Crime Prevention Action Plan for Mountain View, New Mexico

Introduction

Police forces must handle a wide variety of operations and incidents, which are typically resolved through the assignment of available resources. In certain situations, however, a different police response strategy is required, and a specialized command structure may be needed. Command and control refers to an organization's capacity and authority to direct its staff's actions and deploy its resources effectively. Command and control standards are scalable and may be applied to operations and incidents of varying scope and size — from supervising a local community event to investigating a serious crime such as a multi-site terror attack that necessitates extensive police force mobilization (College of Policing, 2013).

This paper presents a novel action plan that may be utilized to address the growing crime rate in Mountain View (MV), New Mexico. Given this alarming rise in crime, the recommended action plan must be pre-emptive, placing greater emphasis on crime prevention than on detention and correction. Two core approaches are put forward to achieve this goal.

Emphasizing Crime Prevention

While it is clearly important that police capture criminals, ensure they are penalized for their offenses, and provide aid and comfort to crime victims, an equally crucial aspect of law enforcement is collaborating to prevent chaos and crime from occurring in the first place. A reactive approach is, in the long run, costlier than a proactive one. Law enforcers should avoid wasting time debating crime's root causes. Although local governments bear partial responsibility for addressing certain social factors — such as unemployment, poverty, racism, homelessness, class conflict, and deficits in education — that contribute to crime, they must recognize that such factors are often only indirect contributors.

Moreover, many causes of crime that are intrinsic to criminals' character — such as greed, laziness, anger, hatred, and lust — are not easily changed by local governmental authorities. Their focus should therefore be on crime's immediate or direct causes: the environmental and situational conditions that influence potential offenders when deciding whether to commit a particular crime at a given place and time. By giving greater attention to these factors, government officials, police, and other law enforcers can make meaningful progress in crime prevention (Plant & Scott, 2009).

Situational Crime Prevention

The strategy of situational crime prevention originated as a scientific rather than a law enforcement tactic. This approach focuses on reducing crime rates through the creation of safer consumer goods and environments. It shifted the emphasis of crime prevention away from solely attempting to deter lawbreakers through punishment and rehabilitation, toward making potential offenders recognize that committing a particular crime at a given time and place is simply not worth the effort. It achieves this through five key mechanisms:

The implications of this approach extend beyond police functions alone. Local government leaders have considerable influence over the planning and design of safer environments through zoning, land-use laws, and related policies. They may also have some degree of influence over the design and sale of consumer products that are particularly likely to be stolen or used as instruments of crime. Situational crime prevention is widely regarded as consistent with problem-oriented policing (Plant & Scott, 2009).