Primer on Municipal Crime Prevention - FCM

S e c t i o n F O U R
PROBLEM IDENTIFICATION
A simple example illustrates this
point. Consider two cities. In the
first, the annual police report shows
that the city had 1,100 robberies
in the previous year, which is an
increase of 15 per cent. Concerned
about an increase in a serious crime,
planners use this information to
implement several generic robbery
prevention programs throughout
the city. However, because these
programs are not targeted at any
specific types of burglary, and can
be implemented only superficially
on a city-wide scale, they are not
likely to have any impact.
Compare this with a city, equipped
with an effective information management
system that finds that over
the past two months there have
been 75 purse snatchings in the
downtown area. Crime analysts
determined that most of the victims
were seniors who were waiting at
bus stops near two large medical
clinics. Most of the robberies
occurred on weekdays between
3:30 and 4:30 in the afternoon.
Sources suggest that suspects are
students at a downtown high
school.
The first step in any crime prevention program is a diagnosis of the community’s problems. You must
understand the problems and the context in which these problems occur in order to prevent them. With
detailed information on hand about a problem, it may be relatively easy to come up with solutions.
As in most activities, the more preparation you do, the more likely you are to succeed.
You can see how much easier it
would be to plan effective programs
with the detailed information
included in the second example. In
the first case, planners would be
grasping at straws to try to find a
solution, but in the second example
one could come up with a variety
of possible prevention strategies
precisely targeted at the problem.
How to Analyze Your
Community’s Crime and
Disorder Problems
There are several steps are required
to analyze your community’s crime
and disorder problems. Below is a
summary of these steps, followed
by a detailed discussion of
approaches.
Summary:
Step 1
Identify your community’s problems.
To do this, you must find the
appropriate sources of information
and collect and analyze as much
information as possible from these
sources. The tasks in Step 1 are:
• Define your community
(by geography or interest).
• Decide who should be involved
in planning.
• Seek out sources of information.
• Measure the problems and their
impact on the community.
Step 2
Determine which problems
are most important. Using these
data, you must next decide which
problems to target, based on their
importance to the community and
their potential for reduction. The
tasks in Step 2 are:
• List your community’s crime
and disorder problems.
• Prepare a priority-setting matrix.
• Determine your community’s
crime prevention priorities.
Step 3
Analyze the target problems and
their community context. The
more detail you can learn about the
nature of the crime problems and
the strengths and weaknesses of the
community, the more likely you will
be to develop successful prevention
programs. The tasks in Step 3 are:
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