THE POLICE SPECIAL SKILLS AND KNOWLEDGE IN SITUATIONAL CRIME PREVENTION

Situational prevention includes measures and techniques that by focusing on intervention in crime condition and reducing crime opportunities restrain crime. Although success in crime prevention programs is based on the participation of several institutions, police plays an important role in crime prevention through relying on crime and controlling crime opportunities and using the special skills and knowledge of the police. Therefore, this article attempts to explain the acquisition of police especial skills and knowledge, and also to answer the following question: what are police required special skills and knowledge in situational crime prevention?

In terms of its objectives the present study is of an applied research type and in terms of data collection procedure it is considered as qualitative-exploratory study. The study population consisted of all elites, managers, police experts in the field of crime prevention. A combination of snowball and judgmental purposive non-probabilistic method was employed for selecting the samples. In this way, after 19 interviews the theoretical saturation was achieved. The required qualitative data were collected and using content analysis as a research technique the concepts, categories and main and secondary factors identified and analyzed.

The main and secondary codes obtained from interviews with elites and police experts revealed that a total of 51 indices were extracted and based on the theoretical foundations they were identified as 16 skill indices and 35 police especial knowledge indices in situational crime prevention. The results show that the identification of crime opportunities and the constitutive elements of crime conditions as police especial knowledge and understanding the physical environment of crime and the ability of statistical analysis of crime as the skills required by the police in crime prevention were identified with the highest frequency. Also, through promoting the level of skills and special knowledge required by the police executives the level of success for situational crime prevention programs can be predicted.