Preventive policing in public areas
Marina Hiller Foshaugen is a doctoral research fellow at the Department of Criminology and Sociology of Law at University of Oslo.
The PhD-project explores how actors within public, private and volunteer organizations perform social control in Norway. Due to the broad spectrum of contributors to crime prevention, the project builds on the concept of plural policing, aiming to highlight different policing actors' involvement with proactive approaches to situational crime control.
Representatives from the Norwegian police, private security companies and the voluntary organization the Night Ravens are the subjects of this study, as they constitute essential urban area controllers that influences safety- and security measures in public spaces. The project aims to gather insight about policing bodies' motivations for performing preventive measures in public spaces, and to provide new contributions to the policing literature.
The project will shed light over current processes in the police organization, given that prevention currently is their primary strategy. At the same time, the study includes new contributors to preventive work in the Nordic criminological research field, by including private and voluntary actors. By examining their rationales and purposes in their proactive work, a complex understanding of these actors' mentalities and roles in the field can be generated, which would provide valuable knowledge about how policing bodies prevent crime and conduct control functions in public spaces.