Community Crime Prevention Guide
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Develop a Community Crime Prevention Action Plan
What is Community?
Crime prevention action plans underscore the importance of community mobilization. In this guide, mobilization is a generic, inclusive term that is used to describe a broad range of interactions, including engagement, consultation and working in partnership/collaboration.
Community mobilization is important in a community crime prevention plan because crime and community safety issues emerge from local, specific contexts. Local residents experience crime problems first hand and have valuable knowledge that may be critical to the success of an intervention. The long-term success and sustainability of action plans are linked to the degree of community involvement and ownership of strategies.
While research demonstrates the importance of mobilizing and engaging community, the challenge is to decide who to approach. The term "community" is broadly used to define groups of people, whether stakeholders, interest groups, citizen groups or others. A community may be a geographic location, a community of similar interests (such as faith-based or business groups) or a community around a particular activity, like sports.
A broad definition of community acknowledges the diversity that exists within any community. Diversity is reflected in characteristics such as ethnicity, culture, gender, age, socio-economic background, values, sexual orientation and physical and mental ability. A broad definition also emphasizes the importance of an inclusive culture and of valuing difference between individuals and communities.
The goal of a community crime prevention action plan is to be inclusive in all its work. At times, it may be necessary to tailor mobilization processes and activities to enable some communities or individuals to fully participate.
Identifying the formal and informal community leaderships and networks for change is critical to a community crime prevention action plan. An asset mapping method is discussed in this guide, see Identify Crime Issues in your community.
In the area of crime prevention, three types of communities have been identified, each linked to a specific agenda:
- criminal justice (police, prosecutors, corrections) agencies that support law enforcement to reduce and prevent crime;
- interest-specific community activists or groups who advance change within the criminal justice system; and
- coalitions of community members and institutional players that advance a broad vision of community safety and well-being.
Resources
Although the task of determining what is community may seem daunting, numerous resources exist to assist in this task. One is Effective Engagement: building relationships with community and other stakeholders
. This is a practical planning guide that shares information about tools widely used in community mobilization.
- Book one outlines the principles and importance of effective engagement and sets out a model for developing best-practice engagement activities.
- Book two is a practical guide on engagement planning using an evidence-based approach. This book also provides sample engagement planning documents.
- Book three is a list of various engagement tools, with details of their purpose, use and requirements. A "how to mobilize the community" section provides suggestions on how to start identifying and mobilizing a community. It provides information on the closely linked task of building community capacity. "How to engage youth" focuses on specific mobilization processes for working with youth.
