Introduction

Tackling anti-social behaviour has, over the last decade, become a government priority. The establishment of the Anti-Social Behaviour Unit in the Home Office in 2003 and, more recently, the formation of the Respect Task Force signal the strategic shift in official policy on law and order. As the officially recorded crime rate continues to drop there has been no let-up in government pressure to maintain ‘law and order’, with the passing of a number of pieces of legislation designed to control the range of activities that have become identified as anti-social behaviour.

In this process, there has been a shift in terminology and in the meaning of key terms such as ‘disorder’, ‘crime’ and ‘anti-social behaviour’, with a blurring of the distinctions between them. These terms are increasingly coming to be used interchangeably, while terms such as ‘disorder’, which once referred mainly to physical disorder such as vandalism, are now more readily applied to the definition of social and behavioural problems, such as street drinkers, youths or vagrants and prostitutes. There is also a growing belief that these social forms of disorder should and can be controlled through law enforcement (Hope, 1999). The conceptual slippage involved in current debates about crime, disorder and anti-social behaviour does not, however, detract from the significance given to these various activities, but rather serves as a self-reinforcing discourse that increases their profile and allows inflated claims to be made about their cumulative impact.

However, a discernible shift in emphasis is taking place, involving a decreased concentration on crimes as specific events and a focus on anti-social behaviour and disorder as low-level continual activities that extend beyond the established crime-control framework and that require a form of control that extends beyond conventional forms of policing. It necessarily requires a series of agencies working in combination, involving forms of regulation that transcend the established boundaries of criminal justice. James Q. Wilson and George Kelling (1982) have provided the most effective rationale for linking disorder and anti-social behaviour to crime in their influential and widely referenced ‘broken windows’ thesis, which posits an ‘inextricable link’ between disorder and crime (see Matthews, 1992; Kelling, 2001).