Essay On Community And Crime Prevention

The dominant theme within the article Appeals to community and crime prevention (Crawford, 1995) is the theme of community – which sees several definitions and applications throughout the article. The paper engages in the numerous ways in which ‘community’ can be defined, all of which are reasonable but also hold widely differing ideals to each other. For example, the definition of ‘community as a defence against outsiders’ (Crawford, 1995, p.106) – in an ‘us vs. them’ manner – is a legitimate definition of what community could be, but at the same time it is widely different to the concept of ‘community as shared space’ (Crawford, 1995, p.108), though it also is a legitimate manner of defining what a community could be. Calhoun (1998, cited in Blackshaw, 2010) however notes that “community” cannot be defined as a group of people or a certain place, which throws both previous definitions out of the water. The concept of community is a fluid idea, that is open to interpretation and change, and the applications of it in modern

107). This is a particularly important and prominent concept, as it brings forth the idea that a community is a collection of people who ultimately hold a shared set of universal desires and attitudes. It highlights the issue that intra-personal conflicts within the community will be shifted aside or “defined” away, in order to keep the feeling of community. This can be seen in other situations – in school, for example, groups of children will often define away, or sweep aside their conflicts, in order to keep the larger system running smoothly. When they don’t, problems arise. This definition of community brings attention both to the whole, but also to the individuals, as it realises that in a community there are going to be cases where people do not cooperate, but realise that the needs of the whole are greater than the needs of an