Integrated Environmental and Personal Crime Prevention in a Complex Urban System: Challenges and Prospects

• In Event: Posters II

Abstract

Although the importance of multi-disciplinary collaboratives for community-wide crime and violence prevention has been recognized for some time, such collaboratives can be difficult to establish, implement, and sustain (McGarrell et al., 2009; Spergel, 1995). This might be particularly the case for crime-fighting efforts that intermingle law enforcement, social service, and public health entities – agencies with similar “big picture” goals but very different strategies, tactics, and human resources. This presentation will report preliminary results from a city-wide violent crime prevention effort (Project Safe Neighborhoods) led by law enforcement but supported by agencies representing social services, education, health, and municipal services. We applied an innovative crime prevention framework that integrates environmental and police interventions guided by the spatially-oriented Risk Terrain Modeling strategy (Caplan & Kennedy, 2016) in tandem with targeted personal interventions via a comprehensive outreach, assessment, and referral system. Our initial results underscore the difficulty of implementing such multi-pronged intervention schemes in a complex urban system, but highlight the importance of place-based crime-fighting from a multi-disciplinary perspective. Findings also support observations made in earlier studies regarding the importance of maintaining an emphasis on distributed leadership in a multi-disciplinary crime-fighting task force.

Authors

• Paul Boxer, Rutgers University

• Joel M. Caplan, Rutgers University

• Grant Drawve, University of Arkansas

• Henri Buccine-Schraeder, Rutgers University

• Joanna Kubik, Rutgers University

• Meagan Docherty, Rutgers University

• Adam Doyle, Rutgers University

• Carolina Herrera, Rutgers University