MISSING PIECES - Inter-Parliamentary Union

MISSING PIECES
ADAPTING POLICING TO LOCAL CONDITIONS
In terms of violence prevention, it is important to update policing practices
according to both good practices emerging from programme evaluations,
and local conditions and particular risk factors. The World Report on Violence
and Health calls for approaches that would also consider underlying
societal, community and relationships factors, insisting that such prevention
strategies will often be more cost-effective than policing and correctional
responses. A number of criminal justice interventions are nevertheless
reviewed, as ‘the policing models and types of intervention involved will
strongly determine whether or not they are effective’. 28 Their principal
recommendations are reproduced below in Box 18.
BOX 18 CRIMINAL JUSTICE AND THE PREVENTION OF INTERPERSONAL
VIOLENCE
Policing will not reduce rates of victimisation by:
• increasing budgets, even by large amounts. Instead, this will divert
scarce financial resources away from public health and educational
programmes that have been shown to significantly reduce crime and
victimisation;
• continuing the current policing models based upon patrols, response
to calls for service, and investigation—all of which become less and less
effective in reducing crime as fewer victims report incidents to the
police; and
• using popular programmes such as neighbourhood watch, boot camps,
and drug resistance education, all of which have been shown to be
ineffective in reducing crime and interpersonal violence.
Policing will reduce rates of victimisation by:
• deploying police officers strategically and holding them accountable to
target specific problems;
• adopting models for policing such as the Strategic Approaches to Community
Safety, where joint police and university teams analyse the causes
of violence, particularly for youth homicides;
• providing data and collaborating in multi-sectoral partnerships (for
example, with schools, welfare, and housing) that aim to tackle persistent
offending by men who are high risk because of dropping out of
school or having dysfunctional families;
• targeting repeat victimisation—where the same person or address is
victimised more than once—through a combination of enforcement,
situational crime prevention, and social prevention;
• empowering victims to protect themselves, for instance, by creating
police stations where female victims of violence know they can talk to
female police officers; and
130