Variation in Crime Prevention Participation: Evidence from the British Crime Survey
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Variation in Crime Prevention Participation: Evidence from the British Crime Survey Tim Hope and Steven P. Lab 1 Past attempts to delineate who participates in crime prevention have focused primarily on the demographic characteristics of those involved in various programmes, and have ignored information on the neighbourhood environment and the respondents’ perceptions about crime and fear. Using data from the 1994 British Crime Survey, this paper investigates the predictors of participation in varying forms of crime prevention. Examination of the data reveals that respondents take part in five clear groupings of preventive activity. Using these domains to probe whether different sets of demographic, areal and perceptual variables predict citizen participation reveals that predictors of participation vary across the crime prevention domains, particularly in terms of subjective perceptions and, to a lesser extent, demographic variables. Key Words: Crime prevention participation; British Crime Survey; private security; Neighbourhood Watch Introduction Discussions of crime prevention programming invariably note two common facts. The first is that official agents of social control, particularly the police, cannot prevent crime and disorder without the significant participation of the public. The second is that engendering citizen participation is, at best, difficult. These facts suggest that successful crime prevention should be an elusive goal. Indeed, any examination of crime prevention programmes reveals a wide range of success and failure, sometimes for similar programmes at different times and/or locations.2 Too often, such programmes are seen to fail without any clear understanding of why they have done so.3 One obstacle, perhaps, has been a lack of attention to the distinction between ‘implementation failure’—ie, failure due to practical difficulties in implementing crime prevention programmes—and ‘theory failure’—ie, failure of measures to produce crime prevention outcomes.4 If preventive measures are perceived to be inappropriate, unacceptable, costly or impracticable by those whose co-operation is required to put them into practice, then it would seem unlikely that they would stand much chance of being implemented, let alone demonstrate success in reducing crime. Surprisingly, however, there has been relatively little recent attention paid to how ordinary private citizens view crime prevention and in what kinds of activity they are prepared to engage. Most policy interest, at least in Britain, has been with developing mechanisms to ‘supply’ crime prevention to the community—whether, for example, through the development of an infrastructure of statutory agencies (via the Crime and Disorder Act, 1998), by encouraging multi-agency partnership working at a local level, or by seeking to influence private firms and organizations to adopt more crime-preventive practices and commodities.5 Yet, in the final analysis, the intended purpose of most of these mechanisms is to influence the behaviour of private citizens, pri
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