NCJ Number
93611
Journal
Canadian Police College Journal Volume: 7 Issue: 4 Dated: (1983) Pages: 310-328
Date Published
1983
Length
19 pages
Annotation
This paper suggests intervention strategies that might be used by the police to mitigate the effects of impending social changes that could impact the crime-related factors of target suitability, effective guardianship, and offender motivation.
Abstract
Target suitability will increase with a continued proliferation of valuable, portable, compact, and readily saleable goods because of technological advances in electronics, telecommunications, computerization, and other high technology areas. The concept of motivated offenders is defined in terms of the probability of committing an antisocial act under specific circumstances, rather than as a quality applying to an individual in all circumstances. Anticipated developments with potential effects on the levels of offender motivation include the slowing rate of economic expansion, changes in the age structure of the population, sex role convergence, increased leisure time, decreased work years, and population redistribution. Probable social changes which can erode effective guardianship are reductions in household supervision of youth and in the percentage of households in which someone is home at any given time. Because police intervention strategies to address these possible crime-inducing social changes require program revisions, and because change is rarely accomplished by edict, program implementation considerations are discussed in the paper. Methods are proposed to foster acceptance and promotion of new programs both among the public and within the police service. Priority-setting implications are then discussed, and an overall goal of policing, together with some implicit subgoals, are specified, with an outline of how in one possible order of priority these goals might be achieved. Twenty-nine references are listed.