The article for discussion this week regarding “Policing and the Fear of Crime” touched on the significant factors that reference the fear of crime. The article first addresses how people feel about crime in their community. Then it progresses the analysis fear from a collection of data and concepts retrieved from research, surveys, and polls. There was an evaluation done in the seventies and eighties, which showed an overwhelming percentage of people who were fearful of becoming victims of violent crimes. There was data retrieved from polls that suggested people were even limiting their activities because they felt uneasy about walking down the street. The sense of fear traveled across different ages, sexes, and professions. The least frightened group individuals were young men, and the most scared were senior women (Moore & Trojanowicz, 1988). There were also variables such as race, class, and residence that altered the public’s perception about fear of violence. The researchers investigated participants who felt as thou if they were ever to acquire wealth and status, their fears of being victims of crime would reduce dramatically. Next, the article addressed what causes someone to become fearful. It was the possibility of actually becoming a victim of a crime which was a considerable influence on person’s fear of crime. There are also the factors of hearsay information about victimization traveling through word of mouth and social networks that cause people to become fearful. While I was assigned to the Gang Unit, people would always ask the questions about the rumors that get passed around about gangs targeting specific individuals for initiations around certain days and times. During my time on the unit, …show more content…
H., & Trojanowicz, R. C. (1988). Policing and the Fear of Crime. Perspectives on Policing, 3, 1-7. Retrieved August 23, 2017.
Paynich, R., & Hill, B. (2014). Fundamentals of crime mapping (2nd ed.). Burlington, MA: Jones &
According to Kelling, Pate, Dieckman, & Brown (1974), patrol is the “backbone” of police work. This belief is based around the premise that the mere presence of police officers on patrol prohibits criminal activity. Despite increasing budgets and the availability of more officers on the streets, crime rates still rose with the expanding metropolitan populations (Kelling et al., 1974). A one year experiment to determine the effectiveness of routine preventive patrol would be conducted, beginning on the first day of October 1972, and ending on the last day of September 1973.
Walker, S., & Katz, C. (2012). Police in America: An Introduction (8th Edition ed.). New York:
This paper will be focusing on the courts as the specific sub-system in the criminal justice system. As said in the book the court system is responsible for charging criminal suspects, carrying out trials, and sentencing a person convicted of a crime. The fear of crime influences criminal justice policies in the court system. One way it does this is with the courts sentencing. Courts are able to give out severe punishments as a method of deterrence. This specific type of deterrence would be general deterrence. The book says that general deterrence theory should work if the punishment is clear, severe, and done swiftly. According to this theory, crime rate should drop because people will fear the punishment. The other way fear of crime influences
Peak, K. J. (2006). Views. In K. J. Peak, Policing America: Methods/Issues/Challenges (p. 263). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Most people use second hand information as their core source of information about crime, this source of information usually being the media. When carrying out sample research in Birmingham, Susan Smith (1984) discovered that 52% of people obtained most of their information about crime from the media, 36% obtained it from hearsay or alleged experiences of friends and neighbours, 3% from their own experiences, and 1% from the police service themselves (cited in Jones, 2001; 8). However the media tend to exaggerate upon areas of criminal activity causing a moral panic. ‘A moral panic is a semi- spontaneous or media generated mass movement based on the perception that some individual or group, frequently a minority group or subculture, is dangerously deviant and poses menace to society. These panics are generally fuelled by the media, although not always caused by, media coverage of social issues… These panics can sometimes lead to mob violence… (newsfilter.co.uk).
Daly, Kathleen, Goldsmith, Andrew, and Israel, Mark. 2006, Crime and Justice: A guide to criminology, third addition, Thomson, Lawbook Co.
Muraski , R. & Roberts. A.R. 2009. Visions for Change: Crime and Justice in the Twenty-First Century, 5th ed. UpperSaddle River, NJ. Pearson/Prentice Hall.
Muncie, J., and Mclaughin, E. (1996) The Problem of Crime. 2nd ed. London: Sage Publication Ltd.
http://www.ojip.usdoj.gov/nij. [Internet Website]. "Crime and Place: Plenary Papers of the 1997 Conference on Criminal Justice Research and Evaluation."
To conclude, the perception of crime is greatly impacted by how media portrays victims of crime, criminals and law enforcement officials are viewed. Often media organisations over-dramatize crime problems to gain consumer attention. The misperception of crime to society impacts how the community live, and how the media presents an inaccurate view of the real level of crime within society. It is believed that the nature of crime in our society is not accurately presented by the
In the context of this class and the concept of planetary urbanism, I chose this case study from South Africa to offer another perspective on gated communities in a global context. As I’ve mentioned before, Western gated communities are better known that such enclaves from other parts of the world. Additionally, South Africa offers an extensive background on crimi-nal activities and urban fear among the population. The following case study by Karina Landman focuses on the Gauteng Province (which includes South Africa’s capital Pretoria as well as Johannesburg) from an urban planning perspective. With the concept of urban fear in mind, I will exemplify how fear of crime influences the urban area inside and outside of gated commu-nities.
The media today is often taken for granted; as people don’t realize the dominance the media source holds in the modern world. Through media sources such as newspaper, TV and social media crime could be easily spread through out the world within seconds. As a result of this, humans understanding of crime and crime control are largely relied upon the media as evidently most people will not be in those serious criminal situations. The media however takes advantage of this situation by exaggerating crime scenes and focusing on particular crimes to make the public fear. Particular groups in the media are stereotyped to an extent where the public foresees then as ‘dangerous’. As a consequence, a change in the public’s perception of crime has forced
Peoples attitudes towards the police and the law play an important role on how they obey the laws and participate in informal social control. Those who see police as unresponsive, or unhelpful lead to more crimes committed in that area, whereas a more positive outlook on the law enforcement; believing police will do their jobs and help others and solve problems, protecting the community will result in less crimes in the area. Therefore, “more crime will occur in neighborhoods characterized by legal cynicism.” (Kirk and Matsuda, 2011) For example, urban areas that alienate themselves from the legal system develop a “code of the street”, meaning more crimes will go unnoticed or unpunished because of the lack of reporting and police duty in that
This essay will contain the ways policing modern society changed throughout the years, and it will show the differences between problem-oriented policing and community policing. It will also show how communities felt safer.
Therefore, according to, (Fear, 2014) explains that “Fear of crime can be differentiated into the public feeling, thoughts, and behaviors. The personal risks of criminal victimization, distinctions can also be made between the tendency to see the situation as fear, the actual experience while those situation, and broader expressions about the cultural and social significance of crime and symbol of crime in peoples neighborhood and in their daily, symbolic lives.” The fear of crime however, do make individuals react a certain way. Individual are more aware of their surroundings. Individuals look for the media to report on crime so they can try to protect themselves and their personal