A Study on People’s Recognition of the Effect of Community POLICING on Crime Prevention in KOREA: Focusing on Sociodemographic Characteristics

Abstract

The quantitative and qualitative changes in crime have required the appearance of new forms of police activities. Community policing appeared to meet these requirements and has been introduced in many countries around the world including USA, UK and Japan and is now in use. Community policing has also been introduced here in Korea. The police in Korea have accepted it as the new paradigm for the police to prevent crime in local communities. This study is designed to find out people’s recognition of the effect of community policing on crime prevention, which is its ultimate goal and analyze the difference in people’s recognition of its effect on crime prevention from the sociodemographic perspective in order to provide the police with basic data for improvement in their community policing. For the achievement of the purposes of this study, the factors such as ‘reduction in the fear of crime’, ‘reduction in crime occurrence’ and ‘reduction in disorder in the local community’ were selected to measure people’s recognition of its crime prevention effect. The research using questionnaires was conducted from Nov. 20, 2013 to Dec. 31, 2013 and administered to 303 people. The SPSS 21.0 program was used as the statistical analysis tool and the t-test and analysis of variance (ANOVA) were conducted. The analysis results show that the average points in the factors of reduction in the fear of crime, reduction in crime occurrence and reduction in disorder in the local community were all below 3 points, thus indicating that people do not recognize the positive effect of community policing on crime prevention. For checking the difference in citizen’s recognition depending on the sociodemographic factors, the people’s recognition of the effect of community policing on crime prevention has been researched depending on 5 factors such as the sex, age, urban residential area, period of residence and job. It was found in this research that the job factor (1) makes a significant difference on the recognition of the reduction in the fear of crime, the job factor (1) makes a significant difference on the recognition of the reduction in crime occurrence and the three factors (3) such as job, form of urban residence and period of residence make a significant difference on the recognition of the reduction in disorder in the local community. Company workers showed higher level of recognition in all respects such as the reduction in the fear of crime, reduction in crime occurrence and the reduction in disorder in the local community than those in technology and production fields. In addition, those who live in the residential area showed higher level of recognition of the reduction in disorder in the local community than those living in industrial areas and others. In terms of period of residence, those who lived for at least 1 year but less than 3 years and those for 9 years or above showed higher recognition of the reduction in disorder in the local community than those who lived for at least 6 years but less than 9 years did. These analysis results indicate that there is a need for a more diversified community policing in consideration of the people’s characteristics in terms of their job, urban residential area and period of residence and there should also be a continuous effort for change in community policing through the periodic evaluation of community policing to improve people’s positive recognition toward community policing.