NCJ Number
87623
Journal
Public Relations Review Volume: 8 Issue: 1 Dated: special issue (Spring 1982) Pages: complete issue
Editor(s)
R E Hiebert
Date Published
1982
Length
62 pages
Annotation
Essays on information strategies for preventing violence emphasize the role of public relations in informing the public, helping to develop public strategies, building community coalitions, encouraging self-help neighborhood programs, and helping businesses to counter crime.
Abstract
Some neighborhood self-help programs are beginning to prove that youth employment, economic development, crime prevention, and private sector partnerships can be integrated in a strategy that addresses the underlying causes of violence in inner cities. A strategy that will deal effectively with violent crime must avoid a predominantly repressive approach and seek a middle ground that will attack the root causes of violence while protecting the public from its consequences. One of the basic causes of violent behavior in American society is the breakdown of a moral order with clear-cut rules for behavior based in consideration for others and a commitment to justice; such a moral consensus has been largely replaced by an amoral pursuit of self-fulfillment, which produces a climate conducive to crime. The entertainment media have done much to reinforce if not contribute to this decay of morality. Violence is such a massive threat to public health that epidemiology offers an approach for mounting a strategy to deal with it. Other means of fighting crime are through education and advertising such as that implemented in the National Citizens' Crime Prevention Campaign and through a battery of community crime prevention programs such as that adopted in Atlanta, Ga. Businesses can also aid in combatting crime by initiating public relations and public service programs that target some general cause of crime, such as unemployment and discrimination in hiring, or some specific crime problem such as drug abuse. For individual entries, see NCJ 87624-31.