From Community to Communicative Policing: 'Signal Crimes' and the Problem of Public Reassurance

In: Sociological research online, Band 7, Heft 2, S. 56-67

Abstract

In this paper the concept of 'signal crimes' is proposed to capture the social semiotic processes by which particular types of criminal and disorderly conduct have a disproportionate impact upon fear of crime. Drawing upon the wider social scientific literature on risk perception, a sense of how and why different crime types might be possessed of different signal values is provided and some of the implications for current police practice outlined.