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A Study On Urban Public Security In China During The Transitional Period

Posted on:2014-12-17Degree:DoctorType:Dissertation
Country:ChinaCandidate:L ZhaoFull Text:PDF
GTID:1106330434973132Subject:Social management and social policy
Abstract/Summary:PDF Full Text Request
With the deepening of the reform and opening-up in China, the society is entering a risk-magnified and dispute-escalated epoch. In recent years, accidents and problems related to public safety and security. frequently occurred, leading to the grave consequences of heavy losses of public and private property or human injuries or deaths. Problems in public security affect the citizen’s sense of safety and security and meanwhile challenge the government’s management in this area. However, the factors relevant to public insecurity are not only from the accidents, but under the influence of the physical, mental and cognitive elements of the individual. What’s more, the public management, social environment, economic situation and mass media all result in public insecure feelings. Thus, all this brings great challenges to the risk management and crisis governance of the government. So researching on factors and resources of public sense of safety and security is not only beneficial to maintain social stability and resist risks but effective to discover social problems and alert possible risks so that the risk proactive management can be truly realized.In present studies on public sense of safety and security, problems like unclear concepts, small research scopes, single method and discipline still exist as the researchers mainly focus on the influence of crime and public order on public safe feelings. Most of the discussed factors are demographic variables and the related discipline is victimology, lack of social, environmental and especially the governmental factors study. Still the cognitive variables haven’t been explored thoroughly yet. All of these less discussed parts are vital and valuable to public safety and security management and researches.This research is a multidisciplinary study including theories, concepts and methodology of sociology, psychology, criminology, public management and public policy, combing qualitative and quantitative study. Theoretically, after the concepts and the assessment studies are reviewed, a framework containing seven public safety and security areas, suitable to a wide range of the broad masses of people, is established to analyze the data based on three-year-survey questionnaires in the city of Shanghai, the most populous city in China. Then empirically, we have assessed the situation of public sense of safety and security in the past three years.By choosing the data of year of2011survey as an example, we study the factors related to public sense of safety and security, hoping to find out the influential elements. Moreover, we try to set up an early warning system upon public safety and security sense to perfect the existing mechanism of the early alerting. Hopefully this research can improve the public safety and security management so we raise a public safety and security governance system in the end according to our previous study. What we find is as follows:Public security evaluation analyses from the year2009to2011indicate that three years of Shanghai public safety and security sense index and the government safety and security management satisfaction index are overall steady, but in some areas fluctuations still exist. The survey data show that the index for food safety sense of citizens in Shanghai is greatly on the downside, the sense of traffic safety for three years is in decline, and the fire safety and security index in the2010survey is in the bottom. In general, most satisfaction index of the government’s public security management is higher than its related public safety and security feeling index, proving that residents have some confidence in the government safety and security management. But in some parts, the residents of public safety and security sense index is obviously higher than the satisfaction index, such as the2009traffic safety and security, the food safety, fire controlling and the natural disaster area in2011. Especially the government management satisfaction index in food safety for2009is far lower than the food safety sense.Public security warning research finds that:through the ROC analysis, the probability of citizens into the threat range calculated by logistic model enjoys a higher accuracy. However, our study is only based on the three-year survey data. If we have enough survey data, the probability of security cordon can be estimated by this method, which will be used in the calculation of citizens’initial crisis probability.First and foremost, all relevant factors show that public safety and security sense is related to physiological factors:Generally, the male feel safer than the female which is particularly true in safety sense of food. As to the personal circumstances, education experience has a negative influence on general safety sense and the safety sense with natural character. The citizens with bachelor’s degrees or above hold the lowest sense of safety and security. Except environment and traffic safety feeling, the other feelings are correlated to educational background, which shows a negative correlation of a higher education with a lower public sense of safety and security. This illustrates risk perception of the public has obvious effects on public safety sense. The more risks they percept, the more unsafe people will feel and the stronger the feeling of insecurity they will have. Secondly, the personal cognition to the outside world has an impact on the public sense of safety and security. The social classes, especially the subjective cognition of social classes, and public feeling of security also have some correlations. In different income groups, the one who enjoys higher incomes tends to have a safer feeling. In general, people who think themselves in a higher subjective social class have a more unsafe feeling of public safety with social attributes. The relative deprivation affects people’s sense of security. The group whose own income is considered unreasonably lower than they should earn has less feelings of public safety. Thirdly, the environment has effect on the public sense of safety and security. The more serious social problems people argue are, the lower their degree of feeling safe is. Moreover, living conditions and environment affects public security feeling in a certain sense:residents in between inner and central ring in Shanghai have weaker sense of food safety than those in outer ring and inner ring while the opposite is true in sense of environment safety. The mass media are important information amplifier referring to feeling of public security. To participate in safety related activities and organizations help improve the sense of public security. Last but not least, public security management has played a very important role in public feeling of safety: people who are more confident in and satisfied with the government’s ability to maintain the public security have a higher degree of sense of security.
Keywords/Search Tags:sense of public safety and security, subjective safety and securityassessment, early warning of public safety&security sense, public safety and securitymanagement
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