Displacement And Diffusion, Mass Media And Crime Prevention

It is very plausible that social constructs and environmental influences greatly impact the decisions and conditions of communities and the people that reside within them. All around us we can see evidence that may formulate our opinions and sway our opinions for good or bad. It is important not to forget that depictions of criminals, their habitats or way of life, can be misconstrued by media outlets and other press coverage. It is rare that the whole story told, so we must research deeper into matters and combine facts to fully comprehend the situation. In turn, this will produce the most accurate answers, or reasons behind acts committed.According to author Frank Schmalleger, "Places can be criminogenic because they have certain routine characteristics associated with them or because they provide the characteristics that facilitate crime commission." This has to be a true statement, if not partial, since history shows us that crime tends to occur in rowdy or overwhelmingly poor areas. At the same time, crime also occurs in less dangerous zones, albeit less frequently. It is my

Weisburd produced evidence to show that the introduction of a crime prevention strategy in a small, high-crime area often creates some type of diffusion of benefits to nearby areas (NIJ, 2009). Which means it has reduced crime rather than increasing it in the zone around the targeted areas. Crimes don’t depend on just the criminals, but also on policing in the key places and other factors (Clarke and Weisburd, 1994). For example, the placement of fences, alleys and other environmental factors that could easily make for a high crime location.

Since it appears that the vast majority of the offenders are rational, crimes almost always happen at some specific areas, places or regions and are rarely randomly distributed, if not never. This phenomenon is well introduced in the crime pattern theory (Brantingham and Brantingham, 1981, 1984, 1993) which intersects the rational theory, routine activity theory and crime pattern theory. In crime pattern theory, both offenders and victim have their own behavior patterns consisting of the same or different activity places. Crimes are more likely to happen in these intersected activity places. Iron Law of Troublesome Places (Wilcox and Eck, 2011) simply indicates that few places (roughly 20%) are responsible for most of problems (roughly 80%),

In 1979 the theorists Lawrence Cohen and Marcus Felson developed a theory based on their research on the increase of crime after the Word War II. They created a theory based on how the increase of suitable targets, the absence of capable guardianship, and motivated offenders are related when producing crime. This theory argues that time and space is one of the main factors when committing crime. Moreover, the theory helps us understand how our everyday activities might lead to criminal activity. Individuals that live in hotspots have more probabilities of being a suitable target because of the increase of motivated offenders in the area. In addition, RAT help us observe the correlation between individuals who stayed at home and the decrease in crime. Moreover, routine activity theory, helps us to change our lifestyle on order to reduce the probabilities that may lead to criminal victimization. Finally, RAT can be use in research in order to test data collection in the areas there of high concentration of crime and offenders.

As members of the criminal justice profession attempt to find the origin of crime and why individuals are motivated to participate in criminal activity. There is the need to attack the problem from all angles and perspectives. The plan is to introduce several concepts that are similar in nature with intentions of establishing a working theory that can be applied to concerns of delinquency. The ecological approach leads to the criminology of place which attributes the necessity for geographical locations that assist in victimization. Also the assumption that bad neighborhoods consist of dense, small homes that will be overcrowded, which contribute to the opportunities to be deviant.

In this week reading highlight a number of theories, in which offenders are typically committing crimes. My selection is routine activity-theory. The reason for the selection is that it covers a broad aspect as to why theories routine crimes occurred. An example is when vehicle burglary is reported and in almost 9 out of 10 it could have been prevented if item was not left in plain view. Besides, other aspects are the offenders’ determination to commit their crimes, and precisely vulnerability and insufficient protection probably play a huge part as well. Every offender may have a unique motivation as to why he or she breaks the law. However, a common motive is to get money from stolen property. Furthermore, poor neighborhood and lack of opportunity

Many studies have been developed on how to prevent crimes from occurring or what are the ways to stop the criminal acts. Guerette & Bowers (2009), they examined and evaluate situational crime prevention techniques which classified by Clarke and Cornish, to determine if the crime displacement and crime diffusion is effective in offending criminal acts. Many critics argued about the effectiveness of crime displacement in offending crimes because of the limited studies about it. Displacement as defined by Guerette & Bowers, it is the relocation of a crime from one place, time, target, offense, tactic, or offender to another as a result of some crime-prevention initiative and crime diffusion is the opposite of crime displacement (Guerette & Bowers, 2009). For this reason, Guerette & Bowers

Displacement is the response of offenders to the crime prevention strategies, especially the ones that block criminal opportunities (Barr and Pease, 1990; Eck, 1993). Besides the most intelligible displacement, the change in the location of crimes (spatial displacement), researchers proposed five other types of displacements, which are: temporal displacement, target (victim) displacement, method displacement, crime type displacement, and perpetrator (offender) displacement (Reppetto, 1976; Garbor, 1990; Barr and Pease, 1990; Eck, 1993). Table 1 shows these six forms of displacements and their distinctions, as well as examples.

Introduction Routine activity theory is derived from the classical school criminological thought. Theorists from the classical school see humans as rational beings that make their decisions based on their own free will. Unlike the majority of theories, the routine activity theory focuses on victimization instead of the offender. Instead of explaining or focusing on why crime occurs, the routine activity theory presumes that criminal behavior and tendencies are constantly present in members of society, but the criminal behavior is waiting for opportunity to rise.

The theories that have been long used to understand how far an offender is willing to travel to commit a crime is crime pattern theory and routine activities theory. Crime pattern theory suggests that offenders will come across opportunities to commit crime by going on their day to day activities. This is where an offenders nodes and paths are identified. Nodes are areas where every day activities are performed for a long period of time, like work or school. Crime pattern theory also suggest that crime will most likely happen while a person is on their way from one node to another as long as the opportunity is present. Having that the offender is familiar with their path to their home, job, or school it is easier from them to come across a

A person’s awareness space is the areas in which they are familiar with. An individual’s awareness space usually correlates with the person's activity space (2014). The crime pattern theory is the thought process of committing any crime and ways of explaining why crimes are committed in certain areas. According to Environmental Criminology (2014), “potential offenders tend to search for opportunities to commit crimes along the nodes and paths of their own activity and awareness spaces” (2014). Awareness space also consists of places that individuals have visited or are aware of that they love to frequently hang around. Police consider those areas “hot spots” and officers are committed to working and making sure those offenders do not commit

Fear is an emotion and like many other emotions, it can overwhelm and control you. The reason that the fear of crime is rampant is because “the rate of violent crime is still relatively high despite recent decreases: 17 out of every 1,000 residents age 12 or older and living in an urban area were victimized by violent crime in 2009 (Greene & Heilbrun, 2014). Many Americans continue to be consumed by fear of crime. I also think that media, the internet, and video games play a huge factor in fear of crime. You turn on the TV and you constantly see a crime. Reality TV has become popular as of late and most of these shows breed violence. “The media, particularly cable networks, provide extensive coverage of heinous crimes, contributing to a heightened

The theory arose following Cohen and Felson (1979) research on the high urban crime rates during the 1960s. The theorists observed that America still reported a high incidence of crime when factors that are traditionally known to increase crime, such as slowed economic situation, had significantly improved. They argued that crimes occurs at specific times and places involving suitable objects or people (Felson & Cohen, 1979). Felson and Cohen proposed the three necessary elements and argued that the absence of any one would effectively prevent a crime from occurring (Lilly, J. R., Cullen, F. T. 2015). They recommended that structural changes in the routine activity patterns in society would help reduce crime events by altering the convergence of space

The geographic information Systems (GIS) has improved and contributes towards empirical studies. For e.g. Curry and Spegrel (1998) utilize geographical pattern to identify international homicide and common types of crime the findings suggested that international homicides’ are allied to areas of ‘poverty and lack of social control’ and common crimes are mainly connected to a ‘measure of social disorganisation’ furthermore, (Tita, et al, 1999) found that gang formation is developed in areas that are characterised by low principles of informal social control (OECD, 2013, P.78a)

There are several theories of crime that originated from both classical and positive schools of criminology. The various crimes that occur within society have shifted the manner of how Americans live their lives. According to Lilly (1989) the various changes within American society has become a dominant feature of American life and a persuasive warning that the social fabrics of urban slums brew crime. Robert E Park, a newspaper reporter of the 1930’s according to Lilly et al (1989) concluded that like any ecological system, cities development and organization were not random, but rather patterned and could be understood in terms of basic social processes such as invasion, conflict, accommodation, and assimilation. Secondly, he contends and observed that the nature of these social processes and their impact on human behaviors like crime could be ascertained only through careful study of city life. Most importantly, several scholars most notably, Clifford R. Shaw and Henry D. McKay embraced Park’s agenda to explain how urban life shaped the nature of criminal activity. In doing so according to Lilly et al (1989) they laid the foundation for the Chicago School of Criminology. Serious and violent crimes have been in the increase during the latter part of 1980s to present.