Fire Fighters, Neighbourhoods and Social Identity: the relationship between the fire service and residents in Bristol

Police engagement

Lersch et al (2008) add a spatial dimension to this avenue of research, questioning the link between police use of force and neighbourhood characteristics. Their research opens with the observation of irony that activities which are meant to guarantee social ‘tranquillity’ often have the reverse effect and inspire discord, the same as which could be said for the fire service, and which certainly reiterates Stott (1998). Lersch et al’s research compares police use of force records with census tract information in a large south-western US police department. It is interesting to note that this data does not consider handcuffing to be use of force, nor (particularly interesting perhaps to UK readers) do they consider ‘pointing a weapon’ to be use of force. The authors acknowledge that certain social groups are likely to have greater experiences of coercive police force than other social groups, and they extend two explanations for this. The first is that the police are more likely to be in certain neighbourhoods, as crimes, like fire, tend to be concentrated amongst the very poor, including poor minority group members. Further (page 285) if there is a greater number of contacts in a certain neighbourhood, then there is the potential for a greater number of uses of force. However, whilst this is true for total numbers of uses of force, it would seem that there should be no need for a greater proportion of the interactions to involve uses of force. The second hypothesis they present is hardly more reassuring: the threat hypothesis suggests that economically disadvantaged groups pose a threat to more dominant groups (page 285), and that the police respond to this as the protectors of these dominant groups by exerting greater social control on the disadvantaged groups, which in social identity terms, suggests strong ingroup bias and active stereotyping, with little impact of contact and no socio-political change.

The research concludes that use of force is not randomly distributed about the city, but is indeed concentrated in areas with high numbers of minority residents (page 295), and that this is consistent with the threat hypothesis. However, it does not address the questions of whether criminality is genuinely higher in these populations, or whether this is emblematic of ongoing poor relations, perhaps caused by civil unrest episodes in the past (page 282). Although the fire service do not use force in their relations with the community, it is feasible that they remain ‘guilty by association’ with the police, especially from times of civil unrest, as in Shiregreen, which experienced riots in the 1990s. It is also possible that they retain their place alongside the police in the popular imagination, whereby good service and positive experiences are expected, whereas bad experiences are weighted very strongly and remembered for a long time.

The spatial dimension is continued by Williamson et al (2008) who take a British example to look at how different neighbourhoods experience crime differently, and that different types of policing might be appropriate in certain circumstances. By applying geodemographics to policing practices, they aim to look at relative levels of risk in different neighbourhoods. This is done by combining census and survey data to consider differing levels of social capital (page 199). They conclude that interventions that are reassuring in one neighbourhood will not necessarily be so in other neighbourhoods, Neighbourhood Watch being a particularly strong example. Although other policy areas are not analysed in any detail, it is also observed that health and education data can be compared with geodemographics in a similarly rewarding fashion. This is also likely to be the case for victims of fire, who tend to share a number of characteristics and risk factors as victims of crime (Kershaw, Nicholas et al. 2008, Office of the Deputy Prime Minister 2006). These are clearly areas of work which could be very beneficial to fire services in their developing service delivery, which, like policing, is increasingly about ‘managing risk’ (page 190) rather than maintaining order.

Other studies depart from Skogan (2006) in different ways. Like Skogan, Bradford et al (2008) maintain that public contact with police can, at worst, be damaging for public confidence in policing, and only negligible at best. However, they take the view that there are a number of different facets within confidence, including effectiveness, community engagement and procedural fairness. As such, they maintain that:

Feeling one’s community lacks cohesion, social trust and informal social control was much more important in deciding public confidence in policing than more instrumental concerns about personal safety (page 6).

This is broadly similar to the approach members of the public take towards their own fire risks, feeling that if they are not in control of a number of aspects of their lives, they have a higher risk from fire (Communities and Local Government 2008). Bradford et al conclude that with this further developed model of community confidence, they were able to establish some positive correlations between police and public, particularly in terms of community engagement and perceived fairness (Bradford, Jackson et al. 2008). This relates strongly to Sunshine and Tyler’s (2003) conclusions about procedural justice, discussed below.

A further study (Murphy, Hinds et al. 2008) builds on these ideas, addressing both the group dynamic of police cooperation and ideas about procedural justice (Sunshine, Tyler 2003a). They consider various different facets for police cooperation, including instrumental reasons, reasons of ‘substantive morality’ (page 137) and reasons relating to perceived legitimacy, based on procedural justice. In this instance, procedural justice is described as being motivated by concerns relating to group membership and status. Further, experiences of treatment from authority figures informs people as to whether they are valued members of a valued group (Lind, Tyler 1988), potentially demonstrating a link between public cooperation and group identity, which can well be transferred to the fire service context. Murphy et al’s research is conducted via survey, relating to six measures covering procedural justice, distributive justice, police performance, legitimacy, cooperation with police and demographic control variables. This is not dissimilar from Sunshine and Tyler’s related work on procedural justice, which enumerates a number of these variables in relation to social identity (Sunshine, Tyler 2003a). Engaging in the community to inspire confidence clearly has ramifications for the fire service too, especially when, if this is not well considered and properly executed, it is likely to leave residents more disgruntled than if there had been no attempt at engagement.

Engaging communities to reduce ASB

Casey and Flint’s (2007) work on non-reporting of ASB clearly links to both the above literatures on police engagement in communities, and the following section on engaging residents in regeneration areas. Using focus group data, and secondary data from the BCS, they present a series of reasons why people do not report ASB incidents which demonstrate a number of different ways in which the resident does not engage with appropriate agencies. For instance, where the resident does not define the incident as ASB, this could suggest that ASB in that neighbourhood is so normalised that residents do not recognise the incident, or that they engage in that behaviour themselves. A further reason stated is that residents have a ‘culture of non-engagement’ with agencies, where the prevailing paradigm within that community is for ‘minding your own business’, with a culture of distrust of authority and non cooperation with agencies perceived to be in authority, such as the police and local authority, and also potentially the fire service. This demonstrates that engagement is a two-way process, not something that is done to residents, rather, something they can choose to engage with, or, as discussed below, actively resist.

The theme of distrust is taken up by Mathers et al (2008), looking at why residents do not participate in New Deal for Communities (NDC) schemes. They find that for many residents, participation could threaten the ‘survival strategies’ that they develop to navigate their extreme poverty and multiple disadvantages. In the case of young mothers, participation with the health visitors consisted of extending the contact that they had with services telling them what to do, with the implicit threat that their children would be removed if they were not compliant. For young men on social security, participation was thought to come between them and their illicit survival activities, fuelled by a sense that the NDC and social security were all linked in some way (Mathers, Parry et al. 2008). There are clearly implications for the fire service with this, both in terms of not presenting messages that feed into the ‘bad parent’ discourse disliked by the mothers interviewed, and in not threatening those people who may not always be on the right side of the law with disclosure. Presenting messages to these groups requires an active recognition of the context in which residents make some of these decisions, as much for the fire service as for regeneration agencies.