Analysing the historical circumstances and theoretical sources that have generated ideas about citizen and community participation in crime control, this book examines the various ideals, outcomes and effects that citizen participation has been held to stimulate and how these have been transformed, renegotiated and reinvigorated over time.
This second edition of the Handbook of Crime Prevention and Community Safety provides a completely revised and updated collection of essays focusing on the theory and practice of crime prevention and the creation of safer communities. This book is divided into five comprehensive parts: Part I, brand new to this edition, is concerned with theoretical perspectives on crime prevention and community safety. Part II considers general approaches to preventing crime, including a new chapter on the theory and practice of deterrence. Part III focuses on specific crime prevention strategies, including a new chapter on regulation for crime prevention. Part IV focuses on the prevention of specific categories of crime and the fear they generate, including new chapters on organised crime and cybercrime. Part V considers the preventative process: the methods through which presenting problems can be analysed, responses formulated and implemented, and their effectiveness evaluated. Bringing together leading academics and practitioners from the UK, US, Australia and the Netherlands, this volume will be an invaluable reference for researchers and practitioners whose work relates to crime prevention and community safety, as well as for undergraduate and postgraduate courses in crime prevention.
Proactive policing, as a strategic approach used by police agencies to prevent crime, is a relatively new phenomenon in the United States. It developed from a crisis in confidence in policing that began to emerge in the 1960s because of social unrest, rising crime rates, and growing skepticism regarding the effectiveness of standard approaches to policing. In response, beginning in the 1980s and 1990s, innovative police practices and policies that took a more proactive approach began to develop. This report uses the term "proactive policing" to refer to all policing strategies that have as one of their goals the prevention or reduction of crime and disorder and that are not reactive in terms of focusing primarily on uncovering ongoing crime or on investigating or responding to crimes once they have occurred. Proactive policing is distinguished from the everyday decisions of police officers to be proactive in specific situations and instead refers to a strategic decision by police agencies to use proactive police responses in a programmatic way to reduce crime. Today, proactive policing strategies are used widely in the United States. They are not isolated programs used by a select group of agencies but rather a set of ideas that have spread across the landscape of policing. Proactive Policing reviews the evidence and discusses the data and methodological gaps on: (1) the effects of different forms of proactive policing on crime; (2) whether they are applied in a discriminatory manner; (3) whether they are being used in a legal fashion; and (4) community reaction. This report offers a comprehensive evaluation of proactive policing that includes not only its crime prevention impacts but also its broader implications for justice and U.S. communities.
What is meant by crime, crime prevention and crime control? Who defines the acts which are deemed as criminal? Who devises the sanctions and who acts as agents of social control? This timely and challenging book brings together a group of leading international criminologists from all sides of the political spectrum. They first examine the formation and implementation of official crime prevention and control policies. In the second part they look at a range of critical perspectives which explore the definition of crime and discuss proposals for its prevention and control.
Do citizen and police initiatives have any impact on the incidence and fear of crime? This volume brings together studies of several community crime prevention programmes that were introduced in major US cities. The book is unique in its breadth of focus: its contributors address a broad and varied audience, including practitioners, policy-makers, and scholars interested in community crime prevention and evaluation research.
Crime prevention and community safety have never before been so high on the public and political agendas, and preventing crime has become a central concern of government - both national and local. This book provides a much-needed account of crime prevention and community safety, examining the issues and debates that have arisen, and explaining them in the light of research evidence. The nature and consequences of the shift to crime prevention upon relations between the state and individuals are considered, as are the implications for the many organisations increasingly charged with responsibility for delivering community safety. In analysing the development of crime prevention in Britain, Adam Crawford draws on domestic as well as comparative research and practical experiences. What is meant by crime prevention? What understandings of human nature and crime causation do specific preventive strategies assume? How do political perspectives shape and influence such strategies? What are the likely future directions of crime prevention? These are just some of the important questions addressed in this book. Adam Crawford steers the reader through the theoretical arguments and debates in this area, supporting and illustrating his analysis throughout with practical examples from case studies. In so doing, he outlines and evaluates the growing importance of crime prevention and community safety within the contemporary British system of crime control, providing both students and professionals in the field with a highly informative key text.
Collective efficacy is a neighborhood-level concept in which community members create a sense of agency and assume ownership for the state of their local community. This concept is one of several forms of formal and informal social control that predict the overall functioning of a community. In this book, the authors examine collective efficacy and crime in eight Miami-Dade County, Florida neighborhoods, based on data they collected from across the country and in the Miami-Dade neighborhoods themselves. They discuss findings relevant to the theory of collective efficacy itself, ramifications for its use within communities, and make recommendations for future research and for translating these results into actionable, crime prevention activities.
This book analyses Labour's policies of local crime control from 1997 through to 2006. Picking up on the Conservative legacy, it follows the establishment of local crime and disorder reduction partnerships and tracks developments from Labour's attempts to subject them to a centrally-imposed performance management regime, through to the emergence of a strong neighbourhoods agenda, combined with the imposition of a largely enforcement-oriented attack on anti-social behaviour. It also explores Labour's attempts to address the causes of crime through a policy agenda that has crystallised around themes of social exclusion, social capital, community cohesion and civil renewal; and that operates through an architecture that aspires to be joined up centrally and locally, and neighbourhood-based. The main focus of the book is upon the unfolding of Labour's 'third way' political project from the centre downwards, but the limitations of this project are exposed through an exploration of a number of key themes. These include Labour's dependence upon the different translations of local practitioners, with whom it engages in a discursive politics of crime reduction versus community safety, and through whom the conceptual and practical weaknesses of evidence-based practice, performance management and joined-up government are revealed.
This book provides an essential introduction to the complex issues and debates in the field of crime control and the new politics of safety and security across the globe. The contributions to this volume present a critique of current policy and open up the field of study to new directions.