Crime Prevention and Control

SITUATIONAL CRIME PREVENTION:

Clarke: situational crime prevention isn’t about improving society or its institutions, but simply reducing opportunities for crime.
There are three features:
1. Directed at specific crimes.
2. Involve managing or altering the immediate environment of the crime.
3. Aim at increasing the effort and risks of committing crime and reducing the rewards.
Three examples of what this might involve:
1. Lock on a bike.
2. Surveillance cameras/CCTV.
3. Security/burglar alarms.
These measures are called target hardening.
Opportunity or ‘rational choice’ theories underlie situational crime prevention. See criminals as weighing up the costs and benefits of crime before deciding.
Functionalist and Marxist theories make crime unsolvable because theories like early socialisation or capitalism would involve transforming mass numbers of people, or having a revolution – this is unrealistic.
The immediate crime situation should be focused on instead as this is where prevention is greatest.
- This is because most crime is opportunistic so we need to reduce the opportunities.

FELSON (EXAMPLE):

Port Authority Bus terminal in NYC was poorly designed and provided opportunities for deviant conduct.
Toilets were a setting for luggage thefts, rough sleeping, drug dealing and homosexual liaisons.
Re-shaping the physical environment to ‘design crime out’ greatly reduced such activity – e.g large sinks which homeless people were bathing in were replaced with small sinks.

DISPLACEMENT:

Situation crime measures don’t reduce crime, they simply displace it.
- Rational thinking criminals will just respond to target hardening by moving to areas with softer targets.
Chaiken et al example: found that a crackdown on subway robberies in NY merely displaced them to the streets above.

DISPLACEMENT FORMS AND DEFINITIONS:

ADVANTAGE OF DISPLACEMENT THEORY:

In the early 1960s, half of all suicides in Britain were the result of gassing. At that time, British Gas supply came from highly toxic coal gas. From the 1960s coal gas was replaced by less toxic natural gas, and by 1997 suicides from gassing had fallen to near zero.
- Even more striking is overall suicide rates fell. Those who might have killed themselves by gassing seemed not to have switched to another method – there was no displacement.

CRITICISMS OF DISPLACEMENT THEORY:

Tends to focus on opportunistic petty street crime. Ignores white collar, corporate and state crime, which are more costly and harmful.
Assumes criminals make rational calculations. Seems unlikely in many crimes of violence, and crimes committed under the influence of drugs or alcohol.
Ignores the root cause of crime, such as poverty or poor socialisation. Makes it difficult to develop long-term strategies for crime reduction.

ENVIRONMENTAL CRIME PREVENTION:

‘Broken Window Thesis’: allowing crime to occur in the environment ‘opens the door’ for worse crimes to take place.
Wilson and Kelling used the term ‘broken windows’ to describe a range of small scale crimes such as not paying correct train fare, vandalism and graffiti, rubbish left on ground and really loud noises.

SOCIAL AND COMMUNITY CRIME PREVENTION:

Zero tolerance focused on the policing.
Social and community crime prevention is different because emphasis is placed firmly on the offender and their social context. The aim is to remove the conditions that predispose individuals to crime in the first place.
This is a longer term strategy because they tackle the roots of crime – not just the opportunities.
The causes of crime are often rooted in social conditions like poverty, unemployment and poor housing.
Social reform programmes might help reduce crime.

SOCIAL REFORM PROGRAMME EXAMPLE – PERRY PRE-SCHOLL PROJECT:

Was aimed at disadvantaged black children in Ypsilanti, Michigan.
Experimental group of 3-4 year olds were offered a two-year intellectual enrichment programme, during which time the children also received weekly home visits.
A longitudinal study followed the children’s subsequent progress:
- Were striking differences with a control group who hadn’t undergone the programme.
- By age 40, they had significantly fewer lifetime arrests for violent crime, property crime and drugs, while more had graduated from high school and were in employment.
- Was calculated that for every dollar spent on the programme, $17 was saved on welfare, prison and other costs.

WHYTE’S SURVEY ON THE NORTH WEST:

Found priorities of the police and other crime agencies in the North West didn’t include environmental crimes and crimes of the powerful.
Despite this, in the North West at the time of the survey, the Environment Agency instituted 98 prosecutions in 2001-2, including 62 for waste offences, 32 for water quality offences, and 2 for radioactive substance offences.
The North West also has one of the most heavily concentrated sites of chemical production in Europe, where just two plants between them release into the air about 40% of all the factory-produced cancer-causing chemicals in the UK every year.
Whyte sees no logical reason for these to not be included in priorities as they potentially affect local communities, therefore the North West’s strategy reflects zero tolerance.

ENVIRONMENTAL CRIME PREVENTION:

There’s an absence of formal control and informal control in these neighbourhoods.
It can go from littering to a magnet for deviants because the police are only concerned with serious crime and turn a blind eye to petty nuisance behaviour, while respectable members of the community feel intimidated and powerless. Without residential action the situation deteriorates, tipping the neighbourhood into a spiral of decline. Respectable people move out and the area becomes a magnet for deviants.

ZERO TOLERANCE POLICING:

Two solutions to environmental crime:
- Environmental Improvement Strategy:
  - Any broken window must be repaired immediately, abandoned cars towed away without delay, etc., otherwise more will follow and the neighbourhood will be on the slide.
- Zero Tolerance Policing Strategy:
  - They must proactively tackle even the slightest sign of disorder, even if it’s not a criminal. This will halt neighbourhood decline and prevent serious crime taking root.

EVIDENCE FOR ZERO TOLERANCE WORKING:

NYC’s police precincts a crackdown on ‘squeegee merchants’ – discovered many had outstanding warrants for violence and property crimes. Between 1993 and 1996, there was a significant fall in crime in the city, including a 50% drop in the homicide rate – from 1,927 to 968.
NY, where Kelling was an adviser to police, a ‘Clean Car Program’ was instituted on the subway, in which cars were taken out immediately if they had any graffiti on them. Only returned to service once they were clean. As a result graffiti was largely removed from the subway. Other successful programs to tackle fare dodging, drug dealing and begging followed.

EVIDENCE OF ALTERNATIVE EXPLANATIONS FOR THE REDUCTION:

The NYPD benefitted from 7,000 extra officers.
There was a decline in the availability of crack cocaine.
Was a general decline in the crime rate in major US cities at the time – including ones where police didn’t adopt a zero tolerance policy.
The early 1990s had seen a major recession and high unemployment, but from 1994 many new jobs were being created.