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The purpose of this paper is to reflect upon the challenges posed for the ongoing implementation of multi-agency risk assessment conferences (MARACs) for police forces in England and Wales during the 2020 pandemic.

This is rapid response research involving qualitative methods primarily online semi-structured interviewing with a sample of police domestic abuse leads in England and Wales.

The findings point to increased use of virtual platforms particularly for MARACs and that this has beneficial consequences both for the police and in their view also for victim-survivors.

The findings reported here are from policing domestic abuse leads. More work needs to be done to explore the value of engaging in virtual MARACs for all the agencies concerned but also whether MARACs continue to be the best way to ensure the victim-survivor is kept in view.

The use of virtual platforms carries a range of practice implications for the future of MARACs for the foreseeable future. These range from ensuring attendance of the appropriate agencies to the range and frequency of meetings, to infrastructural support for all agencies to engage.

This is an original study funded by the Economic and Social Research Council examining police and court responses to domestic abuse during the covid-19 pandemic.

This article discusses the nature of the notion of ‘risk’ in late modern society and the community safety discourse that has resulted. The present agenda tends not to take account of the infinite variability of the notion of community and thus, the difficulty in replicating initiatives. The author argues that a ‘taxonomy of protection’ provides a more fruitful analytical tool. The approach to community safety in other European countries treats the notion as a public good and a similar approach in the United Kingdom, it is argued, may result in different ways of thinking.

Reports on a survey of burglary victims in Hungary, focusing on both their experiences of the crime and their perceptions of the way the police handled the incident. Using police records as a sampling frame, interviews were conducted with 207 victims in Miskolc, one of the largest cities in the country. The impact of the burglaries on victims was considerable. However help from specialist agencies were negligable among our sample. The extent to which the “new” police provide a service to crime victims is thus doubly important. Analysis suggested that victims were generally positive towards the police, felt police services had improved in recent years, and saw the police as relatively sympathetic towards victims. Victims were considerably more positive in their evaluations than were similar victims in Poland. The reasons for this are unclear but may be related to both police‐related differences and wider differences, such as whether or not victims are insured. What is clear, though, is that marked contrasts are emerging between different countries in transition, and these need to be further assessed in future research.

This article sets the scene for the contributions in this special edition of Community Safety Journal. It examines the political contexts of community safety initiatives, compares transatlantic and European traditions and discusses convergent and divergent themes.