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Dangerous Streets: Encounters with the Police

Chapter 5 looks at how housing estate residents interact with the police in negotiating the dangers of ‘the street’. Government policies that go tough on ‘law and order’ have focused on young people’s involvement in street-based activities, invoking a language of ‘gang crime’ and ‘gang membership’. However, this language does not easily fit with residents’ own understanding of the dangers of the ‘streets’ that encompasses both the threat of daily victimization and the failures of the criminal justice system. This chapter argues that the daily threat of serious crime alongside mistrust in the police generates seemingly contradictory responses. Residents sometimes appropriate the police as personalized tools into everyday disputes with friends, kin, and neighbours. Meanwhile, in situations of more serious threat, they tend to fall back onto informal mechanisms of policing that the state outlaws as vigilante violence. It is precisely this gap between citizens’ expectations for support and the reality of police performance that is expressed when residents show support for harsher punishment in a system that has become ‘too liberal’ and ‘soft’.