The Role of the Police in Reducing the Fear of Crime in the Community

Abstract

Background: The feeling of fear of crime is a condition created in the hearts of many citizens, both in urban and rural areas, in war or peace, and the goal of many international researchers in the field of criminology is to evaluate it. This article is broken into three parts. The first part introduces the factors that explain the fear of crime, a including socio-demographic and social-psychological model by A. van der Wurff, L. van Staalduinen, and P. Stringer. The second part provides an overview of paradoxes and inconsistencies in the literature regarding fear of crime and the police’s role in reducing the fear of crime. Discussing public, political, and media perceptions of the role of police, and these perceptions’ implications for possible ways the police can increase feelings of security. Finally, it covers measures that can reduce fear of crime. The police presence in dangerous areas with criminal influence is an important factor to reduce the fear of crime. Citizens continue to make more demands of the police to fight crime, and this task is directed mainly at community policing. Alleviation of the fear of crime comes with the preventive actions of the police. They believe their presence in a neighbourhood calms the situation. For citizens, on the other hand, police presence can be seen as an indicator of an unsafe, tense, or disorderly situation. Methods: The combined methodology from the studies of self-accusation and victimization was used in this paper by following the listed methods. The police’s role to reduce the fear of crime in the RPRFCC community has two distinctive features identified within a comparative study of crime and victimization: the large number and cultural diversity of participants in our country, Kosovo, and its explicitly comparative design. The study reviews how to overcome these challenges and how to gather the data in time or to give an early warning.1 An integral part of comparative survey research is the inclusion of a long tradition of researchers in the fields of cultural anthropology, sociology, political science and criminology, with few clear solutions (A. Prezworski and H. Teune, M. Armer and A. D. Grimshaw, M. L. Kohn, C. Ragin, E. Allardt, S. Karstedt, N. J. Smelser, F. van de Vijver and N. K. Tanzer, T. Bennett, D. Nelken, S. Rokkan, et al.). During the implementation of RPRFCC, many technical, human, and logistical challenges and problems can arise, but awareness of these problems is the best weapon against oversimplification or misinterpretation of the results.2 The research also analyses the strongest and most problematic aspects, such as the challenges faced by residents and identification of a number of recommendations to strengthen law enforcement agencies’ work in the future. The paper addresses the following questions: 1. What conditions and causes lead to the occurrence or development of criminal behaviour in a society at a given time? 2. What are effective ways to remove the conditions and causes of criminal behaviour?