Capacity-building in Law Enforcement

• NCJ Number: 179202
• Author(s): David H. Bayley
• Date Published: 1999
• Length: 4 pages
• Corporate Author: Australian Institute of Criminology
• Sale Source: Australian Institute of Criminology
• Publication Format: Document
• Publication Type: Issue Overview
• Language: English
• Country: Australia
• Note: Australian Institute of Criminology Trends and Issues, No. 123, July 1999

Annotation

This paper highlights the increase in the use of private security services in Australia and how this overlaps with public policing and changes its role; the lack of success in community policing is also addressed.

Abstract

Private security services exist in a number of areas in Australia. Commercial interests either create security forces or hire security personnel to protect their property, premises, employees, and customers. Residential communities also provide their own security and regulate access. "Interest communities," such as banks, equities markets, and contiguous businesses, often hire private personnel to protect their operations. Governments themselves authorize quasi-governmental agencies to provide their own security. Also, citizens now volunteer to provide crime prevention information, undertake security analyses at residential and business premises, patrol streets and other public venues, and assist the police during emergencies. In public policing, civilians are being increasingly employed to perform highly visible activities hitherto limited to uniformed personnel, such as staffing reception counters at police stations, receiving and dispatching calls, and working as community crime prevention specialists. Given this trend toward private-sector security activities, the public police should focus their resources on recurrent problems that generate crime, on "hot spots" where police resources are repeatedly needed, as well as on communities with high crime rates. Further, the police should develop theoretically coherent crime-prevention strategies, develop more flexible processes for distributing resources among and within the major budgetary units, learn from their mistakes and share insights about their successes, and encourage government to support studies of the effectiveness of current popular security strategies. Police should accept that they are limited in what they can do to protect the public and understand that private security efforts are needed to supplement and complement the expertise, resources, and responsibilities of the public police. 4 references