History Of Crime Prevention

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History of Crime Prevention The origins of crime prevention can be traced back to Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay’s (1942) Chicago Area Project (CAP). This was one of the first projects to measure crime prevention starting in the 1930s (Welsh and Pfeffer, 2013, p. 537). CAP was initiated in three of the city 's highest crime areas to test delinquency prevention techniques. Shaw’s approach was to rally the parents to establish the Russell Square Community Committee. Also, his objective was to minimize the attraction of delinquency for gang youth. Ultimately, CAP showed that neighborhood self-help could be used as a powerful organizational principle upon which to build new mechanisms of control in crime-ridden minority communities. The next …show more content…

For example, in the late 1970s, 19 organizations came together to create the National Citizens Crime Prevention Campaign in the United States. By 1979, they had release their first press release and by 1980 they aired their first televised public service announcement with the slogan “take a bite out of crime.” (History, para. 2) Furthermore, by 1982 they founded the National Crime Prevention Council, which is currently the nation’s premier crime prevention agency. Finally, Canada has had a National Crime Prevention Strategy since 1994. The strategy is a part of the Public Safety agenda, which supports a range of programs at the local level through funding streams targeting specific topics and problems (Handbook on the Crime Prevention Guidelines, 2010, p. …show more content…

10% of the cities homicides per year were in the targeted neighborhood. The project involved a ten-component community intervention plan which included community mobilization, increased tactical enforcement, and multi-law enforcement sting operations at removing dangerous gang and drug leaders from the streets (Strategy: Safer Design of Public Areas in Neighborhoods, para. 7). As a result of the project, the overall initiative resulted in a 75% decline in crime and the lowest crime rate in the area since 1972 (Strategy: Safer Design.., para.

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