Conceptualising Community Policing, Crime Prevention and Criminology: A Singapore Perspective

The paper traces the development of the community policing approach to crime prevention in Singapore, examines the perspectives which inform the approach, and briefly describes the various crime prevention initiatives that have been undertaken by the Singapore police as part of its machinery and philosophy of community policing. In addition to linking the interior history of crime prevention to specific social-historical contexts and modes of state governance, the paper attempts to conceptualise the Singapore Police Force's (SPF) community policing approach to crime prevention by using the criminological paradigms of Right Realism and Administrative Criminology to illustrate the tertiary role of the police in the social and situational crime prevention processes respectively.