Preventing Crime & Creating Safer Communities
Home | Distance learning | Information & news | Discussions | Join the network | Contact | Useful links

St Werburgh's Safer Streets Project

9. Final Words

In the grand scale of Bristol neighbourhoods, St Werburgh's is by no means a major problem area. This is good news in one respect – it is a fine place to live; but it does mean that St Werburgh's misses out on some of the major resources for additional services and regeneration. St Werburgh's undoubtedly experiences a displacement overspill from neighbouring areas where intensive interventions have been put in place. This should not be a reason for putting the barriers up, but on the contrary, it should highlight the importance of St Werburgh's workers and residents’ representatives working more closely with people in the neighbouring communities. Although some crime problems (such as burglary, vandalism and domestic violence) are very localised in terms of offender/victim geography, other crimes and incivilities that St Werburgh's residents are concerned about, most notably drug misuse/dealing and prostitution cannot be effectively tackled purely at the immediate neighbourhood level.

The really good news about St Werburgh's is the huge interest by local residents in safeguarding the neighbourhood’s future (as evidenced in the substantial and detailed response to this survey.) Local organisations, such as St Werburgh's Neighbourhood Association demonstrate that there is also a commitment by local people to put direct effort into achieving improvements. This means that St Werburgh's has a very real chance of not only remaining a good place to live, but of getting better and sorting out some of its social problems. The main barrier to improvement in many areas that the UWE team has researched, is not so much the lack of fiscal resources, but the shortage of "people power" to implement and sustain change. Our research (and that of others) has found that the neighbourhoods most resistant to crime are those where there is a stable population, where people trust and support each other through formal and informal networks of all sorts and where residents are prepared to intervene and take action to safeguard their communities. "People power" appears to exist in abundance in St Werburgh's, suggesting very healthy prospects for the future.