Provost Speaker Series Recap: Understanding Every Day Crime
Last Tuesday, Doctors Rachel and Roberto Santos gave a lecture on ways to recognize and prevent situations that can lead to criminal activity in everyday life. The Santos’ are co-directors of the Radford Center for Police Practice, Policy and Research. Dr. Rachel Santos began the lecture by inviting the audience of students and faculty to examine our own routine behaviors. We all have some kind of routine, even criminal offenders, and the paths we take in our daily lives can sometimes overlap.
“Crime is not random because people are not random, and our behaviors aren’t random,” said Dr. Santos. Potential offenders can develop targets for a crime based on their own routines and the routines they can identify from those around them. “Offenders tend to commit crimes near where they live.”
Dr. Roberto Santos talked about the crime triangle i.e. the three components that are common when a crime occurs. Each crime includes a motivated offender, a place, and a victim or target. To prevent crimes from happening, Dr. Santos states that strategies need to be implemented to remove one of the components in the triangle. To prevent ourselves from becoming victims we can identify these components ourselves. What are some places or times that would be ideal for an offender and how can I avoid them? Who would be motivated to cause me harm and what could cause me to become a victim?
Dr. Rachel Santos offered a brief summary of the lecture:
“We really enjoy talking about the work that we do, but that work that we do in practice is underlined in theory. The theory and the research that we do and others in criminal justice do is important to be translated out to practice, whether it is to prevent crime for individual people or to help the police work with people to prevent crime.”
Radford University is lucky to have professors that are so dedicated and passionate about their work, not just in lecture but also in the community. I asked Dr. Roberto Santos about the importance of his chosen field, and he had this to say:
“Criminal Justice is one of the most important things in society, to have students learn and be involved in that and to come out of the university, taking what they learned and applying it makes things better. The criminal justice system is complex, it’s got a lot of layers to it and it’s not perfect so we need good, smart people to learn about the criminal justice system and be able to go out and apply these things and make it better.
The next speaker in the series will be Dr. Jennifer McDonel speaking about the power of music in early childhood education and development on March 18 on the Artis Center’s Main Stage.
