Community crime prevention in Portugal: an introduction to Local Safety Contracts

Ana Amante,Miguel Saraiva,Teresa Sá Marques

doi:10.1057/s41300-021-00112-2

Abstract

Following the philosophy of other international programs as proximity policing or situational crime prevention, the Local Safety Contracts (CLS) have been an innovative strategy in Portugal, as they allow the sharing of accountabilities between the central and the local administration, in association with the police and the community. Nonetheless, little has been written in Portugal about such strategies, and nothing at all for the international scientific community. The aim of this paper is therefore to present the CLS, discussing their crime prevention stance and their impacts on local communities. First, the new preventive and multidisciplinary organizational model that is at the basis of CLS is discussed. Then a qualitative assessment of implementation is made through a set of interviews to relevant actors. Conclusions are drawn based on the experiences of municipalities, police and administration, contributing to the debate on community crime prevention, and enhancing the need for multidisciplinary, multilevel and place-specific approaches.

Highlights

Preventing crime and reducing insecurity have never stopped being core goals of modern societies
Territorial planning needs to address prevention strategies both at macroand micro-levels (DGT 2018). These strategies should be framed by alternative paradigms of security (Canhoto 2010; Oneto 2019), that is, they should integrate models of preventive policing (Fernandes 2015), models of community participation (Loveday 2018; Saraiva et al 2016), and advances in environmental criminology which state the importance of place-specific interventions in social, urban and geographical components as key instruments of prevention (Andresen 2014; Weisburd et al 2016; Wortley and Townsley 2016; Saraiva et al 2019)
From 2016 onwards, the new generation of Local Safety Contracts (CLS) in Portugal has been the culmination of a slow, two-decade paradigm shift, from a reactive-based to a prevention-based model of policing and crime-reduction

Summary

Introduction

Preventing crime and reducing insecurity have never stopped being core goals of modern societies. Until 2006, it can be said that the reactive model carried out in Portugal theoretically privileged just two of the four main pillars of policing: rapid response to incidents and criminal investigation (the other being information and criminal prevention) (Guinote 2019) This model was originally developed in the first half of the nineteenth century, for the control of incidents, the preservation of evidence at the crime scene and for the collection of technically more sustained evidence to increase convictions in court. Such a model was maintained well until the 1980s, as the State was considered in Portugal as the single political entity, whose priorities were perhaps not aligned with those of the population. A reactive model based on the premise of power (the purpose of the police was to fight crime) was increasingly replaced by a proximity and preventing model

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Conclusion