Answer

Week1 a2 project: criminal justice

Introduction

• Crime rates in our community have risen to unacceptable levels.
• This unprecedented rise has been spurred largely by the closure of one the plants that had employed more than 1,000 people.
• We are alone in this. Global trends suggest that crime rates have been on the rise, increasing from 2,300 crimes to 3,000 crimes per 100,000 people (Habitat, 2007).
• In this short presentation, I am going to walk you through the following issues:
• The rising crime rates in our community
• Impact of the high crime rates to our police agency
• Recommendations on how to address the rising crime rates at both community and police agency level
• A possible action plan, and
• The resources needed to implement the plan

Rising crime rates

            Our town has experienced a massive upsurge in crime rate. The reported crimes can be classified into four broad categories:

• Property crimes
  • Burglary
  • Theft/larceny
  • Arson
  • Motor vehicle theft
• Violent crimes
  • Homicide/murder
  • Rape
  • Robbery
  • Aggravated Battery and Assault

Like in other cities that suffer the problem of high unemployment rate, most of the crimes reported in our town fall in the property crime category. These include burglary, theft/larceny, arson, and motor vehicle theft.

Burglary

This occurs when a person unlawfully enters a place such a building, home or motor vehicle with the consent of the owner with the intent of committing felony or theft while inside (Welsh & Farrington, 2007).

Theft/Larceny

This involves unlawful taking, riding, or carrying away property from the owner’s possession. It includes such acts as shoplifting, pickpocketing and other forms of theft.

Arson

Here, a crime perpetrator willfully burns a house, building, motor vehicle, or other type property with a malicious intent such as defraud.

Apart from property crime, violent crime is also on the rise and this include homicide/murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault and battery  

Rising crime rate cont’d

• Organized crime
  • Sale of illegal drugs
  • Prostitution
  • Gambling
  • Loan sharking, and
  • Human trafficking
• Organized crime in the community is also skyrocketing since the closing the closing of the plant. Indeed, our town has, in recent months seen a surge in crime syndicates that facilitate and perpetuate distribution of illegal drugs, prostitution, gambling, loan sharking, and human trafficking among other forms of organized crime.
• Consensual crime
  • Drug abuse
  • Irresponsible alcohol consumption
    • Driving under influence
    • Drunkenness
  • Prostitution
  • Gambling
• The unprecedented rise in organized crime has been a strong predictor for the recent spike in consensual crime. Also known as victimless crime, consensual crime involves people engaging willingly and voluntarily in behaviors and activities that violate the law, although they not harm others. Some of the common forms of consensual crime that have been rampart in the town include drug abuse, prostitution, gambling, and irresponsible alcohol consumption and its related crimes including driving under influence (DUI) and drunkenness.

Internal impact analysis

            The recent spike in crime rates, compounded with a contraction of the town’s economy has affected our officers in various ways including

• Reduced morale
• Poor work-life balance
• Burnout
• Reduced effectiveness in responding to crime

• Augmented by the economic downturn in recent months, the unprecedented rise in crime rates across the town has had a massive impact on our police officers and the whole law enforcement unit. First, majority of our officers are struggling with low morale because they see many in the neighborhood losing what they had toiled for and taken long to earn. The fact that the officers cannot do much to help the residents makes them more demotivated. Second, the police officers are experiencing a poor work-life balance as they are forced to work for longer shifts to combat crime and respond to the reported incidents. In addition to poor work-life balance working overtime also breed work-related stress and burnout among the officers.

Internal impact analysis cont’d

            The high crime rate, combined with the ongoing economic crisis are also affecting our organization in terms of resource constraints and emergency response preparedness.

• Strained resources
• Reduced effectiveness in responding to crime

• The high crime rate came at a time when our town is struggling with an economic crisis. Moreover, such a high was unexpected, and is thus beyond our budget. This means that our resources, including funds and patrol vehicles, are overly strained. The impacts are further reflected in reduced effectiveness in responding to incidents of crime.

Recommendations: community involvement

            After a comprehensive research and consultation with relevant stakeholders, we arrived the following recommendations that will require community involvement in fight against the escalating crime rates.

• Provide job opportunities and income supports
  • Jobs and Income supports to reduce poverty
• Increase formal and natural surveillance
  • Install CCTV cameras in high crime areas
  • Improve lighting both at night and during the day
• Restrict access to tools of crime
  • Spray paints, baggy clothes with many pockets
• Restrict access to alcohol (Cook & Ludwig, 2010)
  • Reduce the number of clubs, pubs, and bars
  • Stricter alcohol policies
• There is an urgent need to prioritize crime control in our community because of its negative contributions to development and the great burden it brings to residents. Successful control of burglary, theft, and other forms of crime, as Cook (2009) reminds us will inevitably contribute positively to investment in the region, job growth, and increase in property values. With this in mind, we have consulted various stakeholder as well as benchmarked best practices in other towns and arrived at a number of recommendations that will require community involvement to curb crime. The main recommendations are that the community should with other agencies to: 1) provide the jobless with jobs and income supports (Cook & Ludwig, 2010); 2) increase formal and natural surveillance (Lopez, 2016); 3) restrict access to tools of crime such as baggy clothes with many pockets; and 4) restrict access to drugs and alcohol

Recommendations: internal agency involvement

            At the internal agency level, we made the following recommendations on how we can combat the high levels of crime.

• Increase access to needed resources
  • Monetary/financial support (Cook & Ludwig, 2010)
  • More patrol cars and additional police officers
• Restrict access to weapons
  • Stop and search
  • Amnesty (Levy, Santhakumaran, & Whitecross, 2014)
• Implement focused deterrence (community) policing (Lopez, 2016)
• Implement hot-spot policing
• Make more use of drug courts
• As mentioned earlier, the unprecedented increase in crime got us unawares, which means our budget and resources are overly strained. We, therefore, recommend that relevant authorities should help us access all the resources we need to not only respond to offences but also prevent their occurrence. some of the resources we need include capital/finances, additional patrols cars and bikes, and additional police officers. Other recommendations we believe will contribute positively to mitigating crime in the community or preventing it altogether at the police level include: 1) restrictions on access to weapons through stop and search, education campaigns, and amnesties (Levy, Santhakumaran, & Whitecross, 2014); 2) implementation of focused deterrence (community policing); 3) implementation of hot-spot policing; and 4) increased use of drug courts (Rao & Vigne, 2013).

Plan of action

• Our organization came up with a plan of action should the aforementioned recommendations be approved.
  1. Goals and objectives (make the community safer for everyone by combating the increasing acts of crime)
  2. Task prioritization and setting deadlines

• Perform cost benefit analysis

1. Set milestones
2. Mobilize the required resources
3. Implement the recommendations

• Monitoring and evaluation

If our recommendations are approved, the first step of our action will be to define our goals and objectives. You will all concur with me that our primary goal and objective is to makes our community safer for everyone and position it for development by curbing the rising crime rates. With this in mind, our next step will be to prioritize tasks that will lead to attainment of the goals and set timeline for each task. The essence is to avoid unnecessary delays during the implementation process. The third step will involve conducting cost benefit analysis to weigh the benefits of implementing the recommendations against its cost. After all, there is no point of investing public resources in implementing the recommendations if they won’t bring significant benefits to the community. In subsequent steps, we will set milestones, to be achieved at each stage, mobilize the required resources, and finally, implement the recommendations. Once implemented, the recommendations will be monitored and evaluated to determine their effectiveness in alleviating crime in the community.

Police resources

• Police resources will inevitably be required successful implementation of the recommendations.
• Some of the resources include;
  • Finance/monetary resources
  • Additional police officers
  • Accessible drug courts
  • Additional patrol bikes, cars, and other equipment

Conclusion

• The unprecedented increase crime rate in our community is largely attributable to economic downturn and high rate of employment.
• We recommend that the community and other relevant agencies must work in collaboration with our organization to address the issue and make the community a safe and secure place for everyone.

            Our specific recommendations are that the community should be actively involved in crime control. This will require the community to:

• Provide job opportunities and income supports
• Increase formal and natural surveillance
• Restrict access to tools of crime
• Restrict access to alcohol

• On our part, the police organization will be required to:
  • Increase access to needed resources
  • Restrict access to weapons
  • Implement focused deterrence (community) policing
  • Implement hot-spot policing
  • Make more use of drug courts