Professional Documents
Culture Documents
MR1349 ch2
MR1349 ch2
CRIME PREVENTION
From the perspective of society as a whole, the best and most useful
activity that law enforcement agencies can carry out is crime prevention. If crimes are successfully (and justly) prevented before they
occur, the societal costs and suffering associated with the effects of
crime are completely avoided. Police carry partbut by no means
allof the responsibility for crime prevention:
Most crime prevention results from informal and formal practices
and programs located in seven institutional settings. These institutions appear to be interdependent at the local level, in that events
in one of these institutions can affect events in others that in turn
can affect the local crime rate. These are . . . communities, families,
schools, labor markets, places, police, and criminal justice
(Sherman et al., 1997, p. v).
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SURVEILLANCE
Police surveillance is one activity justified by its potential effect on
crime prevention. Proponents of surveillance claim that it prevents
crime by deterrence, especially when overt surveillance activities
remind potential criminals of police presence and observation.
Critics contend that surveillance may simply displace crime to unobserved locations, rather than prevent it. Regardless, it is the case that
if an area under surveillance becomes a crime scene, the surveillance
can both alert police to the need for an operational response and/or
provide evidence for subsequent criminal investigation and prosecution.
Because of the many factors involved in contact between police and
private citizens, surveillance technology that transmits information
to police may have significant advantages over eyewitness surveillance. Technology that records video or audio information may also
be especially valuable for supporting investigation and enabling
prosecution.
In this section we consider fixed-site and mobile video surveillance
and night vision/electro-optical surveillance, as well as the special
interest topic of technology for school safety. We discuss another
surveillance technology, video cameras in patrol cars, in the section
of Chapter 6 on police accountability.
Crime Prevention
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represent the entire population. See Appendix A for a description of the adjustment
methodology. For the LETS survey to state police and the FTS survey to crime labs,
results are reported as unadjusted percentages.
2 Mobile video surveillance cameras are those that might be used in a stakeout or
hostage negotiation situation. This category does not include video cameras in patrol
cars, which are discussed in Chapter 6.
3 By selecting Not Needed on the survey. It should be noted that there is likely a
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comes attractive for adoption providing its cost (or, in economic terms, its opportunity
cost) is low enough compared to other uses for funds.
Crime Prevention
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made along with CCTV, as well as the possibility of crime being displaced, rather than reduced, by CCTV. They are also concerned that
male operators may target women for voyeuristic reasons and that
CCTV may be used to target minorities disproportionately. They are
calling for state and federal laws with enforceable criminal penalties
to limit the scope of CCTV use (Steinhardt, 1999).
Some critics of police use of video surveillance (CCTV) nevertheless
suggest reasons for expecting the trend toward increased video
surveillance to continue that are also interesting from the perspective of technology adoption by law enforcement:
First, negative findings are crowded out by the industry and practitioner-led claims of success which dominate the newspapers and
trade magazines.
Second, as the evidence of displacement firms up, areas without
CCTV will fall under increasing pressure to introduce systems as
well.
Third, for many towns and cities, there is an element of keeping up
with the Joneses, . . . but this is not just a matter of unjustified civic
rivalry. As cities are increasingly competing to attract and keep inward investment from ever more mobile multinational corporations, CCTV is seen as part of a package of measures to attract and
keep business and, therefore, jobs, in the town.
Fourth, regardless of its effects on the overall crime rate, CCTV can
be a very useful tool in investigating statistically rare but serious
criminal offences such as acts of terrorism, murder and rape.
Finally, even when CCTV is shown to have a limited impact on
crime, it provides a very useful tool for the police to manage the
problem of informational uncertainty and for allocating resources
to incidents (Norris and Armstrong, 1999, pp. 205206).
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School Safety
In the one-year period from July 1, 1997 through June 30, 1998 there
were 2,752 homicides and 2,061 suicides of children ages 519 in the
United States. Only 35 of these homicides (1.3 percent) and seven of
the suicides (0.3 percent) occurred at school (NCES/BJS, 2000, p. 2).
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Thus, although shootings at schools have commanded national attention, it is wrong to think that eliminating young peoples deaths at
schools is the answer to the problems of youth homicide or suicide.
Non-fatal crime, however, is another matter entirely. The number of
violent crimes against students ages 1218 away from school is only
slightly higher than those occurring at school, and thefts against the
same age group occur more commonly at school than elsewhere
(NCES/BJS, 2000, p. 5). Thus, it is the non-fatal crime (that seldom, if
ever, makes the evening news) that constitutes the real school safety
problem.
What security measures are schools taking and what role can law
enforcement technology play in approaching these problems? In the
latest data available, for school year 199697, 96 percent of public
schools reported requiring visitors to sign in, 80 percent closed their
campus for most students during lunch, 53 percent controlled access
to school buildings, 19 percent had conducted one or more drug
sweeps (45 percent for high schools), 4 percent conducted random
metal detector checks on students, and 1 percent required students
to pass through metal detectors each day. All of these measures were
more prevalent in urban than rural schools (NCES/BJS, 2000, p. 137).
New York City public schools, for example, have a comprehensive
weapon detection program, which has deployed 191 baggage X-ray
machines and 305 magnetometers (walk-through units) at 72 school
sites. This operates in the context of a security system including intrusion detection, access control, CCTV, and voice communications
technology (Lawrence, 2000).
A recent Education Department guide to safer schools suggests several measures for enhancing physical safety, including Monitoring
the surrounding school groundsincluding landscaping, parking
lots, and bus stops (Dwyer, Osher, and Warger, 1998, p. 13). It also
recommends that during a crisis there be An effective, fool-proof
communication system and A process for securing immediate external support from law enforcement officials and other relevant
community agencies (Dwyer, Osher, and Warger, 1998, p. 19). CCTV
installations can help prevent crime at schools and identify perpetrators of crimes that do occur; however, cameras may not be used everywhere:
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Constant monitoring of scenes from video cameras is often an unrealistic approach to security (Green, 1999, p. 30); a more effective
use of CCTV is viewing recorded tape after an incident has occurred
(Green, 1999, p. 25). Although color cameras have lower resolution
than black-and-white ones, color cameras are more useful for identifying perpetrators of crimes (Green, 1999, p. 32). Low quality videocassette recorders (VCR) are commonly the weakest link in school
surveillance systems; VCRs of acceptable quality cost approximately
$500 to $1,200 (Green, 1999, p. 57).
In a charge for the application of even more advanced technology to
these problems, the Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology
Advisory Council (LECTAC)5 Information Systems Subcommittee has
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5 LECTAC is an advisory organization to the National Law Enforcement and Cor-
Crime Prevention
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CRIME ANALYSIS
Analysis of crime data can reveal patterns that are helpful not only in
preventing and operationally responding to crime but also in
increasing accountability to police leadership and the public.6 Most
departments do some type of crime analysis, most commonly
preparation of crime statistics. A recent survey found:
The majority of the departments surveyed engage in some form of
crime analysis with most (73 percent) conducting analyses to fulfill
Uniform Crime Report (UCR) requirements and approximately half
(52 percent) calculating statistical reports of crime activity
(Mamalian and LaVigne, 1999).
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Crime Prevention
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OFFENDER TRACKING
Interviewees and focus group participants supporting this study
painted a pessimistic picture of offender-based tracking systems in
use around the country. Most such systems are between 20 and 30
years old and, like most legacy systems, are now difficult to use and
maintain. It is relevant to note that this also represents a situation
where public opinion and liability risk may represent a factor encouraging rather than discouraging technology adoption. Victims of
crime perpetrated by offenders turned loose in communities without
being adequately tracked are beginning to bring lawsuits against
state agencies for not having or effectively providing information that
could have potentially prevented crime. As the head of corrections in
one western state is said to have asked his legislators, are you more
worried about the 15,000 people Ive got behind bars or the 55,000
people I have out in your communities?
Although not directly addressed by RANDs survey instrument, these
systems also represent an important technology problem for law
enforcement. Better technology for offender tracking has the potential to increase public safety by making information on offenders
easier to share and utilize. It should be noted, however, that such
systems raise many of the same civil liberties issues discussed above
vis--vis video surveillance. As a result, they represent another case
where the use of a technology by law enforcement must be balanced
against individual rights and the resulting (potentially conflicting)
public perceptions of the activity.
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7 It should be noted that the survey instrument did not, for these particular technolo-
gies, ask respondents to rate the priority, usefulness, or impact of these sorts of systems.