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Review date: 16/12/2025
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Taking away the opportunity for people to carry out crime often prevents crime, leading UK crime scientists say.
Taking away the opportunity for people to carry out crime often prevents crime, leading UK crime scientists say. ‘Research has shown that opportunity is crucial in producing many patterns of criminal and other problem behaviour.’ This is the case even where the behaviour in question appears to reflect individuals’ problems and dispositions – such as suicide, say the authors, Prof Nick Tilley and Prof Gloria Laycock.
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Problem-solving and reducing crime depends on ‘strong strategic planning capacity, good data and an ability to analyse it, and willingness and capacity to apply leverage, where necessary, on those best placed to act to reduce crime’.
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Working Out What To Do; Evidence-based Crime Reduction – Crime Reduction Research Series Paper 11 (ISBN 1-84082-792-0) is by Prof Nick Tilley and Prof Gloria Laycock, crime scientist at University College London and Director of the Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science.
Crime problems can usefully be broken down into specifics, for police and other crime and disorder reduction partners to act on. For example, the fact that some products are more attractive to thieves than others has been broken down into the acronym CRAVED ‘ concealable, removable, available, valuable, enjoyable and disposable. Laycock and Tilley say: ‘Action aimed at ‘cooling’ hot products could be productive and each element of the acronym can be considered as a means of reducing the product’s appeal. Thus it could be made less concealable (as in stores when goods are tagged)’.
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‘For example we know that crime clusters on ‘hot spots’, ‘hot victims’, ‘hot offenders’, and ‘hot products’; that low level disorder often encourages more serious problems; and that some circumstances, such as ready firearm availability, can facilitate crime.’ As for drug use, the authors say that ‘drug-taking and crime may reinforce one another’ but point out that criminals may steal first and take drugs later.
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The authors quote 16 opportunity-reducing techniques of situational crime prevention with examples. First, increase the perceived effort of crime: harden targets (steering column locks, anti-robbery screens); control access to targets (entry phones, electronic access to garages); deflect offenders from targets (bus stop location, street closures, segregation of rival fans) and control crime facilitators (photos on credit cards, plastic beer glasses in bars). Second, increase the perceived risks of crime (screen entrances and exits (electronic merchandise tags, baggage screening); formal surveillance (red light and speed cameras, security guards) surveillance by employees (park attendants, CCTV on double decker buses) ; and natural surveillance (street lighting, defensible space architecture. Next, reduce anticipated rewards of crime: remove targets (phonecards, removable car radios, women’s refuges); identify property (vehicle licensing, property marking, car parts marking) ; and reduce temptation (rapid repair of vandalism, off-street parking); deny benefits (ink merchandise tags, PIN for car radios, graffiti cleaning). Finally, remove excuses of crime: set rules (hotel registration, customs declaration, codes of conduct); alert conscience (roadside speedometers, ‘idiots drink-and-drive’ signs); control disinhibitors (drinking age laws, car ignition breathalyser, V-chip in TV) and assist compliance (litter bins, public lavatories, easy library check-out).
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However, the authors point out that it is wrong to expect that the same measure will automatically produce the same outcome in a different place. The record of replicating a crime prevention effort known to work in one place in another place is not good, the authors say. ‘This is not necessarily because the original initiative was flawed in some
unexpected way, but because there was little clarity about what exactly it was that made it work where it did in the first place.’ Also, there is a possibility that benefits will fall off over time, because many crime reduction tactics have a life-cycle: ‘Attention to ways of sustaining effects is therefore needed. Those tactics least liable to diminishing impact, for example target removal, are clearly preferable. Strategies involving a coherent blend of tactics have great promise, for example ‘crackdown and consolidation’ and ‘weed and seed’. These marry enforcement, to bring about short-term impacts, to measures liable to produce longer-term changes in the wake of the short-term measures.’
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For instance, it is commonly said that a reduction in crime in New York has been thanks to a zero-tolerance approach whereby police have tackled low-level disorder which if not stamped on would lead to more serious offending. In fact, the authors say that’s only partly true of New York; however, tackling low-level disorder may send ‘signals’ to potential offenders that offending will not be tolerated, and communities are reporting such low-level disorder to police and feel strongly that such disorder is crime and wants tackling. Also, a chapter in the document focuses on tackling domestic burglary.
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The authors conclude: ‘ … we know that crimes cluster; we know that victims are at increased risk of further victimisation; we know that prolific offenders exist and can be identified; we know that problems recur. There is no reason to doubt that addressing these issues would reduce crime. See http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds
