Crime prevention

This thesis addresses a passive, economical strategy towards enhancing the security
feature of conventional plastic cards by embedding a set of electromagnetic (EM)
material that emulates an invisible "watermarking". It is an overlay strategy to prevailing
security measures.
Proposed method consists of incorporating (embedding) a set of metallic (foil-like) sheet
of high-mu material or high-conductivity metal, or a conducting-fiber interwoven fabric.
The test card when exposed to a suitable excitation of high frequency EM excitation
(with or without superimposing a static magnetic field), the plastic part yields a distinct
path-reluctance to the EM energy when compared to the embedded EM material section.
Sensing the resulting EM reaction with an appropriate circuit, delivers an output signal
depicting the presence of the embedded "watermarking" and any encoded signature in it.
The underlying concept is theoretically analyzed, relevant card-reading methods are
suggested and prototype (experimental) results are presented.

Community-oriented policing implementation has been examined under the
context of large agencies whereas the literature on smaller agencies has ultimately been
lagging behind The purpose of this study is therefore to examine the degree of
community policing implementation within these smaller agencies, controlling for
characteristics derived from the theory of social disorganization, to gather further insight
into what variables may be impacting crimes rates Pearson correlation and OLS
regression analysis is employed to obtain the necessary results The findings indicate that
although community-policing implementation does not significantly impact or explain
the variation of crime rates in small cities, the statistically significant results of particular
social disorganization characteristics should be an indicator of the need to incorporate
theory with practice

Over the years, innovations such as community-oriented policing, problem-oriented
policing, and hot spots policing have enabled the police to make substantial crime control and reduction gains. However, empirical research has shown that police occasionally misuse these strategies in practice. One possible solution is the co-implementation of these strategies with crime analysis. Yet, little is known about this relationship in practice. Using national survey data collected by the Police Executive Research Forum in 2008 from a sample of over 1,000 United States police agencies this thesis explores this relationship. Results of bivariate analysis between agency commitment to and integration of crime analysis within operations and the use of innovative strategies revealed positive relationships. Additionally, bivariate analysis between agency use of accountability mechanisms and innovative strategies revealed a strong positive relationship. Multivariate regression analysis revealed the use of accountability mechanisms and commitment to crime analysis as strong positive predictors of police agency innovation.

Lowi's "arenas of power" theory, one of the most basic policy typologies, was the theoretical foundation for this study. Most public policies can be classified as either regulatory or distributive. Regulatory policy addresses the enforcement power of government. Distributive policy is about providing benefits to selected members of society, financed as a public good. The intention of this study is to comparatively analyze two different police programs. The study stepped back from criminal justice literature to public policy theory, to consider other ways to assess police strategies to reduce crime. Theory was linked to the practice of policing by examining regulatory policy in relation to crime control and distributive policy to crime prevention. The Truancy Reduction Program was selected as an example of regulatory policy/crime control, and the School Resource Officer Program as distributive policy/crime prevention. This is an exploratory analysis, using a quantitative case study methodology. The Broward Sheriff's Office (Fort Lauderdale, Florida) was selected as the case study. The data were drawn from six consecutive school years (1995--2001) of actual documents. The intent was to explore, not establish a causal relationship between the programs and crime reduction, because other major external factors existed beyond the scope of this analysis. The "universal" concepts of effectiveness and efficiency were adapted to create a multi-criteria evaluation of the program outcomes. The central research question essentially asked if one program (and therefore, policy) was more effective and/or efficient than the other. In this study, effectiveness refers to the relationship between program goals and outcomes, while efficiency refers to the relationship between costs and outcomes. To examine effectiveness, the fixed effects pooled time series technique for panel data was employed. To examine efficiency, an efficiency ratio was created to compare program costs against the costs of crime. A relationship was established between each program, crime reduction, and effectiveness and efficiency. The final phase was comparative, employing a multivariate analysis of variance, to determine if one policy was more effective and efficient. The results were inconclusive. The study makes recommendations for future research, discusses implications of the analyses for public administration, and concluding comments.