Directed Readings in Criminal Justice:  Current Security Administration and Management

Instructor:  David R. Kent, M.S., CPP
E-mail:  drkent@loyno.edu
Office:  Stallings 105
Office Phone: 865-2694
Dept. Phone:  865-3323
City College Phone:  865-3530
Off Campus Phone:  504-254-9997
Office Hours:  By appointment.  In addition, I will be available on campus before and after class, and during class
breaks.

Class Time/Location:  City College Conference Room, Stallings Hall, Room 205.  Dates and times are -
 

DAY OF THE WEEK	MONTH/DATE	TIME
Friday	March 01, 2002	6 - 10 pm
Saturday	March 02, 2002	9 am – 5 pm
Friday	March 22, 2002	6 - 10 pm
Saturday	March 23, 2002	9 am – 5 pm
Friday	April 12, 2002	6 - 10 pm
Saturday	April 13, 2002	9 am – 5 pm

ATTENDANCE:  Roll will be taken at the beginning and end of each class.  Issues, discussions, and student presentations require attendance and participation at all scheduled class meetings.

COURSE DESCRIPTION: This course will introduce business assets protection and loss prevention concepts into the overall crime prevention domain utilizing common private sector security administration and management practices.  This crime-mitigation premise is known as "situational deterrence", and is based on a crime avoidance, benefit-denial and risk management philosophy.  Most traditional crime prevention research and policy has largely been concerned with perpetrators and potential offenders.  Private enterprise, however, views crime risk matters in the economic context of lost profits and return on investment (R.O.I.) earnings.

    This course will introduce students to the diverse scope of private protection activities, including regulatory and licensure statutes which provide for private business uses of limited law enforcement powers and authority.  Private crime prevention and industrial security is an industry far larger than criminal justice in the USA, and potentially offers some broad opportunities for better public and private cooperation.
    With an elevated exposure to lethal workplace violence being the most common bond linking public safety and private security practitioners, this course will explore a variety of assaultive risks and mortality ratios.  A natural outcome of working around crime and violence inevitably raises questions about arrest authority, use of force and every variety of legal involvement in both civil and criminal actions.  While commercial interests have traditionally been a barrier to serious and/or effective public-private cooperative efforts, technological advances, government contracts, special-event coverage and improvements in guard compensation and training all work to narrow the respect and confidence gap that separates the protective functions of public safety and private security.

    Law enforcement administrators frequently confront protection issues of deficient security guard training and performance, along with excessive false alarm calls, civil liability exposure and myriad relationship matters between private security and public police interests.  Security managers understandably view police moonlighting as unfair competition in the business protection marketplace.
    This course will attempt to address these relational issues, along with a continuum of psychological, human and physical deterrence concepts, hardware and some technology applications.  We will look at a number of ethical, performance and legal issues that are common to situational applications of goal-directed protective and avoidance measures.

COURSE OBJECTIVES:  At the successful conclusion of this course of instruction students will have acquired a broad appreciation and understanding of America's dual systems of policing, and the shadow justice system that supports a huge private security industry.  Students should be equipped to:

1.  Identify and apply crime-avoidance techniques that are suitable to the threat level and the environment.
2.  Conceptualize and design common security measures.
3.  Utilize risk management principles in calculating the costs of potential losses and estimating recovery time and expenses necessary to restore normal business functions.
4.  Formulate evaluation methods to assess loss exposure and performance levels of physical and human security practices.
5.  Discern the various thresholds of deterrability and distinguish between random, opportunity, acquisitive, instrumental, expressive and common pre-meditated offenses.

Fischer, Robert J., Gion Green.  1998.  Introduction to Security, Sixth Edition, Butterworth-Heinemann, Boston, MA.  (Required text available in Loyola Bookstore)

Tunnell, Kenneth D.  1992.  Choosing Crime, The Criminal Calculus of Property Offenders, Nelson-Hall, Inc.  Chicago, IL.  (Required reading.  Out of print, however, at least one edition will remain on Reserve in the Library.)

Sherman, Lawrence D., Denise Gottfredson, Doris MacKenzie, John Eck, Peter Reuter and Shawn Bushway.  Read only Chapter 7 , “Preventing Crime at Places”, by John Eck in Preventing Crime: What Works, What Doesn't, What's Promising. NCJ # 165366. (http://www.preventingcrime.org/report/chapter7.htm)

Smith, Mary S.  “Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design in Parking Facilities”.  National Institute of Justice, NIJ # 157310  (http://www.ncjrs.org/pdffiles/cptedpkg.pdf)
(Note:  PDF (Portable Document Format) files are created by Adobe Acrobat software and can only be viewed using the Adobe Acrobat Reader viewer. If you do not already have this viewer, you may download it at no cost from Adobe's Web site.  Just follow the instructions on the Adobe web page.)

Palmiotto, Michael J.  1997.  Policing - Concepts, Strategies and Current Issues in American Police Forces.  Carolina Academic Press, Durham, NC.  Chapter 4 only, p 79-107;

Kent, David R.  “Perceptual Deterrence - The founding Principle of Crime Prevention”.  1999.  Unpublished Paper.  (Or as a MS Word file)

Safety and Health Statistics, US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries, 1992 to present. (most current year)  Search US DOL Web Site (http://www.bls.gov/oshcfoi1.htm) ) and print only the two relevant tables that include cumulative data between 1992 and the most current year available, for:

(1) fatal injuries by event or exposure; and,
(2) assaults and other violent acts by major occupational classification that include public safety, police and private security officers.

GRADING SCALE:

A  =   95  –  100
B+ =  90  –    94
B  =   85  –   89
C+ = 80  –   84
C  =  75  –   79

CLASS PARTICIPATION:  Every student will conduct and prepare two research papers as described below under “Research Papers”.  A progress report to include the summarization of the student's work to date will be delivered orally to the class, according to an agreed upon schedule to be decided during our first weekend class meeting.  See details in the Research Papers heading.  The elective topics for the first paper will be chosen from the following subjects:

[Each of the above topics will also constitute study question material for which the student will be responsible]

RESEARCH Papers:  Two research papers are required for this course.

The first research paper (Research Paper 1) topic will be chosen by the student; the second research paper (Research Paper 2) will be a class collaboration research undertaking and the topic will be chosen by the instructor, as outlined below.  These papers will be a minimum of ten pages in double-spaced, business letter typeface, no larger than font size  12 or 13.  The cover page(s), end notes, appendices and bibliography will be extra and do not count in the ten-page minimum.  No color or photo-copied pages are to be submitted.  All writing offered should be un-recycled, original copy, of and by the student providing the work.    Papers are to be stapled, without any covers or bindings.  University policies regarding plagiarism will govern your work products at all times.

Research Paper 1 - Topics can be chosen from the list above, however, you need to obtain approval of the instructor.  Instructor concurrence is necessary to achieve an optimal match between the researcher and their subject.  As a class, please try to be as flexible as possible in selecting the subject of your paper.  Try not to choose a subject area that one of your classmates has chosen so we can attempt to cover as many subjects as possible.  Ten (10) references different from those listed in "COURSE MATERIALS" are required.  Source materials will be responsive, properly attributed and recognizably authoritative security or criminal justice publications.  Not more than half of the references should be purely trade publications (i.e., Police Chief, Security Management, etc.).  Internet source references should not exceed one half of the total number of references.  For example, if you use six (6) internet sources, the total number of sources has to be a minimum of twelve (12); eight (8) internet sources would require a minimum of 16 sources total.

Research Paper 2 -  This research undertaking will have “deterrence” as the topic; all students will have this subject as the topic of their second paper.  The same ground rules will apply to this project as they did in Research Paper # 1.  Students may exceed the ten page limit for their second paper, whereas you are discouraged from running over ten in the first paper.  With deterrence being the basis of all crime prevention and security theory (and practice), it is the salient concept of this course.
This paper will include all the common hypotheses and principles of deterrence, including its theoretical origins with Jeremy Bentham, British utilitarian philosopher, economist and political writer (1748-1832).  Perceptual deterrence will be discussed at length in our first class meeting, to include economic, physical and psychological risk assessment and decision-making models.  Perceived risks have traditionally been expected to govern prospective offender decisions, but will modern deterrence propaganda really work to depress anti-social behavior impulses?  Can perceived certainty of legal sanctions influence free will and predict behavior?  Will reliable probability estimates improve with increasing severity along the sanction continuum?
The current notion about place-specific crime deterrence (situational crime prevention) is more fashionable now that crime control research shows more promise for public sector applications, i.e., Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design.  It would appear that the first real bridge between private security and public safety could be built on a foundation of applied site and place-specific crime-risk mitigation.  You could be working on the concept(s) that unifies private security and public law enforcement in a way that has never before been possible.  You may want to address this assignment as if you were preparing a manuscript for publication.  There are lots of publishing opportunities in the private security literature, and after you have completed this assignment it is possible that you will have a promising submission.  You are free to include your own analytical and interpretative ideas with these findings.

CLASSWORK CHRONOLOGY:  A tentative timetable has been established below to help stay on course throughout the semester.
 

READINGS
March 01 & 02	Fischer & Green (the entire book)
March 02	Kent’s Perceptual Deterrence
March 02	Palmiotto’s Chapter 4
March 22	Smith’s CPTED Parking Facilities
March 22	Tunnell’s Criminal Calculus
March 22	Sherman/Eck’s Preventing Crime in Places
March 22	Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries

APPROVALS
March 02	Topic Approval, both research papers
March 22	Outline Approval, both research papers

 

WRITTEN ASSIGNMENTS
To Be Determined	Research Paper 1
To Be Determined	Research Paper 2

 

PRESENTATIONS
April 12	Oral Reports, Q&A for Research Paper 1
April 12 &13	Oral Reports, Q&A for Research Paper 2

 

EXAMINATIONS
April 13 (1 p.m.. - 5 p.m.)	Final Exam

CITY COLLEGE HOME PAGE  (http://www.loyno.edu/citycollege/)                             LOYOLA UNIVERSITY HOME PAGE (http://www.loyno.edu)

The contents of this communication are the sole responsibility of David Kent and do not necessarily represent the opinions or policies of Loyola University New Orleans.  Copyright © 1996-2002 Loyola University New Orleans.  Last updated on January 25, 2002.