Crime Prevention

Community Crime Prevention

Community crime prevention is based on the belief that increases in the size, density, and heterogeneity of modern urban areas have weakened traditional community controls on individual behavior. Community safety is best achieved, then, through the police and the community working together to reestablish informal social controls. Community residents have important roles to play in protecting their own safety, which include looking out for suspicious activities and securing their own property. Community crime prevention programs are designed to build community capacity to address crime and crime-related problems by strengthening the degree of informal social control exercised by the community. In practice, this means that new or existing community organizations undertake crime prevention activities.

Crime prevention scholars have also examined the relationship between crime and the fear of crime, which are seen as separate but related phenomena. Fear of crime does not always accurately reflect actual crime levels. It is affected by a variety of other factors, including age and gender, local signs of physical and social disorder, and the degree of integration in local social networks. Regardless of its source, however, fear of crime can stimulate or accelerate neighborhood decline. Fear of crime may cause residents to withdraw from community life, which weakens informal social controls and leads to a decline in the mobilization capacity of a neighborhood.

The crime prevention activities typically associated with community crime prevention include those [Page 108]designed to “harden targets” and those designed to increase the degree of community surveillance. Target hardening involves activities such as the promotion of home security surveys conducted by police officers who provide recommendations for how residents can better secure their property. Surveillance activities include the organization of Neighborhood Watch programs or resident patrols. Neighborhood Watch programs, which involve residents being asked to pay attention to strangers or unusual occurrences in their neighborhood and to report them to the police, is a far less active form of community crime prevention than resident patrols.

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