Controlling and preventing crime: the role of the community

Table of Contents

Last Updated on June 4, 2024 by Karl Thompson

Many sociological theories have emphasised the important role of the community in preventing crime, from Functionalism to Left Realism.

In common usage, a community usually means a locally based group of people who live in the same area. You might refer to people who live in the same street, neighbourhood, village or even broader geographical area as your ‘community’.

However in sociology a community can mean any group of people who share common attitudes, beliefs, norms and values. In this sense of the word the term community means a much broader group of people, and it doesn’t have to be based in one area.

Communities and social control

The State performs the function of formal social control, through the police, courts and penal system. However, most people manage to get through their entire lives without coming into direct contact with these formal control mechanisms. According to Consensus Theory this is because informal social control at the level of the family and community keeps most people in check.

Both Consensus Theory and Right Realism emphasise the importance of informal social control at the level of the community in keeping crime rates low.

Hirschi’s Bonds of Attachment Theory argued the more attached an individual was to society the less likely they were to commit crime. Thus the more connections a person has to one’s local community or communities in the broader sense of the word the less likely they are to commit crime.

Charles Murray’s Underclass Theory argued that whole communities of the underclass were detached from mainstream society and became ineffective at preventing crime. The Underclass were the long term unemployed and socialised their children into a culture of worklessness and casual criminality.

According to Marxism, the fact that we have whole communities of the underclass is a structural feature of Late-Capitalism because with technological advances, Capitalism requires an ever smaller workforce. Thus we now have millions of permanently unemployed and underemployed people living in Britain. Just for emphasis – this is the same as Underclass Theory, but from the Marxist Perspective, members of the underclass are victims of Capitalism creating unemployment through technological obsolescence.

Wilson and Kelling’s Broken Windows theory argued that signs of physical deterioration within a community led to increasing crime. Areas with lots of rubbish, unmown lawns and vandalised buildings gave the impression there were no informal control mechanisms in place. This attracted drug dealing, drug taking and anti-social behaviour in those areas because deviants believed it would be easier to get away with such deviant activities.

Left Realism: community intervention projects to reduce crime

According to left realism, crime is highest in those areas which suffer the highest levels of relative deprivation and marginalisation.

Relative deprivation refers to the discontent people feel when they compare their positions to those similarly situated and find that they have less than their peers.
Marginalisation is where one is ‘pushed to the edge’ of that society – on the outside of normal society looking in, lacking the resources to fully participate in that society.

According to Left Realists, the conditions of relative deprivation and social exclusion ‘breed crime’, most obviously because criminal means (rather than legitimate means) are often the only way people in such areas can ever hope to achieve material success, while you have relatively little to lose if you get caught.

Left Realists argue that the government should focus on tackling marginalisation and relative deprivation and marginalisation through Community Intervention Projects (aka Social outreach projects).

The College of Policing has a database of interventions and their impacts on offending. It measures the strength of the evidence and impact. All of the following community interventions have proven to be effective at reducing crime:

After School Programmes
Alternative Education Programmes
Boot Camps

Compulsory Community Treatment (mental health medication)
Wilderness challenge programmes

The only intervention which was ineffective was Music making. Interestingly the database also looks at more Zero Tolerance measures of crime control associated with Right Realism, some of which actually increase crime!

Community intervention projects involve such things as local councils working with members of local communities to provide improved opportunities for young people ‘at risk of offending’ through providing training opportunities or a more active and engaging education for certain children.

Neigbourhood Watch

Neighbourhood Watch Schemes are part of both Left and Right Realist crime prevention strategies.

These are community groups which work together to put in place crime prevention measures in their local communities. You can go to the Neigbhourhood Watch site and find lots of info about how to implement crime prevention measures locally for a wide variety of crimes.

According to a summary of 14 studies, for every 100 crimes in the UK Neighbourhood Watch prevents 15 of them. So without the scheme we would presumably see a 15% increase in crime.

The role of the community in preventing crime in post/ late modern society…

Postmodernists argue that the capacity of local communities to control crime informally, even with the help of state-intervention, is limited because communities today have a high turnover of population – communities tend to be unstable, short-lived and fleeting.

Moreover, Postmodernists point out that the concept of ‘local community’ is irrelevant to many people’s lives today because society is not made up of ‘communities’, it is made up of ‘networks’ Rather than being integrated into tight-knit communities restricted to one place, we have weaker connections to a higher number of people via virtual networks which spread over large distances.

These networks mean that we become susceptible to a whole range of ‘new crimes’ such as cyber-bullying, trolling, phishing, and identity theft, which take place in ‘virtual space’ and there is thus nothing local communities can do to control such crimes.

Moreover, members of these virtual networks are also relatively powerless to stop criminals operating through virtual networks. In short, in the postmodern, networked society, local communities are powerless to control virtual crime.

Right Realist Criminology – Includes an introduction to Realism and detailed class notes on Right Realism covering rational choice theory, broken windows theory, Charles Murray’s views on the underclass, situational crime prevention and environmental crime prevention (mainly zero tolerance policing).

Left Realist Criminology – class notes covering relative deprivation, marginalisation, subcultures, early intervention, community based solutions to crime and community policing.