The Roles of Community Participation in Crime Prevention: In the Case of Gambella Town

Abstract

The role of community participation in crime prevention in Gambella Town plays an important role in reducing crime because it enables regular people to participate and producing public safety and security alongside police participants. The study's goals are to evaluate the roles of community members in crime prevention, pinpoint the mechanisms of community participation in crime prevention. The study employed was descriptive by design and qualitative in approach. Participants of the study were 36 (thirty-six) that were selected by using the purposive sampling from community elders, youth, police officers, and court judges of the community participants of Newland 01 Kebele, one of the selected kebele in the study areas. The data gathering tools employed for the study were primary data, which was gathered by key informant interviews, focus group discussions, in-depth interviews, and a field observational checklist with semistructured questions from selected participants that stopped at 36 participants, and secondary data gathered from related documents, such as journal articles and different books from the website and the gathered data were analyzed inductively. The major findings were significant factors of community participation in prevention crime since 2022, the lack of trust between community and law enforcement, language and cultural barriers, murders, and suicides.