adminPatrick Bhunu
THERE are some routine things that each one of us do so religiously to the extent that we cannot even afford to go out or to sleep before doing them. On a daily basis we do such things as locking the gates, doors, closing windows, guard our purses and secure valuables. We have also gone an extra mile by providing counselling sessions to our children. We buy houses in neighbourhoods where we feel that our safety is guaranteed. We invest in alarms, breed the most vicious dogs and in some instances hire security guard services. This is all done in the name of minimising the prospects of a criminal attack.
In the same vein, business organisations, be they banks, shops, offices, factories and others, have a host of precautionary measures that they religiously enforce in order to safeguard themselves, their employees, clients and other stakeholders against such vices as fraud, unlawful entry, robbery and vandalism. It is in this province of crimes that situational crime prevention methods are applied. Situational prevention measures are focussed on particular areas of the entity and the assumption, generally, is that offenders, when faced with impediments, will merely abandon their plans and shift their attention elsewhere.
Reducing opportunities for crimes perpetrated by employees can indeed bring substantial net reductions in crime and eventually results in healthy profit margins. Situational crime prevention introduces discrete managerial and environmental changes in order to reduce the opportunity for crime to occur in business organisations. It is a proactive measure which seeks to forestall the occurrence of crime rather than to wait for detection and sanctioning of offenders. Therefore it evolves around the crime settings rather than upon those committing criminal acts.
Situational crime measures should be moulded or tailored to highly specific categories of crime. Here distinctions should be made between different kinds of offences under the crime categories. For example, those in the Zimbabwe Republic Police, particularly members of the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) will tell us that unlawful entry targeted at an electrical goods shop certainly requires different measures from those that may be applied to prevent unlawful entry targeted at cash or jewellery items.
The need to tailor measures to particular offences does not necessarily mean that employee offenders are specialists or serial offenders, it simply implies that the commission of specific kinds of crimes depends entirely on the constellation of particular environmental opportunities and that these opportunities may need to be blocked in highly specific ways. I always talk of trying to secure the stable long after the horses have bolted out, this can only be countered by establishing effective opportunity reduction techniques.
At one time or the other, we may all be prepared to steal small items from our employers, but only a few of us would have some courage to go out and rob people in the dark. This simply supports the notion that making it harder to find excuses for criminal action may sometimes be an effective opportunity reduction technique.
Changing the environment is designed to affect assessments made by potential offenders about the cost and benefits of committing a particular crime, given the fact that an individual is presented with an opportunity to commit the crime as a result of his or her interaction with the environment. In this regard, there are a host of measures that hard pressed managers seeking practical ways to solve troublesome crime problems confronting their businesses can employ. These measures may include, but not limited to, the installation of surveillance cameras, target hardening, electronic access control for people, electronic telephone management system, access points closures and improved stock-taking and record keeping procedures.
These measures do not seek to eliminate delinquent behaviour among employees of a company through the improvement of their working conditions and other motivational perks, but are merely there to make criminal action less attractive and more costly.
There are typical living testimonies of successes achieved through situational measures, such as the virtual reduction in armed robberies in banks due to target hardening. Target hardening, in simpler terms, implies making targets more resistant to attack or more difficult to remove or damage. When we fit better doors and windows to our buildings, we will be trying to make the building resistant to attack, which in any literal sense is hardening the target. Other measures that may be applied in order to harden the targeted area or items by offenders are the installation of alarm systems, screens, fencing systems, and the use of wheel locks on parked vehicles.
Target removal entails the removal (permanent or temporary) of vulnerable property. This is done in order to ensure that an item that the offender may be interested in is not visible. A typical example may be removing cash from the drawers or tills and lock it in strong rooms. For a jewellery shop, removing products from the display windows at night is another form of target removal, just like moving small items of value nearer to cash tills in a supermarket.
Reducing gain for the criminal in the event of a crime being committed (reducing payoff) can be achieved through the use of replica items in shop displays, for example. Others may prefer branding or marking of property to make it identifiable, and therefore less valuable to the thief.
Restricting access to buildings or sites is also another form of situational measure that, when properly implemented, makes it difficult for a potential offender to carry on with their act without being detected. Access can be restricted by use of access cards, identity cards, entry card systems, combination locks as well as creating separate entry and exit points.
Any preventive method that slows a criminal down or increases their risk of being caught is an effective method. The longer it takes for one to be able to commit an offence, the more vulnerable the potential criminal will feel, and at the end of the day it becomes mission impossible.
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derick.khumalo