COMMUNITY POLICING - Responding to and Preventing Crime Within a Community Policing Framework
Responding to and Preventing Crime within a community policing framework
The safer communities approach to crime prevention is an initiative of the federal government that is centered on four principles:
The community is the focal point of effective crime prevention
The community must identify and respond to both short and long term needs
Crime prevention efforts should bring together individuals from a range of sectors
Strategies for preventing crime should be supported by the entire community
Proactive targeted strategies rely on the use of patrol for the apprehension, deterrence, and incapacitation of criminal offenders and include cover patrol, repeat offender targeting, saturation patrol, roadblocks, and repeat complaint address policing
Community service approaches to preventing crime focus on involving the community to assist in addressing problems of crime and social disorder. Strategies include foot patrol, community police stations and mobilizing the community.
Crime prevention programs include a variety of police and community initiatives whose primary objective is to prevent crime and reduce the levels of criminal activity. Traditionally, crime prevention programs have been categorized as primary, secondary and tertiary. Crime prevention programs can be tailored to the specific needs of neighborhoods or communities and/or directed toward specific types of crimes and social disorder. In contrast to proactive targeted strategies and community service approaches, crime prevention programs make extensive use of community residents as partners and are more focused on problem-solving.
Tactical or directed patrol involves saturating high crime areas (hot spots) with police officers or targeting individuals involved in specific types of criminal activity. Police activity is proactive and aggressive and is based upon a plan developed through an analysis of crime data.
Hard crime calls involve serious crimes such as hold ups, shootings, auto thefts, assaults and sexual assaults while soft crime calls include disturbances, fights, vandalism, and drunks.
Team policing can be a core component a police services’ community policing model. It includes assignment of teams of officers to a specific geographic area and the development of partnerships with the residents ot the area. Team policing facilitates the development of police-community relations, an enhanced ability to address and solve problems of social disorder, improves officer morale, and increases the productivity of officers
Primary prevention programs are designed to identify opportunities for criminal offences and to alter these conditions in an attempt to reduce the likelihood of crimes being committed. Other features:
Most often directed toward property offences
Include such programs as Operation Identification, Neighborhood Watch, Citizen Patrols, CPTED, POP
Secondary prevention programs focus on areas that produce crime and other types of social disorder and attempt to identify high risk offenders. Often based on crime-area analysis. Programs include diversion, school based crime prevention programs, and intervention programs for youth.
Tertiary prevention programs focus on deterring, incapacitating and rehabilitant offenders order to reduce further criminal behavior. Not generally operated by the police.
Situational crime prevention programs seek to reduce the availability and attractiveness of opportunities to commit criminal activity. CPTED programs, Operation Provident and “Lock it or Lose it” car theft initiatives are good examples. Crime prevention through social development (CPSD) attempts to eliminate some of the underlying factors that contribute to crime. These approaches include initiatives to reduce poverty and increase the availability of proper housing, employment, educational opportunities, and adequate play and recreational facilities. There are several types of CPSD programs
Family based
School-based
Peer-group based
Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) is a primary prevention program that attempts to reduce criminal opportunities by altering the physical environment of structures and places.
Increasing police legitimacy is a heretofore little discussed crime prevention strategy that may hold great promise. It refers to the collective efforts by the police to ensure that citizens are treated fairly and to explain to community residents the role and activities of the police through face-to-face contact.
The “broken window” approach to crime prevention is based on the premise that even minor deteriorations of a neighborhood (a broken window), if not repaired, triggers further neglect and creates and environment for crime
Crime displacement occurs when criminal offenders and their activities have relocated. The five forms of crime displacement are :
Geographic
Temporal
Tactical
Target
Functional
This phenomenon makes it difficult to assess the effectiveness of crime prevention programs
Public notification – The practice of informing a community when certain offenders are released from correctional institutions – raises the issues of the rights of society vs. rights of the individual.