Description
This project examined the role of a new kind of institutional actor in crime and disorder reduction, the ‘night-time economy co-ordinator’ (NTEC), appointed in Swansea and funded out of the Home Office Tackling Violent Crime Programme.
The NTEC was appointed specifically to inform and co-ordinate responses to alcohol-related violence at night in the city centre and bay areas of Swansea on the presumption that responsibility for tackling this violence cuts across a number of public authorities (police, local authority service directorates, health authority etc.) and that remediation of the problem could not be achieved by these authorities acting alone; their various responses to the problem of violence therefore needed to be ‘co-ordinated’.
The evaluation examined the challenges of co-ordination encountered by the NTEC, of countering the ‘silo mentality’ of established public bureaucracies and facilitating joint operations. It also provided an impact assessment of co-ordinated measures to reduce alcohol-related violence against the person. This impact assessment entailed the development of a database recording the frequency, location and timing of incidents of violence against the person, which was used, in turn, to inform a ‘problem-solving’ approach to crime reduction in which responses were premised on quantitative and qualitative evidence of crime problems and their interpretation by local practitioners and the social scientists involved in the evaluation.
Decisions on publication of findings from this research reside with the Safer Swansea Partnership.
