Conceptualising the trend in burglary in England and Wales

Hope, TJ

Abstract

Our effort to understand crime rate change is hampered by governmental thinking about crime, and the vested interest governments have in favourable (popular) outcomes. At least as practised in the United Kingdom, thinking about burglary often assumes a ‘top-down’ approach, placing most of the drivers of crime rate change in the hands of government; while reducing private citizens to passive, isolated
individuals, and civil society and its institutions to a wasteland devoid of intention, morality and purpose (Hope and Karstedt, 2003). Not surprisingly, the increasing use
of crime statistics as a source for governmental performance measurement (Matrix and Hope, 2006) tends to reinforce government’s own self-image that it has (or ought
to have) the dominant influence over society’s crime (Garland, 2001) 2. Because of this, governments find it difficult to come up with narratives to explain the changes in crime rates observed in their own national statistics: reluctant to take responsibility when crime goes up, at a loss to explain why it goes down. Part of their difficulty rests in failing to acknowledge sufficiently the active role played by private citizens and civil institutions within society (Hope and Karstedt, 2003). This paper, which tries to account for the trend in burglary in England and Wales since the start of the 1980s, attempts to correct the balance somewhat, weighing the governmental perspective
against a more ‘market-oriented’ or ‘civil society’ perspective.

Presentation Conference Type	Other
Conference Name	Colloquium on Property Crime, Project CRIMPREV (FP6, EU)
Conference Location	Brussels
Start Date	Feb 7, 2007
End Date	Feb 8, 2007
Deposit Date	May 9, 2011
Publicly Available Date	Apr 5, 2016
Additional Information	Event Type : Workshop

Conceptualising the trend in burglary in England and Wales

Hope, TJ

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Abstract

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