National Citizens' Crime Prevention Campaign.


MENU TITLE: Citizens' Crime Prevention Fact Sheet
Series: BJA
Published: November 1995
4 pages
6,861 bytes

Bureau of Justice Assistance Fact Sheet

National Citizens' Crime Prevention Campaign

The National Citizens' Crime Prevention Campaign
brings together the forces of public education and
community empowerment to enable residents of urban
and rural communities to fight crime, violence, and
illicit drug use. This initiative allows criminal
justice practitioners and residents across the
Nation to share information about effective crime
prevention methods and how to apply them to
individual communities. As a national focal point
for crime prevention, the campaign has stimulated
the creation of similar efforts in nations around
the world. Campaign members work with police,
schools, and community groups to generate
partnerships; build skills and abilities; stimulate
individual and collective citizen action; and rally
national, State, and local efforts.

Background

The campaign is managed by the National Crime
Prevention Council (NCPC), a nonprofit research
organization staffed with crime prevention
practitioners and funded through a cooperative
agreement with the Bureau of Justice Assistance
(BJA) of the Office of Justice Programs (OJP), U.S.
Department of Justice (DOJ). In development from
1977 through 1979 and making its public debut in
1980, the campaign emerged out of focus-group
findings that community-based prevention efforts
represent a vital force in reducing violence and
other crimes. Through its public education,
training, and technical assistance services, the
campaign reaches out to every community throughout
the Nation.

Key Campaign Elements

The overall mission of the National Citizens' Crime
Prevention Campaign is to create safe and caring
communities. Focusing on the prevention of violence
against children and adults, crimes against
households, and drug use, especially among youth,
the campaign carries out its mission by providing
the following services and resources to members of
the multiagency group, the Crime Prevention
Coalition. Furthermore, the campaign works in
partnership with bureaus of OJP to provide crime
prevention assistance to grantees and subgrantees.

Public education. Through public service
advertising and distribution of general educational
materials, the campaign provides information that
generates both a community and an individual sense
of responsibility for preventing crime:

o Public service advertising includes highly
successful television, radio, newspaper, magazine,
billboard, and transit advertisements. The
campaign's trademark is the well-known and trusted
crime prevention symbol McGruff the Crime Dog, who
carries the message "Take A Bite Out Of Crime."
These public service advertisements can be
localized and individualized by State agencies and
associations, or major media market organizations.

o Educational materials offer proven solutions that
can be applied to community crime prevention work.
Books, monographs, workbooks, booklets, brochures,
and program kits share the lessons learned from
crime prevention programs and practitioners across
the Nation. Kits provide "how to" information in
the form of reproducible materials that can easily
be adapted to the local level to enable law
enforcement agencies, community groups, and other
interested parties to establish and sustain
high-quality, locally oriented prevention efforts. 

Training and technical assistance. The National
Citizens' Crime Prevention Campaign encompasses the
following training and technical assistance
activities:

o Hands-on, practical workshops conducted by NCPC
staff offer the knowledge and skills needed to
initiate and strengthen prevention efforts in
communities across the Nation. In fewer than 6
years, more than 3,500 people from more than 40
States have been trained in these formal workshops.
Trainees range from local chief law enforcement
executives to public housing residents.

o NCPC staff also offer training through
presentations and workshops at national and State
conferences, reaching more than 1,000 criminal
justice practitioners every year.

o In addition, effective responses to specific
community concerns are delivered via technical
assistance. NCPC staff respond by mail, by
telephone, and in person to thousands of technical
assistance requests each year.

A network of leaders. Around the Nation, this
campaign provides a network of leaders from all
sizes and kinds of jurisdictions who value
prevention as a priority. The formal embodiment of
this network is the Crime Prevention Coalition,
which consists of more than 120 member groups and
for which NCPC serves as secretariat. Coalition
members include national constituency-based
organizations, State agencies and associations, and
Federal agencies ranging from the Boys and Girls
Clubs of America and the American Association of
Retired Persons to the International Association of
Chiefs of Police and the U.S. Department of Housing
and Urban Development. The coalition helps to
spread crime prevention messages both within and
among its constituencies, assists in determining
the crime prevention needs of professionals working
in the field, sponsors the annual Crime Prevention
Month, and serves as a forum for sharing crime
prevention experiences and expertise among member
organizations. 

Demonstration programs. NCPC designs and manages
several demonstration crime prevention programs for
BJA. Findings and lessons learned from these
programs are incorporated into campaign educational
and training materials to show which strategies
work. For example, the Community Responses to Drug
Abuse program, which was conducted in 10 different
sites from 1989 through 1992, has demonstrated the
remarkable capacity of local groups in
crime-besieged neighborhoods to tackle tough
problems using appropriate training, responsive
technical assistance, and modest financial aid.
Furthermore, in 1992, the Texas City Action Plan
brought together seven of the largest cities in
Texas to develop grassroots-government planning
partnerships that produced comprehensive crime
prevention plans for each of the cities. 

For Further Information

For additional information about the National
Citizens' Crime Prevention Campaign, contact:

National Crime Prevention Council
Second Floor
1700 K Street NW.
Washington, DC 20006-3817
Tel: 1-202-466-6272

Bureau of Justice Assistance Clearinghouse
P.O. Box 6000
Rockville, MD 20849-6000
Tel: 1-800-688-4252
Fax: 1-301-251-5212
Internet: look@ncjrs.aspensys.com

U.S. Department of Justice Response Center
Tel: 1-800-421-6770

FS000121
November 1995