“The modern criminal jurisprudence recognizes that no one is born criminal and that a good many crimes are the product of socio-economic milieu” – Jugal Kishore v State of Bihar
Historically, crimes were largely considered acts committed against the state or religion, and crimes against individuals were not so prevalent. Thus, often, crimes were equated with sins. However, the concept and pattern of crime have evolved, and various definitions of crime can now be found depending on the circumstances. Crime is inevitable in any society since some or the other violation of any code of conduct prescribed for the members of a society is bound to occur. The inevitability and universality of the phenomenon of crime have aptly been described by Emile Durkheim as follows:
“There is no society that is not confronted with the problem of criminality. Its form changes; the acts thus characterized are not the same everywhere; but, everywhere and always, there have been men who have behaved in such a way as to draw upon themselves penal repression… No doubt it is possible that crime itself will have abnormal forms, for example, when its rate is unusually high. This excess is indeed undoubtedly morbid in nature. What is normal, simply, is the existence of criminality, provided that it attains and does not exceed, for each social type, a certain level… To classify crime among the phenomena of normal sociology is not to say merely that it is an inevitable, although regrettable, phenomenon, due to the incorrigible wickedness of men, it is to affirm that it is a factor in public health, an integral part of all healthy societies.”
Durkheim believed that even a society made up of people with angelic qualities would still have violations of the norms of that society, leading to the same scandal that the ordinary offense does in ordinary consequences even though faults that seem venial to a layman would create there.
Criminology is a science that deals with different aspects of human behaviour that violate criminal law. Edwin H. Sutherland gave a comprehensive definition of the term criminology – the body of knowledge regarding crime as a social phenomenon that includes within its scope the process of making laws, breaking laws, and reacting toward the breaking of laws.
Over the past years, crime has been characterised by negative dynamics of its quantitative and qualitative parameters to which the crisis processes in the field of economy and social life have largely contributed. The burden of the crisis, the demographic processes, and the criminological analyses give grounds to assume that the criminogenic situation will continue to get complicated, which would hurt crime in the country.
The policies that have not been implemented over the years in the field of economy, social sphere, education and culture have accumulated some considerable social negatives, generating criminal activity. The interaction and coordination among the institutions fail to achieve the desired and targetted outcome. This necessitates activation of countering crime and taking anticipating actions to avoid the occurrence of adverse behaviour in its development.
Global experience proves that prevention is the most effective method to counter crime. It includes a set of measures that aim at establishing, limiting and removing the criminogenic and victimogenic factors. Prevention results in a reduction of crime and costs for countering crime, increased security of citizens, and citizens’ trust in the capacity of law-enforcement bodies to protect their rights and lawful interests.
As communities evolve through globalisation, immigration, gentrification, secularisation, individualism and other trends, new crime patterns are emerging, driven and enabled by profound technological and sociological change. A community cannot be understood as a homogenous entity. Modern developed societies comprise communities of communities, within which are high levels of cultural, ethnic, socio-economic, and religious diversity. Identifying credible representative stakeholders, and developing trust and engagement within a multi-layered society is non-trivial. The efficacy of community policing appears to hinge on a commitment to a long-term strategic vision, scalability and sustainability, doctrinal acceptance within police culture, and police facilitation of community-led problem-solving with accountability, transparency and honesty in managing stakeholder expectations.
One must critically question to what degree communities should be made responsible for their own safety and security. On one hand, to deny this responsibility (or opportunity) is disempowering, while on the other, the risk of collectivising guilt must be considered if crime or terrorism persists or pervades.
Community policing is the foundation of any focused violence prevention strategy. While community policing programmes are not effective in reducing crime, they have been found to generate positive effects on citizen satisfaction, perceptions of disorder, and police legitimacy. Moreover, community engagement strategies implemented as part of community policing initiatives can provide important input to help focus problem-oriented policing, hot spots policing, and focused deterrence approaches, which do seem to reduce violence.
Developing close relationships with community members would help the police to gather information about crime and disorder problems, understand the nature of these problems, and solve specific crimes. Community members can also help with key components of strategies tailored to specific problems by making improvements to the physical environment and through the informal social control of high-risk people. In this way, police strategies focusing on particular people and places would cease to be a form of profiling and become a generator of community engagement projects. Indeed, a central idea in community policing is to engage residents so they can exert more control over situations and dynamics that contribute to their potential for victimisation, and by doing so, influence neighbourhood levels of violence.
Contemporary global occurrences have suggested that peace and security of life and property are essential to sustainable national development. These occurrences are best achieved through an effective policing system. According to McNamara, there is a direct correlation between developmental advancement and security issues. The researcher explains further that security evolutions are in response to development evolution. The position taken here is that no peace, security and sustainable national development will ever be possible in any part of the world, without a reasonable institutional mechanism – in the form of a strong criminal administration system. In every criminal administration, there exists a tripartite institution – police, court and prison institutions. While the police are the first point of call in every criminal administration process, the court is the second, and the third is the prison which serves as a correctional institution for the convicted. A weak criminal administration system creates loopholes for crime occurrence. The extent of the presence of these crimes in today’s society is significant to their role in communities.
Crime activities call for serious concern as they often influence the decision of people to live in certain areas. Also, when crime becomes a frequent issue in any community, many other issues like the livelihood of people, the development of the state and/or process of a community can be affected. According to Havi, many social problems grow out of uncoordinated and disorganised social changes sometimes, especially among those who cannot adjust to the ever-changing new environments. As social changes continue to emerge, they tend to induce social disorganisation, including crime. Crime rates vary from one society to another based on the degree of social change in those societies. Nevertheless, the effectiveness of the criminal administration system – the police, the court, and the prison – in the societies can increase the probability of reducing incentives for individuals to commit a crime in a socially disorganised society. Security and law enforcement provision within every human settlement in any jurisdiction – a village, hamlet, cottage, town, city, metropolis, mega-polis, etc. – has primarily been the preoccupation of the security agencies, particularly the Police Service. Police services have been at the forefront of preventing and solving crimes in most countries. These crimes include burglary, stealing, robbery, rape, trafficking, etc. – disorders that have an instantaneous and perceptible impact on the quality of life of the citizenry. To prevent crime occurrence and enhance community development, community members must unite against all forms of crime, violence and neglect of the rule of law, with serious partnership commitments with the police in reducing fear of crime, crimes and insecurity. The Police agencies must develop a healthy relationship with the members of the communities to satisfactorily and constantly address their concerns. Community and police collaboration in problem identification and solving has yielded desirable outcomes in countries where it was first implemented.
The practice has been adopted by many countries globally to solve crime issues through preventive mechanisms. Besides, keeping communities completely free from crime remains somehow impossible, especially with the traditional system of policing where policing is centred on creation than prevention. Prevention strategies in crime management have nonetheless, proven to be more efficacious in handling crime issues than professional/traditional policing strategies.
Restorative thinking in crime management tends to have yielded low or no significant results, which could be the reason for the manifestation of high crime rates globally. Be that as it may, crime prevention can be referred to as various efforts to prevent crime from occurring or ensuring that criminal offending is prevented before the occurrence of the act in the first instance. The common goal is to ensure the occurrence of future criminal acts is prevented. Characteristically, crime prevention and crime control are not the same. While the former is problem-oriented in nature and normally operates outside of the boundaries of the formal justice system, the latter is characterised by all programmes and policies designed to fight crimes, which include the making of arrests by police, court disposal, and sentencing.
According to Waller, prevention can be considered the 4th pillar of crime reduction in juxtaposition with the police institution, court and prison. Consequently, this categorisation positions crime prevention as an alternative approach to the traditional approaches of crime combating. Ordu and Nnam postulated that rigorous partnership and collaborative efforts of both the formal and informal agencies of social control can lead to a near crime-free society since a completely crime-free society is ideal. In other words, the idea of partnership and collaboration can lead to greater success in crime prevention and control in our societies. The shortcomings of traditional policing catalysed the evolution of Community Policing. Meanwhile, the emergence of community policing was to address the high crime rates the traditional policing system has failed to address by improving police-public relationships. Conversely, community policing has become a globally well-known paradigm of contemporary policing. Although, there is no universal agreement on what constitutes community policing, community policing – also known as policing with the community with its root in England – is “both a philosophy (a way of thinking) and organisational strategy (a way of executing) that allows the police and the community to work together in solving problems of crime and disorder”.
The thinking of CP was governed by the “ideal of policing as a community problem, solving and policing by consent to be responsive to the needs and expectations of residents”. This denotes the partnership between the general public and the police agency to address neighborhood-specific problems, where the public is involved in decision-making processes with the police and is engaged in local problem-solving. However, there are three main complementary components of community policing: (1) community partnership – To establish and maintain trust, (2) problem-solving: a process of identifying specific concerns of communities and the most appropriate remedies to solve the problems, and (3) organisational transformation. The rationale for public involvement is that it has become impossible for the police alone to provide and/or maintain safe communities. In this regard, CP has therefore tasked the Police, especially in the developed world to change their concentration from crime control mechanisms to crime prevention mechanisms and problem-solving, and very recently in developing countries. Scientific evidence abounds to suggest that the police are more effective at reducing crime when the key principles of CP are adopted. Foot patrols as one of the strategies of CP have been successful in crime reduction, including directed patrols in crime hot spots. The basic role of CP is hitherto to ensure crime is prevented before its occurrence by repairing broken windows in an already disorganised society.
Although Ghana has an improving global recognition as one of the peaceful countries within sub-Saharan Africa, there exist some social vices that have created undesirable impacts on the good name of the country. Crimes, such as serial killings, armed robbery, drug trafficking, fraud, rape, child abuse, and cybercrimes – to mention but a few, are already menacingly creating negative impacts on the reputation of Ghana.
To solve these crime menaces, CP was officially launched in Ghana by the Ghana Police Service on August 13, 2011 to make communities across Ghana safer and more habitable although this strategy has been in the system since 2002. Daily Graphic, on 13th February 2016, reported that since the launch of CP in 2011, with the notion of empowering citizens to contribute toward ensuring safety in their communities as well as transparency and accountability in the performance of the GPS, the initiative seems to have lost its essence, as a result of which people now take the law into their own hands when a community member errs on the side of the law. People have now taken responsibility for their safety because they believe that the police cannot protect them.
Community policing is not effective due to many factors. These factors include low awareness of the presence of CP efforts and low knowledge of its functions in the various communities and lack of appropriate community policing strategies. This is premised on the fact that achieving success in community policing demands a good understanding of the concept by the implementers and the general public. This lack of awareness and knowledge of the function of the CP concept cut across the public and the police service making it difficult to follow good practices of the CP. Furthermore, the lack of appropriate CP strategies in the various communities will make the implementation generally unsuccessful. Even though there is low awareness and knowledge of CP, good cordiality exists between the Police Service and most community leaders in some communities, which are in turn seen as an opportunity to market CP in these communities if the agency wants to get the implementation right.
In conclusion, community policing demands an operating context in which there is high potential to build trust relations between communities, the police, and other public institutions.
Fundamentally, community policing must be adopted strategically, implying an institutional, structural, and cultural commitment to its delivery throughout the policing model.
Failures can be attributed to the unclear vision, managerialism, short-termism, and a lack of commitment to focus police resources on community-led problem-solving.
The role of community policing in counter-terrorism is both increasingly important and scrutinised. In safeguarding terms, this relates to the elicitation of intelligence, interdicting radicalisation, and protecting vulnerable communities from hate crimes and hate incidents.
As a means of amplifying community reassurance, community policing has a role in the alleviation of fear and improving perceptions of community safety. Causative links between increased community policing and crime rate reduction seem weak.
This should not be interpreted as being overly pessimistic. Reducing fear of crime and increasing public perception of the police is likely to increase a community’s sense of self-worth and confidence.
Reference
Acheampong, S. (2015). Community Policing And Crime Prevention In Edge Cities: Insights from Awutu Senya East Municipality. Published Master Dissertation. University of Ghana, Legon
Balcha, M. F. (2014). Assessing The Role of Community Policing in Crime Prevention : Challenges And Prospects. The Case of Bahil Adarash Sub-City, Hawassa, Ethiopia. Hawassa University.
Briggs, R. (2010) ‘Community engagement for counterterrorism : lessons from the United Kingdom, International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs 1944-), 86(4), pp. 971–981
Fielding, N. G. (2005) ‘Concepts and Theory in Community Policing’, The Howard Journal of Criminal Justice, 44(5), pp. 460–472. doi: 10.1111/j.1468-2311.2005.00391.x.
Goodman, M. (2015) Future Crimes: Inside The Digital Underground and the Battle For Our Connected World. Corgi.
The writer is a Ph.D. candidate, CEPA, Ch. ME, ChMC, CFIP, MSC, MPHIL, BSc, LLB, Dip CFI, & Dip P.I. Contact: 0246390969 – Email: [email protected]
