Crime Prevention Strategies Flashcards
What are the three key types of crime prevention strategies?
=> Situational Crime Prevention (SCP)
=> Environmental rime Prevention (ECP)
=> Social and Community Crime Prevention
How does Ron Clarke describe Situational Crime Prevention?
As a ‘pre-emptive approach that relies, not on improving society or its institutions, but simply on reducing opportunity for crime’
Describe the important characteristics of Situational Crime Prevention.
=> They are directed at specific crimes
=> They involve managing or altering the immediate environment of the crime
=> Increase the effort and risks of committing crime while also reducing reward/gain
Why is an underlying Situational Crime Prevention approach an ‘opportunity’ or rational choice theory of crime?
It takes the view that criminals act rationally. Criminals weigh up costs vs benefits of committing crime before deciding whether or not to follow through with the offence.
SCP assumes most crime is opportunistic meaning that opportunities must be reduced.
Give an example of a Situational Crime Prevention strategy.
Target Hardening - measures include locking doors and windows so that they demand more effort to open, while increased CCTV surveillance/security in shops increase the likelihood of shoplifters being caught.
Replacing coin operated gas meters with pre-payment cards is another example which reduces the burglar’s rewards.
Describe an example of Situational Crime Prevention being put into action.
An example of SCP in action was the Felson and the Port Authority Bus Terminal in NYC, which was poorly designed and provided opportunities for deviant behaviour. (e.g. the toilets were a setting for luggage thefts, sleeping rough, drug deals and homosexual liaisons.)
To tackle these problems the physical environment of the toilets was re-shaped to ‘design crime out’, greatly reducing such activities. (e.g. large sinks were made smaller to prevent the homeless from bathing in them)
Evaluate the effectiveness of Situational Crime Prevention Strategies.
=> Rather than preventing crime, they simply displace it. If criminals are acting rationally, they may respond to target hardening by simply moving to areas with softer targets.
=> Tends to focus on petty opportunistic street crime, while ignoring white collar, corporate and state crime, which may be more costly and harmful
=> Assumes that criminals make rational calculations, which seems unlikely in many violent crimes or crimes committed under the influence of drugs/alcohol.
=> Ignores root causes of crime (e.g. poverty or poor socialisation), making it difficult to develop long term strategies to reduce crime.
What forms can displacement of crime take?
=> Spatial (moving somewhere else to commit crime).
=> Temporal (committing the crime at a different time).
=> Target (choosing a different victim).
=> Tactical (using a different method).
=> Functional (committing a different type of crime).
What causes neighbourhoods with ‘broken windows’ to decline?
Decline occurs in neighbourhoods where there’s an absence of formal social control (police) and informal control (the community).
Police are only concerned with serious crime, turning a blind-eye to petty nuisance behaviour, leaving respectable members of the community feeling intimidated and powerless.
If this continues, the neighbourhood is tipped into a spiral of decline.
Give an example of an Environmental Crime Prevention strategy.
=> Zero Tolerance Policing (Wilson and Kelling).
=> Based on the idea that disorder and absence of control leads to crime.
=> Their proposed solution is to crack down on any disorder, using a twofold strategy.
How do Wilson and Kelling describe Environmental Crime Prevention?
‘Broken Windows Theory’ - used to explain all the various signs of disorder/lack of concern for others that are found in some neighbourhoods (e.g. noise, graffiti, begging, dog fouling, littering, vandalism etc.).
What is Wilson and Kelling’s twofold strategy for cracking down on disorder?
=> They argue that when ‘broken windows’ are left unrepaired (e.g. tolerating aggressive behaviour), a signal is sent out that no-one cares.
=> Any damage within a neighbourhood must be repaired immediately because of this, in order to deter criminal/deviant behaviour.
=> Rather than merely reacting to crime, police must adopt a zero tolerance policing strategy, proactively tackling even the slightest sign of disorder (even non-criminal behaviour), to prevent neighbourhood decline and prevent serious crime from happening.
Describe an example of Environmental Crime Prevention being put into action.
Kelling’s Clean Car Program - subway cars in a subway in New York kept getting graffiti’d and so to tackle this, every time a car was found to have graffiti on it, it was immediately taken out of service and cleaned. This lead graffiti largely being removed from subways.
Evaluate the effectiveness of Environmental Crime Prevention Strategies.
Wasn’t clear how zero tolerance was the cause of improvements because:
=> 7000 extra police offers were also deployed in New York, which may be the real cause for the reduction in crime.
=> There was a decline in crime rates across major US cities at the time (even those where a ZTP was not adopted).
=> Early 1990s saw a major recession as well as high unemployment rates, but many new jobs were being created from 1994.
=> There was a decline in the availability of cocaine, meaning that there was less opportunities to commit crime.
=> Deaths/homicides fell sharply, but attempted homicides remained high. It an therefore be argued that the decrease in homicides can be attributed to improved medical emergency services, rather than policing.
Describe the important characteristics of Social and Community Crime Prevention.
=> Firmly emphasize the potential offender and their social context.
=> Aim to remove conditions that predispose individuals to crime in the first place.
=> Involve longer term strategies for reducing crime, since they attempt to tackle the root cause of offending, rather than removing opportunity.
