Police And Crime Analysis

In the book written by R.B. Santos titled ‘Crime analysis with crime mapping’, I am focusing on Chapter 3 which is titled ‘Effectiveness of police in reducing crime and the role of crime analysis’. In this chapter, I will be summarising on the effectiveness of police in preventing and controlling crime, the role of crime analysis and finally on the definition of problem. Weisburd and Braga (2006) stated that American policing have made significant changes and development in both their thinking and practice over the last three (3) decades. These changes are possible due to America’s advance technologies, new and latest perspectives in policing and finally evaluating the already existing practices. In order to determine the correct and appropriate

As stated in its name, police must collaborate with the community and use other resources apart from polices’ to prevent and solve crime. According to the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Community Oriented Policing (2011), they defined community policing as a philosophy which supports the systematic use of partnerships and problem-solving techniques, to address the immediate situation which affects the public safety issues like crime, social disorder, and fear of crime. As the community policing is difficult to evaluate, some specific strategies had been used to represent community policing in evaluations. The first strategy would be “neighbourhood watch” where the residents and community members themselves increase their watch and monitoring over their own neighborhoods. There are also other strategies involved which is to increase the flow of information from the community to the police through meetings, officers having conversations and tightening their bond with the community, storefront beat offices as well as providing crime information to public through Internet, letters, social media, crime maps and also “reverse 911”phone calls so that they are able to protect themselves (Sherman et al., 1997). Weisburd and Eck (2004) states that the results of the research shows that the strategies invented and applied to the community did not reduce crime and to increase the effectiveness of police to

It is also called as “zero tolerance” policing. Sousa and Kelling (2006) states that the broken windows policing focuses on strict enforcement of law against disorderly behaviour and minor offenses like prostitution, public urination, and aggressive panhandling. This step is vital as it is to prevent more serious crime from happening. Skogan (1990, 1992) failed to find proof that the enforcement of broken windows policing reduced additional disorder or more serious crimes to occur. Weisburd and Eck (2004) also states that New York City uses this type of policing in 1990s and many NYC officials admitted that the crime rate dropped because of broken windows policing but many people also say that there are some other reasons for the reduction of crime rates in New York City. The role of crime analysis in broken windows policing is limited to evaluation of the development of the enforcement. This is because the police address the activity generally over time and space. Crime analysis works best in broken windows policing by determining where and when the enforcement of disorder activity can be best