Author: Prof Nick Tilley
ISBN No: 978-1-84392-39
Review date: 13/12/2025
No of pages: 224
Publisher: Willan
Year of publication: 11/09/2012
Brief:
We all do crime prevention, without noticing it. Prof Nick Tilley has brought out a textbook on crime prevention that navigates the tricky balance between being readable and getting theory across.
You do crime prevention every time you lock your door or cross the road to put distance between yourself and someone threatening-looking in the shadows. But why do we do such things? A two-age list of ‘25 techniques of situational prevention’ suggests that most things you as a security manager do increase the criminal’s effort; increases the criminal’s risk of getting caught; reduces the rewards; reduce the things that provoke crime – such as separating rival fans in a stadium or outside the ground; or remove excuses for crime – whether putting up signs or making it easier to comply, by offering litter bins or pub lavatories so that people don’t drop litter or pee in the gutter. Tilley is good at explaining the sometimes daunting jargon. Mainstreaming for example is ‘the rolling out or normalising of a service or intervention that has been put in place temporarily or in only one location, where it seems to have been effective’. The author – a sociologist by background – is also alive to the real world where ideas and programmes on paper fall foul of human folly or unknowns. Leaders, as he say, may be indifferent. People behind a project naively optimistic; other agencies may not share data or play ball. And even if something works, somewhere, unless you learn lessons, there is little point in investing heavily in it. Yet: “Much crime prevention evaluation … falls short of even basic technical adequacy.” Or putting it another way, of the Crime Reduction Programme that saw central government cash for council public space CCTV, Tilley calls it ‘a fairly unequivocal implementation flop and the funding was cut short’.
Each chapter at the end has exercises and further reading. There’s a 12-page book list at the end besides. So while the book seems aimed at people taking an academic course – like the crime science ones at the Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science at University College London, where Tilley is based – it’s of use too to security people whatever they are doing to prevent crime. Whether – to take a car park as an example – your answer to crime and fear of crime is to employ an attendant, up the lighting, or chop back bushes, do you know why you do one thing and not another? If what you do fails, is it because the idea was not so good, or because whoever fitted the lights or cut the bushes did not do a good enough job? Or because the attendant fell asleep?! Tilley is a welcome voice in favour of what is sensible and effective – and possible – in crime prevention.
