criminal topic 5-crime prevention Flashcards
wilson and kelling
1. claims about the history of policing and how the role/function of the police has changed over time
-in the past, the role of the police was to assist communities in maintaining order
-following the urban riots in 1960s, “the police role…slowly changed from maintaining order to fighting crimes”
wilson and kelling
2. psychological claims about how criminal behaviour can develop
-at community level,crime emerges from disorder in ‘a kind of developmental sequence’- if a window in a building is broken and left unrepaired,all the rest of the windows will soon be broken
-vandalism like this can lead to the breakdown of community controls
-crime increases and residents modify behaviour to use streets less to not be involved
-tipping point where communities cannot recover
-philip zimbardo 2 cars without license plates parked with bonnets up on street in new york and california.> car in NY attacked within 10m, california left for a week but when touched destroyed within hours
-if the neighbourhood cannot keep a beggar from annoying passers by, it is less likely to call the police to identify muggers or intefere.
wilson and kelling
3. they make suggestions for the future
-police should focus again on order-maintenance as their primary role+ responsibility
-should try variations on an experiment in new jersey which provided money to help cities take police officers out of their patrol cars and assign them to walking beats to make neighbourhoods safer as disorderly behaviour was managed through informal rules being defined and enhances even though it didnt actually decrease crime
-police shiefs should work out where to focus their resources to identify neighbourhoods that are at the tipping point in which broken windows need to be mended straight away
cohen and felson
routine activity theory
3 factors needed for a crime to occur:
1. suitable targets (things worth stealing/attacking)
2. a motivated offender(inclinded to commit crime+capable of it)
3. the absence of a ‘capable guardian’ (someone to deter the crime from happening)
a targets suitability of attack is based on 4 criteria:
1. value (worth of target from offender viewpoint)
2. inertia (extent to which article/target can be realistically removed,taken or robbed)
3. visibility
4. access
zero tolerance policy in new york
principles of ‘broken windows’ theory applied in new York
‘zero tolerance’ approach went through 3 waves:
1. subway graffiti- cleaning station set up in Bronx to ensure all subways with graffiti were cleaned up-wouldn’t let kids spent 3 night painting murals and use rollers to paint over them
2. subway fare-dodging- teams of up to 10 police officers in plain clothes assigned to subway stations that were particularity prone to fare-dodging and a city bus turned into a rolling police station to speed up processing of those arrested. checks were run on all those arrested and 1 in 7 had outstanding warrant for previous crime and 1 in 20 were carrying some form of weapon
brown-cctv in town centrees
Newcastle,Birmingham and kings Lynn
-investigated levels of anti social+criminal behaviour before and after CCTV introduced
results: in Newcastle, burglaries went down by 56% and criminal damage reduced by 34%
-in 4 underground London stations crime fell by 70% in a year after CCTV installation
-but only fell by 25% in 15 stations closest to the 4 with CCTV but 38% across whole network.
-suggests that the intro of CCTV has largely displaced crime rather than eradicated it
Ernest jones et al - eyes on posters
uni cafeteria studied amount of littering depending on posters containing messages to clear litter with eyes eye images on them or flowers
results: 50% dec in littering when posters featured eyes
