Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
find, punish and rehabilitate offenders. Hence, most of the Safe City strategies that
have been effective stress the necessity of adopting more multi-agency crime fight-
ing approaches within the city. So different police jurisdictions, government depart-
ments, social and medical agencies, justice systems, and even schools in the case
of juvenile crime, should co-operate to share information about potential criminal
behaviour. Certainly there will always be organizational rivalries and differences of
opinions as to the best approaches, even to tendencies to restrict information flows
about crime or those prone to crime to people within an organization, for many be-
lieve that the rights of privacy and protection of a citizen's rights should restrict the
general availability of information. But this co-operation is necessary if the battle is
to be successful. For example, an important part of the Liveable Rotterdam strategy
(van den Berg et al. 2006 ) was the decision to forge formal agreements between
different municipal departments as well as with parts of surrounding government
departments, in addition to police, justice and welfare agencies and seeking the
co-operation of the national government. The main message of this feature is that
no single part of the crime-fighting or crime prevention units can complete the task
alone.
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Effective and Accountable Policies
Any Safe City strategy should contain individual programmes that have been shown
to be effective and accountable, crime-fighting policies that are appropriate for par-
ticular problems. In the last few decades more policies are being subject to rigorous
scientific experimentation to measure effectiveness and costs, especially in relation
to evidence-based policing (Sherman 2002 ) or violence control (Tolan and Guera
1994 ; Elliot 1993 ; Greenwood 2004 ). This led to U.K. officers creating a Society
for Evidence-based Policing in 2010 (SEBP). The implementation of each policy
involves access to sufficient resources—in qualified personnel and especially long-
term funding—to solve the problems faced. The policies adopted should also have
specific, measurable targets with progress being monitored to ensure that such goals
are attained, again as far as possible. These need to have realistic attainments, so
several monitoring periods may be required before real success is achieved. Ad-
vocates also argue that managers responsible for the policies should also be held
accountable for the success or failure of policies.Finally, they should be especially
sensitive to the safety problems of women, following the 'gender mainstreaming'
approach to gender equity (U.N. 2002) and the policies of the UNWomen initiatives
(UNW).
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Spatial Incidence of Crime
Several spatial issues are involved . Many crimes vary in their spatial incidence so
most Safe City Policies target what are now called the spatial 'hot spots' of crime
and also accept that the police will have quite different policies for fighting crime
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