17. Crime Prevention Strategies Flashcards
What are the Left Realist solutions to crime?
- Improved policing
- Intervention programmes
- Community based strategies
Left Realist Solutions: Improved policing
-Police must focus on improving relationships with communities and the public should have more say
-Police rely on public to report crimes so if the public don’t trust the police they wont help them tackle crime
-This is a multi agency approach evidenced by the square of crime
Left Realist Solutions: Intervention programmes
-Must deal with social structure and inequality
-School and early years programmes to stop school failure early on
-‘Sure Start’ introduced to improve educational opportunities
-‘New Deal’ attempted to reverse exclusion of young people
-Improved policies are key as they deal with underlying structural inequalities
Left Realist Solutions: Community based strategies
-Improved leisure facilities for young people give them structure and stability enabling them to have interests which stops boredom.
-Improved housing estates, reducing income inequalities, reducing unemployment etc will help cut crime
-Restorative justice is preferred.
Evaluation of Left Realist Solutions
-Most costly of all crime prevention measures
-If done effectively can save hundreds of thousands of pounds turning a potential criminal into a successful tax paying worker
-These approaches only tackle street crime and ignore white collar, corporate, green crimes etc
What are the Right Realist solutions to crime?
-Situational Crime prevention
-Environmental crime prevention
-Zero tolerance policing
Right realist solutions: Situational crime prevention
-Reducing opportunities for crime
-Target hardening, increasing security on the targets of crime eg burglar alarms, locks
-Car theft was dramatically reduced in Germany when steering column locks were made compulsory
-Especially useful as these are relatively cheap and work to counteract opportunity theft when there is no capable guardian
Right realist solutions: Environmental crime prevention
-Measures relating to the public environment, making public places harder to commit crime
-Surveillance eg CCTV, more police
-Lighting not only deters criminals but also makes people feel safer to go out
-Environmental measures and attempts to ‘design out crime’ proved seemingly successful in New York
Right realist solutions: Zero-tolerance policing
-Strictly enforcing penalties for relatively minor crimes or anti-social behaviour
-Aim is to stop more serious crime as social control is increased
-Seemingly successful in New York as homocide rates dropped to 82%, however they were already falling.
New York Case Study: Displacement theory
-A crackdown on subway robberies in New York merely displaced them to the streets above, so didn’t actually reduce crime rates.
Evaluation of Right Realist Solutions
-Doesn’t address underlying causes of crime
-Cannot relax this approach or crime will rise again
-We don’t have enough police to take a zero tolerance approach
-Crime reduction probably a result of displacement
-Only tackles opportunistic street crime
