Have you ever thought to yourself, what attracts crime to an area, or what makes you vulnerable to becoming a victim?
Crime happens for a wide variety of reasons, so many that it would be difficult to give a single answer to try and explain why all of them occurred. One school of thought however, focuses on the logical theory of 'opportunity'. If an opportunity isnt present the crime cannot take place, or rather, it cant take place at that particular time or location. It doesn't take a genius to work out that if you limit opportunities for crime, you can start to work towards preventing crime, or at best (selfishly I suppose) sending it somewhere else.
With this in mind, if you dont want to become a victim, it could be argued that everyone carries some level of responsibility to try and remove the opportunities for someone to offend. Whilst this isn't necessarily true for all crime types, it's application has been proven to be fairly successful in the reduction of serious acquisitive crime (burglary, autocrime and theft).
If we take the example of autocrime for example, if you don't leave valuables on show in your vehicle, a criminal is less likely to want to force entry in order to steal them. Better yet, if you remove your valuables from your vehicle altogether, even if the thief is still insistent on having a look around, at least they will leave empty handed.
It's also important to consider other avenues of preventing crime. Good quality security lighting is extremely effective at deterring nighttime prowlers. Whist it likely won't stop the theif, it will usually encourage them to move on to somewhere less risky.
Some will argue that they shouldn't have to put all these measures in place and I couldn't agree more. However, at times the world we live in is far from ideal and this places the onerous back to to each of us to do what we can to prevent crime. I hear you ask 'so if it's all my responsibility, why do I pay my taxes to fund the Police & council'. Well... they have responsibilities also, but it is on us to persever in reporting crime to them, as well as sharing information on suspicious incidents to help them to paint a better intelligence picture.
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