Author: Pauline Lesch, Efus
What is Efus?
Founded in 1987 under the auspices of the Council of Europe, the European Forum for Urban Security (Efus) is the only European network of local and regional authorities dedicated to urban security. It includes nearly 250 local and regional authorities from 16 countries (www.efus.eu).
Development of the Efus Local Safety Audit
Gaining a clear picture of the security situation in a city is a crucial prerequisite to the development and implementation of effective security policies. This requires that perceptions of security held by different demographic groups are properly understood and considered. The European Forum for Urban Security (Efus) has long promoted the importance of regional authorities adopting such an evidence-based approach — a consideration reflected in a number of the Forum’s publications and projects.
The 2008 Efus publication "Guidance on Local Safety Audits: A Compendium of International Practice", first outlined the Forum’s ambition to systematise evidence-based information collection in its projects and in the support it offers to its member cities. As a follow-up to the 2008 Compendium, and a reflection of the evolution of methodologies and focus areas during the previous decade, in 2016 Efus published Methods and Tools for a Strategic Approach to Urban Security. This publication embeds the Safety Audit within a larger conceptual framework — The Strategic Approach to Urban Security.
Adopting a strategic approach
The elements contained within the Strategic Approach to Urban Security are not new — nor is the approach itself. It is rather a framework comprising the different phases of developing and implementing a local security policy. The approach outlined by Efus initially comprised five elements (Efus, 2016):
1. The safety audit: learning about, analysing and understanding elements of the local security situation
2. The strategy: translating the findings of the audit into goals and objectives
3. The action: defining an action plan and guaranteeing its efficient implementation
4. The evaluation: assessing the implementation and the impact of the action
5. The mobilisation and participation: engaging in a continuous effort to include all stakeholders and foster participative processes.
This is not a linear process but rather a circular one that highlights the principles of inclusion, participation and evaluation. A conceptual model building on the original Efus structure has been developed by CCI. This model detailing the strategic approach to security policy development and implementation — as well as indicating the support provided by Efus — is illustrated in Figure 1, below.
Figure 1. The Efus strategic approach security policy development and implementation (Wootton & Davey, 2020)
Detailing the Safety Audit
The safety audit is a multi-stage process managed by a Steering Committee, comprising relevant city authority stakeholders, and an Audit Team made up of people with relevant areas of expertise. Such areas include: research design; community engagement; and statistical analysis. These two groups are complemented by associated stakeholders representing different interest groups within the city (e.g. community leaders; cultural group representatives; business group representatives, etc.).
The audit begins with an initial broad review of the local context — what is referred to by Efus as a "wide and shallow investigation". This enables an initial appraisal of problems and factors contributing to a city’s level of crime and delinquency. The collected data is analysed and discussed by the Audit Team and the Steering Committee who, in consultation with the other stakeholders, decide on which problem areas to focus in the second stage of research. The second stage involves more in-depth research into the particular problems, places or groups of people that have been identified as requiring further investigation. This is described as the "narrow and deep investigation" stage of the Safety Audit.
Based on the finding from the research stage, intervention priorities are identified and translated into a security strategy. All stakeholders are further consulted, an action plan is elaborated, and an Audit Report is prepared (Efus, 2008).
New tools and methods
Since the publication of "Methods and Tools for a Strategic Approach to Urban Security", Efus has continued to work on projects and partnerships that nourish its repertoire of tools and methods that support security actors at the local and regional level. The human-centred approach and design methodology employed by the Cutting Crime Impact (CCI) project inspired Efus to mobilise this knowledge and progress its strategic approach to Urban Security.
One of the key tenets of the CCI methodology is the focus on end-users — to investigate and understand their needs and requirements through direct engagement with them. In the case of CCI, the end users include law enforcement agencies (LEAs) and security policymakers. This human-centred approach involves the use of tools and methods tailored to exploring relevant contexts, gathering data and generating insight. These include: observation (ethnography); focus groups; immersion; journaling and insta-ethnography; to name but a few.
In a world where the security challenges facing local and regional authorities are evolving, it is increasingly important to apply appropriate tools and methods that can provide relevant insight to inform action.
Emphasising the participative
Shifts in political governance, changes in economic climate, and technological advances provide both challenges to and opportunities for urban security. Citizen-led initiatives are growing in number, and public participation becoming the norm in the formulation and implementation of urban security policies. Too often, however, citizen participation is limited to a consultation role rather than true citizen co-production of urban security policy — often due to fears around implementation difficulties and unforeseen consequences. Such fears may deter municipalities from fostering public participation (Efus, 2016). In contrast, Efus seeks to embrace and champion true citizen engagement in security policy co-creation.
By multiplying sources of information and fostering an environment in which every group’s lived reality and perception of urban security are taken into account, the Efus Safety Audit prepares the stage for the co-production of urban security policies that reflect the needs of inhabitants. Efus emphasises the inclusion of a diverse and representative range of stakeholders in the work of the Steering Committee and the Audit Team as a first step towards such co-production. The involvement of civil society organisations can facilitate this — such as local security councils, youth clubs, minority or parent-teacher associations, to name but a few.
Feelings of insecurity as an additional indicator of the urban security situation
In its 2017 Manifesto, Efus committed to:
"…Targeting underrepresented and marginalised types of victimisation, including violence against women and discrimantory violence, to ensure that our knowledge of such phenonmena and the effective means of fighting these are improving.”
Efus, 2017, p.37.
In addition, addressing security challenges related to radicalisation and polarisation is also an objective. Some forms of crime and delinquency instil a stronger sense of 'crisis' than others, yet it is important to be aware that the main concern of citizens is usually day-to-day security and their feelings of safety. Feelings of insecurity not only have an impact on the individual but also on the collective wellbeing. As such, insecurity will inform a population’s political and economic behaviour as well as their behaviour in, and use of, urban public spaces.
CCI reflects this understanding, with one of the project's four Focus Areas addressing the measurement and mitigation of citizens' feelings on insecurity. Generally, victimisation surveys attempt to measure the level of fear of crime in a population by asking respondents how worried they are about different crime types. CCI research argues that the conceptual formulation of “fear of crime” is problematic, being an umbrella term that includes a range of emotional reactions and cognitive processes. For example, fear of crime victimisation is conflated with more abstract concerns or anxieties about non-crime-related issues. Thus, asking questions using the label “fear of crime” may obscure the true nature and impact of citizens' subjective experience of urban insecurity.
Conceptualising Feelings of Unsafety
The Design Against Crime Solution Centre at the University of Salford has developed a conceptual framework that aims to operationalise feelings of unsafety — the different facets of worry, anxiety, and fear impacting the lived experience. It recognises that feelings of insecurity often arise without any actual victimisation or threat (Davey & Wootton, 2014). The 'Feelings of Unsafety' model includes individual perspectives on unsafety — from 'assumed situational vulnerability', 'situational anxiety', and 'fear' in the face of immediate threat. It includes two facets arising after crime victimisation — immediate 'shock, anger and distress' and the medium to longer-term processes of dealing with victimisation. Finally, completing the cycle is the rationalisation of the experience that leads to an individual's 'modified perspective'. This process feeds into the 'background context' as individual experiences are shared with family members, friends and neighbours and this in turn informs wider societal concerns, anxieties and political priorities. In this way, the model seeks to illustrate how the 'background context' for feelings of unsafety both nourishes and is nourished by individual experience. Identifying this conceptual structure is important for measuring feelings of insecurity in a way that can provide actionable understanding — particularly in relation to specific demographic groups and situations. Understanding the different factors that shape 'insecurity' is fundamental to the generation of effective strategies for mitigating their impact (Davey and Wootton, 2019).
The revised edition of the Efus Safety AUDIT developed by CCI will include methods and tools employed by project partners to understand, measure and mitigate feelings of insecurity. Their experiences give shape to the conceptual framework developed by CCI researchers and highlight the importance of taking feelings of insecurity into account when drawing up a prevention and security strategy. The tools used by Lower Saxony and the department of interior of Catalonia include surveys designed to specifically measure particular aspects of insecurity and participative methods such as 'exploratory walks' that foster the active collaboration of local people. Inspired by the lessons learned during the CCI project, the Efus Safety Audit guide will support local and regional authorities in gaining a holistic understanding of the security situation in their cities and make the process of information collection more effective, inclusive and representative.
References
Efus (2008) "Guidance on Local Safety Audits: A Compendium of International Practice", published by Efus: Paris, France, available from www.efus.eu
Efus (2016) Methods and Tools for a Strategic Approach to Urban Security, available from https://efus.eu/en/resources/publications/efus/11191/
Efus (2018) Manifesto: Security, Democracy and Cities – Co-producing Urban Security Policies, published by Efus, March 2018. The Manifesto was developed at the end of the conference European Forum for Urban Security (Efus), the City of Barcelona and the Government of Catalonia on 15–17 November 2017, in Barcelona. Available from: http://efus-network.eu/efus/en/publications-2/
Efus (2013) Local Safety Audits: A Compendium of International Practice, available from: http://efusnetwork.eu/efus/en/topics/tools-and-methods/audits-and-evaluation/efus/654/
Davey, C.L. and Wootton, A.B. (2019) PIM Toolkit 4: Report on feelings of insecurity – Concepts and models. CCI Deliverable 7.2. Available from the CORDIS https://cordis.europa.eu/login/en
Davey, C.L., & Wootton, A.B. (2014) “Crime and the Urban Environment: The Implications for Wellbeing”, in Wellbeing. A Complete Reference Guide (Eds) Burton, R., Davies-Cooper, R. and Cooper, C. Wiley-Blackwell: Chichester (UK)
