Social Crime Prevention Program at Colon Street Cebu: Critical Analysis

Crime prevention is important because it attempts to reduce and deter the crimes. It refers to the range of strategies that are implemented by individuals, communities, businesses, non-government organisations and all levels of government to target the various social and environmental factors that increase the risk of crime, disorder and victimisation. There are a variety of different approaches to crime prevention that differ in terms of the focus of the intervention, the types of activities that are delivered, the theory behind how those activities are designed to bring about the desired results and the mechanisms that are applied. The purpose of this social crime prevention essay is, to promote public safety, peace and order in Colon Street Cebu City and to determine the effectiveness and efficiency of the crime prevention program used on Colon. These asses the researcher, students, or even the professional to lessen the crime committed and to strengthen the relationship between the community and the public servants in Colon Street Cebu City.

The Current State of Crime Rate in Colon Street Cebu City.

A high crime rate will drive businesses out of a neighborhood. This eliminates both availability of products and services and a source of jobs. Further, those who do stay find it necessary to charge higher prices to offset losses due to thievery and higher costs of both security measures and insurance premium if insurance is available at all.

The loss of productive activity by those who live by preying on others reduces the output of the area in which they live. Thus, crime injures economically both direct victims and others in the crime-ridden neighborhood.

Community crime prevention programs or strategies target changes in community infrastructure, culture, or the physical environment in order to reduce crime. The diversity of approaches includes neighborhood watch, community policing, urban or physical design, and comprehensive or multi-disciplinary efforts.  These strategies may seek to engage residents, community and faith-based organizations, and local government agencies in addressing the factors that contribute to the community’s crime, delinquency, and disorder.

The ICPC (International Centre for the Prevention of crime) conducted Workshop to develop a set of tools to facilitate the implementation of Crime and Violence Prevention program. On July 4 and 5, ICPC was invited to make a presentation in a National Conference on the theme “Protecting Youth against Delinquency and Crime” in Tunis, Tunisia. The conference was held by the Tunisian Presidency and the Geneva.

The PNP (Philippine National Police) said in Philippine Daily Inquirer that Crime Prevention remains as top priority to ensure public security and safety, but they need the active support and cooperation of the community (Kalibo, Aklan, PIA Sept, The PRO-6 Chief emphasized the vital roles of every stakeholder in preventing crimes, such as cooperation and alertness. People are encouraged to report and become volunteers by informing the PNP about suspicious movement of persons such as modus operandi in their area. Cooperation of each stakeholder is the main key and must be done to preserve the safety of the community.

In Cebu City, Police Office Director Royina Garma fielded 180 personnel from CCPO from the 11 precincts. She also requested for 20 police outpost. So she can provide assign policemen, especially in areas where crimes are rampant and prominent. In addition to the policemen, Garma also contacted local barangay units, such as the tanods, to assist the policemen that she deployed.

Colon Street is known as the oldest street in the Philippines and was built by the Spaniards during the time of Miguel Lopez de Legazpi. It is the heart downtown Cebu, a glittering area by night lined with movie houses, restaurants, department stores and other business establishments. This makes the place become rampant of many kinds of crime.

It is not just others who are adversely affected by criminals. Perpetrators themselves lose ground economically. A large portion of people charged with criminal activity are relatively young. Their criminal behavior harms them in several ways. They may spend time incarcerated when they could have been gaining employment experience. Their criminal record may hamper them in obtaining future employment. They develop attitudes and habits that are detrimental to participation in the workplace. For these reasons many criminals condemn themselves to poverty.

Theoretical Background of the Study

This study is anchored on the Developmental Crime Prevention. The developmental perspective postulates that criminal offending in adolescence and adulthood is influenced by “behavioral and attitudinal patterns that have been learned during an individual’s development”.

The early years of the life course are most influential in shaping later experiences. As Greg Duncan and Katherine Magnuson note: “Principles of developmental science suggest that although beneficial changes are possible at any point in life, interventions early on may be more effective at promoting well-being and competencies compared with interventions undertaken later in life.” They further state that: “early childhood may provide an unusual window of opportunity for interventions because young children are uniquely receptive to enriching and supportive environment. As individuals age, they gain the independence and ability to shape their environments, rendering intervention efforts more complicated and costly” .

Developmental prevention is informed generally by motivational or human development and life-course theories on criminal behavior, as well as by longitudinal studies that follow samples of young persons from their early childhood experiences to the peak of their involvement with crime in their teens and twenties. Developmental prevention aims to influence the scientifically identified risk factors or “root causes” of delinquency and later criminal offending

The theoretical foundation of developmental prevention is robust, and is the subject of the two opening essays of this volume. Frank Cullen, Michael Benson, and Matthew Makarios overview the major developmental and life-course theories of offending, with a special interest in how the theories explain why some individuals “are placed on a pathway, or trajectory, toward a life in antisocial conduct and crime.” David Farrington, Rolf Loeber, and Maria Ttofi summarize the most important risk and protective factors for offending. They conclude that impulsiveness, school achievement, child-rearing methods, young mothers, child abuse, parental conflict, disrupted families, poverty, delinquent peers, and deprived neighborhoods are the most important factors that should be targeted in intervention research.

Supporting statement of this study is the Situational crime prevention. Situational prevention stands apart from the other crime-prevention strategies by its special focus on the setting or place in which criminal acts take place, as well as its crime-specific focus. No less important is situational prevention’s concern with products (e.g., installation of immobilizers on new cars in some parts of Europe, action taken to eliminate cell phone cloning in the United States) and on large-scale systems such as improvements in the banking system to reduce money laundering.

Next is the Community Crime Prevention. More often than not, community-based efforts to prevent crime are thought to be some combination of developmental and situational prevention. Unlike these two crime-prevention strategies, there is little agreement in the academic literature on the definition of community prevention and the types of programs that fall within it. This stems from its early conceptions, with one view focused on the social conditions of crime and the ability of the community to regulate them, and another that “it operates at the level of whole communities regardless of the types of mechanisms involved”.

Then the Social Crime Prevention., this theory is most commonly directed at trying to influence the underlying social and economic causes of crime, as well as offender motivation. This approach tends to include crime prevention measures that take some time to produce the intended results, rather than focusing on the physical environment. This may include action to improve housing, health and educational achievement, as well as improved community cohesion through community development measures.

Another theory is Community development. This is premised on the notion that changing the physical or social organization of communities may influence the behavior of individuals who live there. The risk of becoming involved in crime, or being victimized, is greater in those communities that experience high levels of social exclusion or a lack of social cohesion. Also underlying the community development approach is the belief that crime in a particular community is not primarily or solely the result of the actions of a small number of criminogenically disposed individuals, but the result of the coincidence of a series of structural determinants present within particular communities (eg differential rates of access to housing, employment, education and health services, among other factors). The underlying assumption is that if these crime-promoting structural stress factors can be relieved, reconfigured or removed, then crime will be reduced. Community development strategies can aim to build social cohesion and address factors leading to community disorganization, empower communities to participate in decision-making processes, increase resources, services and economic opportunities in disadvantaged communities or address low level physical or social disorder that may be a precursor to more serious problems. Community development programs that focus on strengthening informal networks and enhancing community structures have the potential to build community capacity, which can, in turn, provide opportunities to mobilize communities to address local crime problems.

Lastly is Crime prevention mechanisms. To accurately identify and share information on the types of mechanisms used in the studies reviewed as part of this project, a consistent and comprehensive framework was required for classifying the mechanisms underpinning the various interventions that have been evaluated. Without a clear framework for their classification, it would be difficult to describe an intervention in a way that can be shared and potentially replicated in another crime prevention strategy. For this reason, the CCO was chosen as the conceptual framework for this review. The CCO framework has been developed to provide a common point of reference to facilitate the effective and efficient transfer of knowledge about the principles underpinning the full range of prevention strategies, as well as to help inform the choice of interventions by practitioners and policymakers. The CCO framework allows for interventions to be classified in accordance with one or more identified precursors for crime and disorder events. These classifications take into consideration both social and environmental causes (reflecting the range of approaches to crime prevention described above). For each precursor, a corresponding principle of prevention is also identified.

Conclusion

There are many possible ways of classifying crime prevention programs. An influential scheme distinguishes four major strategies. Developmental prevention refers to interventions designed to prevent the development of criminal potential in individuals, especially those targeting risk and protective factors discovered in studies of human development. Community prevention refers to interventions designed to change the social conditions and institutions (e.g., families, peers, social norms, clubs, organizations) that influence offending in residential communities. Situational prevention refers to interventions designed to prevent the occurrence of crimes by reducing opportunities and increasing the risk and difficulty of offending. Criminal justice prevention refers to traditional deterrent, incapacitative, and rehabilitative strategies operated by law enforcement and agencies of the criminal justice system.

Various models have been developed to categorise the broad range of activity that falls within the definition of crime prevention. Understanding the different approaches to crime prevention is important, as there are implications for determining the appropriate institutional and management arrangements necessary to support specific crime prevention interventions. An understanding of the different approaches available and their underlying rationale and theory is also crucial to developing effective crime prevention programs and projects.

References

1. Sherman, L. W., Farrington, D. P., Welsh, B. C., & MacKenzie, D. L. (Eds.). (2002). Evidence-Based Crime Prevention. Routledge.

2. Welsh, B. C., & Farrington, D. P. (Eds.). (2012). The Oxford Handbook of Crime Prevention. Oxford University Press.

3. Eck, J. E., & Guerette, R. T. (Eds.). (2012). The Oxford Handbook of Crime Prevention. Oxford University Press.

4. Lab, S. P. (2017). Crime Prevention: Approaches, Practices, and Evaluations. Routledge.

5. Gill, M., Fisher, B., & Bowie, V. (2014). The Evaluation of Crime Prevention Initiatives. The Police Foundation.

6. Welsh, B. C., & Braga, A. A. (Eds.). (2014). Criminal Justice Policy Review, 25(3). Special Issue: Crime Prevention. Sage Journals.

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7. Bowers, K., Johnson, S. D., & Pease, K. (Eds.). (2015). Prospective Longitudinal Experimental Evaluations of Crime Prevention Initiatives. Crime Science Series, 5, 1-103.