Empowerment and collective efficacy: Insights for community-based crime prevention

The current climate surrounding policing in the United States indicates a need to develop more community-based solutions to crime in order to create a more just society. Collective efficacy theory is a widely studied framework that explores how communities mobilize to address crime through informal social control. Though collective efficacy is associated with lower levels of crime, research suggests that developing effective interventions based on the theory is difficult. The present study examines collective efficacy through the lens of empowerment and tests mutual efficacy and self-efficacy as predictors of informal social control among community members, and within respondents’ households. Findings from the study increase our understanding of how and why empowered individuals and communities mobilize to prevent crime, and identify practice behaviors that make collective efficacy theory more actionable for social work practice.