Crime Prevention and Security Policies in Greece: Past and Present Political Control, and Perspectives

The striking feature of preventative policies – especially in France, the Netherlands, and Belgium – comes from the importance granted to the local level. For North American specialists, community policing may lead to a deep restructuring of social control. But community mobilization may also question the monopoly the state exerts on the city. Henceforth, there are controversies over citizens’ mobilization in Europe. Since our previous evaluation of public policies in the 1980s, we have observed a withdrawal of preventative policies in several European countries and a resurgence of models focussing on crime control. In the context of a new relationship between the state and citizens in which private agencies of security get increasingly involved, the policies of safety and prevention developed in the 1990s appear more and more as a new model of crime control. The contributions gathered in this special issue come from sociologists, criminologists, law and political scientists and they cover eight European countries. Initially they were discussed within the framework of a GERN – Groupe européen de recherche sur les normativités – seminar. If studies underline that increases in delinquency can hardly be contested, the analyses presented here emphasize the complexity and contradictions of public action which can generate feelings of insecurity as a result of their paradoxical effects.