Crime Prevention for Communities
Crime Prevention for Communities—What’s the Latest and Best?
By Jean O’Neil, National Crime Prevention Council
Back to Ask the Expert: Jean O'Neil
Crime prevention became recognized more than three decades ago as encouragement of personal behaviors to reduce opportunities for criminals. It’s come a long way since then. Today, crime prevention means creating and sustaining neighborhoods and communities where crime cannot flourish.
This means stopping situations from becoming problems and leading to crime. It means linking with each other in neighborhoods and with other neighborhoods and communities. It means working in partnership not just with police but with service agencies and organizations of all kinds.
Police are not just enforcers in this day and age—their more vital roles are convener, catalyst, coordinator, and collaborator. Up-to-date departments recognize that communities must be the driving force in driving out crime, that police can assist but can never do the job alone. But because police see more of the community than almost any other agency of government, they are positioned to take on these new roles—facilitators and problem-solvers—with deeper knowledge than any other single public agency.
Getting the facts—gathering not just opinions and guesswork but data from all kinds of sources—has become a vital part of identifying not just the problems but their causes and suggesting ways to bring groups together to work on solutions that address mutual concerns. Just as important, the data help ensure accurate problem identification. Gather data not just on crime rates but on population growth, fire and rescue calls, park and recreation services, traffic issues, and school population and performance. If need be, get some help from a law enforcement planner or the local planning agency to make sense of the data picture.
Sharing is a major element of new crime prevention. Sharing data, concerns, possible solutions, and evaluations helps each neighborhood in a community grow even stronger; sharing among communities strengthens them as well. But the most important sharing occurs at the neighborhood level, where crime prevention calls for problem-solving, combining all the knowledge about a problem and possible solutions, seeking experienced help if needed, and working toward a common goal of resolving the situation rather than coping with crises. Working with city agencies, local faith communities, business organizations, and nearby civic groups can strengthen your neighborhood’s ability to address its problems.
Evaluation—a sometimes dreaded word—has become another major element of crime prevention. Knowing whether the neighborhood (or community) has made progress and why helps keep things on course, provides necessary corrective direction, and helps the community recognize and celebrate. Evaluation should be a means of improvement, not a test of personal or program worth—and in the hands of good evaluators today, it is just that.
What are some tested strategies in crime prevention?
Changing personal habits—always locking doors and windows; locking the car and taking the keys, teaching children basic safety habits—each of these helps reduce immediate crime risk.
Knowing and working with neighbors works. Neighbors who know each other (and have training in Neighborhood Watch-style techniques) know what's normal and what’s out of the ordinary. They know what suspicious behavior and situations are and how to report them.
Developing effective neighborhood coalitions, whether based on or including Neighborhood Watch, puts weight and experience behind the neighborhood’s requests for city services and help with local problems.
A number of programs work to reduce juvenile crime and to help delinquent youth bring themselves back into the community. These include Family Foster Care and Multisystemic Therapy, among others. Though some expertise is needed to run the programs, neighborhoods and communities can back them and support their use by local and state government.
Programs that allow children and young people to take on positive, meaningful roles in their communities—as volunteers, as paid workers, or as civic leaders—help them build bonds that deter criminal behavior, drug use, and other social ills they might otherwise fall prey to. Some examples include Teen Courts, Youth as Resources, and Boys & Girls Clubs.
Well-run afterschool programs have developed into community centers that help children, teens, adults, and elders. The New York City Beacon Schools are a widely recognized model of how the school and community can share facilities for both their needs.
Neighborhood programs that provide friendly, non-invasive support for older persons in the community (or younger people with disabilities) can help these people feel better connected to the neighborhood and help them reduce their risk of becoming victims of frauds and scams as well as other crimes. It also helps identify more people with skills that can benefit the whole neighborhood.
Neighborhood patrols—not arresting anyone but keeping an eye out for activities that arouse suspicion or concern—can provide the kind of surveillance that discourages criminals from even trying to practice their trade on the neighborhood’s turf. These patrols should work with and get training from the local police or sheriff’s department, even though they are not sworn officers of the law.
Changing some of the environmental features of the community—how the entrance is lighted, how traffic is routed, trimming low branches and bushes in parks and on school grounds, and many other strategies of crime prevention through environmental design may provide ways to deter or evict criminals at low cost—ways that also make the neighborhood more attractive for public use.
On a community level, several approaches to assessing the community’s supports for young people—the factors that increase their risk of crime and drugs and the factors that protect them against those risks—have proved excellent ways to focus local energy on making the long-term differences that will keep neighborhoods and communities healthy for many years to come.
Best practices in crime prevention rely on cooperation, collaboration, common sense blended with hard facts, commitment to the neighborhood and community, and commitment to the future. They involve addressing causes as well as symptoms of crime, and they require continual maintenance and care. There is no single silver bullet against crime, but there is ammunition that can help every neighborhood and community get the job done.
