Crime prevention

"Crime prevention" is a term used to describe efforts to reduce crime, deter criminals, and improve public safety. It is undertaken both at a community level, in the form of government and law enforcement, and through individual responsibility to prevent victimization. As a whole, crime prevention involves recognizing and anticipating the factors that lead to crime and addressing them to stop crimes from occurring. Efforts to prevent crime can involve law enforcement, social programs, or education.

Overview

Crime-prevention programs at the community level vary according to the area’s culture and infrastructure. Traditional law enforcement is one of the most visible forms of crime prevention. Police officers enforce the law and are responsible for apprehending criminals when rules are violated; often, when officials from police departments act as a presence in the community, the threat of punishment is deterrent enough to prevent criminal actions. By making regular patrols and focusing on particularly at-risk locations, police officers can deter criminals and reduce recidivism through their mere presence. Citizens can also help through community policing and programs such as a neighborhood watch. These groups report suspected illegal activity to the authorities, especially in cases of nonviolent crimes such as vandalism and burglary.

Strategies such as removing or reducing the opportunity to commit a crime and making the risk greater than the reward help curb crime. For example, something as simple as a well-lit house or a well-advertised alarm system will often prevent theft, and the implementation of automated traffic cameras to catch speeding drivers will drastically reduce criminal activity because of the near certainty of being caught.

Social programs can also help prevent crimes and eliminate the factors that lead to them. The goals of these programs may include keeping at-risk youth in school, minimizing their participation in gangs, and providing assistance to victims of violence or abuse. Other programs work to prevent recidivism by ex-offenders or provide rehabilitation services. Many of these efforts are directed toward children and teenagers, such as the Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) program, aimed at preventing the use of controlled drugs, and McGruff the Crime Dog, a children’s mascot for crime awareness. In addition, social programs with a broader scope, such as those focused on issues in education, housing, poverty, social equality, and human rights, have all shown to have a role in reducing crime.

At an individual level, crime prevention can involve reducing one’s likelihood of being a victim. The risk of becoming a target can be lessened by taking small measures for personal safety. These practices, also called target hardening, include locking doors, using alarm systems, learning self-defense, safeguarding privacy, and recognizing risks and warning signs. In the twenty-first century, the increased issues of identity theft and Internet privacy have necessitated additional measures of self-protection to prevent fraud.

One specific theory of crime prevention is situational crime prevention, which aims to reduce crime by limiting the opportunities for it to be committed. The concept first emerged in the 1970s, when the British Home Office conducted a series of studies on how opportunity factors into the commission of crime, and was fleshed out in an 1980 article by Ronald V. G. Clarke. Rather than addressing the underlying issues that causes people to commit crimes, situational crime prevention focuses on identifying the factors that enable crimes to be committed and then removing or mitigating those factors. This concept is based on the rational choice theory of economics, which argues in essence that broad patterns of social behavior are the result of individual actors making decisions based on their own preferences as well as the constraints they face and the information available in any given situation, using reason rather than instinct to guide their actions. As applied to crime prevention, this theory assumes that offenders weigh the benefits and risks of a potential crime before committing it, and that creating situations in which the risks are heightened or the potential benefits are reduced will cause them to decide that the benefits are not worth the risks.

There are five main categories of situational crime prevention techniques: increasing effort, increasing risk, reducing reward, reducing provocation, and removing excuses. Examples of techniques include adding steering column locks and ignition immobilizers to cars (increased effort), adding increased street lighting and visible security cameras to areas targeted for crimes (increased risk), removing valuables from locked cars (reduced reward), rapidly repairing vandalism to discourage imitation (reduced provocation), and posting signs clearly spelling out laws and consequences (removed excuse). Although it has its proponents, situational crime prevention has received some criticism for taking a strict law-and-order approach to crime rather than seeking to alleviate the social conditions that drive offenders to commit them.

Bibliography

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