whom can you trust? the politics of ‘grassing’ on an inner city housing estate

Whom can you trust? The politics of'grassing' on an inner city housingestate

Karen Evans, Penny Fraser and SandraWalklate

Abstract

This paper derives from an ongoing research project concerned toexplore how people living in, going to work in, attending school in,high crime areas manage their routine daily lives. It focuses on one ofour research areas in which we argue that the question of the 'fear ofcrime' is much better understood through an appreciation of how thequestion of trust manifests itself in that cotnmunity. In other words,whom you trust, when, and by how much, mediate the way in whichpeople living in this area manage their routine daily lives and withinthat their sense of security.

Introduction

This paper emanates from an ongoing piece of empirical research,based in the City of Salford, which was designed to explore theways in which people living in two high crime, inner city areas ofthat city were managing their 'fear of crime'. When originally for-mulated the ideas underpinning this project were very muchlocated within the 'fear of crime' debate; a debate which had upto that point concerned itself with the rationality or irrationalityof people's fear of crime. Part of the concern of this project wasto address these issues but also to consider the reverse side of thequestion of fear through exploring the circumstances in whichpeople felt safe. This concern was influenced not only by feministwork in the area (especially that of Stanko, 1985, 1990) but alsoby the work of Giddens (1991).

Giddens (1991: 44) suggests that:

© The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 1996. Published by Blackwell Publishers,108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 lJF, UK and 238 Main Street, Cambridge, MA 02142, USA.

Karen Evans, Penny Fraser and Sandra Walklate

All individuals develop a framework of ontological security ofsome sort based on routines of various forms. People handledangers and the fear associated with them in terms of emo-tional and behaviourial formulae which have come to be partof their everyday behaviour and thought.

For Giddens, how we manage our 'ontological security' is a keyproblem for people living in late modem societies. In part, heargues, this is a consequence of the extent to which 'The risk cli-mate of modernity is [thus] unsettling for everyone: no-oneescapes' (Giddens, 1991: 124). As individuals, then, we 'colonisethe future' (Giddens, 1991: 125) in order to manage (though notnecessarily reduce) our anxieties. This is achieved in differentways, both practically and emotionally. In the particular contextof managing crime and its associated fears and anxieties some ofthose management processes may be articulated in our under-standings of how, when and where we feel safe.

So, this project was concerned to establish those 'taken forgranted' aspects of routine life in which managing anxietiesaround crime might be manifested. In order to achieve this wehave spent two years in the field talking to people working, living,going to school in our two research areas. This paper stems fromour understanding and interpretation of how 'ontological security'may be being maintained in one of our research areas: Oldtown.In the process of making sense of our findings in this area itbecame apparent that the 'fear of crime' debate in which thiswork has been originally located could in no way account for thestatements people living and working in this area were making tous. As a consequence our analysis of this data will draw muchmore on the relevance of the concept of trust articulated in thework of Gambetta (1989), Gellner (1989) and Luhmann (1989) asone way of making sense of some of our findings. But first adescription of our research area, Oldtown, will be presented.

Oldtown

Oldtown attained some contemporary notoriety during a twoweek period in 1992 when violence erupted between the policeand young people living on the estate. Shots were fired at a policevehicle and a local carpet warehouse was ,set alight. Further cre-dence was given to this notoriety by The Independent on Sunday

362 © The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 1996

Whom can you trust?

in April 1994 in an article headed 'Fear Rules in No-Go Britain'in which Oldtown was one of forty localities depicted in the fol-lowing way:

How else would you describe an area which taxi drivers refuseto serve, where doctors are advised to seek police protectionbefore making house calls and which the police themselves willonly visit in numbers? What do you call an area where themajority of law-abiding residents lock themselves in theirhomes in fear of a lawless minority?

How accurate such a description is, of course, is a moot point. Itwould, however, be difficult to deny that Oldtown is knownlocally as a 'high crime area', with many of the associated prob-lems which such a label implies. For the ward as a whole the1991 Census records an unemployment rate of 22.9%, a youthunemployment rate of 32.4%. 61.2% of houses were council-owned, 23.8% owner-occupied, and 7.1% were housing associa-tion. The single parent family rate for this area stood at 9.6%. Itis also located in a part of the City of Salford with an historicalreputation for toughness.

Situated in the dockland area of Salford once known as theBarbary Coast, Oldtown now has two distinct parts. One is asso-ciated with a new and prestigious dockland development, and oneis associated with an area locally referred to as the OldtownTriangle. The former comprises private luxury flats and housingdevelopments alongside new commercial enterprises in an attrac-tively landscaped waterside setting. The latter comprises councilhouse property, much of which is undergoing a process of alter-ation, with some high rise accommodation and a small area oflarge Victorian terraces including the famous Coronation Street.From any point within the Oldtown Triangle the rather surrealskyline of the Quays is, therefore, not insignificant to those livingwithin the Triangle. Much of what follows in this paper is pri-marily focused on the latter council house area.

As the label implies the Oldtown Triangle is a geographicallybounded area, which there is very little reason to enter unless youlive there. This generates not only a sense of isolation but also afeeling of a separate identity in the area.

From Oldtown I think they think that you're either thick orbent - I always used to say that about . . . Square, but now it

© The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 1996 363

Karen Evans, Penny Eraser and Sandra Walklate

seems it's all of Oldtown. 'Cause people don't understand whyyou stay. People'U say to me, 'Aren't you frightened of goingout at night?', and I say, 'No, I live there, why should I befrightened of going out at night?' . . . I walk about, course I do. . . 'Til it happens, it's stupid to think it's going to. My patch,you're not shoving me off.

As the quote above illustrates, this sense of 'my patch' provides avery strong articulation of local identity; a local identity, how-ever, that is not necessarily uniform or homogeneous.

The triangle itself divides into two parts, the 'top end' and the'south end'. The boundary between the two is the park, witheverything the 'other side of the park' symbolising all that isproblematic about the area for those living in the 'south end'.Indeed, one 'south end' management committee was formed withthe express purpose of ensuring that their area did not end uplike north Oldtown. Moreover, we were told young lads from the'top end' call south Oldtown lads 'lemons' signifying their lesserlocal status. There is, however, no straightforward geographicalrelationship between these expressions of local identity and wherepeople actually live. The role of family and other local networkscan serve to supercede geographical location in the expression oflocal identity: 'my patch'.

One community worker who had worked in the area for fiveyears told us that he did not know anyone living on the estatewho did not have family there. The effectiveness of such localnetworks, family ties and local identity is not only significant inunderstanding the sense of a separate identity in the area, but italso serves to fuel other processes, especially those connected withcrime. As another community worker went on to say:

Everyone knows who this group is and what they are into atany particular time. This creates the fear - nothing is keptsecret really and the grapevine is very active. The gang'sexploits are known throughout the estate very quickly after anyincident has occurred. People then become wary of walkingpast this gang - they may be challenged -because everyoneknows what is happening - then everyone is a potential 'grass'.

This combination of territory and cultural values provides animportant foundation, as we shall see, to understanding not onlythe importance of 'being local' as key to feeling safe in the com-


Whom can you trust?

munity but also to understanding the 'structure of feeling' withinthis community around crime, criminal activity and fear.

To summarise: Oldtown is a geographically bounded area inwhich 'being local' and family and kinship ties still matter. It isalso an area with a public and private reputation of 'toughness',having all the material and social hallmarks of a geographicallocality which has experienced little change over the last fifteenyears (although some Estate Action monies have changed parts)other than the building of a highly prestigious enterprise develop-ment within its sights. In this socio-structural location the phe-nomenon of 'grassing' referred to in the quote above, takes aparticular form. It is to a discussion of this form which we shallnow turn.

Understanding 'grassing'

The term 'grassing' has its origins in cockney rhyming slang. Itstems from defining someone who is close to a 'copper' as a'grasshopper', and was used in the criminal underworld of the1920s. In its original derivation, then, a 'grass' was someone whoprovided information to the police about ongoing criminal activ-ity, and, once an individual was known as a 'grass', they werecertainly someone who was not to be trusted. The purpose of thispaper is to consider the contemporary symbolic and actual powerof this term in Oldtown. In order to do this we shall addressthree issues. First, we shall offer a description of the term 'grass'and its contemporary usage in this locality. Second, we shall offera critical analysis of what we have identified from our data as the'no-grassing' rule. Third, we will offer a tentative exploration ofthe inter-connections to be made between this 'no grassing' ruleand what has been called in this paper the 'square of trust' (viz.Young, J., 'The Square of Crime', 1992). But first, in what waysis the term 'grassing' articulated and understood in Oldtown?

Key features of 'grassing' in Oldtown

Relationships between the police and the local community in theold City of Salford (that is, the City of Salford prior to re-organization of local government boundaries in 1974) havealways been somewhat fragile and tentative. In part the reasonsfor this are historical; as a traditional dockland area, it is a local-ity embedded in the routine practical relationships between



employers and employees found in other similar locations (see,for example, Hobbs, 1989; Barke and Tumbull, 1992). Moreover,Roberts (1973: 100) documents that in (old) Salford at the turn ofthe century:

Except for common narks, one spoke to a 'rozzer' when onehad to and told him the minimum.

Such unwillingness to communicate with the police has a strongcontemporary resonance, as the following passage from a paperby the then Chief Superintendent of the Salford Division illus-trates:

First and foremost our thinking has been and continues to beinformed by social and cultural realities of life in this city.There are many complex factors at work which continue toprovide the unique Salford culture, and I am only highlightingone or two. The old 'Barbary Coast' may have disappearedwith the closure of the Terminal Docks and slum clearances ofthe 197O's, but the docking community ethos lives on. Not onlyin the old docks area, but wherever Salfordians, moved fromthe slums, were re-settled. The docking conmiunities had longendured harsh social and economic conditions and had devel-oped mechanisms to help cope with these realities. One was toremove goods from the docks for the use of self, family,neighbours, friends, etc. This meant there was a certain reserveand reticence shown towards the police (dock or city), lest theyshould discover too much about the few possessions anyindividual had.

Therein lies the root of the modem phenomenon of 'NoGrassing' which so powerfully influences social behaviour inthis city. This today means far more than its traditionalinterpretation, as part of that so called Code of Honouramongst thieves, which purportedly prohibited an individual,brought to book for his misdemeanours, from naming hisaccomplices. 'Grassing' is now given a wider meaning so as toinclude any communication, of any kind whatsoever, with notonly the police, but also all those deemed to be 'in authority'.(Cramphom, November 1994)

Not only does this quote illustrate both the historical context tounderstanding 'grassing' in Salford, and its contemporary wider


Whom can you trust?

interpretation to include authorities other than the police, but italso implicitly demonstrates the extent to which the police regardthis phenomenon as a barrier to meaningful and effective policing(more of which below).

The wider resonance that this phenomenon has is furtherdemonstrated by the following quotes taken from the SaifordCrime Audit (Brooks, Taylor and Walklate, 1994):

You tell the police . . . and someone sees you . . . then it's like:'grass!' and they'll batter you, smash your windows, beat yourfamily up.

Telling a teacher, that's grassing t h a t . . . If you did grassyou'd get your head battered . . . you just get leathered andevery time you came into school, you'd get the mick took outof you. (High School pupils, Saiford, June 1994)

Indeed, as a part of the work conducted for this Audit one malepupil told the research team that if you did tell a teacher aboutbeing bullied, you would no longer be able to join 'The Firm' (aschool gang, possibly imitating a local gang of the same name,the influence of which this paper will return to). Though it wouldappear that young girls in Saiford, excluded as they are frommembership of 'The Firm', feel less pressurized to behave in thisway. Indeed, this source of evidence introduces an interestinggender dimension to the processes surrounding 'grassing' whichhas, on occasion, resulted in the punishment of a male familymember when a female family member has broken the 'no grass-ing' rule. As a senior police officer with several years service inthe area reported:

There is a sort of code, I think I touched on this briefly, thatyou do not victimise women. For instance, we persuaded awoman to go as a witness on two really serious assaults againsta gang member. One was really an attempted murder and ittook ages to get to court, it was before we had the sophistica-tion of witness-protection that we have got today, but we didour best but they kept intimidating this woman. They keptshouting at her and calling her names, making threats towardsher, but when they eventually did something physical theydidn't do it to her, they did it to her son. They caught him, hewas in his late teens - nineteen - and they stuck a screwdriver



up his bottom which caused all sorts of terrible internal injurieswhich is one of the traditional techniques of dealing with whatthey call a grass.

The influence and power that the rules around 'grassing' wield arelearned very quickly in the area. As one female burglary victim-interviewed as a part of a separate research project- and who hadlived in Salford for less than two years stated when asked if shewould report a crime to the police again:

No - I've already reported cases seven times and it's not worthit 'cos they don't do anything and I'm worried about beingthought of as a 'grass' and the victimization you can get as aresult of this. I don't always report now because they thinkyou're a 'grass' and spray graffiti about you and bully you.(Burglary victim, female, interviewed September 1993)

Arguably, as we shall see, this woman's testimony needs to be con-textualised not only in terms of the local cultural norms of notreporting incidents to those in authority but also in terms of thegeneral belief that the police 'don't do anything'. Indeed, her rela-tive newness to the community may also have been a factor con-tributing to both her ability to manage the events happening to herand the level of acceptance of her as a member of the community.

Being a stranger, then, is also problematic in relation to thephenomenon of 'grassing' in Oldtown. Indeed, a Home Officesponsored survey on witness intimidation was aborted in the areain December 1993:

In Salford the survey was aborted before the end of the surveyperiod because of threats to an interviewer and abusive behav-iour to residents, known to have been interviewed. (Maynard,1994)

The focus of this Home Office survey may, of course, have con-stituted what was particularly problematic about the presence ofinterviewers on the estate. The experience of those interviewers,however, certainly intimates the importance of understanding thepresence and influence of gang activity in the area, as this quotefrom the Salford City Reporter (17 March 1994) also illustrates:

The man dubbed Salford's Mr Big, Paul Massey, was in courtafter being arrested after a 'brawl' at the Club 21, Piccadilly in


Whom can you trust?

Manchester. The prosecution dropped charges of violentdisorder against him and eight others after the court was toldthat police had decided not to pursue the matter becausewitnesses were afraid.

The potential impact of the processes surrounding witness intimi-dation returns us neatly to the question of the extent to which this'no-grassing' rule certainly acts as a barrier to effective policing.

This discussion of 'grassing' so far has alerted us to a numberof aspects to this phenomenon; its potentially gendered nature, itswidespread recognition in the local culture, and its connectionswith the activities of the local criminal gang. There are, however,three key elements to this phenomenon which lead it to be mani*fested in these ways; intimidation, politicisation, and socialization.Whilst each of these are not mutually exclusive categories, theyare terms which do highlight the different ways in which 'grass-ing' is understood and harnessed in the locality. For the purposesof this paper we will explore each of them separately.

Grassing and 'intimidation'

'Grassing' as intimidation has two dimensions to it. The first fea-tures in the official discourses of the police and other agencies intheir talk of the area. It is given substance in a number of ways.Not only through the more eloquent analysis of the former divi-sional commander cited earlier, but also through the circulationof accurate or not so accurate stories of incidents and people inthe locality. During the course of our research to date two storieshave been offered to us as being illustrative of the power of thiskind of intimidation. They are presented here in the words of aretired Police Superintendent who spent some considerable timeduring his career working in Oldtown. In referring to the ware-house incident of 1992 commented on above he says:

Carpetworld came about as a response to the police and thecommunity in the area, trying to solve a particular problem ofstolen vehicles being used against property in the area. Butagain to raise their own profile, to inspire intimidation and tocreate the myth. They were then doing public displays ofhandbrake turns. There was a considerable amount of anger toresident kids in the area. In fact, there was one team who weredoing it a lot and knocked three thirteen year old girls down.



They were not badly hurt, fortunately, but they could easilyhave been killed.

(PF) Which part of the estate was that because it does seem tobe one part of the estate where people constantly refer tothe dangerousness of the speed of cars and joy-riding?

The same people still live in that sort of area [— Road], thosethree girls, initially the incident was reported to us - this is oneof the areas which you mentioned at the beginning where anapproach was made from Mr M and some of his friends tointercede and sort the business out. Eventually the people inthe car had to pay £650 or make an offer, they didn't have tomake an offer of £650 to the parents of the kids concerned.The other side of that offer is that if you don't take it you getdone over for being a grass, so it's a bit like an offer you can'trefuse.

These stories allude to and develop in a local context the moregeneral phenomenon of 'no grassing' in Salford. They also alludeto the belief in the powerful presence of a 'Mr Big', a presencewhich appears to inform the response of both the police and thecommunity to the processes of grassing. As far as the police andother official agencies are concerned, however, this presence isalways spoken of in terms of intimidation, and, as a consequence,as a barrier to not only effective police community relations butalso effective policing.

It should be remembered, of course, that we are identifyinghere a discourse, a way of talking about a particular locality, theimpact of which may vary according to which constituent part ofthe community is being addressed. For example, the Home Officestudy cited earlier interviewed 188 people in Oldtown, 23% ofwhom had been a victim of crime in the previous year and of that23%, 18 individuals knew their offender's identity and stillreported the crime to the police. Thus emphasising thesignificance of the discourse, perhaps, rather than its necessaryconcomitant empirical reality.

However, it is through stories such as these that the policeattribute a local lack of trust in them and therefore a subsequentunwillingness to pass on information. This does not mean, how-ever, that individual police officers are not trusted. In differentways the local Field Intelligence Officer and the Schools Liaison


Whom can you trust?

Officer appear to have good, individually-based local relationswith some sections of the community. But despite these goodrelations, they too have not been completely exempted from thesecond aspect of intimidation: public shaming.

In the middle of Oldtown there is an area in which nearly allthe local amenities are located: a supermarket (now closed), achemist, a betting shop, a job shop, a post office, a public houseand a hardware store. This area provides the physical locationand space for 'public shaming' ceremonies to take place. In otherwords, if there is graffiti to be written, and if there is graffiti to bewritten about a particular person who it is believed has 'grassed',then their name will appear in this location. It is here that peopleare named for the rest of the community to see: and since this isthe only place where there are any local amenities in Oldtown itserves its purpose as a public arena of shame very well.

The use of this arena in this way serves a number of functionsin the local community. It certainly provides a very real forum inwhich members of the local community are made very muchaware of not only who has been accused of 'grassing' but also ofthe consequences of being so accused. The desire to avoid such'public shaming' is one basis on which choices of individual com-munity members are made concerning who to inform about what.Moreover, the actual appearance of names in this arena serves adeeper function: it marks, potentially, those whose behaviour hasbeen deemed outside of the locally accepted norms and values. Assuch it serves to remind all members of Oldtown of those normsand values. In this sense, there may be a similar functional rela-tionship between the processes associated with public shamingand the further maintenance of social solidarity and cohesionfound within this local community. Processes not dissimilar, per-haps, to those identified in Puritan communities by Erikson(1966) and certainly offering a different feel to the functions ofshaming than those identified by Braithwaite (1989).

Those held responsible for intimidating the community in thisway are commonly referred to as the 'Salford Firm'. The presenceof this gang in the locality is widely acknowledged, both inofficial discourses about the area and in individual communitymembers' articulations about their locality. It is the nature andextent of this presence and its influence which can be disputed,but what is less in doubt are the aspirations towards politicalcredibility associated with the gang's activities. In reality this gangprobably comprises twenty to thirty 'full-time' members, involved



in criminal activity at varying levels of seriousness. Understandingthe political aspirations associated with these activities provides adifferent insight into understanding the phenomenon of 'grassing'.

Grassing and 'politicisation'

The relationship between 'politicisation' and 'grassing' introducesthe notion of a moral code underpinning the processes under dis-cussion here. This is alluded to and then clarified in the followingquotes taken from an interview with the spokesperson for the'Salford Firm'.

. . . 'Cos a lot of people accuse us, saying 'That —, you know,encourages them to break the law', but I don't have to encour-age them to break the law, people who make them break thelaw are those who are responsible for them breaking the law,you know the councillors, the politicians - these are the oneswho are responsible, not me. I only advise them how not to getcaught, you know, don't do this, don't go robbing off oldladies, mugging old ladies - it's not on - you know, don't gorobbing and burgling ordinary people's houses of televisions,you know, if you want to go and rob, go to the Quays.

The recognition of a political dimension to crime and its causa-tion offers a different and arguably more subtle definition of whatcounts as 'grassing', which does not always mean not informingthe police. So:

. . . You've not got to be a grass, I mean, there's a code in that- when is it right to inform the police about a certain thing,and when is it not correct. You know, if someone rapessomebody or interferes with a kid, or mugs an old lady, as faras the correct-minded thing for people, you know what I mean,the concern - if somebody hands them in then they're notgrassing, you know, but if somebody goes and says 'so and sohas done a ram-raid' or 'so and so has done a post office', thenit's grassing, it's not acceptable.

Moreover, when incidents occur which break this moral code:

. . . we try to find out who's done it and if they're really youngpeople, then we'll give them a talking to, you know, to say 'it'sout of order', you know what I mean, but if it's someone who's


Whom can you trust?

supposed to be, you know, responsible and knew what theywas doing - knew that it was a woman on her own or awoman with three kids and no husband, you know what Imean, they get a smacking . . . [this is] street politics, youknow, 'It's not on - there's too many burglaries going on,we've got to put a stop to it', you know what I mean. Wedon't go and tell the police, you know, we've got to handle itourselves, you know, there's got to be some kind of, you know,street justice, so when the lads find out who's going roundbreaking into people's houses, they get a smacking, you knowwhat I mean, and it's called 'taxing', you know . . .'

These processes obviously give a very different flavour to 'com-munity policing' than that offered by the rhetoric of 'communitypartnership' or neighbourhood watch.

So the processes associated with 'grassing', for those seen to beresponsible for perpetrating those processes, are much more sub-tle, and defended as not purely criminal but also political. Indeed,it is the subtlety of these understandings, which permeates andsupports some aspects of the views expressed by local individualresidents in response to survey questions on perceptions of crimeand safety in their neighbourhood. These individual responses tapthe third dimension of 'grassing' identified here: the social.

Grassing and 'socialization'

As a part of our field work we conducted a door to door surveywith 300 of the residents of Oldtown. This survey was designed toexplore questions associated with feeling safe in the home, feelingsafe in and out of the local area, and the measures of crime pre-vention and personal safety taken. What we discovered, however,was that many of our questions simply did not resonate with ourrespondents (neither did we face any of the difficulties encoun-tered by the aforementioned Home Office survey). As the qualita-tive responses recorded by our interviewers revealed perception ofsafety in the locality were frequently informed by, 'You're alrightif you're local', or, as one respondent put it, 'You're regularround here'. Other comments made to this effect were:

I've lived here all my life and feel safe. What goes on here is away of life. You have to stick up for yourself and teach kids todo the same. (Unemployed female, lived in the area for 40years).



It's safe for locals but not strangers in the areas. (Middle agedmale, unemployed, lived in the area for 29 years).

Oldtown is a great area if you are a member of the community,went to the local school and grew up with the local villains, butterrible if you're an outsider. (Elderly female, lived in the areafor 11 years).

I've no real problems because I know the people and the areaand grew up with local villains and know local youths. (Middleaged male, employed, lived in the area 35 years).

If your face doesn't fit here you'll have problems, otherwiseyou're okay. (Housewife, lived in the area for 3 years).

All sorts of interesting questions are generated by this kind ofassertion of locality. Despite the fact that according to the HomeOffice sponsored survey on witness intimidation, of the 35 peoplewho had been a victim of crime in the previous year and recog-nised the offender, seven of those people knew the offender to bea neighbour on the estate; being local still seems to matter. Whenthis belief about the importance of being local is put alongsidepeople's beliefs about crime the picture becomes a little morecomplex. In other words, there was an additional belief articu-lated in our door to door interviews that 'people round here don'trob off their own'. So people said things like:

People don't take off their own - businesses are more likely tobe hit by crime. (Young, employed female, lived in the area formost of her life).

Teenagers here still have a code about leaving people they knowalone. (Middle aged female, lived in the area for 33 years).

Criminals live here and rob elsewhere. (Young, female,employed, lived in the area for 3 months).

Burglaries in this area are rare but some people are involved inrobbery elsewhere. (Middle aged female, lived in the area for 24years).

These two beliefs: 'You're alright if you're local' and 'Peopleround here don't rob off their own' were beliefs expressed so fre-


Whom can you trust?

quently that we concluded that they amounted to what might betermed 'neighbourhood dogma'. This is to say, they were notindividual views formed in the isolated moment of the interviewbut had a shared local currency beyond this moment. We believe,they therefore represent, in the words of Elias and Scotson,'Individual variations of standard beliefs and attitudes current inthe(se) neighbourhood' (1965: 5). In fact, one's relationship tocrime (belief that you are protected or at least left alone becauseyou're 'local' or conversely a target for crime because you don'tbelong and believe in the moral code of local criminals) isarguably one of the most significant expressions of community onthe Oldtown estate. Such beliefs appear to render superfluous theneed for other kinds of 'grass roots' community based responsesto crime like, for example, vigilantism.

The origins of this shared belief are probably very complex butthe influence of the quasi-political network of the Salford Firmdescribed above is undoubtedly one key factor contributing tothese responses. The sense we currently have, therefore, is that ifyou buy into the local dogma that 'the criminals round here donot rob off" their own', that you will be alright so long as youdon't grass to the police or any other 'official', and if you acceptthe presence of alternative structures of control on the estate,then you can actually possess a sense of confidence, 'well-being'or ontological security in your neighbourhood.

It is important, however, not to overstate the prevalence or depthof this security. As is often the case, residents will accept that thiscode operates and will appreciate the personal advantage it affordsthem, but will nevertheless worry about their children growing up insuch an environment. Nevertheless the evidence that residents areaware of and believe in this code, regardless of whether or not itbears any actual relationship to empirical experience, is significantin defining not only who belongs in the locality and who does not,but also in ensuring, at an individual level, a certain sense of secu-rity. The question remains, in what ways do these three aspects ofthe 'no grassing rule' - the intimidatory, the political, and the social- contribute to the levels of trust in this locality?

A square of trust?

The concept of trust has been relatively under-explored in sociol-ogy. In referencing the notion of trust and its relationship with



'ontological security' Giddens (1991) has argued that trust is mostclearly articulated in traditional societies through kinship rela-tions, local communities, or religious commitment, but in latemodem societies the absence of these mechanisms renders trust amatter of individual contractual negotiation. In a similar vein,Luhmann (1989: 105) suggests that to talk of trust or distrust inmodem societies is increasingly problematic:

In describing modem society it may be more important toaccept two interdependent structural changes: firstly, theincreasing diversification and particularization of familiaritiesand unfamiliarities; and secondly, the increasing replacement ofanger by risk, that is by the possibility of future damages whichwe will have to consider a consequence of our own action oromission. If this is true our rationalities will, as a matter ofcourse, require risk-taking; and risk-taking will as far as othersare involved, require trust.

In other words, both of these writers share a presumption thatthe processes of modemization have, and will continue to have,an effect on what we understand by trust and how that under-standing is articulated. The processes whereby trust is understood,then, may for these writers be connected with the nature of thesocial relationships within which any individual finds themselves,and how those social relationships may be differently informed bynotions of risk and danger. As Gambetta (1989: 217) suggests:

When we say we trust someone or that someone is trustworthy,we implicitly mean that the probability that he will perform anaction that is beneficial are at least not detrimental to us is highenough for us to consider engaging in some form of coopera-tion with him.

So trust may also be connected to an idea of the possibility of co-operation, and who it is safe and/or risky to co-operate with.Merry (1981: 151) for example, argues:

It appears that notions of danger are related to whom oneknows, and whom one does not know; they are a function ofthe shape and boundaries of social networks.

How, then, are these networks given expression to in Oldtownthrough the phenomenon of grassing?

376 © The Editorial Board of The Sociologieal Review 1996

Whom can you trust?

In Oldtown, relationships of trust at an individual level are cer-tainly predicated on whom one knows and whom one does notknow: but additionally tinged with an idea of whom it is risky totrust and whom it is not risky to trust in a local context in whichthe phenomenon of 'no grassing' features so prominently. At onelevel the strong presence of family and kinship networks provide abasis on which such relationships need to be understood. Thuschallenging the presumption made by Giddens that relationships oftrust are more appropriately understood in the context of tradi-tional societies. In other words, in our research area it appears thatlocal people trust other local people; some of that trust may berooted in kinship ties and some of it is rooted in simply beinglocal. This is one way in which this high crime community, giventhe powerful influence of the no grassing ethos and the reality ofthat ethos rooted in local experience, structures its sense of security.

Trusting other local people, because they are local, does notmean that you do not trust other individuals. But those otherindividuals are trusted in a highly individualistic and fragile man-ner dependent upon what those individuals do with the trustinvested in them. These processes may include trusting individualpolice officers and individual officials from other agencies, but itcertainly does not mean offering generalized trust to those officialagencies. The risks of 'public shaming' are too high a price to payfor whatever benefits might accrue from such a co-operative ven-ture. Moreover, this does not mean that the anarchistic politics ofthe Salford Firm have won out in the battle for the hearts andminds of this community. But it does mean that we may have tore-think the mechanisms whereby social solidarity is not only pro-duced but also maintained.

Gellner (1989: 143) has this to say about trust:

The paradox is: it is precisely anarchy which engenders trust, orif you want to use another name, which engenders socialcohesion. It is effective government which destroys trust. Thisis a basic fact about the human condition, or at any rate abouta certain range of real human conditions.

Drawing on Ibn Khaldun's sociology, Gellner argues that urbanlife is incompatible with trust and social cohesion. Such processesare rooted in the tribal processes of rural life. It may be that inOldtown, and in other areas like it, the social conditions of mod-em life have created the possibility for the re-emergence of a



version of trust which Gellner here is associating with rural lifeand the absence of government. The absence of the influence ofofficial agencies in this area and the presence of the influence ofthe Salford Firm are part of these social conditions. In this con-text individual community members are caught between a numberof different influences all of which might differently influencetheir sense of personal security, but in which their personal senseof local identity is key; hence the square of trust.

Official agencies

Neighbourhood dogma'Being Local'

Salford firm

Family and kinshipnetworks

In this square of trust, whom you trust, whom you can trust, howyou trust and how much you can trust (Nelken, 1994) at an indi-vidual level depend upon where an individual is located betweenthese mechanisms. Based on our fieldwork so far it would appearthat people trust as much as the local neighbourhood dogma per-mits whilst simultaneously endeavouring to avoid 'public sham-ing'.

Conclusion: questions for policy?

Anderson and Davey (1995) have reported on the increasinginfluence that the ideas of 'communitarianism' are having onBritish left wing political thinking. Led by Etzioni, this school ofthought believes that 'we need to create "a new moral, social, andpublic order based on restored communities, without allowingPuritanism or oppression" '. (Anderson and Davey, 1995: 18). Ofcourse, communitarians are not the only ones to have invoked theconcept of community in recent years as a mechanism throughwhich a range of social problems might be addressed. More con-servative thinkers also invoke this concept. Indeed with greateremphasis on traditional moral orders rather than creating newones, such concerns nevertheless display the extent to which thenotion of the community inspires debate on both the left and theright. This is nowhere more the case than in the arena of crimeand crime prevention. Here community crime preventionresponses of different kinds have proliferated over the last fifteen


Whom can you trust?

years. A central dilemma underpinning such responses, however,reflects a key sociological problem: what is meant by 'community'and how is an understanding of community constructed, if at all,by people living in a common locality?

The mechanisms and processes identified in this paper certainlyoffer a different perspective on community and 'communitysafety' to that found in the rhetoric of crime prevention. InOldtown your place in relation to crime places you in a commu-nity of belonging and exclusion. Here there exists a strong com-peting definition of community to a professional definition ofcommunity and the concomitant goal of crime prevention. It isconsequently important in Oldtown to recognise who is seen to beprotecting you and how: for many people it is not the police orthe council but local families and/or the Salford Firm. Moreover,it is the absence of confidence in the formal agencies which cre-ates the space for these other forces to come into play.

How far these processes permeate the area as a whole remainsan open question, as does what happens to those who areexcluded from them. Nevertheless, it would be very difficult todeny both the presence and importance of those processes forunderstanding what might work or not work in policy terms inthis area. For example, planned regeneration of the community inOldtown intends to recreate the 'natural' sense of communitywhich existed around the docks (whether real or imagined). Butwhat does this say about the community which already exists?How, and should you change the importance of 'being local'which this research has documented (even though the downside tothat might include the guaranteed safety of those who obey thelocal rules on 'no grassing')? What would be the costs andbenefits to the community of interfering with those processes,always assuming that such interference was possible? And wheredoes understanding the 'underside' of communities and the reali-ties of that underside leave the communitarians? As yet we haveno answers to questions such as these, but to ignore them wouldbe to ignore some very real processes which carry very real conse-quences for places like Oldtown.

Keele University Received 16 September 1995Finally accepted 14 March 1996

® The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 1996 379

Karen Evans, Penny Eraser and Sandra Walklate

Note

The research on which this paper is based is supported by the ESRC's Crime andSocial Order Initiative grant number L21025036

References

Anderson, P. and Davey, K., (1995), 'Import Duties', New Stateman and Society,March 3rd, pp. 18-23.

Barke, M. and TumbuU, G., (1992), Meadowell: The Biography of an 'Estate withProblems', Aldershot: Avebury.

Braithwaite, J., (1989), Crime, Shame, and Reintegration, Cambridge UniversityPress: Cambridge.

Brooks, K., Taylor, I., and Walklate, S., (1994), Crime in Salford: CommunitySafety and Protection of Residential and Community Property in Salford in1994, University of Salford: Institute of Social Research.

Cramphom, C , (1994), Presentation to Witness Intimidation Seminar, Worsley,Salford, November.

Elias, N. and Scotson, J.L., (1965), The Established and the Outsiders: ASociological Enquiry in Community Problems, London: Frank Cass andCompany.

Erikson, K.T., (1966), Wayward Puritans, New York: John Wiley.Gambetta, D., (1989), 'Can we trust trust?' in D. Gambetta (ed.). Trust: Making

and Breaking Co-operative Relations, London: Basil Blackwell.Gellner, E., (1989), 'Trust cohesion, and the social order' in D. Gambetta, (ed.).

Trust: Making and Breaking Co-operative Relations, London: Basil Blackwell.Giddens, A., (1991), Modernity and Self Identity, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Hobbs, D., (1989), Doing the Business, Oxford: Oxford University Press.Luhmann, N., (1989), 'Familiarity, confidence, trust: problems and alternatives' in

D. Gambetta (ed.). Trust: Making and Breaking Co-operative Relations,London: Basil Blackwell.

Maynard, W., (1994), Witness Intimidation: Strategies for Prevention, PoliceResearch Group Crime Detection Series, Paper 55. London: HMSO.

Merry, S., (1981), Urban Danger, Philadelphia: Temple University Press.Nelken, D., (1994), 'Whom can you trust? The future of comparative criminol-

ogy', in D. Nelken (ed.). The Futures of Criminology, London: Sage.Roberts, R., (1973), The Classic Slum, Harmondsworth: Penguin.Stanko, E.A., (1985), Intimate Intrusions,, London: Routledge.Stanko, E.A., (1990), Everyday Violence, London: Virago.Young, J., (1992), 'Ten points of realism' in R. Matthews and J. Young (eds).

Rethinking Criminology: The Realist Debate, London: Sage.


whom can you trust? the politics of ‘grassing’ on an inner city housing estate

Documents