Community participation in crime has serious potential

Jul 03, 2010 Letters

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Dear Editor,
The concept of community participation in crime prevention as a means of reducing crimes in neighbourhoods has serious potential to be taken to the regional and national levels if handled properly.
I am in some agreement with the several views expressed by contributors in the letter pages of the dailies, and wish to offer some considerations which could boost this laudable initiative if handled correctly.
I think in the first instance that we should assume as suggested that there is a relatively high level of consensus both within and between community groups, or stakeholders, about community problems and potential solutions. They argue that in the absence of the assumed intra- and inter-group consensus, community policing may well nigh be impossible to implement. However, we should observe the caution that the operationalised concept may also succeed, but to the dismay and detriment of some community groups. (Bohn et al 2000). Therefore the issue of the community stakeholders agreeing on the social problems and their solutions demands urgent answers since there is a real potential for conflict.
Several experts in the area of policing strategies insist that community policing – unlike professional policing, is based on a shared responsibility for community safety and security, around which revolves a more proactive approach involving a visible presence; interventions which address crime producing problems; arresting law violators; maintaining order; and resolving disputes (the last sounds suspiciously like alternative dispute resolution).
All of the aforementioned are ultimately focused on achieving the objectives of establishing and maintaining peaceful neighbourhoods.
Among the categories of individuals and groups who can be described as stakeholders are: community residents; community business owners; community leaders; and law enforcement personnel who work in the community (in one study prostitutes were seen as a category). Skogan, 1996 and Wycoff, 1991 argue that the prospect of a unified perception in terms of problems and solutions are likely to be aggravated in communities divided by race, class, and lifestyle differences.
Skogan supported by Sherman 1997propose a variation of this view which posits that community-based programmes are very difficult to launch in low-income, heterogeneous, high-turnover, high-crime neighbourhoods’’ the very neighbourhoods that need the programmes most. One possibility for this undesirable feature of involuntary or voluntary exclusion in heterogeneous communities may be that minorities and the poor operate under the assumption that they are targets rather than beneficiaries of such programmes. However there is likely to be general agreement that certain social issues are worthy of attention including: street dwellers (transients), the drug trade, inadequate police services, and a lack of community interest in crime prevention.
In similar vein there are general solutions stakeholders may wish to consider including:, police outpost in the community; more ranks posted to the area and greater use of patrols; consistent commitment by law enforcement to the community’s problems; zero tolerance of crime; greater community interest and participation in crime prevention; and greater multi-sector support.
It should be pointed out that historically police acceptance of operational vis-à-vis conceptual community policing has not been automatic thus generating numerous conflicts in a scenario where consensus among community stakeholders is not guaranteed.
Furthermore the situation may be exacerbated by conflict among and between community residents, police members, community leaders, community business owners, as well as the perpetrators of a community’s problems (Sadd and Grinc, 1996.). Among the benefits of community policing area-specific solutions is the displacement effect where offenders can change locations; time of committing offences; their targets; adopt new behaviours to attack the same targets; and switch the type of crime they commit (Eck, 1997).
These changes are likely to place unwary communities which do not see the need to become involved in community policing at risk of becoming a victim community through – for want of a better word, infiltration.
We need to recognise that community policing as an operationalised concept (free from undesirable influences) could succeed if it is embraced by the vast majority of community residents; if greater efforts are made to secure the necessary multi sector partnerships aimed at addressing the more fundamental social problems of poverty, racism, illiteracy, and family disruption. Altering those major correlates of social problems probably requires monumental changes in political and economic policy without which the most that can be accomplished by community policing would be the temporary amelioration of the symptoms of a community’s principal social problems rather than the resolution of the underlying problems themselves.
Patrick E. Mentore

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