On-Campus Students: Battling Crime and Social Evils - Essay Sample

Introduction

On-campus, students get exposed to several crimes. A campus can get considered as a hotspot of crime, primarily due to the large number of students flowing in and out of campus daily. The students are also victims of many social evils in the society like drug abuse and sexual immorality, which is mostly facilitated by peer pressure or a search for instant gratification obtained from the actions. Car theft is one of the most significant crimes that the students on campus often have to go through. Thieves break into the vehicles and steal valuables in the vehicles. Some got to the extent of stealing vehicle parts or even stealing the vehicle itself. The primary purpose of this proposal is to analyze the problem of theft from vehicles and how the crime can be solved to provide a safer environment for students on campus.

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Problem Analysis

Being a higher education facility, many people would expect that campus is a haven for the students where they focus on their academics and promote interpersonal relationships. Unfortunately, crime and criminal victimization are quite rampant in the campus environment, and campus administrators are called upon to input stringent measures to protect their students. Kijanczuk (2014) attributed the high probability of crime on campus to the lifestyle that the college students adapt to when they join campus, for instance, sharing rooms with total strangers, and reduced concern for personal belongings.

While some instances of theft in vehicles may be as a result of the carelessness of their owners, it is essential to note that the crime may be an arranged activity that could have been well thought out by the perpetrators who may or may not be students. Students on campus are encouraged to take the appropriate measures of keeping their items safe, including locking their vehicles. In contrast, other students take a step further by forming watch groups that look out for criminal activities on campus (Kijanczuk, 2014). All the same, taking items from another individual without their permission cannot be justified, and the action should get punished as per the law.

Theoretical Review: Routine Activities Theory

The routine activity theory purposes of explaining why crimes take place. The theory emphasizes the crime patterns, especially for repeat criminal activities like the theft from vehicles on campus getting addressed herein. As Rossmo and Summers (2015) puts it, the routine activity theory shows how crime is dependent upon noncriminal activities, which are done regularly. The regular noncriminal activities facilitate the convergence of the offender and target at a suitable place and time that the crime can be carried out. Also, the routine activity pattern ensures that the capable guardians are absent at the time of the crime, therefore, providing an opportunity for the crime to take place (Rossmo and Summers, 2015).

Routine activities theory indicates that the crime can get controlled in the presence of guardians, intimate handlers, and place managers. The close controllers are the people who have influence over the offenders and can limit their probability of committing the crime. At the same time, the place managers can be the people put in charge of the places where the crime is likely to be determined (Eck and Weisburd, 2015). In the absence of the guardians, intimate handlers, and place managers, the crime is more likely to take place. The remedy towards crimes that are supported by the routine activities theory is to make variations in the regular patterns. For instance, a student can avoid parking their vehicles at a particular parking spot every day. By changing the parking spots, a potential offender will get challenged since the target does not fall into their pattern.

Data Analysis

Generally, a crime can get defined by assessing the law that has been broken, the offender, the target, and the place that the crime has been committed. The crime theories can help the crime analysts know the specific data they should collect to understand more about the crime and the suspects (Kijanczuk, 2014). When assessing the theft from vehicles, the data that could be relevant to the criminal investigation could be the specific details of the vehicles which were stolen from, their owners, the place the crime took place, and the time as well (Santos, 2016). It is also essential to look at records to look at the potential offenders and to understand how the cases were solved previously. The sources of the data could be from the victims of the crimes, the eye-witnesses of the crime, the place managers guarding the target vehicles, the surveillance records, and records of similar crimes from the law enforcement teams and school security records.

As the routine activities theory suggests, the crime takes place when the offender getting assured that the guardian of the target is absent (Miro, 2014). On-campus, offenders are likely to take advantage of the lesson periods. The offenders can analyze the time when most students have their lessons because, at that time, there is a lower probability of being seen when committing the crime. In terms of place, the offenders may choose to steal from the vehicles that have been parked away from the study halls and security points to reduce the chances of getting caught.

Several issues may affect the data collected and data quality in the time of theft from vehicles on campus. The most poignant point is the insufficiency of data. The offender ensures that the routine activities followed by the target follow a particular pattern and then strikes when the person is unlikely to be caught. Identifying such an offender can be close to impossible unless there were some witnesses in the vicinity. Another issue could arise with the carelessness of the guardian. The owner of the vehicle could be unable to identify what exactly got stolen because they have failed to keep an account of their personal property.

Analysis Section

The process of analyzing crime is an essential segment of ensuring that the crime is solved and working towards the elimination of a similar crime in the future. For the particular crime of theft from vehicles, the crime analysis process would require representatives of a law enforcement agency, the campus security team, statements from the victims of the crime, records of surveillance, and statements from eye-witnesses. With relation to the theft from vehicles on campus, the opportunity of crime, according to the routine activity theory, is provided when the offender (thief) can access the target (vehicles to steal from) when the guardian (owner of vehicle or place manager) is absent by assessing the routine activities of the guardian to know when they will be away from their vehicles.

Crime analysis can be tactical, strategic, or administrative. Tactical crime analysis focuses on providing an immediate response to a crime that is happening on the spot. Strategic crime analysis involves a more extended period compared to the tactical aspect where the crime analyst takes time to identify the high crime rate areas and find lasting solutions to the problems. Lastly, administrative crime analysis ensures that the resources required to investigate and solve crimes are sufficient. The resources include the police officers, the vehicles, and other relevant resources in crime analysis. Other aspects of crime analysis include intelligence, criminal investigative, and operations analyses, as well as crime mapping by type of study (Santos, 2016). The crime of theft from vehicles on campus should follow a strategic crime analysis because it requires adequate time to establish the relation between the theft from the campus as well as the long-term prevention of the crime.

The techniques of crime analysis include mapping the area where the crime has occurred on campus through singe-symbol, graduated chart, and interactive mapping, as well as the use of buffers. Descriptive crime mapping can be carried out by category, statistical classification, and manual method. Analytical mapping is also a technique in crime analysis that involves density mapping (Santos, 2016). Since the crime in question is rampant, it is essential to conduct a pattern identification process to assist in the crime analysis. Density mapping is a critical method in establishing the hotspots of crime on campus. In density mapping, the crime analysis tries to determine the number of incidents in an area about the population of the area the crime has occurred.

In the initial pattern identification, crime analysis use ad hoc linking, weights, and thresholds as well as making inquiries about the occurrence of the crime. Following that, the analyst establishes the pattern of the crime by deduction and induction. The pattern finalization gets characterized by identifying the principal case, critical areas in the patters, and other related matters (Santos, 2016).

Recommendations

The relevant audience for the proposal would be the students and staff members of campuses since they would obtain a better understanding of how the process that the theft of belongings from their vehicles takes place and how it can get stopped. The information can get disseminated through holding talks on campus about the vulnerability of their belongings on campus. In the IACA (2015), a recommendation gets made that the dissemination can also be carried out through academic and practitioner publications so that people in national and international forums can get the information and take the necessary steps to decrease the probability of crime in their campuses.

References

Eck, J., & Weisburd, D. L. (2015). Crime places in Crime Theory. Crime and place: Crime prevention studies, 4. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.362.1293&rep=rep1&type=pdf

IACA (2015). Effective Responses: High Crime and Disorder Areas Standards, Methods, & Technology Committee White Paper 201501. https://iaca.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/6-iacawp_2015_01_high_crime_areas_solutions.pdf

Kijanczuk, K. A. (2014). Theft of Personal Belongings on College Campuses. Florida Atlantic University. https://fau.digital.flvc.org/islandora/object/fau%3A13677/datastream/OBJ/view/Theft_of_personal_belongings_on_college_campuses.pdf

Miro, F. (2014). Routine activity theory. The Encyclopedia of Theoretical Criminology, 1-7. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/9781118517390.wbetc198

Rossmo, D. K., & Summers, L. (2015). Routine Activity Theory in Crime InvestigationIn The criminal act (pp. 19-32). Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9781137391322_3

Santos, R. B. (2016). Crime Analysis with Crime Mapping. Sage publications. https://books.google.co.ke/books?id=oElbwIcP1ioC&pg=PR5&lpg=PR5&dq=tactical+crime+analysis+Chapter+9,pattern+identification+process&source=bl&ots=_NG6rSa4BQ&sig=ACfU3U1jt-SQ-J1XabeTINt9zAldVs0GGg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjWgZ3wpZ7pAhVj8-AKHdfHA0YQ6AEwDHoECAUQAQ#v=onepage&q=tactical%20crime%20analysis%20Chapter%209%2Cpattern%20identification%20process&f=false