SAFE STREETS ACT

Safe Streets Act

Safe Streets Act

Introduction

Crime prevention refers to those methods that reduce crime, violence and insecurity successfully attacking the causes that promote these problems. For too long, policy makers and security officials believed that crime prevention was a matter falling under the sole responsibility of the various state security agencies and the criminal justice system. In this sense, increasing power meant increasing preventive state budget and human resources of these agencies; hence the cost in each of the fundamental functions of criminal justice has increased steadily over the past decades, while crimes also increased (Barr & Pease, 1990).

However, in recent decades, several studies have shown that prevention programs other than more police on the streets or police operations also generated findings that would result in a decreased level of crime in a community. These studies showed that many of people entering the criminal justice system or various types of crimes and misdemeanors, presented social disadvantage, economic, cultural, that influenced their behavior. In other words, developed under certain conditions (social deprivation, economic, cultural, and urban) and they operated on certain factors (risk) to provide incentives for criminal behavior.

In this paper, the crime prevention program or strategy will be critically discussed in-context to its objectives and implications. How does the program address or change the way we think about crime, prevention and security. The paper will engage some of the conceptual and critical ideas such as community, security, surveillance, risk, and responsibility, etc. From there, it begins to develop a whole field of public safety policies aimed at reducing risk factors associated with crime (e.g. drug addiction, family violence, culture of violence, exclusion, availability of firearms). Increase factors protection (e.g., family containment, end of school, extracurricular activities, etc.).. Thus understood, the Crime Prevention includes all those actions to prevent, deter and obstruct the commission of crimes.

Police Crime Prevention Units

Beginning with the establishment of the London Metropolitan Police Department, the modern system of policing has existed for more than 150 years. During that time, several key objectives have continued to serve as cornerstones of traditional policing ideals and efforts. Without a doubt, crime control has always been one of those objectives. In fact, it can easily be argued that controlling crime is the main objective of policing. With that in mind, there has been a long-standing focus on crime prevention in policing, as well.

There is no better way to control crime than to prevent it before it even occurs. Although crime-prevention techniques have historically been used by police departments in a general fashion, police crime-prevention units have only begun to surface in the last few decades (Armitage & Smythe, 1999). The late 1970s through the early 1980s observed the birth and development of community-based policing. One main concern of the community policing era is a strong focus on crime prevention. At the same time, problem-oriented policing has been quickly growing in popularity as an effective methodology for analyzing and responding to crime problems, especially community-wide crime ...