Situational Crime Prevention: Reducing Crime through Environmental Changes

Abstract

Assignment Number [Name] Situational crime prevention is a great approach in crime analysis that pays close attention environmental settings that trigger crime rather than the specific crime offenders. According to Clarke (2016), situational crime prevention approach emphasizes on managerial and environmental changes that helps reduce opportunities of crime occurrence. What does this imply? It is an approach assumes that making strategic changes to an environment plays a significant role in deterring crime thus positively hindering chances of any form of crime occurrence in such environments. For this reason, situational crime prevention approach deals with how rather than why certain crime happens in given situation and how to prevent recurrence or continuity of such crimes. Shariati & Guerette (2017) argues that situational crime prevention approach remains based on four components. The first component is rational choice whereby the approach aims at understanding offenders thought process. Specificity is another component SCP employs to analyze the specific types of crimes offenders engage in to understand the opportunities that triggered offenders’ choices to engage in crime. Opportunity structure helps SCP analysts formulate a map through which offenders took in committing crime as this component helps in gathering information from both the victims and the offenders. Last but not least, SCP employs different techniques for crime prevention that best suit the noted triggers to help reduce opportunity for crime. It is imperative to understand that all the above components utilize rational choice theory to help understand and stop crime. SCP theory assumes that opportunity preceded choice while choice preceded rational choice. Such an assumption implies that rational choice supplement key situations that trigger criminal behavior thus modifying such situations can help in change such rational choices (Cornish & Clarke, 2017). In short, rational choice links situations to certain crime acts which SCP approaches focuses on to enhance modification/change to ensure that...