Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
are ever completely solved; there is always the need to be vigilant against corrup-
tion, against police intimidation, aggression, the sentencing of the innocent, or the
failure to find, or to convict offenders, or solve problems posed by criminal gangs.
In the case of the judicial systems there are many different structures in various
developed countries, but there is a general expectation that justice officers, like
the police, must be held accountable for illegal actions, over-coercive behaviour,
or decisions that deny people their civil rights. Sadly, this is not the case in most
countries throughout the world; the police and security services are usually feared
and seen as part of the problem of safely in the city, since individual officers may
seek bribes, are in the pay of criminals, or act as enforcement agencies on behalf of
a coercive state. Similarly, corrupt judges, or deliberate political interference, often
make a mockery of the fairness of the judicial system. But even in countries where
such problems have largely been reduced, by the development of what a majority
may see as fairer and less biased policing and judicial systems, the last 20 years
has seen increasing dissatisfaction with the crime fighting system's effectiveness.
Four sets of issues account for this situation: problems in defining and measuring
crime; problems in policing, deficiencies in the judicial systems; discontent about
how the consequences of crime are dealt with.
12.3.1
Problems in Defining Crime
At first sight the fact of a crime, a burglary, a murder or car theft, seems easy to
measure. But apart from these examples many types of what are seen by a society
as criminal behaviour are less easy to conceptualise, which causes severe problems
in the compilation of statistics of crime and hence the public's perception of crime
levels. The reason is that crime is not a rigid and unchanging category of behaviour.
We need to be aware of the social construction of crime, because a crime is a result
of the state's decision as to what constitutes a crime (Davies 2005 ). What is a crime
in some jurisdictions (such as abortion in the Irish republic or rape in a marriage
in most western countries) is not criminalised in others, has been decriminalised in
others, or reduced in the level to which punishment applies.
Figure 12.3 shows it is possible to recognize a hierarchy of approaches in the
attempt to measure crime, which creates a sequence of crime reporting. It runs
from the way crime is defined: the extent of criminality disposition in a population;
through anti-social behaviours—those that cause unease or distress to other—but
are not criminalised; to the actions that are criminalized by the laws of a nation—
but which vary considerably between national jurisdictions; to crime events (as well
as failures); to the fact that not all crimes are reported to police; to the even smaller
numbers that are recorded; to crimes subsequently investigated; and those that are
solved in the sense that people are charged; to the numbers of the people that are
convicted and those that are punished.
Each of these stages involves a reduction in the amounts of crime recorded and
eventually solved. This crime recognition sequence illustrates that that there is a
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