Progress and Prospects in the Prevention of Repeat Victimization (From Handbook of Crime Prevention and Community Safety, P 143-170, 2005, Nick Tilley, ed, -- See NCJ-214069)

• NCJ Number: 214075
• Author(s): Graham Farrell
• Date Published: 2005
• Length: 28 pages
• Sale Source: Willan Publishing
• Publication Format: Book Chapter
• Publication Type: Issue Overview
• Language: English
• Country: United Kingdom

Annotation

This chapter focuses on research and practice concerning the prevention of repeat victimization.

Abstract

The author begins by presenting some widely accepted facts about repeat victimization. To date, practice and evaluation have focused largely on repeat residential burglary, signaling a pressing need for a broader strategy. The author identifies the types of crimes and disorder most likely to be repeated, including bank robbery, commercial burglary, computer network hacking, and computer theft, and then presents a typology of repeat victimization that describes the type of repeat victimization, its characteristics, and examples. The extent of repeat victimization is briefly discussed before the author moves on to identify the 17 reasons police should focus on the prevention of repeat victimization, which include the fact that targeting repeat victimization is an efficient means of allocating scarce police resources and police managers can use repeat victimization as a performance indicator. Next, the author reviews the research literature on effective means of preventing repeat victimization, focusing specifically on the evaluation of 10 anti-burglary projects which indicated that strong prevention mechanisms must be coupled with multiple tactics for prevention and a strong implementation. Five main challenges to preventing repeat victimization are identified: (1) the measurement of repeat victimization is difficult; (2) discerning the most effective tactical strategy; (3) persuading victims and other citizens to adopt prevention measures; (4) programs designed to prevent repeat victimization cannot be adopted from other localities due to the variable nature of repeat victimization; and (5) sustaining prevention efforts beyond the initial funding year. The author discusses each of these challenges in turn and points out that there has been a paucity of research related to the prevention of repeat victimization for most types of crime. Further, the efforts that have been developed have focused almost exclusively on residential burglary and have suffered from poor implementation. Tables, boxes, figure, notes, references