Situational Crime Prevention

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Situational Crime Prevention

• Understanding Criminology
• Dan Ellingworth
• Tuesday, 17th February 2009

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Lecture Outline

• Crime Prevention a new approach
• Typologies and Theories
• Techniques and What Works
• Kirkholt Burglary Prevention Programme
• Neighbourhood Watch
• Critique

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How did Crime Prevention Thinking emerge

• Massive rise in crime rate since the 1950s,
  despite the rise in affluence
• Massive rise in CJS expenditure
• Little evidence of conventional CJS policies
  working
• Legitimacy of CJS questioned
• An etiological crisis of criminology?

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A new paradigm?

• Home Office
• Ron Clarke crime as opportunity
• Pat Mayhew natural gas and suicide
• British Crime Survey
• a more victim-oriented approach
• awareness of deficits of police data
• puncture the balloon of fear of crime
• a separation of crime reduction from the
  punishment of offenders

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The Change in Thinking

• OLD
• The State v. the Offender
• Offender breaking the criminal code
• Solution
• Punishment and Deterrence
• Change offenders disposition to commit crime

NEW
Solution Intervene in the situation that
produces crime
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Typology of Crime Prevention(Pease 1997)

• Primary (or Situational) Crime Prevention
• reduction of crime without reference to criminals
  and potential criminals
• leading role played by the police
• Secondary Crime Prevention
• Attempts to change the propensity of an
  individual to embark on a criminal career
• Leading role social work / youth service
• Tertiary Crime Prevention
• focuses on the truncation of a criminal career
• Leading role prison and probation
• Not entirely effective
• recruitment into crime
• identification of high-rate offenders difficult
• moral concern over false positives
• Move from tertiary to primary prevention

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Marcus Felson Routine Activities Theory
Crime Occurs
Most settings of crime can be analysed in
terms of these three factors Crime can be
prevented by altering any or all of these factors
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Chemistry for Crime

• Also need to consider
• facilitating factors props camouflage audience
• Target characteristics CRAVED hot products
  (Concealable, Removable, Available, Valuable,
  Enjoyable, Disposable) also apply to predatory
  personal crime
• Geography nodes, paths, settings
• Opportunity is the Key

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Situational Crime Prevention

• 3 broad aims
• Design safe settings
• Organise effective procedures
• Develop secure products
• Within these, there are now a range of techniques
  addressing the immediate setting of crime
• Efforts to prevent crime with reference to human
  nature, punitive deterrence, or rehabilitation
  are much less effective

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Crime Prevention

• Renewed relevance for criminology over the
  nothing works pessimism
• Practical methods of reducing crime that are
  unconnected with punishment
• Evidence led What Works?

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What works in Situational Crime Prevention? (Ron
Clarke)

• Increasing the effort of crime prevention
• Target hardening Access Control Deflecting
  offenders Controlling facilitators
• Increasing the risks of detection
• Entry / exit screening Formal and Natural
  surveillance
• Reducing the reward
• Target removal Property identification Removing
  inducements Rule setting

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Kirkholt Burglary Prevention Programme

• Public Housing Estate 2280 dwellings
• High Burglary Rate
• Existing knowledge predicted medium risk of
  burglary
• Reality twice the high risk rate

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Kirkholt Burglary Prevention Programme
Evaluation Model

• Contextualise
• Specify
• Target
• Intervene
• Measure
• Analyse and Evaluate
• Adapt

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Effects
1986 1987 1988 1989
Number of Burglaries 512 317 170 145
Change -38 -67 -72
Comparison 1 -19 -24
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Key Features of The Kirkholt Programme

1. It was well resourced
2. It was about a high crime area
3. It was a self-contained area and community
4. One specific target (coin meters) could be
   removed
5. Particular crime problems were well researched
6. Well specified problem repeat burglary
   victimisation

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Problems with Kirkholt Evaluation

• Identification of Detailed Impacts
• Could only evaluate the project as a whole
• Solution
• Limit the range of interventions
• Limits the wider impact of the project, and
  misses opportunities
• Expand the scope of the target
• Implementation problems?

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Replication

• Need to consider Context, Measure, Mechanism and
  Outcome if the findings are to be replicated
• E.g. Cocoon home watch
• Context A medium sized, homogeneous, clearly
  defined estate with little through traffic.
• Measure Stimulus and maintenance of near
  universal cocoon home watch.
• Mechanism Increased perceived risks of
  recognition of offenders, plus heightened levels
  of informal social control.
• Outcome A reduced burglary rate overall and a
  general reduction in crime and incivilities.

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Neighbourhood Watch

• Informal social control Model
• main agent for social control is the community,
  not the police
• Neighbourhood Watch produces the social
  interaction necessary to strengthen community
  cohesion main aim to reduce fear of crime
• OR
• Opportunity Reduction model
• Natural surveillance
• Self-protection / target hardening

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Effectiveness of NW?

• More support for the informal social control
  model
• fear of crime lower in areas where residents feel
  more responsibility and control over their area
• fear of crime seems to be related to perceived
  level of social order
• NW participants exhibit higher levels of informal
  social interaction than others community
  capital?

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Evaluation problems

• Self-selection bias
• Schemes tend to exist in areas with existing high
  levels of social cohesion doubts whether
  attitudes and behaviour are actually changed
• Assumption that NW protects areas against
  offenders from other areas
• highest crime areas show high levels of both
  offences and offenders difficult to overcome
  mutual distrust
• Some evidence to suggest heightened fear and
  awareness of crime

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Displacement

• Temporal
• Spatial
• Tactical
• Crime type
• Perpetrator
• Never 100

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Rhetoric and Reality of Crime Prevention

• 2 histories of crime prevention (Weatheritt)
• the elevation of crime prevention as the primary
  objective of policing encouraging
• the day-to-day reality less encouraging
• CP still marginal to main policing activities
• Police culture still generally reactive CP not
  seen as getting a result

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Rhetoric and Reality of Crime Prevention

• Multi-agency approaches
• still dominated and dependent on police
• local authorities now have a statutory duty to
  get involved. However
• no extra funding
• not a leading role
• audits and evaluations leading to situational
  crime prevention, but not social crime prevention
• an unwarranted assumption of a shared approach?
• Jock Young
• net-widening community control has
  supplemented, rather than replaced traditional
  crime control
• little empirical evidence of this theory