COMMUNITY ORGANIZATIONS AND CRIME

Although not a panacea, community organizations have particular strengths that they bring to crime prevention: generating and sustaining participation, generating a broader understanding of community crime, developing programs that address broader social causes of crime, and forming partnerships for community policing. Questions about the efficacy of community-based crime prevention programs may be due to several limitations of prior evaluations. First, they fail to acknowledge the fluid and political planning process of community organizations, which results in changing goals and objectives. Second, the need of community organizations to balance the production of outcomes and the process of developing activists makes it difficult to assess their accomplishments. Third, the emphasis on outcomes forces organizations to shorten the necessary social learning process, undermining the programs' effectiveness. Finally, the evaluations' conceptual model ignores the political and institutional dimensions of communities and assumes only one means of producing safe communities.