the analysis of security challenges more explicit and better understood by their members, with security certain to be a central theme of research and innovation funding for the foreseeable future.

Security research and innovation

Research funding programmes with a focus on security include the Partnership for Conflict, Crime and Security Research (PaCCS) programme, established by the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) (formerly Research Councils UK) programme in 2008 as the Global Uncertainties Programme; the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 Secure Societies Challenge; and the Centre for Research and Evidence on Security Threats (CREST). CREST was launched in 2015 following a competitive process managed by the Economic and Social Research Council. A consortium of psychologists from the universities of Lancaster, Bath and Portsmouth was selected to develop and deliver a national hub for understanding, countering and mitigating security threats. CREST-funded projects cut across a variety of disciplines, but its home discipline reflects the significance now being afforded by the UK government to behavioural science as a dimension of the national security solutions of the present and future.

Other bodies that have formed within the UK to facilitate innovation and collaboration in the development and delivery of security solutions include the Joint Security and Resilience Centre (JSaRC), which is a partnership of UK central government and the security industry located in the Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism (OSCT) within the Home Office, the Security and Resilience Industry Suppliers Community (RISC) and the Academic RISC. RISC was established in 2007 as a security industry alliance serving as the principal channel of communication with the OSCT and other government departments and agencies on security-related requirements and policy issues. It was founded by the trade associations ADS, the British Security Industry Association (BSIA) and techUK, and it informed the development of JSaRC. RISC’s corporate members are a range of representative bodies within the security sector, with around 6000 companies being represented through the participating organisations.

RISC’s activities have also included representing industry perspectives in submissions to the UK government’s Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR), Security Export Strategy and National Security Capability Review (NSCR). The chair of RISC and the Minister of State for Security and Economic Crime co-chair the Security and Resilience Growth Partnership (SRGP), a forum that informs government-industrial co-operation on security issues. In 2014 Academic RISC was founded, inspired by the RISC approach, as a network of universities to promote academic engagement in solving challenges in national security and resilience. Academic RISC is chaired by Professor Chris Hankin, Director of the Institute for Security Science and Technology, Imperial College, and now comprises 120 member universities which receive updates on opportunities circulated by the UK government.

The contribution of criminology

Criminology has a huge contribution to make to such initiatives. For example, as our government has recently acknowledged, the UK’s future resilience to cyber security threats relies on a significant expansion of the cyber security profession and its broadening out to encompass a much wider range of capabilities, beyond the current, limited routes into the profession primarily through the STEM disciplines. Cyber security is, above all, about the strategic management of risk, and needs to take much greater account of the human factors that are a central feature of both the threats and the solutions, the partnership working and intelligence expertise on which those solutions rely, and its significant legal, regulatory and ethical dimensions. These human considerations are at the heart of criminological thinking. Michael McGuire’s[i][ii] work to bring technology to the forefront of criminology has been a valuable step forward, mapping out key areas of our discipline’s contribution to understanding, utilising and managing technological advancement. The concepts of crime science and applied criminology have become increasingly influential within criminology with their emphasis on practical applications to crime problems. Many police studies scholars, myself included, have long advocated expansive conceptions of policing that recognise the multiple actors undertaking policing functions, and the centrality of partnerships and networks to protective security, intelligence-sharing and other security/policing functions. Ten years ago, Lucia Zedner explored the relationship between security and criminology in her influential textbook[iii] and, if the value and potential contribution of criminology is to be fully recognised by government and industry as the competition for security research funding becomes fiercer, it is time to look at this again. Security should not be seen as a sub-set of criminology. Rather, criminology is arguably a sub-set of security in the context of the research programmes and cross-sector collaboration initiatives to which I have referred, or at least needs to be communicated as being one of its essential components in responses to research and funding calls and within inter-disciplinary networking.

Recently, the critical criminologist Alex Vitale controversially claimed that criminology ‘has become a technocratic pursuit of small questions divorced from ethics’, but security is far more than a technocratic concept. Its breadth is illustrated by this far from exhaustive word cloud of security terms.

Indeed, in the aforementioned MoD report it is argued that ‘the defence and security community should consider placing human security (“the people”) at the centre of their world view’. This influential report and its American equivalent view the world through a security lens, but encompass the ‘megatrends’ confronting the world in the coming decades, across the areas of global governance, economic development, technological advancement, demographics, migration, health, resources, environment, conflict, disorder and insecurity. Critical perspectives are as important as any to our understanding of challenges across these broad areas and how we can confront them. Developing sub-fields of our discipline such as green criminology and post-conflict/Southern criminology address vital aspects of sustainable development and bring ethical considerations to the fore.

A proposal for a specialist network

Through this blog I want to solicit interest in forming a BSC specialist network on security, with a view to raising the collective profile of criminology within government and industry, and collaborating with others to examine and map out criminology’s contribution to our understanding of security challenges and the search for solutions. This extends across security concepts and definitions; the global ‘megatrends’ and national and local political and economic trends shaping our world today; security risks and threats that extend beyond traditional crimes to include human rights abuses, environmental threats to life, corporate crime and corruption, for example; the multiple actors and agencies from the global level downwards that influence the construction of security challenges and the responses to them; and the laws, strategies, policies and practices that make up those responses. Since these areas are so broad that they potentially encompass all topics of criminological interest, what I am specifically looking for is members who would see particular value in collaborating through the lens of security, stepping outside the constraints of a crime/criminal justice perspective on the world while bringing the same expertise and interests to the table. This also requires a shift in language and terminology, with a focus on security problems, security solutions, and security agencies and departments, alongside our common concerns of crime and criminal justice.

The overarching aim of the network would be to support the engagement of criminologists – individually and as a collective – with stakeholders globally, regionally, nationally and locally. While making shared research interests its priority, the network would help inform criminology teaching and student employability in related areas, enhancing links to possible guest speakers and employers: a further means of reinforcing the contribution and stature of criminology across a variety of dimensions. I am in a position to support the development of members’ connections with the corporate and commercial sectors in particular, through my current voluntary role as Chairman of the Security Institute, the UK’s main professional association for security practitioners with just under 3,000 members at the time of writing.

As a first step, I would like to organise a meeting at this year’s BSC conference at the University of Lincoln from 2nd to 5th July, and a panel session at which to introduce the proposal for a specialist network in security, as well as to showcase some of the important research being undertaken in this area. I would like to hear from BSC members who would be interested in participating in the network, forming a committee, meeting up at the conference and/or contributing to the conference panel, and would be grateful if expressions of interest could be emailed to me at alison.wakefield@port.ac.uk before Tuesday 7 May. I strongly hope the idea of such a network will be of interest to BSC members both old and new, and also welcome general comments and feedback.

^[i] M.R. McGuire, Technology, Crime and Justice: The Question Concerning Technomia (Routledge 2012).

^[ii] M.R. McGuire, T.J. Holt (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Technology, Crime and Justice (Routledge 2016).

[iii] L. Zedner, Security (Routledge 2009).

 

Contact

Dr Alison Wakefield, University of Portsmouth

Email: alison.wakefield@port.ac.uk

Twitter:  @DrAlisonsTweets

Website: http://www.port.ac.uk/institute-of-criminal-justice-studies/staff/dr-alison-wakefield.htm

 

Images: courtesy of the author