Author: Justin Kotzé
ISBN No: 9780815353935
Review date: 24/04/2024
No of pages: 188
Publisher: Routledge
Publisher URL:
https://www.routledge.com/The-Myth-of-the-Crime-Decline-Exploring-Change-and-Continuity-in/Kotze/p/book/9780815353935
Year of publication: 09/07/2019
Brief:
price
£92, hardback
Mark Rowe writes: I looked forward to opening this book, judging it not by its cover but its title (sub-title; ‘Exploring Change and Continuity in Crime and Harm’). Years ago, I put it in conversation to a UK criminologist that the official statistics for crime so under-recorded crime, just as crime is under-reported to police and even this is ‘screened out’, that the stats are useless. The criminologist replied to the effect that the stats were all we had. So if you don’t have confidence in the data you have about how deep a swimming pool is, do you dive in anyway?!
This book, then, offered the prospect of challenging the orthodoxy that from the mid-1990s (to take only the UK), partly thanks to a fall in car theft thanks to manufacturers making their products more secure, crime has fallen. Let’s leave aside the uncomfortable fact that car thefts are rising thanks to new keyless cars not being that secure.
The author ends with a call, to stop masking ‘the profound socio-economic turbulence we are living through’, and take a honest look at what crime really happens to people.
This book, as in fairness the author says right away, derives from his studies for his doctorate, awarded in 2016, which will explain use of such criminology jargon words as ‘contextualising’, ‘glocal’ (global-local’) and ‘zemiology’ (the study of ‘social harms’, not the same thing as crimes). While the author sets off with international statistics of crime – that come with the problem that people simply don’t tell all the crimes and ‘harms’ they suffer, let alone cause – to his credit he bases his book on actual reality, a place on Teesside that he gives the name ‘Lake Town’ to. Academics get cross if you seek to identify the place they have studied; suffice to say, it’s an industrial, or rather de-industrial, part of town. As in so many parts of Britain, when the factory, steel and chemical works, jobs went or were cut drastically, not only did economies suffer, so did culture; people no longer felt the security of a job for life. What effect does this have on crime and the well-being of people and a place?
The author suggests there are ‘invisible crimes’, or to be more precise a ‘hidden landscape of everyday crime’, such as violent crime by, and done to, drug-addicts and their dealers; violence ‘both commonplace and normal aspects of everyday life, often viewed as unexceptional occupational hazards’. Such as; theft of drugs. How helpful is it that the author, now a lecturer in criminology at Teesside University, suggests ‘that the most widespread harms are in fact structurally embedded within the global capitalist system itself’? In other words, just as climate change protesters are claiming there is such a thing as ‘climate guilt’ – that citizens and indeed entire countries are at fault, ever since they embraced the Industrial Revolution – Justin Kotze is arguing that we’re all complicit, ‘in the production of harm’ (page 69).
Really?
Kotze does go on to actual experience in Lake Town, which ‘suffered from the socio-economic fall-out of widespread de-industrialisation’. It has unemployment and little to offer residents. To his credit the author has left behind theory and stats for ‘the stark reality of life’, not only dealing in drugs, but prostitution and crime to pay for addiction (whether legal, such as alcohol, the ‘legal highs’ of sleeping tablets, counterfeit pharmaceuticals, or outright illegal drugs; besides anti-social behaviour and disorder that notoriously, in any place, well-off or not, gets under-reported, such as loud music bothering the neighbours. People taking drugs to blot out the misery; here are the ‘social harms’ with damaging consequences that Kotze introduced. This is separate from, as informants told Kotze, people doing crime (‘just criming it’) to afford to live, not least because they are not in work and are subjected to benefit sanctions. As Kotze hears and writes, people in Lake Town find crime and harm pervasive, as they for instance can earn ‘a couple of hundred quid a week’ by holding drugs for dealers. Or, fellow residents offer cheap clothes or consumer goods, presumably stolen or counterfeit.
Surely none of this is new; it’s been reported for years, decades, and in the book Dark Heart, by the Guardian journalist Nick Davies (1998). A shadow economy, whether of shoplifted goods stolen to order, or of serious and organised crime, avoiding the taxes and overheads of the legal economy; and (to recall Dark Heart) the site of sexual exploitation, illegal gambling and debts paid off by working for criminals, ‘The shocking truth about hidden Britain’, to quote Davies’ sub-title. The scandals of Rotherham and elsewhere were there for years to find, if anyone in authority had wanted to look, or indeed believe those who spoke up.
To return to Kotze, and what he found in Lake Town. Everything can be stolen; your prescription drugs, the goods you stole; because you are hardly going to complain to the police (‘no one believes in them round here’). In other words, many housing estates, and not just in Lake Town, are ‘self-policed’. Kotze goes on to the police, who he finds ‘persistently and deliberately downgrade reported crime, aggressively persuade victims not to make ‘complaints’ and ultimately physically manipulate police recorded figures’. For instance, police would rather report a burglary of a home (of interest to householders, voters, and therefore politicians) as burglary of a non-dwelling (of less interest).
In short, crime figures (or any other official stats of life in Lake Town, health and well-being, and household income?) in no way reflect the front line. The crime decline is not only inaccurate; the figures it’s based on are obsolete, Kotze argues; because ‘only that which can be easily measured and quantified is explored’.
If an inhabitant of Lake Town is forever subject to crime and harm – the intimidations, the offers of stolen goods, the sexual crimes, that presumably are going on, but are little covered in this work – can you even measure it? Do the harms that people on high-crime housing estates, that police keep a lid on at best, fluctuate by season; are they susceptible to beat policing, target hardening, the weather? Since de-industrialisation has happened for at least 30 years, maybe 40, maybe 20 in places, how possible is it to plot changes over time – and compare it with the official stats? Or, how if at all can you plot trends, if as the author says crime and the terrain it’s carried out on, is changing so much and so fast. In other words, understandably, Kotze does more knocking down than building ‘new lines of thought’.
While Kotze does say it’s time ‘to wake up from the myth-making dream … we must take a good look through unveiled eyes at the world as it is and begin to confront the reality of our times’, in the penultimate chapter he goes on to more theory, when surely it would be more valuable to compare Lake Town with an outwardly more affluent district; or are the better-off sides of town largely insulated from Lake Town and its equivalent poor areas, presumably in every town and city? Is the same true of other statistics of society, such as income or health? The ‘uncomfortable truths’ Kotze has aired presumably are as true in the schools and health clinics of Lake Town.
Pictured; Teesside port, by Mark Rowe.
