Neighborhoods with more police patrols are less likely to be burglarized than neighborhoods with normal police patrols
Abstract:
Orientation: Neighbourhoods with more police patrols are less likely to be burglarized than neighborhoods with normal police patrols
Research purpose: The purpose of the study is to determine whether perceived more police patrols in the neighbourhoods can have a direct correlation with fewer reported burglaries.
Motivation for the study: To develop a multivariate understanding of the trends of reported burglaries in neighbourhoods with increased police presence.
Research design, approach and method: This is a survey research which seeks to get from the police the primary data of the nature and frequencies of burglaries reported in a metropolis estate. Methodological processes are both qualitative and quantitative. Focus group discussions, structured interviews and mail questionnaires will be used to collect data from the police and from the state managers. This will then be followed by a descriptive statistical analysis. A summary and interpretation of results will then be provided.
Main findings: Whereas much of surveys have looked at police performance focussing on effective training and work equipment, the increased police presence in the neighbourhood is thought to scare buglers and may discourage numerous attempts before they occur, more like prevention measure.
Practical/managerial implications: The research findings could provide the police department with additional incentive to succour the reported crime data trends and respond adequately with increased presence.
Contribution/value-addition: It is suggested here that the study will provide a platform of decision making human resource divisions of police to employ more officers for better policing.
Introduction
Sparked by pure human curiosity and, perhaps, genuine heightened concern in matters of personal and neighbourhood security, many have gone into asking what the police can do to effectively address crime and disorder. There exists a large pool of published information on the topic of criminal justice, but there is a specific pack of information reviews that have sort to address the core question of what constitutes a properly working police (White, 2011).
Background of the Study
This is one more proposed investigation on criminal justice, which however seeks to deviate from the conventional identified police policing strategies and tactics. Our reviews from available literature have revealed a trend that is worth noting. Prior investigations have focused what the police should be doing, what the police should not be doing and what we are not adequately informed about in the course of police work. Though much is revealed from literature on the best-in-class suggestions in terms of the expected police behaviour, conduct and practices, but literature has been boldly silent on the police numbers per unit area in terms of demography. Based on the critical review of the literature on police policing, therefore, we seek to correlate police policing effectiveness and the matter we consider resides beyond a single or individual police actor in addressing crime and correcting disorder (Willis, Mastrofski, & Weisburd, 2007). This is the matter of police numbers, area demographic numbers per police and effective police policing. This matter needs to be eliminated because of the possibility of blanket accusation on the police policing activities being inordinately unsatisfactory.
Problem of the Statement
Security is a matter of grave concern, not only to the government but even seriously affect the people and their daily way of life. While police are trained in recognised curriculum, equipped with working tools and therefore expected to perform extraordinarily, many neighbourhoods have come to realise that inadequate responses or ineffective outputs have often characterised the police operations. This scenario has been seen especially, where there is the occurrence of a larger magnitude of disorder (Lum, Koper, & Telep, 2011).
But especially important to note, majority of neighbourhoods report sparks of crime in isolated corners of the communities in which the go about their businesses or reside. This paper, therefore proposes to examine the possible dimension of inadequate policing resulting from the possibility limited police numbers versus the population per area of service.
Literature Review
Most studies have looked at policing studies as cases and largely checked at large urban police departments (Skogan, 1990). While this is not the contention, most of these studies looked at the components of police behaviour as individuals and never got into depth of looking at the uncontrollable factors that could bedevilled the work environment where the police operate, the focus of this study (Farrington & Welsh, 2005). Previous literature almost always returned the same verdict of the same question running around:
What strategies are most successful, and how should police implement them? This did not adequately take care of the non-normative type of thing including the fact that police are human, cannot be present everywhere all the time and might miss several cases, forcing only knee-jack reasons to already occurred problems.
There appears to much persuasive literature on policing regarding hotspots but this also is not adequate because the evidence of hot spots is based on perception (Braga, 2005). If burglars know then easily they will change their operations. This is more compelling reason for our research to look into police presence instead of reactions to police capabilities (Townsley, 2008).
The Research Method and approach
This research is seeking to reveal the results of interviews that will be carried out among the metropolitan police in the city of a named state acting under the general. The police will form the primary respondents. Secondary, respondents will be residents in two selected neighbourhoods with organised and joint estate management. This will clarify the possibility of emerging conflict where the police can insist they are few, overworked and probably anything else that goes into their interest. The chosen communities would be asked to confirm or deny their perception of the overall effectiveness of the police patrols. Of specific concern to them is: Do they feel the police in the neighbourhood? The [police interviewees will be sorted into two categories. This study purposes to use all the police below the top most rank to establish their feel of the nature of pressure associated with insufficient numbers, if any. The top officer is considered a manager, who may, in all possibilities be biased by the trappings of the office. This category of police might decide to insist that their juniors are the problem. Therefore, it will be interesting to see how the bottom and top levels of police react to this matter.
Research Setting and Instrument
For more confident results and because the lower rank of police levels may have many respondents, an anonymous mail questionnaire will be sent to individual police e-mail accounts. All questionnaires will be introduced and confidence of respondents affirmed. The questionnaires will carry, in a few cases a different framing of the questions seeking answer the core research objective of attempting to justify or deny the research hypothesis. Because secondary data will be sought to corroborate or balance primary responses, three respondents will be targeted. The primary respondents will be the police and the secondary respondents will be the residential estate leadership on the concern of police policing presence in the life of residents.
Research Strategy
Research Recruitment, Procedure and Ethical Considerations
The department of police will be requested for a no name list of all police officers e-mail lines in the metropolis. An excel sheet of the mail list will be created and an introduced questionnaire mailed to each police person’s-mail address number. A purposeful, e-mail address will be created by the researcher and moderately titled to, be liked by the police, as “policewelfare@awebaddress.” This is meant to create an attractive or truly enticing psychology to ensnare as many officers to read their e-mail inbox details and actually make the final step to electronically answer the few questions whose major objective is to confirm or deny the place of police numbers and impact on policing quality. On the other hand, since the head police will be few and scattered in the police bases, the researcher will find appointment and interview each on the core matter of policing and police numbers. The same is also true on further interviews of the estate leadership who will be assembled at the town hall for focus group discussions. This should limit the time spent in data collection, put checks and balances in separate responses and create a unified research verdict on various interest groups. The mail questionnaires to the lower level police will be accepted back in a month to allow for emergency or busy officers to be catered for. It is hoped that those who will have seen this questionnaire may out of curiosity alert their colleagues who mat intern check and fill in the questionnaires. An electronic allowance will be created to allow one to auto-save the answers so far provided, and continue at an appropriate time, for there could be elements of disruption as an officer fills in this form. The period wills in addition, help to spread the factor of not checking one’s mail over an appropriate length of time to help the police come back to the e-mails should they, perhaps be non-regular users.
Data Analysis
Data will be analysed by separate met5hodolies. For example data from the estate managers obtained from focus group discussions will be taken to have been analysed for a single voice for general census will have been agreed on at the town hall. However, data from the lower police and the senior police chiefs will be analysed by the Statistical Package for Social Scientists. All data will be filtered for similarities in answering the direct objective of the study which is to test the impact of police numbers on the population feeling of the police presence. Data will be presented for comparison of outcomes with the means of various groups compared. Linear regression analysis will be used to test the hypothesis stating that police numbers help in better policing. Pearson’s moment correlation will be used to finally test the straight of the correlation.
Results and Conclusion
The results of this research will be presented in tables, graphs and pie charts. The overall findings of this study, is believed to posses the potential of adding a dimension to the police to fairly accurately and constantly, consider community numbers as a consequence of effective policing.
The results will, further add knowledge in the existing body of criminal law.
Limitations of this Research
This paper believes that there could reside, environmental independent factors that the police have no control over and which have not been considered in evaluating their overall effectiveness in restoring law and order. The research may further be limited by the subjective opinion of respondents which may conflict, sharply, depending on who the question of numbers and effectiveness may be poised to. The mail questionnaire will only be availed to the police whose primary e-mail address data will have been found at the central registry as of the time of the research.
References
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