Global Report on Human Settlements 2007 - PoA-ISS

90
Urban crime and violence
Box 4.4 The government of Western Australia’s Community Safety and Crime Prevention Strategy
Western Australia’s Community Safety and Crime Prevention
Strategy is guided by seven principles: sustainability; working better
together; inclusiveness; targeted efforts; evidence-based decisionmaking;
focusing on results; and sharing knowledge. It is driven by
five key goals, and under each a set of priority actions is identified.
The five key goals are:
• supporting families, children and young people;
• strengthening communities and revitalizing neighbourhoods;
• targeting priority offences;
• reducing repeat offending; and
• designing out crime and using technology.
The other two primary components of the strategy involve the
development of partnership processes, and the establishment of
various forms of grant funding which are targeted at helping with
the implementation of the priority actions. Partnerships between
communities, police, local government and other public agencies
are encouraged at local level throughout the state to develop local
Community Safety and Crime Prevention Plans, with both state
advice and resources being available to assist with this process. The
strategy also identifies five specific funds that will be established as
part of a total spending of AU$15 million on grants over four years
in order to take this process forward. These five funds are the:
• Local Government Partnership Fund, which will help local
partnerships to get established and produce local Community
Safety and Crime Prevention Plans;
• Community Partnership Fund, which will give small grants for
community crime initiatives being undertaken with, or
supported by, the police;
• Indigenous Partnership Fund, which is specifically for supporting
work on community safety and crime prevention in
indigenous (Aboriginal) communities;
• Research and Development Fund, which is about supporting
targeted and evidence-based approaches through research and
related activities; and
• Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED)
fund, which will support the adoption of CPTED principles in
the planning of new development and infrastructure improvements.
Source: Government of Western Australia, 2004
National
governments often
have a major role to
play in relation to
military, security
and police forces in
terms of policy,
funding and
disposition
terms of policy, funding and disposition. All of these
elements impact both directly and indirectly upon the
experience of crime and violence in cities. In particular, the
ways in which police services are directed and managed are
of particular significance in this context, and so it is very
common to see city political and executive leaders wishing to
engage in a regular dialogue about these matters, not only
with national government, but also with the senior officers
responsible for police operations in cities.
Third, while there is often an important local dimension
in campaigns to tackle corruption of various kinds, the
role of national governments is absolutely vital since the
legal and judicial systems will both have important parts to
play in such initiatives. National governments can also set
the tone for drives against corruption, as part of a commitment
to good governance. It is important that this is done
otherwise individual local initiatives can quickly lose
momentum.
Sub-national level
Governance arrangements vary remarkably at the subnational
level. Consequently, it is difficult to generalize
about this level of activity, except to note that where it
exists, and depending upon its powers, it is quite likely that
important components of initiatives to tackle urban crime
and violence will be found. To illustrate this, three examples
of initiatives at sub-national level are described below. The
first is the approach to tackling crime prevention in Western
Australia, where the state has significant powers and sees
the process on which it is embarking as being strategy led. In
the second approach – a less direct example – the subnational
level is responsible for putting in place tools that
can provide a framework within which crime and violence
are looked at alongside other elements that determine public
policy priorities in municipalities. This is the process of
preparing integrated development plans in the province of
KwaZulu-Natal (South Africa). The third example relates to
the role that legislative processes at the state level can play
in crime prevention through the Safe Neighborhood Act in
Florida (US).
■ Community safety and crime prevention
strategy: Western Australia
The lead in developing policies and practices on crime
prevention in Western Australia is taken by the Office of
Crime Prevention. 24 It has six key tasks:
• initiating crime prevention public-awareness campaigns;
• developing and coordinating strategic and holistic
policy;
• providing advice to state and local government;
• undertaking research to establish best practice to be
utilized in community safety and crime prevention
strategies;
• informing about relevant training and development
programmes; and
• providing grant funding for community safety and crime
prevention initiatives.
The state’s Community Safety and Crime Prevention
Strategy 25 is summarized in Box 4.4.
One of the most interesting elements of this example
is its use of grant funding to implement the strategy. One of