Improving Community Involvement in Crime Prevention

The need to tackle crimes is as old as urbanization. Growing immigration to cities and the increase in urban population are not in proportion to public facilities and security and order measures. This creates variety of issues including unemployment, poverty, violence, and crime. The problem at hand is how public involvement and cooperation with the Police of the Islamic Republic of Iran may be employed to prevent increase in crime level. Accordingly, the main objective is to “determine solutions for improving community involvement in crime prevention”. Clearly, in order to determine ways to improve community involvement in crime prevention we need to identify crime prevention, police, and community involvement. To this end, we examined prevention measures with particular emphasis on non-criminal measures and their subsets – local and social prevention. Among police actions, we selected community-based approach, the most prominent form of which is community police. Theories of collective prevention were discussed with particular focus on criminal opportunity theory. In this applied survey we used library method and field studies to collect data. The statistical population includes 504 over-eighteen citizens in northern, southern, western, eastern, and central Tehran as well as 78 police experts including sheriffs in Tehran police stations. Cluster sampling was used for citizens while targeted sampling was utilized for police experts. Data were collected through two researcher-constructed questionnaires. The data were compared by significance test and analyzed through descriptive statistics and SPSS 17.Our findings suggest that most important features in police personnel that can help improving community involvement in crime prevention are behaviors and manners toward public, correct actions, appearance, communication to people, and education. The most important characteristics of people in improving involvement in crime prevention are awareness of one’s self and socio-political environment, public attitude toward police performance, moral motivations, personal inclinations, and methods used in predicting involvement. According to some of respondents, lack of confidence in police, lack of communication of required information to people, improper behavior of police toward people, fear of involvement consequences, and negative attitude to police performance are among the factors which hinders community involvement in crime prevention. Finally, a number of suggestions, including establishment of community police, multi-purpose social organizations, education, and communicating information through media, are provided to improve community involvement in crime prevention.