The actual responsibility for the reduction of the common crimes bothering us the most rests with the individual and the community. This also can be traced to early English and U.S. history. Today, it is essential that the community resume its historic responsibility from the prevention of common street crimes, leaving the full-time law enforcement professional free to pursue the reduction of the more difficult and sophisticated crimes of the professional criminal or the serious habitual offender. Most people believe that crime is inevitable. Most people believe that nothing can be done.
Most people believe that crime is a police problem.
Most people believe that crime is not their problem. It is the consensus of law enforcement today that the police cannot and should not have to attempt crime reduction efforts alone. Citizen involvement is not new or exceptional. Although there is little recorded before the dawn of modern history about society's approaches to the control of crime, scholars record that one early attempt was by the King of Babylon, Hammurabi, who in about 1800 B.C. established a code of penalties for faulty home building. In the 1960's, officials of the University of Louisville, Kentucky, went to England to examine the crime prevention techniques at the Home Office Crime Prevention Training Center at Stafford, and returned to the United States to organize existing information into the police science now known as crime prevention.