Why Don't the Police Stop Crime?
| Published date | 01 April 2005 |
| Author | David Dixon |
| Date | 01 April 2005 |
| DOI | 10.1375/acri.38.1.4 |
4THE AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND JOURNAL OF CRIMINOLOGY
VOLUME 38 NUMBER 1 2005 PP.4–24
Why Don’t the Police Stop Crime?
David Dixon
University of New South Wales,Australia
Several answers to the question ‘Why don’t the police stop crime?’ are
considered. Police do stop some crime, although increasingly they will
rely on nonpolice personnel for assistance in doing so.The proportion of
crime they stop is not fixed: learning the right lessons from the experi-
ence of New York City will help them to increase it. Nonetheless, police
need to be alert to the dangers of concentrating single-mindedly on
crime reduction. Doing so not only has inherent dangers, but it can also
divert attention from other tasks and objectives of policing.
Understanding the police role in crime control and reduction is
hampered by populist insistence that simple answers are enough. Equally,
the academic promise of new ‘sciences’ of crime and policing is
overstated. The article argues for a more inclusive and sophisticated
approach to answering the question in its title.
Recently, there have been several burglaries in our area. I was talking about them
with a neighbour, who asked ‘Why don’t the police do something about it?’ I
tried to give him a potted version of my lecture to undergraduates on the limits of
police effectiveness, but he was not impressed: ‘If they can’t catch crooks, what
good are they?’ As if on cue, around the corner came the first police officer to be
seen in our street for months. He was pushing crime prevention leaflets into
mailboxes, advising people to lock the back door and to cancel the newspaper when
they go on holiday. My neighbour’s disgust was complete: ‘So we have to do your job
for you now, do we?’
This article’s title is deliberately ambiguous, as well as provocative. I intend to
consider various ways of answering the question ‘Why don’t the police stop crime?’,
and also to suggest some answers, some of which are in the form of questions in
riposte. While the article primarily has a policy orientation, it is appropriate to go
beyond this to talk a little about the nature of inquiry into these matters, and their
relationship to our broader intellectual culture.
Answer 1:They Do
The first, and most straightforward, answer is that the police do stop crime, or at least
some crime. A hackneyed example from historical experience is that when police go
on strike, some forms of crime increase (Sherman & Eck, 2002, pp. 302–3): there is
Address for correspondence: Professor and Associate Dean (Research), Faculty of Law,
University of New South Wales, Sydney 2052, Australia. E-mail: d.dixon@unsw.edu.au
no doubt that the presence of police does contain crime to some extent. The police
affect the occurrence of crime both by catching some criminals (possibly leading to
incapacitation and individual deterrence) and by presenting a risk of detection and
punishment (contributing to general deterrence). This is a modest claim, not an
expression of what Reiner calls ‘“police fetishism”’, the ideological assumption that
the police are a functional prerequisite of social order so that without a police force
chaos would ensue’ (2000, p. 1). If it is accepted that the police have some impact
on crime, there is no reason to believe that this impact is constant: presumably, it
can be increased (or reduced) if the police operate differently. This suggests that the
key issues are specifying the type of crime being considered, assessing the extent to
which police can stop crime, and identifying the most effective strategies and tactics
for crime control.
Answer 2:What Kind of Crime Are You Talking About?
The concept of crime as a category unified by anything more than legal prohibition
should have been abandoned in our criminological cradles. In order to understand
the field, the focus must be much tighter than simply being on ‘crime’. Corporate
fraud, child sexual assault, drunken driving, and offensive language have nothing in
common beyond their legal status as offences. Putting more police on the beat is not
going to affect white-collar crime. Developing forensic skills is irrelevant to the
policing of disorderly conduct in the street. We need, therefore, to acknowledge
factors such as variations in the reporting and detectability of types of crime, the
likelihood of one detection leading to other crimes being cleared up (as offences
‘taken into consideration’ or ‘written off’), the influence of relationships between
suspect and victim, and between police and public, and so on (Bottomley &
Coleman, 1980, 1981; Coleman & Moynihan, 1996).
Answer 3: Because They Can’t Do It by Themselves
There is increasing recognition that policing is not just the business of state police
forces. The monopoly of the police may never have been as complete as some mid-
20th century police chiefs envisaged, but ‘pluralisation’ is now a key theme in
contemporary discussions of policing. Within the public sector, state police are
supplemented by and cooperate with a range of bodies, including transnational and
international agencies, security services, specialist agencies such as crime commis-
sions, customs departments, specialised sections of other departments (dealing with,
e.g., social security fraud or crime inside prisons), and local government policing
agencies. Problem-oriented strategies involve cooperation in crime reduction with a
wider range of departments and agencies. In England and Wales, such cooperation
has been hastened by the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, which shifts some responsi-
bility for the management of crime onto local government and requires police and
local authorities to work together.
Meanwhile, in the private sector, the growth of commercial providers of security
is well-documented (see, e.g., Bowling & Forster, 2002; Button, 2002; Prenzler,
2000). Their services include the familiar guarding and patrolling, but also more
specialised services such as commercial crime investigation and interrogation of
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WHY DON’T THE POLICE STOP CRIME?
THE AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND JOURNAL OF CRIMINOLOGY
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