Paperback released by IAP in May, 2008 Scholars in various disciplines are recommending comprehensive measures to solve multiple societal as well as individual problems. The philosophy of "community education" has been overlooked but is a workable, comprehensive approach to addressing crime. As used in this book, community education is a philosophy, process, and program comprised of three overriding and interrelated elements: community empowerment, community problem-solving, and the effort to involve all community members in the pursuit of lifelong learning. The Hyde Park neighborhood in St. Louis has one of the highest rates of reported drug sales and high rates of homicide, robbery, aggravated assault, arson, and burglary. The community lays claim to several crime-inducing variables including population loss, a high percentage of population shift resulting in a higher percentage of black population and boarded-up housing units, a high rate of unemployment, a very low per capita income and a high percentage of citizens living below the poverty line, and a high percentage of female-headed households. Nevertheless, the people of Hyde Park are participating in a crime prevention approach that is applicable to all communities. Insights to urban life and problem solving are provided by community members, covering such topics as policing and how it can be improved. These insights and others offered by the author are supported by theories and philosophies found in the literature. In the process of solving their own problems, community members involve themselves in lifelong learning activities and leadership development. Written in a style that is appealing to the general public as well as academics, it is of special interest to educators, community leaders, criminologists, academics in urban affairs and sociology, social workers, law enforcement agents, and politicians.

This book explores multi-year community-based crime prevention initiatives in the United States, from their design and implementation, through 5-year follow ups. It provides an overview of programs of various sizes, affecting diverse communities from urban to rural environments, larger and smaller populations, with a range of site-specific problems. The research is based on a United States federally-funded program called the Byrne Criminal Justice Initiative (BJCI) which began in 2012, and has funded programs in 65 communities, across 28 states and 61 cities. This book serves to document the process, challenges, and lessons learned from the design and implementation of this innovative program. It covers researcher-practitioner partnerships, crime prevention planning processes, programming implementation, and issues related to sustainability of community-policing initiatives that transcend institutional barriers and leadership turnover. Through researcher partnerships at each site, it provides a rich dataset for understanding and comparing the social and economic problems that contribute to criminality, as well as the conditions where prosocial behavior and collective efficacy thrive. It also examines the future of this federally-funded program going forward in a new Presidential administration. This work will be of interest to researchers in criminology and criminal justice, particularly with an interest in translational/applied criminology and crime prevention, as well as related fields such as public policy, urban planning, and sociology.

This book introduces the philosophy of "community education" as a workable, comprehensive approach to addressing crime, and describes its use in the Hyde Park neighborhood of St. Louis as a case example. Community education attempts to rebuild communities by addressing three overriding and interrelated elements : community empowerment, community problem-solving, and the effort to involve all community members in the pursuit of lifelong learning.

Proactive policing, as a strategic approach used by police agencies to prevent crime, is a relatively new phenomenon in the United States. It developed from a crisis in confidence in policing that began to emerge in the 1960s because of social unrest, rising crime rates, and growing skepticism regarding the effectiveness of standard approaches to policing. In response, beginning in the 1980s and 1990s, innovative police practices and policies that took a more proactive approach began to develop. This report uses the term "proactive policing" to refer to all policing strategies that have as one of their goals the prevention or reduction of crime and disorder and that are not reactive in terms of focusing primarily on uncovering ongoing crime or on investigating or responding to crimes once they have occurred. Proactive policing is distinguished from the everyday decisions of police officers to be proactive in specific situations and instead refers to a strategic decision by police agencies to use proactive police responses in a programmatic way to reduce crime. Today, proactive policing strategies are used widely in the United States. They are not isolated programs used by a select group of agencies but rather a set of ideas that have spread across the landscape of policing. Proactive Policing reviews the evidence and discusses the data and methodological gaps on: (1) the effects of different forms of proactive policing on crime; (2) whether they are applied in a discriminatory manner; (3) whether they are being used in a legal fashion; and (4) community reaction. This report offers a comprehensive evaluation of proactive policing that includes not only its crime prevention impacts but also its broader implications for justice and U.S. communities.