Crime Prevention - CSS Criminology Notes
Crime Prevention - CSS Criminology Notes
Crime prevention is the attempt to reduce and deter crime and criminals. It is applied
specifically to efforts made by governments to reduce crime, enforce the law, and maintain
criminal justice.
1. Studies
Criminologists such as Gottfredson, McKenzie, Eck, Farrington, Sherman, Waller and others
have been at the forefront of analyzing what works to prevent crime. Prestigious
commissions and research bodies, such as the World Health Organization, United Nations,
the United States National Research Council, the UK Audit Commission and so on, have
analyzed their and others’ research on what lowers rates of interpersonal crime. They agree
that governments must go beyond law enforcement and criminal justice to tackle the risk
factors that cause crime because it is more cost effective and leads to greater social benefits
than the standard ways of responding to crime. Interestingly, multiple opinion polls also
confirm public support for investment in prevention. Waller uses these materials in Less
Law, More Order to propose specific measures to reduce crime as well as a crime bill.
Some of the highlights of these authorities are set out below with some sources for further
reading. The World Health Organization Guide (2004) complements the World Report on
Violence and Health (2002) and the 2003 World Health Assembly Resolution 56-24 for
governments to implement nine recommendations, which were:
(i) Create, implement and monitor a national action plan for violence prevention.
(ii) Enhance capacity for collecting data on violence.
(iii) Define priorities for, and support research on, the causes, consequences, costs and
prevention of violence.
(iv) Promote primary prevention responses.
(v) Strengthen responses for victims of violence.
(vi) Integrate violence prevention into social and educational policies, and thereby promote
gender and social equality.
(vii) Increase collaboration and exchange of information on violence prevention.
(viii) Promote and monitor adherence to international treaties, laws and other mechanisms
to protect human rights.
(ix) Seek practical, internationally agreed responses to the global drugs and global arms
trade.
The authoritative commissions agree on the Role of Municipalities, because they are best
able to organize the strategies to tackle the risk factors that cause crime. The European
Forum for Urban Safety and the United States Conference of Mayors have stressed that
municipalities must target the programs to meet the needs of youth at risk and women who
are vulnerable to violence. To succeed, they need to establish a coalition of key agencies
such as schools, job creation, social services, housing and law enforcement around a
diagnosis.
2. Types
Several factors must come together for a crime to occur:
(i) an individual or group must have the desire or motivation to participate in a banned or
prohibited behavior;
(ii) at least some of the participants must have the skills and tools needed to commit the
crime; and,
(iii) an opportunity must be acted upon.
Primary prevention address individual and family level factors correlated with later criminal
participation. Individual level factors such as attachment to school and involvement in pro-
social activities decrease the probability of criminal involvement. Family level factors such
as consistent parenting skills similarly reduce individual level risk. Risk factors are additive
in nature. The greater the number of risk factors present the greater the risk of criminal
involvement. In addition there are initiatives which seek to alter rates of crime at the
community or aggregate level. Secondary prevention uses techniques focusing on at risk
situations, especially focusing on youth who drop out of school or get involved in gangs. It
targets social programs and law enforcement at neighborhoods where crime rates are high.
The use of secondary crime prevention in cities such as Birmingham and Bogotá have
achieved large reductions in crime and violence. Programs that are focused on youth who
are at risk have been shown to significantly reduce crime. Tertiary prevention is used after a
crime has occurred in order to prevent successive incidents. Such measures can be seen in
the implementation of new security policies following acts of terrorism such as the
September 11, 2001 attacks. Situational crime prevention uses techniques focusing on
reducing on the opportunity to commit a crime. Some of techniques include increasing the
difficulty of crime, increasing the risk of crime, and reducing the rewards of crime.
criminal setting and is different from most criminology as it begins with an examination of
the circumstances that allow particular types of crime. By gaining an understanding of these
circumstances, mechanisms are then introduced to change the relevant environments with
the aim of reducing the opportunities for particular crimes. Thus, SCP focuses on crime
prevention rather than the punishment or detection of criminals and its intention is to make
criminal activities less appealing to offenders.
The theory behind SCP concentrates on the creation of safety mechanisms that assist in
protecting people by making criminals feel they may be unable to commit crimes or would
be in a situation where they may be caught or detected, which will result in them being
unwilling to commit crimes where such mechanisms are in place. The logic behind this is
based on the concept of rational choice that every criminal will assess the situation of a
potential crime, weigh up how much they may gain, balance it against how much they may
lose and the probability of failing, and then act accordingly.
(i) Safeguarding
Another aspect of SCP that is more applicable to the cyber environment is the principle of
It has been suggested that cybercriminals be assessed in terms of their criminal attributes,
which include skills, knowledge, resources, access and motives (SKRAM). Cybercriminals
usually have a high degree of these attributes and this is why SCP may prove more useful
than traditional approaches to crime. Clarke proposed a table of twenty-five techniques of
Situational Crime Prevention, but the five general headings are:
Reinforcing targets and restricting access the use of firewalls, encryption, card/password
access to ID databases and banning hacker websites and magazines.
Removing targets and disrupting cyber places monitoring Internet sites and incoming spam,
harsh penalties for hacking, rapid notification of stolen/lost credit bankcards, avoiding ID
numbers on all official documents.
(i) Grouping and classification to determine patterns and associations among sets of data.
(i) Data mining to categorise and group data and automatically identify associations and
rules that may be indicative of remarkable patterns, including those connected to fraud.
(ii) Specialist systems to programme expertise for fraud detection in the shape of rules.
(iii) Pattern recognition to identify groups or patterns of behaviour either automatically or to
match certain inputs.
(iv) Machine learning techniques to automatically detect the characteristics of fraud
(v) Neural networks that can learn suspicious patterns and later identify them.