In this device, we will explore specific and general crime prevention solutions and strategies, applied to lessen and control the occurrence of criminal offenses in the population. The role of the citizen and the community will be differentiated from the role of their state through the establishments of the legal justice system.
Unit Objectives
To appreciate the need for citizen involvement.
To discuss the role of the authorities.
To describe the role of Policy Makers.
To examine the techniques employed by the criminal justice system to impact reform and treatment.
To assess at least four approaches to crime prevention employed by the legal justice system.
Readings and Online Resources
Reid, Mouth (1998) Community Policing: A Philosophical Approach to the Study of Community Building.
Reid, Dental. Policing by Consent. The Copper 97 Vol. 1 No. 1
http://www. youtube. com/watch?v=RTYIPBoeGaU
http://www. youtube. com/watch?v=jENcqG_Kd5c&feature=related
Session 4. 1 Community Criminal offenses Prevention Approaches
Learning Aims:
By the finish if this time the student should be able to:
Define the elements of the crime prevention triangle
Discuss the components of the crime avoidance triangle
Describe the crime prevention triangle
Define the jobs of the elements in the offense prevention triangle
Discuss the participation of the elements in the criminal offenses prevention triangle
Understand the necessity for citizen participation.
Appreciate the role of specific and community communities in the prevention of crime.
Explain the necessity for the Criminal offense Prevention Experts in creating a community team
Introduction
In this time we will look at specific crime prevention approaches designed to highlight the critical role of the citizen, the authorities and policymakers in their work to address crime control or decrease both at the local level of the city and their state generally.
The Crime Elimination Triangle
Figure 4:1 THE CITY Crime Elimination Triangle
Effective crime elimination requires a closer relationship between your police, policy producers, and the city at large. It's important for all sides to start lines of communication and work to explain their respective roles in such a way that they understand their tasks to the entire cooperative effort. The task of getting these key industries of the community together is challenging neither is one able to be effective with no other. The challenge is often that every sector has specific viewpoints that appear to be inconsistent with the needs and objectives of others in the triangle.
For instance, the police have customarily been one of the most closed teams in Caribbean contemporary society. This position has been influenced by several factors among which will be the following; Police Forces in your community boost a paramilitary in structure; Many of the cultural and professional problems they come across cannot be talked about with people outside their career; and the type of police force work frequently confines them to persons working of their particular formations. The factors listed all support an evergrowing trend towards police isolation from the people they are intended to serve.
On the other hands, most individuals have very limited knowledge of law enforcement work. Such views are often further distorted by tv programs that suggest attractive and unrealistic method of solving crimes and sociable disorder. Hence a typical citizen's impression of the police is associated with issuing traffic seat tickets, or arresting felons. The citizen is improbable to maintain a pleasant spirits in either of these circumstances, and sometimes learns to affiliate officials with enforcement and power. The authorities spend the majority of their time interacting with the less advisable elements of Caribbean society inasmuch as they package with suspects and vagrants frequently, and sometimes have a tendency to connect the uncooperative behavior of the elements with the general public. It is not uncommon for the police to threat with suspicion volunteers who wish to aid in the management of criminal offense.
Politicians or policymakers are given labels that maintain them up to general public scrutiny and ridicule. Views expressed during heated promotions or unrealistic goals by the general public that an public has the capacity to wave a special wand and cure the ills of modern culture have offered to strain the partnership between the elected officers and their constituents.
All of these realities show that every aspect of the triangle has an important part to learn in the community crime prevention process but that we now have difficulties which, if not carefully handled could deepen the divide between each sector. The effectiveness of a triangle depends upon strong linkages. If one of these three groups does not participate, the chances for success will be critically diminished.
Defining the Jobs in the Offense Prevention Triangle
Citizen and Community Participation
The dependence on citizen contribution in community crime prevention is critical to the establishment of any "crime-free" culture. Two essential ingredients are a well-trained police force and the best and cooperative citizenry. It is often the truth that too little residents have made a commitment to actually involvement.
Participation in community "crime prevention efforts is not merely desirable but necessary. Authorities and crime avoidance specialists by itself cannot control criminal offense; they need all the help the community can give them. Regardless of the later there seems to be an irreversible trend, lately, towards less involvement by residents and increased duties being delegated to the police. Increased specialization in various police forces in conjunction with increased taxation has inspired citizens to look to the authorities, as professionals, to assume the duty of community safety. Subsequently, calls for service to the common law enforcement firm have increased steadily as citizens viewed for assistance, not only with legal matters but also for a wide range of service endeavours, such as invites to talk with the wayward child that didn't comply with house rules, retrieving trapped dogs and cats and transporting mental patients to the hospital for treatment. It would be reasonable to presume that around 80 percent of law enforcement officials calls relate with noncriminal conduct instead of actual inspection or the apprehension of criminals.
Community amounts from isolated individuals to diverse community groups. The degrees of expertise vary from novice to attained professionals. The drive to participate is as diverse as the city itself. Yet the top secret to changing general public attitudes and ultimately behaviour lies within this vast and generally untapped reference.
The pursuing are various levels of involvement in criminal offenses prevention work with which citizens feel safe and choose to recognize. It is beneficial to first go through the role a person might play, and then broaden the base for participation to group assignments or collective citizen action.
The Role of the Individual
Practitioners know a vast majority of your community's population does not participate in an identifiable group but still participates in a wide range of activities. These people have concerns regarding criminal offenses and really should be come to and motivated to participate in crime prevention programmes as individuals. Some of the ways an individual can participate include:
1. Adding volunteer a chance to programme efforts
2. Being an advocate for crime prevention concepts
3. Reporting dubious activities to the police
4. Taking initiatives to practice opportunity lowering strategies at home/work even though moving
about the city, such as:
a. installing secure, deadbolt locks
b. providing good security lighting
c. trimming shrubbery away from entrance doors and windows
d. always locking car entrance doors and windows
e. using common sense and consciousness when going alone
f. marking all valuables with an individual identification number
g. not transporting or displaying massive amount cash
h. keeping away from walking only after dark
Activity: Crime Reduction Tips
View the Youtube videos below, they provide some useful crime prevention tips for individuals
http://www. youtube. com/watch?v=RTYIPBoeGaU
http://www. youtube. com/watch?v=jENcqG_Kd5c&feature=related
Activity 4:1
Collective Citizen and Group Tasks:
The community's role is strengthened when group initiatives are put into individual citizen initiatives. If Offense prevention is to be effective in enhancing standard of living, the role of the community-at-large must be widened to add supportive work from a wide platform of existing private sector groups-businesses, business, churches, etc. within the jurisdiction. Organized organizations like the Chamber of Commerce, P. T. A. , Scouts, Females Tutorials, Kiwanis, Women's Night clubs, and Church Groups lend their support to community criminal offense prevention programming and bring with them a preexisting pool of volunteer time, skill, energy, and the excess clout and sources of established organizations. They also bring with them the organizational goals, plans, and types of procedures, resolutions on community issues, and reputation which may or may not accurately fit everyone else's plan. The role these teams must play is sometimes difficult to specify and mobilize, and always difficult to control.
Yet it is vitally important to reach and involve individuals within their own context. The duty is to attain people where they can be and with the tools they are used to using. This will not simply mean that everyone has to sign up for Neighbourhood Watch Programs. It does imply that every citizen can take part in crime prevention doing whatever a citizen is a part of-Boys Golf clubs, a tenants' corporation, the insurance industry etc. The secret to citizen involvement is to provide them trust within their own familiar environments.
The experience gained in community offense prevention programmes over the Caribbean region have helped identify the following things in the community-at- large role:
The community most importantly must accept the responsibility for arranging a community criminal offenses prevention programme. They have got the largest stake-and finally they have significantly more to reduce than either regulations enforcement or policymaker segments.
The city must identify devoted leadership for an arranged crime prevention work.
The city must provide the required resources (time and funds) for the management to receive basic crime reduction training.
The city must plan structured training for other volunteers in the program.
The residents must identify the problems of the city through cooperative initiatives with police firms, using such tools as studies, judgment polls, and genuine offense data.
The participants of the community must plan a coordinated approach to crime prevention efforts by designing and matching jobs to the passions of various volunteer teams.
The market leaders must establish an efficient mechanism for outreach and insight so various organizations know what others are doing. This will help ensure coordination, and is generally termed networking.
The community group must solicit commitments from various groupings supporting crime elimination attempts to ensure program continuity.
The group organizers must provide opportunities for all groups or individuals to participate in the community-wide programmes (while allowing categories to preserve their separate personal information).
The group organizers must set up an ongoing process of obtaining and examining project information for evaluation purposes to assist further decision-making.
The organizers must identify and obtain resources to properly finance a sustained offense prevention work.
The market leaders of the criminal offenses prevention device must assist in the smart use of collective citizen power to influence public policies that promote offense prevention concepts.
The city group must provide as a strong advocate for increased communication between your various segments creating the crime prevention triangle.
The communities must be sure the contribution of the multimedia as somebody in the full total community crime elimination programme.
Community volunteers have learnt much about their role in crime prevention over the last 10 years. Their role will become even more clearly defined through the next ten years as volunteers acquire additional knowledge in managing and maintaining community crime elimination programmes.
Police Participation
The behaviour of the individuals towards the authorities service are generally inconsistent. The authorities are loved when they are needed but often feared because they're regarded as the state's associates of electric power and authority. The reality is that only hardly ever is the true nature of the police service broadcast and very rarely is the person inside the even understood or known. Yet we understand his role to be critical.
What is generally agreed is that whenever faced with trouble, people expect quick authorities response and victims want and expect the effective service of a specialist. Predicated on the wide selection of service demands there may be little think about that both individuals and police as well are occasionally unclear about the definition of the role of the police in the elimination rather than the detection of offense. The following factors are essential:
The police are not separate from individuals. They draw their power from the will and consent of individuals.
The police are the state appointed musical instruments through which people can achieve and keep maintaining open public order.
Police officials are decision producers and often make a decision whether to arrest, to produce a referral, to seek prosecution, or even to use push.
Police officers are just as accountable for their decisions as the magistrate or judge is made for decisions deliberated for months.
The officer must understand intricate cultural and sociable problems and connections to be efficient and effective.
A police officer is an integral part of and not aside from:
a. The city served
b. The criminal justice system that establishes what course society will follow to deter lawbreakers or rehabilitate offenders in the interest of general population order
c. The federal government that provides the formal bottom part of expert.
The officer initiates the criminal justice process through arrest of suspects and can be kept responsible where they neglect to do something.
The police will be the criminal justice aspect in closest connection with the general public (and they are frequently blamed for failures in other parts of the system).
The law enforcement are helpless to control crime without the cooperation of a substantial portion of the individuals.
The role of the authorities thus becomes:
to assume that offense will take place when hazards are high, to identify when a high-crime risk exists
to appraise the seriousness of the particular risk
to initiate action to remove or reduce the risk.
"Educational, specialized and supportive resource- an enabler rather than a main doer.
The police force role in criminal offense protection strategies should:
Utilize the patrol function to make and maintain attempts to recognize and arrest suspects
Help as a source for open public information and training regarding criminal offenses prevention programs
Coordinate criminal offenses prevention activities in their individual jurisdictions
Show information with the public gathered through police data examination capabilities
concerning the sorts of criminal offense and the methods being utilized by perpetrators against citizens
Take effort to develop planned crime prevention functions within each department
Policymaker's Participation
Many earlier attempts to establish offense prevention programmes carefully skirted the issues of evaluating the role of the public sector or seeking to require the policymakers. This hesitancy was caused in part because notions of criminal offense prevention were viewed as new and untested and hadn't been accepted as a viable reaction to long-standing social and economic problems. Very few programmes have been able to report specific successes in actually demonstrating a reduced amount of crime. Also, some communities experienced experiences with acquiring politics support for offense prevention programmes during a political election, only to be silently swept under the rug when elections were over and the difficult job of get together budgets was underway when confronted with declining resources.
Slowly, isolated encounters surfaced that shown a positive relationship between renew citizen participation in crime avoidance/opportunity reduction programmes and a lesser home burglary or vandalism rate in neighbourhoods. Policymakers were eager to have a closer look. Such closer scrutiny led in Barbados to the establishment of the National Task Power on Crime Prevention in June 1996. This firm collaborates with the Royal Barbados POLICE on the examination of national crime statistics and initiate programmes aimed at reducing crime in selected personal neighborhoods. In 1968 in america of America, Congress proven a legislative concern and provided economic resources to jurisdictions for mounting offense prevention efforts and funded them through the Justice Team Law Enforcement Assistance Supervision (LEAA).
Activity: A Caribbean Perspective
The above mentioned has been the American experience.
Can you think of ways this approach can be modified to match the Caribbean actuality befitting your country.
Post your suggestions in the discourse forum and react to suggestions posed by your classmates.
Activity 4:2
As a result of this increased interest by officials in the general public sector and the connection within neighborhoods, there is currently a more clearly identified role of the policymakers in the community crime elimination process. Professionals are confident that this role will continue steadily to progress and clarify over time, but for the present, I offer the following points on the role of the policymaker:
1. Provides leadership in setting open public plan that establishes a jurisdiction-wide crime
prevention programme.
2. Encourages coordination and co-operation between government businesses to increase existing
resources and steer clear of duplication of initiatives.
3. Develops and adopts building security rules.
4. Actively stimulates opportunity reduction routines for public owned properties, such as:
a. marking all valuables with property recognition numbers
b. providing good, security lighting
c. putting in deadbolt locking devices
5. Promotes crime reduction education and training for employees within the public sector.
6. Provides financial support for crime prevention programmes.
7. Publicly helps crime prevention programmes to encourage other communities and people to
participate.
8. Designates a long term public agency to provide as an organizational bottom part for crime
Prevention programs.
9. Demonstrates a long-term commitment to crime avoidance by passing a formal quality to
sanction the criminal offenses prevention programme.
10. Requires accountability of program efforts.
The Crime Protection Practitioner: Building a Community Team
Even after the various elements in a community have a basic knowledge of their role and duties in a community criminal offense prevention work, there still remains essential work to be achieved in order to determine a promising criminal offense prevention program in a community.
Much work has been practically wasted before as various communities go about well-meaning attempts to establish programmes for reduction with out a coordinated strategy.
Likewise, a community criminal offenses protection "team" doesn't just happen. The various elements that exist in your community must be linked mutually before any game plan can be written. This requires specific attention. One or more individuals must be determined to experience the training role also to mold associates from various attributes of the triangle into a working team.
These specialists are called criminal offenses prevention professionals. Who are they and what do they actually?
Practitioners in the united states represent a broad cross-section of the society. Some are criminal justice specialists, some are elected representatives. Many are business people, school educators, or civic club volunteers. Crime protection experts sometimes volunteer while some arc elected. In any case, they play a significant role locally crime elimination process. A account of successful experts would include:
willingness to contribute a significant amount of time to crime avoidance efforts
the eagerness to stimulate others
a basic knowledge of the unlawful justice system
a thorough understanding of the concepts of crime avoidance and the ability to teach and
advise others. .
capacity for assessing skills and resources within the community
the capability to relate with all interested communities and match these hobbies to the entire program
effort
the skills to help links that achieve a coordinated method of programming
good organizational skills
an understanding of the type of the political process and the guidance that enables public
support to be translated through decision-makers into general public policy
Above all, the successful practitioner will have got two primary capabilities:
COMMITMENT to the reason, and
the PERSISTENCE to keep the commitment as time passes in the face of obstacles that are sure to arise.
Activity: Minuscule Investigation
Identify and categorize the criminal offenses prevention professionals in your place.
Report your conclusions to the course coordinator or teacher.
Activity 4:3
Summary:
In this session we have analyzed specific crime prevention strategies focused round the crime protection triangle. With this session we outlined the critical roles of individuals as a sub-sect of organizations, at one end of the continuum and the community as complete. The role of the police, and policy manufacturers were also highlighted as essential to the construction of good crime prevention plan and practice. Within the next session we will look at the role of the criminal justice system in the control of offense and works of unsocial behavior.
