Crime Reduction - Helping to Reduce Crime in Your Area

1. Introduction

2. Definitions

3. Spheres of crime reduction

4. The preventive process: from crime problems to crime prevention solutions
        Worked example 1 - theft
        Worked example 2 - assault

5. Intervention

6. Intervention Space: crime prevention and the Conjunction of Criminal Opportunity

7. Implementation

8. Targeting

9. Insertion of the implementations in the community

10. Social levels of action

11. Management: planning, feedback, monitoring and evaluation

12. Tactical management of crime reduction schemes

13. Keeping ahead

14. Conclusion

1. Introduction

A common theme of the recent Crime Reduction Programme has been the implementation of schemes which are based on reliable evidence of what works and what is cost effective, and which themselves generate more of that evidence through rigorous evaluation. The successor programme - the Safer Communities Initiative - also favours an evidence-based approach, as do the Crime Reduction Toolkits on the Crime Reduction website.

Although using evidence-based action, where that evidence is available, is central to successful performance in delivering crime reduction, other considerations are also important. These include a wider know-how, a culture of innovation and learning, and a conceptual framework. This last is the subject of this guidance note.

Crime reduction embraces an extremely varied range of activity which has evolved over the last 20 years.   An even more varied set of terms, concepts and frameworks have haphazardly proliferated in an effort to describe and organise that activity.  Rival classifications, vague or illogical distinctions (eg physical versus social prevention, or prevention versus deterrence) and cultural or even ideological boundaries (eg situational versus offender-oriented approaches, which almost occupy separate worlds from each other and from traditional law enforcement) fragment the field and place severe limits on performance.

Without a uniform system of clearly defined terms and concepts, practitioners are denied some important tools for thought. They can't clearly envisage, describe, plan and implement what they are trying to achieve in a community safety/crime reduction scheme. And they can't readily communicate with each other - particularly with partners from other agencies. This makes it hard to focus on how, exactly, the methods employed by the scheme are intended to work - predisposing schemes to weak implementation and drift of objectives, and hindering quality assurance. It compartmentalises solutions into what the police can achieve, what the local authority can do or what the probation service can deliver, and inhibits the adoption of a problem oriented approach. It stifles intelligent and selective replication and innovation attuned to local contexts in favour of a limited cookbook of fixed recipes and tried and untested popular solutions. It also renders evaluation difficult, hinders the accumulation of a collective body of "what works" principles. Even finding out what has worked already is difficult without a decent system for describing and retrieving information.

The Conjunction of Criminal Opportunity (CCO) framework seeks to remedy this by:

• defining terms such as prevention, reduction and community safety clearly and drawing useful distinctions between these perspectives

• bridging the cultural fault lines dividing the field

• helping practitioners to envisage, communicate and implement specific interventions in the causes of crime, and to integrate diverse approaches (for example, securing burgled houses whilst cracking down on handlers of stolen goods and addressing what motivates the local teenagers to offend).

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2. Definitions

The CCO begins by defining crime prevention, reduction and community safety. Prevention and reduction focus on criminal events, while community safety has a wider perspective.

Reduction is a simpler, but wider, concept than prevention. It incorporates the future orientation of prevention, whether it is directed towards reducing the risk of individual criminal events (eg intercepting a specific racial attack planned for the weekend) or decreasing more general crime risks (eg the high risk of burglary in a neighbourhood, or making offending by particular individuals less likely). But it also has the present orientation of disrupting and frustrating specific crimes as they happen (for example through police action to halt a fight or a citizen’s action to repulse a pickpocket). And it has the past orientation of limiting progressive harm after a crime has happened (eg halting further misuse of a stolen credit card); and arresting, and punishing or treating convicted offenders.

In practice there will be very few crime reduction actions which do not have a preventive aspect. Offenders will usually anticipate intervention and punishment, and take avoiding action – hopefully by being deterred or discouraged from committing the contemplated crime. And imprisonment, curfews, supervision or treatment will mean they are unable or unwilling to commit the next crimes, at least for a while.

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3. Spheres of crime reduction

Judicial reduction intervenes in the causes of crime through the very existence of the Criminal Justice System (CJS) and through its formal processes in arresting, prosecuting, trying, sentencing and punishing individual offenders

The rest of crime prevention, acting outside the formal process of the Criminal or Civil Justice Systems, can be called extrajudicial.  This is implemented by a range of agencies, partnerships, and private companies and individuals;  and may take place before or after any court case occurs, or more often in the absence of any such proceedings.  Within this ‘residual’ category, there are two other spheres. 

Civil prevention covers the everyday, routine social and economic behaviour of individuals and institutions, which create opportunities, motives and predispositions for crime.

But there is an important intermediate area. This can be called parajudicial crime prevention. The various agencies involved in the CJS - prison, police, probation - also implement a range of activities which are intended to exercise powers toprevent impending criminal events, to deflect groups at risk of committing crime or to rehabilitate existing offenders. And the police, of course, patrol the streets, frustrate offenders’ preparations for crime, intervene in ongoing crimes, administer formal cautions and advise on prevention. Due to their significant impact on individual liberty and privacy, these activities are subject to stringent procedural checks and balances and are often formally linked to the penal process. Parajudicial prevention can be defined as crime prevention which acts through the agencies of the CJS, which may sometimes be formally linked to the criminal process, but which is not strictly part of justice.

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4. The preventive process: from crime problems to crime prevention solutions

Doing crime reduction is less about supplying fixed, cookbook solutions from a limited repertoire, and far more about applying basic principles at various stages of a  process.  In other words, practitioners should be less like technicians and more like consultants.  A number of versions of these stages have been produced over recent years, including “SARA” (Scanning, Analysis, Response, Assessment) of Problem-Oriented Policing.  But they are all pretty similar:

1. Identification of crime problem and setting of objectives for reduction

2. Diagnosis of causes of crime problem

3. Selection of specific interventions and creation of practical operational solutions

4. Implementation

5. Evaluation and adjustment

In dealing with immediate local crime problems, the first stage of the preventive process is usually to identify patterns of crime risk. This can be done through crime pattern analysis or offender targeting. 

Problem space: a map of symptoms and crime reduction objectives

The second stage is to identify the immediate causes that come together to make the criminal events happen - the Conjunction of Criminal Opportunity.  This is a kind of 'universal story' of the criminal event in which an offender, who is ready, willing and able, seeks out or engineers a crime situation comprising a vulnerable and attractive target of crime, in a favourable environment and in the absence of motivated and capable preventers. Remoter causes such as societal influences on childrearing quality or the market price for spare parts for cars are diverse and many but all ultimately act through the immediate ones.  It is possible topick out just 11 generic kinds of immediate causal precursor. Two concrete examples of criminal events and their causes are given below:

On the offender side:

• criminality - longer-term, personality based influences predisposing them to crime

• lack of skills to avoid crime - whether to avoid conflict or to gain a legitimate living

• readiness to offend - shorter term influences - motives and emotional states (need money, stressed out) as determined by current life circumstances, conflicts, influence of drugs

• resources for committing crime - skills, courage, knowledge of targets and modus operandi, tools, weapons and networks of collaborators

• anticipation and perception of risk, effort, reward and attacks of conscience

• presence in the crime situation

On the situational side:

• target person, property, service, system or information that is vulnerable, provocative or attractive

• target enclosure - building, room or container that is vulnerable topenetration and contains suitable targets

• wider environment that is logistically/tactically favourable for offenders and unfavourable for preventers, and which may attract or motivate the offence 

• absence of crime preventers - people or organisations, formal or informal, who make the crime less likely

• presence of crime promoters - who make the crime more likely whether unwittingly, carelessly or deliberately - for example by supplying tools, information or other criminal services before or after the crime

This approach assumes that future risk will be the same as patterns of crime that have already been seen to occur. Other approaches to the identification of risk can also draw on this framework. Longer-term offender-oriented crime reduction approaches start in a different way, identifying risk and protective factors in children and young people's life circumstances that may subsequently lead them to offend. Future risks that are different from present patterns can also be anticipated: the CCO has the potential to help local authorities, under s.17 of the Crime and Disorder Act, conduct crime impact assessments of proposed policies and practices. Rather than ask the overwhelmingly broad question "what impact on crime will this have?", they can ask "what impact on criminality will it have, what impact on resources for avoiding crime?" and so on systematically through the 11 generic causes.

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5. Intervention

Having diagnosed the causes of the crime problem, practitioners have to choose how and where to intervene in them. An intervention disrupts the conjunction of criminal opportunity, reduces the risk of criminal events and, if all goes well, reduces the number of such events that actually occur. Benefits for community safety and economic well-being may follow. Off the shelf interventions won't do - the interventions must be customised to the specific local problem and context.

The 11 generic kinds of intervention are mapped onto the causes they are ultimately intended to block, weaken or divert - even if, as with early childhood schemes, the intervention is way upstream of the crimes they seek toprevent.

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6. Intervention Space: crime prevention and the Conjunction of Criminal Opportunity

These are highly specific interventions against specific crime problems.  Interventions at a more strategic level would address the same causes but in a more structured way, centring on making it difficult for offenders to earn enough of a living through crime at acceptable levels of risk and effort.  An example of a strategic intervention would be trying to design out concentrations or flows of wealth which offenders are inevitably drawn to exploit (eg warehouses of computer chips, funds flowing routinely through vulnerable channels). Some crime problems of a repetitive or prolonged nature (such as domestic violence), or persistent disorder, would also require analysis and intervention at the levels above the basic 'single event' perspective.

Whether interventions are implemented in a strategic or tactical context, the immediate principles or mechanisms by which they are intended to work can be described in terms of the 11 types of cause in the CCO framework.  In practice, real-world methods of intervention are more complex.  Remote methods may work by a long chain of cause and effect before they can influence the immediate precursors.  A single method (such as putting a fence round a building site) can work through a whole range of mechanisms (physically blocking access, discouraging offenders, helping preventers - site guards).

Individual methods may be combined in a package that addresses a range of causes of a particular crime problem, or tackles causes common to a wide set of crime problems.  This more holistic approach has been shown to confer synergy and efficiency, but it should be tightly specified: we must avoid a loose all inclusive initiative at risk of unclear and drifting objectives.

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7. Implementation

Implementation is about targeting and delivery: delivering the right interventions to the right causes of crime in an efficient, effective, sustainable and acceptable way that addresses the identified and prioritised needs of victims and community.

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8. Targeting

A public-health distinction widely-used in crime prevention gives three approaches to the targeting of intervention methods:

• primary - focusing on the general population of potential offenders, or of potential crime situations or human and material targets of crime

• secondary - focusing on people at particular risk of offending, on targets at risk of victimisation or on places at risk of setting the scene for victimisation

• tertiary - focusing on those already convicted or victimised, or targets and scenes of existing crime (linking to the concepts of repeat victimisation, repeat offending, and hot-spots - generally shown to be a very efficient approach to targeting scarce resources)

The entities or things targeted need not be confined to the individual level – families, peer groups, institutions, communities etc can all be targeted, as in the ‘social levels’ schema described below. The alternative targeting strategies will of course have respective advantages and disadvantages which depend on the crime problem, the method to reduce it and the wider context. A familiar issue is the trade-off between efficiency of targeting versus possible stigmatisation – targeting a specific housing estate or a specific set of individuals as potential offenders may be more efficient, but could have the drawback of labelling the people adversely. Efficient targeting may also have to be balanced against perceived equity – if the residents of one estate receive upgraded household security or more intense police patrols, their neighbours, with similar crime levels, may be upset. Such issues should, of course, be addressed strategically through the audit/ consultation/ action plan process, but there will be much more to consider at the immediate practical level of scheme implementation.

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9. Insertion of the implementations in the community

 ‘Official’ or formal crime preventers such as governments and their agencies, and local partnerships, cannot operate alone but must act at a distance – by mobilising other public and private institutions and ordinary citizens better-placed toplay particular roles in crime reduction. These roles may involve directly intervening in the causes of crime, or facilitating the interventions of others by motivating and enabling them or alleviating constraints. To set alongside efforts to boost these preventive roles, we also need to influence those who accidentally or recklessly promote crime by their everyday private, public or commercial activities.

Acting at a distance involves a sequence of steps to insert the crime reduction tasks in the community. These can be systematically set out under the acronym CLAMED:

• Clarify the Crime Reduction (CR) tasks that need to be achieved externally rather than delivered in-house. These tasks can include delivering the intervention itself, or helping other people to do so by providing support or overcoming obstacles 

• Locate the preventive agents – identify institutions and individuals with the potential to carry out the CR tasks effectively and acceptably – in terms of their current expertise, manpower, presence at the right places on the ground or involvement at key stages of the relevant processes, and alignment of their own responsibilities and interests with the CR tasks in question (better to find an institution that just needs a gentle nudge to take on responsibility, rather than one that needs massive external incentives, sanctions and support). Once located, secure their cooperation and enhance their performance in pursuit of the designated goals by:

• Alerting them to the crime problem, that they or others might be affected by it, that they might be contributing to its cause and/or might be capable of contributing to its cure.

• Motivating them to take on the CR task – through inherent acceptance of and belief in its worth, self-interest in its achievement or compliance with external incentives and sanctions linked to exercise of responsibilities and duties, adherence to standards, avoidance of litigation etc.

• Empowering them – building enabling capacity by supplying competence (know-how and technical aids), operational resources such as funds, staff and information, and appropriate legal powers; alleviating constraints, but at the same time ensuring checks and balances are in place to limit over-zealous action.

• Directing them (if appropriate) to follow particular guidelines, select particular targets or implement particular activities.

Given the many interdependencies within society, it will usually be necessary to do more than apply the CLAMED approach to individual people or institutions in isolation – more often an integrated set of local actions may be needed to bring together and coordinate a range of agents working in concert. We may for example need to motivate agency A to alert institution B, in its turn to empower and motivate individuals C. Or we may need to act upon one agency to alleviate the constraints it is placing on another, closer to the implementation of the desired crime reduction intervention. And we need to establish an overall local climate receptive to CR, to boost and nurture the specific CLAMED activities. Media handling issues will also appear here.

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10. Social levels of action

The methods employed in inserting, implementing and intervening act on or through a diverse set of ‘entities’ in the real world, ranging from the individual offender or target, to family, community, or institutions such as schools. These entities can be described in terms of a range of social levels:

• Individual places/people

• Family and intimates

• Peer groups

• Institutions – school, culture, religions etc

• Media

• Areas (purely geographical) and Communities (common-interest, whether or not geographical)

CR practitioners need to be aware of the levels they are dealing with because a particular crime problem (or a wider social need consequent upon that crime)  may appear at one level (eg casualties of drunken assaults arriving in hospital);  its causes may operate at another (eg the layout of the streets);  and the solutions at yet another (eg the policies for public entertainment licences).

Community is a particularly problematic concept. It is important to unpack the term because people’s use of the term is extremely varied and loose, and this can obstruct clear thinking about problems, causes and solutions, and communication between CR partners.  There are traditional, geographical communities, of course, and wider communities of interest and/or identity (eg members of an ethnic or economic group, spread out in space) which are not localised, but ‘virtual’. Communities comprise a mix of individual and collective interests, whether these relate to individual private residents and users, or corporate institutions. Most so-called ‘community crime reduction initiatives’ are community-based rather than acting through community mechanisms.  Community can feature as: 

·        a physical and social environment or setting for crime

·        a target of crime (eg if a mosque is attacked)

·        a source of preventive interventions (acts of collective self-protection, informal social control, conflict mediation)

·        a context for prevention which can help or hinder it (for example, by hostile attitudes to the police)

·        a source of awareness, motivation and empowerment for crime preventers (eg a neighbourhood watch group)

·        a means of implementing crime prevention methods (eg helping elderly neighbours to mark property, or alerting them to risks  of burglary) and supporting victims of crime

·        a source of offenders (eg many high-risk individuals live there) and crime promoters (handling stolen goods, passing on criminal resources such as information or weapons)

·        the cause of crime in its own right (eg a lawless subculture, or a community in internal conflict)

Many of these aspects of community can be linked to the still-developing concept of social capital. This has been defined as “features of social organisations such as networks, norms and trust, that facilitate co-ordination and co-operation for mutual benefit.”  A related concept is collective efficacy - the ability of the community to control the precursors of crime, and levels of trust, respect and self-esteem within and between community members which enable them to do so.

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11. Management: planning, feedback, monitoring and evaluation

The final step of the Preventive Process - evaluation and adjustment - is best considered from a wider, managerial perspective. There are several kinds of crime reduction activity to be managed:

• Routine services - such as patrolling, provision of crime prevention advice, or probation casework.

• One-off operations - such as targeting a specific offender or intercepting a specific crime.

• Schemes - an organised crime reduction initiative which addresses a specific local crime or disorder problem at a particular point in time, usually through the implementation of one or more preventive methods. Some schemes may involve packages – a linked set of schemes tackling a wide range of causes, or perhaps tackling a holistic set of causes common to a number of crime problems in an area.

Management can be considered at two levels: strategic (the process that begins with crime audits and action plans) and tactical (managing individual crime reduction schemes initiated under a wider strategy). Each will require different arrangements for management. The focus here is on the tactical management of schemes.

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12. Tactical management of crime reduction schemes

Whatever the methods employed by such schemes, we can describe them in terms of a ‘universal story’, the long version of which is:

• acquisition of input (fundraising etc) leads (at various points) to

• input of funds and resources which supports

• data collection and analysis, planning and implementation activities (targeting and delivery) which lead to

• insertion activities (mobilising others in the community – measurable as immediate outputs) which lead to

• their delivering interventions in the causes of crime (measurable as remote outputs) which lead to

• intermediate outcomes (first steps in influencing the causes of criminal events – such as changed attitudes among young offenders – amounting to a reduced risk of crime) which lead to

• ultimate outcomes (principally reduced crime) which may lead to

• wider costs and benefits (quality of life, wealth creation, regeneration etc).

In advance of each step, management involves progressing this sequence, through planning and option appraisal, securing commitment toproceed from all the relevant parties, and setting out a series of objectives at different levels, including milestones.

During or after each step, management involves various reviews to compare achievement against objectives and take action to anticipate or correct any shortcomings – feedback and adjustment processes such as monitoring and evaluation.

Some of these feedback loops are short and elementary to guide immediate tactical action, others longer and wider in scope to track the ultimate objectives of the scheme or to feed into wider crime reduction strategy:

• Internal monitoring of implementation and insertion – involves ensuring that the various objectives and milestones set for activities and outputs are being met or are on course – including quality assurance of the actions undertaken. Action is taken to correct shortcomings.

• Local process evaluations – a more thorough, usually independent, assessment of how input was transformed into output; whether this was efficiently and effectively targeted and delivered – what went right and wrong; and what tricky issues were involved, such as equity.

• External performance monitoring – ensuring that crime reduction targets are being met (such as ‘a 30% fall in vehicle crime’) or reliable indicators of crime risk are falling.

• A full-blown local impact evaluation – attribution of cause and effect (such as ‘vehicle crime fell by 40% and of this, 25% can be attributed to the scheme), what specifically went right and wrong; assessment of cost effectiveness and cost benefits, to ensure accountability and foster the achievement of best value. Informs the decision whether to continue, modify, expand or replicate the scheme elsewhere within the partnership.

• Process and impact evaluations and cost effectiveness assessments designed to build up the strategic, national knowledge base of what works.

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13. Keeping ahead

The generic causes and cures identified in diagnosis and intervention spaces are an unchanging background to what practitioners can do. By contrast, however, the specific interventions and methods they implement will have to change and upgrade, or become obsolete. This is because criminals are always adapting topreventive methods and new technology and business practices are constantly providing new opportunities for crime - new targets, tools, and environments. Organised criminals are best placed to exploit these changes. To cope, preventers have to adapt and innovate as fast as the criminals, scanning for emerging crime problems, and for new modus operandi; and anticipating future problems so that vulnerabilities can be designed out before we get huge ‘crime harvests,’ as happened with mobile phones.

We also have to make interventions:

• Adaptable and upgradeable,

• Varied - so the offender can’t ‘break one, break them all’

• Unpredictable.

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14. Conclusion

It is intended to develop this overview note more fully when time allows, and with benefit of feedback from users on both concepts and communicability. A fuller version of this guide, with diagrams, is available:

Further, more detailed descriptions of the framework are available as a PowerPoint presentation and a formal publication:

‘The Conjunction of Criminal Opportunity - a Tool for Clear, ‘Joined-Up’ Thinking about Community Safety and Crime Reduction’. Chapter in Ballintyne, S., Pease, K., and McLaren, V., eds., Secure Foundations: Key issues in crime prevention, crime reduction and community safety. London: Institute for Public Policy Research, 2000.
For details on how to order this book, visit the Institute's website, www.ippr.org.uk

Paul Ekblom
Crime and Policing Group
Home Office Research, Development and Statistics Directorate
Tel: +44 20 7273 3252 fax: +44 20 7273 3134 e-mail: paul.ekblom@homeoffice.gsi.gov.uk 

Further Development

Since its origins in the mid-90s, CCO has continued to evolve and grow.  Now its outer packaging is changing in a way which better reflects its role in Knowledge Management for crime reduction. The good news is that the core concepts and terms (and those diagrams) remain unchanged.

The new packaging is called the 5Is of crime reduction - Intelligence, Intervention, Implementation, Involvement and Impact. It is evolving as a tool for collecting, managing and applying knowledge of good practice. 5Is is essentially action-oriented - a restatement of the steps of the 'Preventive Process'. It can be seen as a second-generation version of SARA (Scanning, Analysis, Response, Assessment) in Problem-Oriented Policing. CCO now appears under Intelligence (in setting out the possible causes of crime alongside complementary frameworks such as the risk and protective factors for offending) and Intervention (in mapping out the generic principles of crime reduction). The remaining material in the current CCO documents on this website is incorporated in other stages of the 5Is, eg Involvement.

5Is is still in an initial phase of development in the UK and the EU Crime Prevention Network but some summary materials are presented on the Crime Reduction Website Learning Zone since the label is becoming more widely known: 5Is: a practical tool for transfer and sharing of crime prevention knowledge - introduction. Eventually the CCO documentation will be reorganised to take this into account.

Enquiries and comments on this development are welcome - contact Paul Ekblom 

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