Media Campaigns and Prevention of Organized Crimes

This paper reviews the effect of the media campaign on organized crime prevention. A crime prevention campaign, which is done through generalization is of different significance. Due to having diverse audiences, media campaigns enjoy multiple dimensional effects; educating members of the society about crimes causes the reporting rate of citizens about crimes and consequently news stories on criminal developments increase. In fact, such a campaign might not lead to change in behavior rather it might attract further attention to these crimes. Major targets of such campaigns, however, can be listed as follows: Transmission of information to potential criminals and victims, informing the society about problems of committing crime, introducing mechanisms to strengthen crime targets, and warning about increase in police patrols. On this basis, the paper intends to answer the following questions with regard to media campaigns aimed at preventing organized crimes: What kind of information should be provided in order to increase public awareness of organized crimes? What kind of people should the target audience consist of? How should the information in consideration be transferred to the public? What kind of campaign is more effective? The paper is trying to scrutinize different dimensions of media campaigns.