The prevention of crime is a historical and traditional duty of law enforcement, tracing back to its early origins in the United States and in England, from which most of our basic law derives. 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.