Crime Prevention Units

Throughout most of history, preventing crime and responding to criminal behavior was the purview of the victim, his or her family, and community residents. There was no police force (or criminal justice system, for that matter) as we know it today. The earliest responses to crime included retribution and revenge on the part of the victim and his or her family. Indeed, the earliest laws outlined the role of the victim in addressing crimes. The Code of Hammurabi (approximately 1900 BCE), for example, outlined retribution by the victim and/or the family as the accepted response to injurious behavior. Lex talionis, the principle of “an eye for an eye,” was specifically set forth as a driving principle in the Hammurabic law. Such laws and practices provided legitimacy to individual citizen action.

The existence of formal systems of social control is relatively new. The Norman Conquest of England in 1066 gave rise to an obligatory form of avocational citizen policing where male citizens were required to band together into groups for the purpose of policing each other. If one individual in the group caused harm (to a group or non-group member), the other members were responsible for apprehending and sanctioning the offender. Beyond [Page 110]this obligatory action, a variety of cooperative practices emerged that relied on citizen participation to protect the community and one another. Watch and ward rotated the responsibility for keeping watch over the town or area, particularly at night, among the male citizens. Identified threats would cause the watcher to raise the alarm and call for help (hue and cry). It was then up to the general citizenry to apprehend and (possibly) punish the offender. Those responding to the call for help were not employees of the state. Rather, they were other common citizens. The “watch and ward” and “hue and cry” ideas were codified in 1285 in the Statutes of Winchester. It is apparent throughout these actions that crime prevention was a major responsibility of the citizenry.

Similar citizen responsibility was commonplace in the New World colonies and the early United States. The vigilante movement, which mirrored early ideas of hue and cry, was a major component of enforcing law and order in the growing frontier of the young country. Citizens were required to look out for themselves and band together into posses when an offender needed to be apprehended and punished.

Although most discussions of early social control focus on the apprehension of offenders and the use of retribution and revenge, a great deal of evidence supports the idea that citizens used a variety of other protective actions. Examples of these alternative approaches include the use of walls, moats, drawbridges, and other physical design features around cities that protected the community from external invasion. Yet another early prevention approach was the restriction of weapon ownership as a means of eliminating violent behavior.

The advent of modern policing is typically traced to the establishment of the Metropolitan Police in London in 1829. Interestingly, a key to the Metropolitan Police was the idea of crime prevention. Sir Robert Peel, who was the driving force behind the Metropolitan Police Act, and Charles Rowan, the commissioner of the new organization, both saw crime prevention as the basic principle underlying police work. Even earlier attempts at formal policing, such as that in 17th-century Paris, emphasized crime prevention through methods such as preventive patrol, increased lighting, and street cleaning. Formal police forces in the United States, mirroring the movement in England, emerged in the mid-1800s and were restricted primarily to the largest cities in the Northeast, leaving most citizens to continue their efforts at self-protection. The advent of the 20th century witnessed a great deal of change in societal response to deviant behavior. Formal police forces became the norm, and crime prevention and responses to crime were taken out of the hands of the general public and placed into the hands of the police.

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