Place, Crime and Insecurity in Everyday Life in an English Town, 2019-2023

What crimes and security concerns trouble differently-situated groups of people today? What demands for action do these prompt from different authorities? To what extent are contemporary insecurities mediated through people’s sense of place and attendant feelings of belonging? The field of criminology used to be confident that it knew how to answer these questions and had a paradigm—‘fear of crime’—within which to investigate and theorize them. That paradigm was always unstable. But over recent decades it has been thoroughly dissolved by the sheer range and scale of technological, cultural, economic and political transformations —from the Great Crash and its aftermath, to the digital revolution, Brexit and the rise of nativist populism, #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter, the gathering climate crisis, and the legacies of the COVID pandemic, to name only a fraction of the concerns that bear upon people’s everyday lives. This research are explored these questions of in/security in everyday life by revisiting an old research site, Macclesfield in Cheshire. The town was the site of an old study, Girling et al., Crime and Social Change in Middle England (Routledge 2000) which was carried out in the mid 1990s. The current research is a study of everyday security concerns in Macclesfield between November 2019 and July 2023. grappling with how upon to theorize and investigate in/security in everyday social relations today in order to understand the hopes and fears that are in play when people think, deliberate and act in response to the question—What does it mean to be and feel secure in Britain today?

We used a range of methods to investigate the experience and perceptions of safety and security among differently-situated people living and working in the town today. We interviewed people individually and in small groups, conducted two community surveys,
spoke with the local authorities, police and other security providers, analysed local social media (X and Facebook), observed public spaces, attended public meetings and spent time with a wide range of local groups and police actors.

Back in the mid-1990s, when three members of the present research team conducted a similar study of ‘crime-talk’ in the town. In the 1990s, people in Macclesfield expressed a wide range of concerns, some of which reflected problems that were high on the public agenda nationally at that time. These included worries about burglary, car theft, and drugs and anti-social behaviour, especially around licensed premises and about groups of young people in public spaces. They also worried about the absence of visible policing in the town.

Our new study shows that those worries have not gone away. But they are today less prominent in what people tell us about what it is like to live in and feel safe in this town. For most of our participants, crime was not at the forefront of their accounts of concerns
about the town and their ability to imagine a secure future there. Local place-talk in the 2020s is not first and foremost talk about crime – a striking change from what we found in the 1990s. The main findings of the present study are as follows:
• Drugs and drug-related disorders remain a major concern. But residents typically associate it with concerns about exploitation and vulnerability, and with its impact on the quality of their environment.
• People notice and often spoke to us about various forms of sometimes hidden social suffering in the town, and much of the work of local agencies, including the police, is today focused on these problems, domestic abuse and vulnerability related risks being prominent along them. This is also reflected in the work of the
vibrant voluntary sector in the town.
• People’s attention nowadays seems more focused on a range of harms that we might broadly term ‘environmental’. Acts of care and repair of the physical and natural environment are a prominent feature of civic and everyday life in the town.
• There is a high level of concern about cars and traffic (including with speeding, poor parking, and driver behaviour near school gates).
• People spoke to us extensively about littering, graffiti, potholes and the future of the town centre that raise concerns about a deteriorating built and social environment.
• Residents seem less focused on – and for the most part less angry about – the service they receive from the police, and more concerned with what they see as the inability of local government to care for the infrastructure of the place in which they live.
In voicing such concerns, people also raise questions about who is or should be responsible for acting to solve or improve these problems, and sometimes about what actions they can take, individually and collectively, to express care for their locality and
its future.