PROACTIVE POLICING STRATEGIES FOR CRIME PREVENTION
The Hollywood film ”Minority Report” is an action-detective thriller set in Washington D.C. in 2054, where police utilise ” pre-cogs” to arrest and convict criminals before they commit their crime. Precrime relies on the visions of three psychics or “pre-cogs” whose prognoses of future events are never in error. Tom Cruise plays the head of this Precrime unit and is himself accused of the future murder of a man he hasn’t even met. Proactive policing or the act of law enforcement preventing a crime before it takes place has come a long way. Today, the fictional Pre-crime Department in the Minority Report has become a reality in many countries. Person-based predictive policing is proactively using data to identify and investigate potential suspects or victims and also visualise the spread of violence like a virus among communities. The same data is able to predict who gets shot and who may commit the next murder.
Proactive policing implies all strategies that have prevention or reduction of crime as one of their goals that are not reactive such as controlling or dealing with ongoing crimes or responding to crimes after they have occurred. The term “proactive policing” encompasses several methods designed to reduce crime by using prevention strategies. By definition, it stands in contrast to conventional “reactive” policing, which mostly responds to a crime that has occurred.
Proactive policing specifically would include elements which emphasise prevention, mobilisation of resources by expecting events of crime or disorder or by targeting criminal forces likely to drive crime or disorder. There are several proactive policing approaches that we could broadly categorise as place-based, person-focused, problem-oriented, and community-based.
Place-based proactive policing prevents criminal offences by using data to set apart small geographic areas where crime is known to be concentrated. Hotspot policing or crime mapping is one such strategy, which has roots in both the notion and research that crime focuses at places even more than it hinges on people. Locations identified as hotspots may require additional patrol, periodic visits by beat officers, or other responses appropriate for the crimes occurring there. Experiments in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in the 1980s by Sherman revealed that 60 percent of the crime occurs at 6 percent of places. Place-based concepts have led to deterrence-based strategies such as beats, pickets, directed patrol, crackdowns, and different situational crime deterrence approaches to crime hot spots.
GIS can play a crucial role in hotspot policing by enabling crime mapping and analysis by providing mapping solutions for crime analysis, criminal pursuit, traffic safety, community policing, and many other tasks. GIS software helps combine vast amounts of location-based data from multiple sources. A GIS helps crime officers determine potential crime locales by analysing complex seemingly unconnected data and presenting them all in a graphical, layered, spatial interface or map. Mapping crime can help police protect citizens more effectively. An understanding of where and why crimes occur can improve attempts to fight crime. Simple maps that display the locations where crimes or concentrations of crimes have occurred can help direct patrols to places they are most needed. Use of more complex maps to observe trends in criminal activity and plans may prove invaluable in solving criminal cases. Police agencies usually compile q vast amounts of data, but the data in such a form is hard to visualise. However, the same information displayed graphically provides a powerful decision-making tool for investigators, supervisors, and administrators.
Hot spot policing is one of few areas in police research that researchers have analysed using randomised controlled trials. Several systematic studies have uncovered that directing police efforts in a small geographic area diminishes crime. When the police launch an intervention, some criminals get arrested while some stop committing crimes, while others commit crimes in changed locations or alter their ways of executing offences in reaction to the police interventions. Thus, a spot that had been a hub for crimes can abruptly be exempt from criminal activities, with some criminals shifting to another location.
A person focused proactive policing prevents crime by using data to recognise substantial concentrations of crime within small communities. Focused Deterrence, for instance, is a strategy that targets specific criminal behaviour by a few offenders, police confront such offenders and inform them they will not tolerate their persistent criminal behaviour. Yet another person based proactive approach to prevent crimes is “Problem-Oriented Policing (POP) “. Authorities base the POP approach to an understanding of the social causes of crime and treating the same by tailoring remedies to them. POP is an analytical procedure used by police agencies to plan strategies that deter and curtail crime by targeting underlying conditions responsible for recurring crimes by striking at their roots. Once police identify a problem, they expect officers to work closely with community members to develop a solution. The goal is to find a cure for the ailment instead of merely treating the symptoms. This approach requires police organisations to use a spectrum of approaches to problems and assess their impact.
Community policing is another aggressively tested, proactive approach that uses community resources to identify and control sources of crime. Community policing uses strategies that support the systematic use of neighbourhood partnerships and problem-solving techniques to deal with circumstances giving rise to crime proactively. The main aim of neighbourhood policing is to help police build bridges with the community through interactions for creating partnerships and strategies for reducing crime and disorder.
The success of proactive policing depends in no small extent on police legitimacy.
Police legitimacy is the degree to which the community views the police as legitimate; police frequently make this assessment based on the public’s eagerness to heed and collaborate with the police. We may correlate police legitimacy with the extent of public backing, and cooperation they receive, in their endeavours to combat crime. If police give up their legitimacy, it can jeopardize their capacity and power to function effectively. When police lack legitimacy, residents are less likely to contact police or cooperate with their investigations. Police–public interactions contaminated by mistrust are more likely to develop into a conflict or a tussle for dominance and status that could result in injury or death of police and the public alike.
Procedural Justice Policing is an antecedent to police legitimacy; procedural justice focuses on discerned fairness in processes concerned with policing, which includes a chance of being listened to and the awareness that police are impartial, credible, and trustworthy. And also by the way, they treat people with dignity with due regard to their rights. Procedural justice concentrates on how police and other legal authorities interact with the public, and how the aspects of those interchanges mould the public’s impressions of the police, and their readiness to conform to the law. Thus, procedural justice helps develop relationships between authorities and the population in which the community has faith and belief in the police as fair, impartial, benevolent, and legitimate, because of which the community feels compelled to obey the law and the instructions and follow them as mandated. Procedurally just policing is necessary for the development of goodwill between police and communities and improving community perceptions of police legitimacy, which includes the belief that authorities may demand proper behaviour. Creating and sustaining police legitimacy fosters the acceptance of police decisions, respect for the law, and provides for high cooperation between police and public to combat crime.
In 1982, James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling proposed a theory called Broken Windows Policing(BWP). BWP is a proactive approach that centres on vigorous enforcement against minor offences, such as broken windows, which is based on the theory that neighbourhoods tainted by social and physical upheaval imply resident apathy to crime and attract more predatory crime. BWP was further popularised in the 1990s by New York City police commissioner William Bratton and Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Implementing the theory brought about a significant decline in crime in the city. BWP theory infers that policing processes that tackle minor offences such as defacement, gambling, open boozing, and vandalism help to create a climate of order and lawfulness, staving off more severe crimes. So a disciplined and tidy setting, that communities preserve, delivers a sign that the neighbourhood is being monitored and that they will not tolerate criminal behaviour. Contrarily, a disordered environment, one that they do not maintain that has broken windows and is filthy and messy with graffiti and litter would hint that the community is not being regulated and that criminal activity has little chance of detection.
Finally, Predictive policing is the latest proactive approach that offers the recourse to law enforcement agencies to pre-emptively act against anticipated crimes by focusing on crime-prone areas and individuals at the risk of offending or being targeted. If police halt crimes before criminals commit them, it will have a huge social and economic value not just for those at the risk of being victims of such crimes , but also for the criminals, as it can stop them from making life-altering mistakes.
Police in India are continually working with limited resources and are always under pressure while reacting to critical incidents. To solve this problem, police agencies in advanced countries are turning to the technology not just to fight crime but also to prevent it by leveraging the capabilities of “Predictive Policing” that focuses on harnessing the power of big data analytics, coupled with geospatial technologies and a combination of evidence-based police response models to do crime analysis, detection and prevention. Predictive policing is the second step of smart policing that will facilitate the police to provide services efficiently and proactively. The predictive policing technique considerably shifts the response mechanism from reacting to crime to forecasting the possibility of crime and deploying resources to preempt the crime.
India can leverage technology to implement proactive policing by using computer-based algorithms that analyse CCTNS data to sequester places that breed crimes (place-based policing) and single out potential future offenders (person-based policing). Predictive policing promises to be a game-changing concept. Authorities understand that the application of analytical and quantitative approaches will continue to be an essential part of police activities. As it is predictive, the effort involves crunching data of past crimes to foresee and thus, it is primarily reactionary police with a proactive approach.
Just as how police are trying to prevent crimes proactively we can also be proactive and prevent crime in our own houses and offices by reducing the opportunity for crime to occur at our home, our place of work or our business. We can, as individuals and communities, implement these principles by identifying the weak spots, vulnerable areas, and improving upon such areas. We can prevent crimes from occurring in our properties by making it harder for an offender to access our brick and mortar properties by upgrading the locks on your doors, windows, sheds and outbuildings and our electronic devices and by using secure passwords to prevent criminals from hacking into our online accounts. We may leave items in our surroundings, such as tools and ladders that criminals may use to climb up or climb down and commit crimes. We can control access to a location, a person or an object by locking the doors and windows to both our house and our vehicle and by ensuring our fences, hedges, walls and other boundary treatments are in a good state of repair. We may also install oa sound security system in place at a commercial site replete with entry barriers, security guards, ID cards, etc.
With our lives, Stephen Covey identifies being proactive as one of the seven habits, encouraging us to be proactive to be successful. About 95% of your actions and thoughts are repetitive, causing unhealthy and reactive subconscious patterns. There is, however, a part of us that is alive and fully connected to Source, which doesn’t thrive on repetition. When we become self-aware of our thoughts, we will stop reacting like a Pavlovian dog and proactively choose our response by being mindful. The more self-aware we become, the less reactive we will be.
Source from: epaper/deccanchronicle/chennai/dt:02.03.2020
Dr.K. Jayanth Murali is an IPS Officer belonging to 1991 batch. He is borne on Tamil Nadu cadre. He lives with his family in Chennai, India. He is currently serving the Government of Tamil Nadu as Additional Director General of Police, Law and Order.
