Identifying what works: Recent trends in crime prevention strategies

This paper reviews lessons learned from evaluations of crime prevention programs in the past three decades and discusses how crime prevention approaches have changed in terms of theory, research, evaluation, and public policy. We argue that present strategies of crime prevention may be best understood by tracing the failures of earlier American crime prevention efforts. The paper discusses different types of crime prevention strategies and draws upon examples from developmental, law enforcement, and criminal justice approaches. From this discussion emerges a set of principles for a new approach to crime prevention that is specific in terms of the problems addressed and the contexts examined. The paper concludes with examples of recent crime prevention strategies that utilize these lessons and that appear to have promising effects on crime. While these approaches suggest optimism in terms of the crime prevention potential of new strategies, we urge caution in that these new crime prevention efforts are at an early stage of development. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Hot spots policing and crime prevention: A systematic review of randomized controlled trials

Crime scholars and practitioners have argued that police actions should be focused on high-risk crime places rather than spread thinly across the urban landscape. This review examines five randomized controlled trials of the effects of concentrating police enforcement efforts on crime hot spots. The findings of these evaluations suggest that focused police actions can prevent crime and disorder in crime hot spots. A meta-analysis of the effect sizes from the five experiments reveals a statistically significant mean effect size for hot spots policing interventions; this suggests overall reductions in citizen calls for service in the treatment hot spots relative to the control hot spots. These studies also suggest that focused police actions at specific locations do not necessarily result in crime displacement. Although these evaluations reveal that these programs work in preventing crime, additional research is needed to unravel other important policy-relevant issues such as community reaction to focused police enforcement efforts.     

Resisting ‘progressive’ carceral expansion: lessons for abolitionists from anti-colonial resistance

This article documents a government-led strategy to more closely integrate policing with community-based ‘crime prevention’ programming in the city of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. These initiatives have targeted neighborhoods with large Indigenous populations. In this article I illustrate how community-level conflicts over responses to ‘crime’ are also sites of settler colonial conflict, and how settler colonial governance is reproduced and resisted through the governance of crime. Interviews with politicians, policy-makers, bureaucrats in the crime prevention branch of the provincial government, and directors and employees at community-based organizations suggest that the pursuit of the government strategy of integrated crime prevention and suppression has been more a project of attempting to ‘manage’ urban Indigenous people than serve their interests. As a contribution to abolitionist thought and theory, this article profiles sites of conflict between community police and community-based organizations over definitions of the ‘crime’ problem in city-center Winnipeg. These examples highlight a kinship between carceral abolitionist and decolonial politics.     

Community Safety Maps for Children in Japan: An Analysis from a Situational Crime Prevention Perspective

Recent years have witnessed several major crimes against children both inside, and in the vicinity of, schools in Japan. These criminal incidents have heightened parental and community concerns regarding the safety of children in school. From the perspective of situational crime prevention, this study attempts to examine the nature and characteristics of community safety maps designed for children. It assesses the potential benefits of these maps and analyzes the structural and cultural obstacles for their implementation. This paper calls for more research into further innovative crime prevention strategies that can be used in Japanese schools so as to prevent children from becoming victims of crimes.     

Street justice: Some micro-moral reservations: Comment on sykes

Research on the use of incapacitation strategies to reduce crime has increased rapidly in the last decade. Estimates of the crime reduction potential are numerous and variable, reflecting different assumptions by researchers. This paper reviews and synthesizes studies of collective and selective incapacitation. Sentencing practices in the 1970s and early 1980s prevented an estimated 10 to 30 percent of potential crimes through collective incapacitation strategies. Greater use of incarceration, such as through mandatory minimum sentences, would prevent additional crimes, but prison populations would increase substantially. Selective incapacitation strategies target a small group of convicted offenders, those who are predicted to commit serious crimes at high rates, for incarceration. These high-rate serious offenders, however, are difficult to identify accurately with information currently available in official criminal history records. Preliminary research, assuming moderate accuracy, suggests that selective incapacitation may prevent some crimes, such as 5 to 10 percent of robberies by adults, but increases in prison populations would result. The future of selective incapacitation is discussed in light of current research and knowledge about serious criminal activity.     

Implementing and evaluating crime prevention and control programs and policies

The history of crime prevention and control efforts in the United States has demonstrated little progressive improvement in our ability to deter crime. The major obstacles to implementing effective interventions and policies have been a weak scientific knowledge base about how to prevent crime, the research community's inability to effectively disseminate what is known about the causes of crime and to translate this knowledge into operational programs and policies, and a resistance on the part of practitioners and policy makers to evaluate programs and policies and to use this information in the development of new programs and policies. In the last decade, there have been major advances in our understanding about the causes of crime and we have now demonstrated the effectiveness of selected prevention programs. But there is little evidence that this scientific knowledge is informing current practice or policy. Problems in the dissemination of this information and the resistance to utilizing it remain. These problems are discussed and suggestions are made for addressing them. Our knowledge base remains modest, but it is now sufficient to inform policy and practice. The research community must work to do a better job of disseminating this information and overcoming the resistance to utilizing it before we will be successful in implementing effective crime prevention programs and policies. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Crime prevention in a communitarian society: Bang-jiao and tiao-jie in the people's Republic of China

This paper examines two important strategies of community crime prevention in contemporary Chinese society: bang-jiao and tiao-jie. Bang-jiao refers to community efforts to reintegrate offenders into the community. Tiao-jie refers to community groups designed to resolve disputes among neighbors and family members, and in doing so, to reduce crime. We describe these strategies, discuss their philosophical underpinnings, and identify the features of Chinese society that support their implementation. We also explore their effectiveness with survey data from a sample of offenders in Tianjin, China. Our empirical analyses suggest that bang-jiao and tiao-jie may indeed be important structural mechanisms for crime control in a communitarian society.     

Focused Deterrence Strategies and Crime Control

Research Summary

Focused deterrence strategies are increasingly being applied to prevent and control gang and group‐involved violence, overt drug markets, and individual repeat offenders. Our updated examination of the effects of focused deterrence strategies on crime followed the systematic review protocols and conventions of the Campbell Collaboration. Twenty‐four quasi‐experimental evaluations were identified in this systematic review. The results of our meta‐analysis demonstrate that focused deterrence strategies are associated with an overall statistically significant, moderate crime reduction effect. Nevertheless, program effect sizes varied by program type and were smaller for evaluations with more rigorous research designs.

Policy Implications

The available empirical evidence suggests these strategies generate noteworthy crime reduction impacts and should be part of a broader portfolio of crime reduction strategies available to policy makers and practitioners. Investments still need to be made, however, to strengthen the overall rigor of program evaluations and improve our understanding of key program activities associated with observed crime reduction impacts.     

Biosocial criminology and modern crime prevention

Objective

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, criminological efforts to prevent or reduce crime were centered on addressing presumed biological causes of crime. Most of these strategies involved calls for eugenics—proposals that today are considered unethical and morally reprehensible. Biologically-oriented criminology and crime control policies have re-emerged with new sophistication and attention to the importance of social context. Additionally, developmental crime prevention, with a special focus on biological/physiological risk factors in the early life course, has become influential in criminology. This paper examines the relevance of biology to modern day crime prevention.

Materials and methods

Narrative review of the theoretical and empirical literature of biology and developmental crime prevention.

Results

There are a growing number of developmental crime prevention programs that address biological risk factors for delinquency and later criminal offending. These programs are found in the family, school, and community domains. Evidence suggests that these programs can reduce crime.

Conclusions

While “biological crime prevention” as a separate field has not yet emerged, findings show that crime prevention programs can and do address biology in a sociologically sensitive manner—and these programs have shown significant impacts on crime.     

The Centrality of Theory in Modern Day Crime Prevention: Developments,Challenges, and Opportunities

Theory matters in crime prevention. Indeed, but this is hardly the full story. Crime prevention is oftentimes viewed as atheoretical—not grounded in the etiology of crime and offending. Reasons abound for this view, and the recent interest in an evidence-based approach to policy-making has been at the forefront. This article reviews the role that theory plays in modern day crime prevention, with a special focus on the three main crime prevention strategies: developmental, community, and situational. The review identifies a number of key challenges and opportunities for making theory more central to crime prevention. It suggests that the classification system employed in situational crime prevention has allowed for a more explicit connection between sound theory and prevention techniques, and may provide important lessons for developmental and community crime prevention.     

Constructing Crime against the Elderly in Swedish Crime Prevention Campaigns

The study investigates how crime prevention activities frame the problem of crime against the elderly, regarding character, causes, effects and solutions. Data was collected through participant observations, interviews and analysis of a film produced by a local crime prevention council in Sweden. It is concluded that crime prevention for seniors produces complex and contradicting images of the problem. In situational crime prevention seniors are warned to look out for strangers stalking them or trying to access their homes. Statements that victimization is uncommon among the old are combined with warnings that invoke images of mysterious ever-present perpetrators. In social crime prevention, where causes and interventions of crime are discussed, crime prevention officers link the problem to established social problems such as drug abuse and juvenile delinquency. This way of framing the problem is typical for a Swedish Social Democratic perspective, where lack of community and integration are defined as causes of social problems. It is concluded that warnings to look out for strangers who ask for help may be at odds with this striving towards community.     

Awareness of community-oriented policing and neighborhood perceptions in five small to midsize cities

Although past research in large urban areas showed that community-oriented policing (COP) had a positive effect on citizens' views of the police and their neighborhood, very little was known about its impact on citizen perceptions in smaller cities. In the present study, multiple-regression was used to analyze survey data from 524 respondents in five small cities or towns in North Carolina to examine the success of local police departments in disseminating information about their COP program. The association between resident awareness of COP and their ratings of police/community relations, self-protection strategies, fear of crime, and community integration was also assessed. Police agencies in each city implemented COP at least one year before the survey. Results indicated that 20-50 percent of residents were aware of community policing efforts in their neighborhoods, but most did not participate in these efforts. Awareness of COP was associated with greater self-protection efforts, lower fear of crime, and stronger feelings of community attachment, controlling for demographic, perceptions of neighborhood problems, and victimization. Awareness of COP also had a stronger association with the outcome variables compared to a more traditional policing strategy, perceived visibility. The implications of these findings for COP programs, especially for small to midsize cities, are discussed in the Conclusion.     

ASSESSING THE EXTENT OF CRIME DISPLACEMENT AND DIFFUSION OF BENEFITS: A REVIEW OF SITUATIONAL CRIME PREVENTION EVALUATIONS*

Few criticisms of situational crime‐prevention (SCP) efforts are as frequent or prevalent as claims of displacement. Despite emerging evidence to the contrary, the prevailing sentiment seems to be that crime displacement is inevitable. This study examined 102 evaluations of situationally focused crime‐prevention projects in an effort to determine the extent to which crime displacement was observed. The results indicate that of the 102 studies that examined (or allowed for examination of) displacement and diffusion effects, there were 574 observations. Displacement was observed in 26 percent of those observations. The opposite of displacement, diffusion of benefit, was observed in 27 percent of the observations. Moreover, the analysis of 13 studies, which allowed for assessment of overall outcomes of the prevention project while taking into account spatial displacement and diffusion effects, revealed that when spatial displacement did occur, it tended to be less than the treatment effect, suggesting that the intervention was still beneficial. Implications for theory and future research are discussed.     

The irony of broken windows policing: A micro-place study of the relationship between disorder, focused police crackdowns and fear of crime

In their seminal “Broken Windows” article in Atlantic Monthly, J. Q. Wilson and G. L. Kelling (1982) suggested that police could more effectively fight crime by targeting minor offenses. They hypothesized that untended disorder increases fear of crime in a community, starting a chain of events that eventually leads to heightened levels of crime. By targeting disorder, police can thus circumvent this cycle of neighborhood decline (Skogan, 1990). This study aimed to improve knowledge of the relationship between disorder and fear of crime in the context of the broken windows hypothesis by using a micro-place level research design involving a police crackdown on disorder and minor crime at hot spots. The results of the current study suggest that perceived social disorder and observed levels of physical disorder have a strong impact on fear of crime. This confirms the relationship between disorder and fear hypothesized by the broken windows literature, and implies that police may be able to reduce fear of crime by reducing disorder. It was also found, however, that the police intervention itself significantly increased the probability of feeling unsafe. Accordingly, any fear reduction benefits gained by reducing disorder may be offset by the fact that the policing strategies employed simultaneously increase fear of crime. These findings suggest the importance of a careful focus on “how” broken windows policing programs are implemented. Such programs must be geared not only to reduce disorder, but also to prevent increases in citizen fear that accompany crackdowns and other intensive enforcement efforts associated with broken windows policing.     

Multi-sector cooperation in preventing crime: the case of a South African Neighbourhood Watch as an effective crime prevention model

Abstract

This case study describes the experience of effective and sustainable multi-sector co-operation in the prevention of crime between the Roodekrans Neighbourhood Watch (RNW) in Roodepoort, South Africa, the South African Police Service, private security businesses and the local business sector. This case study is illustrated in the context of empowering communities to take ownership of community safety by facilitating a multi-sector approach. Many studies have highlighted the role of the police in driving crime prevention, however, this paper focuses on the role and contribution of communities themselves as an effective vehicle of crime prevention drawing on multi-sector co-operation. Knowledge regarding best practices in this field of crime prevention remains a work in progress, therefore this paper aims to contribute to the general framework for the growth of successful multi-sector community-based crime prevention initiatives.     

Community Members’ Perceptions of the CSI Effect

The CSI Effect is the notion that crime show viewing influences jurors to have unrealistic expectations of forensic evidence, which then affects their trial decisions. Analyses of popular media shows that the media portrays the effect as a real problem, and research surveying the legal community indicates that they believe the CSI Effect exists and may change their investigation and trial strategies accordingly. The present study expanded on this research by surveying community members regarding their perceptions of the CSI Effect. Community members reported their general television and crime show viewing behaviors, and we examined this in relation to their knowledge construction of the CSI Effect. Findings indicate that overall, the majority of community members did not have knowledge of the CSI effect, but those who did perceive it as an unrealistic expectation of evidence. When provided with a definition of the CSI Effect, people generally believed it exists. Additionally, crime show viewing and participant’s race influenced people’s perceptions of the CSI effect. Limitations of this study and directions for future research are also discussed.     

Swedish quantitative criminology in the 1990s: A brief overview

Quantitative criminology research published in Sweden in the 1990s is reviewed and put in the context of major Swedish traditions in quantitative criminological research. Sweden has a strong tradition in sophisticated longitudinal and ecological research which continues into the 1990s. Other traditionally prominent areas of Swedish quantitative research include studies of crime trends, violence, and youth criminality. Traditionally Swedish quantitative criminology has been dominated by studies using official statistics and criminal records as data. In the 1990s there has been a significant upswing in survey studies, motivated partly by an increased interest in questions of etiology and crime prevention. More fundamental research on the causes of crime, including new longitudinal studies, and more evaluations of crime prevention initiatives are needed.     

Incapacitation and imprisonment: prisoners' involvement in community-based crime

Abstract

The impact of incapacitation on prisoners' offending behaviour is a neglected area of research. The aim of this study was to examine the extent and nature of prisoners' involvement in community-based crime in the UK. Participants were selected from nine prisons in the UK and consisted of 360 prisoners, 81 females and 279 males. Offenders were interviewed to assess levels and forms of involvement in community-based crime and perceptions of other prisoners' involvement. Levels of prisonization and institutional and demographic characteristics were used to identify vulnerability to involvement in community-based crime. Twenty-five per cent of the sample admitted personal involvement and 63% reported other prisoners' involvement in a diverse range of crimes. Analyses revealed prisoners involved in community-based crime are likely to be young, male recidivists who hold prisonized attitudes. Prisoners who are white, prisonized and recidivist reported highest levels of other prisoners' involvement in community-based crime. No age or gender differences delineated prisoners' reports of others' involvement. The results show that incarcerating offenders may not prevent their involvement in community-based offending. Discussion centres on the characteristics of involved prisoners and considers the implications of the results for rehabilitation and penal policy.     

Deliberate firesetting: hotspot schools as arenas and preventive actors

ABSTRACT

Firesetting is one of the crime acts most representative of youth crime, and schools are among the buildings most often targeted, causing significant social, material and economic damage. This study examines schools as arenas with particular exposure to deliberate firesetting and as actors interpreting and utilizing their organizational scope to prevent school fires. The focus on school organizations is unique and urgently needed in research on juvenile firesetting, given their pivotal but under-researched role in crime prevention. The study is based on an in-depth analysis of data (interviews, documents and official registry data) related to 20 fire-exposed lower secondary schools in two major Swedish cities. These schools mobilized a broad repertoire of social, situational and structural measures. Interviewed school personnel perceived and responded to firesetting in relation to the institutional school setting, group dynamics, individual characteristics and local context. The schools were generally located in socio-economically disadvantaged areas and faced comprehensive educational and social challenges. The firesetting problem – and paradoxically some well-intentioned preventive efforts – risk adding further dimensions to school segregation and inequality, potentially increasing stigmatization and marginalization.     

Researcher–practitioner partnerships and crime analysis: a case study in action research

This paper describes a recent researcher–practitioner partnership designed to address the challenges faced by law enforcement agencies when implementing crime control and prevention strategies. Using an action research methodology, the project embedded a group of trained students within the law enforcement community to assist with local crime problems and supplement existing crime analysis and research capabilities in six agency units. Results of this case study offer several implications for future researcher–practitioner partnerships focused on crime analysis and present an enhanced set of metrics for evaluating success.