Community Policing and Environmental Design: Panaceas to Crime Prevention in Ibadan, Nigeria

Abstract

Community policing and crime prevention through environmental designs (CPTED) has provided panaceas to urbanisation challenges in developing African countries where apparatuses of formal and informal institutions have failed in combating crimes. Information was elicited from 180 household heads in 9 randomly selected communities in Ibadan. The efficiency of security apparatuses was Likert scale rated and made amenable for parametric analyses. Households’ attributes: age, education, income and length of stay were correlated with involvement in community policing whereas, the effectiveness of crime prevention (dependent) was evaluated across environmental designs (independent) through Analysis of Variance.Results show that child labour (58.9%), prostitution (55.0%) and auto robbery (52.8%) were among the most common crimes in the study area. High correlation for community policing across locality was evident (r = 0.642; p = 0.045), Household heads’ education (r = 0.588) and income (r = 0.452) also correlated positively whereas, age (r = - 0.270) and length of stay (r = - 0.205) were negative.The efficiency of crime prevention was significant given housing enclosure (F = 2.793) and street accessibility (F = 4.980). Therefore, improvements in security information dissemination, adoption of crime detecting technologies and designing out opportunities for crimes in the study area are suggested.