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Introduction
The rise of violence in cities is an issue that affects a wide layer of the population. In that regard, Rockville, a large coastal city in North Queensland with a population of 100,000, is no different. The city, despite being a coastal tourists attraction, has distinct problems of poverty and violence, specifically with Aborigines and youth, which are clearly seen in several areas in the city, where these problems are prevailing.
A reported upsurge of violent assault, property offences, defacement with graffiti and chroming (generally, inhalant abuse, with particular reference to sniffing petrol, glue, and chrome paint), has largely affected the community. In addition to being a policing issue, the matter of street gang violence and delinquent acts deserves prominence presumably because their incidence exceeds national and state benchmarks, the numerous stakeholders involved, and because some of the offenses are not so much illegal as social and health matters.
Clearly, such offences require an approach, which involves the perspective of all the stakeholders involved. In that regard, this report analyses the problem proposing a response taken from strategies based on several policing models, such as Zero tolerance and broken Windows theory, the proactive framework, the fire engine approach, and prevention strategy. The model chosen for solving the presented problem is the SARA model which implies scanning and identifying the problem, along with outlining a proper response. According to the analysis, the report will present an implementation plan which will be based on the options that were outlined through the analysed alternative models strategies.
Scanning
According to the SARA model, which abbreviation refers to the systematic process of problem-solving involving Scanning, Analysis, Response and Assessment (Centre for Problem-Oriented Policing, 2009a), the first scanning stage implies the identification of the problems occurring in Rockville. The scanning stage includes the given facts of the case that concern the police and the public at large in Rockville.
The Problem
For the nation as a whole, the AIC (2009a) has tracking data showing that juvenile offences have been twice as prevalent, proportionally speaking, as adult crime, and the former has rebounded whereas that of adults was flat. After declining from 3,965 per 100,000 per year in 1996-97 to 3,023 in 2003-2004, juvenile offender rates resurged in 200607 to 3,532 per 100,000. In 2006, by comparison, the adult offender rate was the lowest ever recorded in the history of the nation, 1,492 per 100,000. These numbers are instructive, not only to establish the scale of juvenile offenses but because the benchmark for common odds reporting is exactly the population of the test community, Rockville.
By way of comparison, Powers (2008) reports that children (in the culpable age range 10 to 17 years of age) comprised one-sixth of the 156,455 offenders identified in Victoria in 1998 and 1999. Children were observed to be over-represented primarily in theft offences theft of bicycle (42.2% of offenders versus the 18% they represented in the offender population), burglary (24.7%), auto theft (32.6%), other theft classes (23%), robbery (23%), and apprehended with equipment for stealing (20.6%) but also in potentially deadlier offences such as arson (39.6%), for property-related offences (33.7%) and disturbances to regulated public order (27.2%).
Chroming and inhalant abuse, on the other hand, are not per se illegal. Only the sale of addictive inhalants to juveniles is prohibited by law if the retailer has reason to believe the product will be abused. Arguing against proposed criminalisation after a two-year upsurge of volatile substance abuse earlier in this decade, Cleary (2003) asserted that the police already sufficient powers such as urging loitering gangs to move on, being able to seize utensils used to chrome, and charging adolescents if they have been witnesses to an offense. (Cleary, 2003)
The Stakeholders
The stakeholders involved in the aforementioned problem might include Police Community Consultative Councils, the juvenile justice and corrections system, the parents of adolescent offenders, property owners who must repair or clean up vandalised property (including the operators of ferry services), the victims of violent assault and, by extension (since many of the victims fell afoul of in inter-gang violence), all the youthful offenders themselves. Additionally, in terms of the crimes committed by Aboriginal part of the population, the stakeholders might include Indigenous community members as the solution of the problem involves interaction and partnership with the police.
Analysis
Analysis, the second stage of the SARA model, is primarily intent on understanding the roots of juvenile offending and taking stock of how Queensland and other states have responded to the problem.
Conditions
It should be mentioned that the 1992 Acts may be flawed for an over-emphasis on children being solely responsible for their behaviour and the earnest hope that administering appropriate punishment will deter juveniles from future offences. Empirical research suggests, moreover, that it is not the knowledge of guaranteed, swift and severe punishment but the upbringing and morality of the minor that differentiates offenders from those who never come to the attention of the juvenile system (Schneider, 1990; Braithwaite 1989).
If the state is to pursue meaningful and sufficiently-funded whole of government social justice strategy, it should recognise that rigorous research has found that the risk profile for juvenile offenders is statistically skewed toward boys, the Indigenous, and those who are severely and continually maltreated. Specifically, the risk is highest where maltreatment last occurred in adolescence or in fact continues at this crucial life stage. By type of maltreatment, sheer neglect and physical abuse are more strongly associated with juvenile offending than emotional or sexual abuse (Dennison, Stewart and Hurren, 2005).
Being included in the facts of the case, one accepts that the prevalence of these petty crimes is confirmed. Equally implicit is that Indigenous and Torres Strait Islander minors are overrepresented in the commission of the stated offenses, though OConnor (1992) refers to this in an analysis of the antecedents for the Juvenile Justice and Childrens Court Acts of 1992.
Constraints
Other than assault, the offenses that concern police and other stakeholders in Rockville defy easy solutions because they are either elusive or not illegal. For instance, owner and neighbourhood vigilance against the intractable problems of vandalism and graffiti at least those that deface areas open to public view, are only part of the solution because the offense is not limited to gangs, the perpetrators readily move elsewhere when police presence is increased, and cleanups invite repeated defacement sooner or later. Hapless property owners may naively believe graffiti is not really a crime and therefore fail to report such to the police. Nor do movies, television and print media help by seeming to glamorise urban street art (Weisel, 2002).
Solutions
In that regard, it can be outlined that the sought solution should not be solely attached to the legal enforcement actions, as they cannot handle the issues which are, on the one hand legal, and on the other are taking a large scale and has serious consequences. Additionally, several offences lie in a risk zone, which comprises of offenders that might step up toward committing more serious offences, if no interventions are made. Thus, the strategies that will be addressed should derive from a framework that not only outlines the legal status of the offenders and the punishment, but also contributes to the prevention of more serious crimes in the future.
Trends and issues
In the long run, crime rate is bound to go up since an analysis conducted jointly by the Queensland Crime and Misconduct Commission and the Australian Institute of Criminology and covering all juvenile offenders under supervision (in youth detention centres) in the state as of 1994 and 1995 revealed that eight in ten became adult criminals as well. For Dr. Paul Mazerolle, Director of Research and Prevention at the Queensland Crime and Misconduct Commission, such astonishingly high recidivism can only mean that the rehabilitation services offered child offenders were wrong or woefully inadequate (Townsend, 2003).
Response
Objectives
Considering the tension between the justice system in Queensland and the supporters of the welfare model, which is operative since 1982 according to OConnor (1992), this tension strives to attain long-term mitigation of juvenile offending rates, and thus the shift to justice system in holding the youth accountable for the their actions implies different objectives to achieve. On the other hand, those who believe in the welfare model, believe that attacking the roots of juvenile offending alienation, marginalisation and rebellion are bound to get better results in the long run than hailing juveniles to the police, neighbourhood watch, security grills or installing CCTV systems everywhere. The Juvenile Justice Act of 1992 established the principle and a corollary objective, if you will, that cautioning and other punishments for children should give offending minors the opportunity to develop in a responsible, beneficial and socially acceptable way (Office of the Queensland Parliamentary Counsel, 2008).
Thus, it can be seen that a central point between the two approaches should be sufficient to address the issues of the youth. Such objectives include:
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Putting an emphasis on the youth at risk.
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Reducing the crime rates.
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Educating the community, in order to take a larger role.
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Achieving a balanced system of differentiation of the committed offences, and accordingly the punishment of the young offenders involved.
Performance indicators
It is quite obvious that the main performance indicators in the presented issue are the crime rate statistics. The trends of the crime, however, are to be measured on the long term, where the official statistics, although can be misleading in terms of overstating the performance and understating the weaknesses in favour of other variables, will show the expected improvements in this area. Nevertheless, the overall perception of the stakeholders involved might give a general view of the trends in the rate of offences on the streets, giving a different perspective on the general picture.
In that regard, a number of surveys, which might trace the undocumented effects of the plans implementation, can fill the gap of information regarding the performance. Such effects might include local unreported offences, the perception of safety, the cleanness of the streets, and etc. Additionally, surveys of the neighbourhood safety and fear can be useful, where There are several theoretical and empirical investigations of how incivilities influence crime and fear at the neighbourhood level. (Crime Prevention Indicators)
Strategies
The strategies proposed can be seen through a representation of the strengths and the limitations of several policing models which will be overviewed in the following section. The strategies include the following:
Zero Tolerance and the Broken Windows Theory
The Broken Windows theory (Wilson and Kelling, 1982) was based on the strong logic of the observation that neglecting to replace a few broken windows in an occupied building attracted vandals to shatter other windows. Unless attended to, this cascaded to breaking and entering, illegal occupation of unoccupied buildings, and arson. The authors also contended that a little litter on a sidewalk leaves pedestrians and tenants in the area complacent about littering some more, leaving trash in piles and breaking into parked cars. The theory appealed to those who believed in more stringent policing as the answer to petty crime and unrestrained vandalism.
The Proactive Framework
Applied to the Rockville case, proactive Knowledge Management (KM) is an outgrowth of both community-based and problem-oriented policing strategies. This has great intuitive appeal for law enforcement agencies because, by leveraging the collective knowledge of the local police force and what is applicable from experiences in the rest of the state, proactive KM can be shown to directly lead to greater productivity. Subsequently, Rockville residents and the media have more positive perceptions of police effectiveness.
Far from compiling just the obvious databases of incidents and suspects, knowledge management directs a more comprehensive view of the micro-environments in which police officers walk their beats, maintain order and exert maximum effort to control crime. Proactive KM strengthens enforcement by replacing raw intuition with empirical insights and supplementing the experience of police officers who have long watched over an area.
Proactive management promises to attain distinctly improved clearance rates and citizen satisfaction (with all the concomitant community support that implies). How is this concretely achieved in practice? If a painstakingly compiled knowledge base of crime and disorder incidents were to be compiled with relevant demographic and socio-economic information into a free-form relational database and inter-correlations calculated, decision rules and artificial intelligence could then predict with reasonable probability when a local area or neighbourhood may be deteriorating, evincing the signs of greater youth gang activity, and being more prone to outbreaks of offenses in the near future. If, for instance, one of the signposts were graffiti and defacement, police officers could intervene early and forestall the (probable) downward spiral into car theft and breaking-and-entering by enjoining residents and shopkeepers to form a community watch at an early stage (Wormelli, 2005).
The other great potential of proactive policing, provided the knowledge base is updated with success achieved down the road, is that the force gains data-based insights as to which responses work better at addressing the problem. Going forward, it is certainly more efficient use of police resources to know that community watch, stricter truancy supervision, and working hand-in-hand with Aborigine community agencies stabilise matters better than simply putting more officers on patrol.
The value of proactive knowledge management was already recognised in the 1960s. Lack of implementation, the Stanford Research Institute found, was most certainly not due to lack of information because police forces routinely showed they already possessed 95% of what was needed. To make the promise of proactive KM a reality, the Rockville force needs an analyst who can zealously cull the information from case files or from officer recall, patiently encode these into an accessible database, and incorporate an AI-strengthened relational system that a police officer could query in plain language and get results that are all relevant to a situation being investigated. Month by month, technology continues to advance to the point where police officers can query powerful systems remotely from mobile platforms, i.e., laptops and Smartphones.
All in all, the computing power, intelligent systems, map-based displays and logic-driven processing have been available for some time. And total cost of acquisition and operation has driven steadily downward. Hence, acquiring the components for proactive policing is no longer a question of resource constraints as much as supportive policy and administrative decision-making.
For all the potential benefits of proactive policing, there are drawbacks. The strategy provokes civil libertarian concerns, including in the Australian local context (OMalley and Sutton, 1997), where mistrust and dominance seem to characterise race relations from day to day.
Reactive Policing (the fire engine approach)
Besides proactive policing, the other prominent facet of Australian police practice is the reactive approach. The latter is perhaps more traditional since, OMalley and Sutton (1997) relate, the fear of mobs and riots that attended the Age of Industrialisation led to the formation of formal, state-controlled forces that could be called on at need. Before then, in fact, communities relied on parish constables and local watchmen (McKay, 2009).
In the modern era, reactive policing retains a place because civil libertarians fear unnecessary enquiries that violate the rights of the innocent and law-abiding. Where violence and disturbances take place on private property, reactive policing means officers must be invited in, either in person or (more likely) over the phone. Thus, the second half of the 20th century saw an emphasis on enhancing crime fighting capability through acquisition of better technology and giving patrols greater mobility, thereby improving efficiency, response times, and clear-up rates.
The drawback is that enhanced crime-control expertise and reactive policing per se do not bring crime rates down. Going by experience in-country and in the United States, it may well be that implementing more frequent and visible police patrols using marked cars in Rockville will reduce neither the apprehensions of the law-abiding nor the propensity of juveniles to try and get away with petty crime (Wilson, 1975). Speedier response rates did not materially alter crime rates, citizen satisfaction with police service or clear-up rates. As well, assigning many more investigators bore no relationship to solving crimes.
Prevention
The viability of the following strategy, prevention, is highlighted by the Attorney-General Department (2009a) launching as early as 2004 a National Community Crime Prevention Programme. Essentially, the Programme involved funding project proposals of citizens and non-government organizations that could enhance community security, forestall crime and anti-social behaviour, generally promote safety, and in all other ways diminish the fear of crime. A fund of $65 million was made available nationwide, with special provision made for the Greater Western Sydney region. Three years later, in May 2007, this was followed by a fast-track Small Grants Programme to accommodate the many proposals that had come in.
Within Queensland itself, initiatives that were approved for offering better prospects of preventing the petty offenses within the scope of this paper were: (Attorney-Generals Department, 2009b; 2009c):
Implementation plan
Taking a cue from the SARA model, one crafts a response by first assembling the alternatives. In particular, this means idea generation informed by investigating what other towns have done with problems that are surely universal.
Having already covered ground on the strategies based on the policing models, this paper offers the working hypothesis that the aforementioned offenses can be traced to the combination of the universal juvenile impulse for social rebellion and the special circumstances of Aboriginal youth exposed to many instances of discrimination and abuse in earlier life.
Moving forward, the plan must reject central government policy drift, evident in funding patterns for local responses. These have been largely of the preservationalist persuasion, meant to protect property and persons, as well as to show that crime rate can at least be stabilised (if not brought down) in the near term. Given the accumulated body of knowledge about the circumstances preceding or associated with juvenile offending, there ought to be greater thought given to fashioning diversion, mentoring and counselling interventions. Any community convinced of the essential humaneness of engaging with juveniles as individuals eager to grow into esteemed citizens, will surely agree with the value of saving and reshaping lives. To get started, all it takes may be reconceptualising the objective as reducing, not the overall crime rate, but the offending rate amongst at-risk juveniles to that of mainstream adolescents, those who do not come to the attention of the justice system.
Presuming that offenders in Rockville can be apprehended and adjudged guilty, the first intervention available to the justice system is that of letting them off with a formal caution delivered by a senior police officer in the presence of parents or guardians. Victoria had recourse to this for just under one-third of juvenile offenders in 1998/99 but did so in precisely half of miscellaneous theft cases, one-fourth of burglaries, 28% in property damage cases, and 19% in the case of assaults. Powers (2008) notes that, notwithstanding the absence of applicable law, this is allowed in the Police Manual for all offences by children where there is enough admissible evidence to commence judicial proceedings and where the child has admitted guilt.
Since 2002, another type of intervention ran in Victoria is the ROPES challenge program, where young offenders coming from a formal caution or those with pronounced anti-social tendencies are invited to participate in an outdoors physical challenge test in partnership with a police officer. A kind of team-building exercise that requires teamwork, encouragement and trust to successfully complete, ROPES aims to steer juveniles away from further criminal or anti social acts. Post completion, youth agencies and family counsellors may do their part to resolve issues raised by the youthful offenders (OMeara, 2007).
Yet a third step that suggests itself is based on the straightforward recommendations of the broken window theory. Kelling and Coles (1998) maintain that, as with repairing damaged windows or clearing sidewalks of litter in quick order so as to prevent the situation from deteriorating, zero tolerance is the key to stop petty crime and anti-social acts from becoming more prevalent. Specifically, the theory puts forward community policing and hyper-vigilant protection of public areas as the best way to prevent juvenile offenses from worsening. In fact, the authors argue, the fine net cast for petty offenses has also resulted in the apprehension of those who commit more serious crimes.
The Role of Stakeholders
The stakeholders, previously mentioned in the report, might include in addition to their formal duties, providing support to community groups, which if provided by the police can be beneficial to both parties. It should be mentioned that the role of the stakeholders, which are part of the legal enforcement has a wider array of roles, including patrols, and night shifts, both of which contributes to the effectiveness of the cooperation. Additionally, the roles of other stakeholders such as the parents of the offenders and the offenders themselves are no less important, and can be seen through the cooperation, monitoring, and education. As to envisioning the stakeholders involved, it is all often the case that crime prevention groups put priority on time spent with the legal and other institutional agencies concerned with juvenile offenses. In the case of the Cairns Neighbourhood Watch, for instance, the objectives consisted of strengthening crime prevention and improving community safety. To achieve the aforementioned, it was thought sufficient to work in partnership with the Police Department, Emergency Services, Department of Housing, Community Renewal, City Council and Ministers Office for e.g. the CBD and Environs Management Plan (Attorney-Generals Department, 2009c).
Resources and Funding
The physical resources, which are necessary for the implementation of the proposed solution implies the usage of educational materials which will be made available in police departments, various support groups and parents. Additionally, the interventions such as the proposed by the ROPES programs might be funded through non-governmental organization, and on the local level, where stakeholders affected by the crime rates might contribute to the project. A fund made available, first on the local level, and then nation wide can fill the gap for the necessary resources for the program to be implemented. It should be mentioned that in certain offences, such as the misuse of the substances, can be funded with the cooperation of police powers, youth mental health and other welfare services. (Gray et al, 2006)
Assessment
The SARA model calls for post-intervention assessment concerning whether a plan was implemented, comparing pre- and post-intervention behavioural benchmarks, investigating whether the overarching goals were met, and resolving continuing gaps with fresh strategies.
The evaluation process will be difficult specifically in cases related to community interventions and police initiatives, which are unrecorded. In that regard, a vital part of the implementation can be seen through documenting the activities performed, whether on the polic
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