Handbook of Crime Prevention and Community Safety

Nick Tilley, Aiden Sidebottom, Nick Tilley, Aiden Sidebottom

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781317530817
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

This second edition of the Handbook of Crime Prevention and Community Safety provides a completely revised and updated collection of essays focusing on the theory and practice of crime prevention and the creation of safer communities. This book is divided into five comprehensive parts:

• Part I, brand new to this edition, is concerned with theoretical perspectives on crime prevention and community safety.
• Part II considers general approaches to preventing crime, including a new chapter on the theory and practice of deterrence.
• Part III focuses on specific crime prevention strategies, including a new chapter on regulation for crime prevention.
• Part IV focuses on the prevention of specific categories of crime and the fear they generate, including new chapters on organised crime and cybercrime.
• Part V considers the preventative process: the methods through which presenting problems can be analysed, responses formulated and implemented, and their effectiveness evaluated.

Bringing together leading academics and practitioners from the UK, US, Australia and the Netherlands, this volume will be an invaluable reference for researchers and practitioners whose work relates to crime prevention and community safety, as well as for undergraduate and postgraduate courses in crime prevention.

Part I

Theoretical perspectives on crime prevention and community safety

Chapter 1

Theory for crime prevention

Nick Tilley and Aiden Sidebottom

Introduction

‘Theory’ will be used in this chapter to refer to any set of ideas on which we might act or interpret the world. We follow Karl Popper in this, who went so far as to argue that biological organisms have built-in theories setting expectations and informing behaviours. If expectations and consequential behaviours are too far off the mark, the biological organism perishes. In contrast to other organisms, human beings can, ‘allow hypotheses to die in their stead’ (Popper, 1972, p. 244). By this Popper means that we can invent, critically discuss and test our hypotheses empirically in advance of putting ourselves at stake by acting on them.

Popper’s use of the term theory, and our accordance with this use, dissolves the frequently invoked contrast between theory and practice. It is a distinction that we find unhelpful. All practice, we argue, is washed through with theory, whether or not practitioners, policymakers or researchers acknowledge it. A chief of police commits his or her police service to ‘community policing’; a householder installs a burglar alarm; a police sergeant sends patrols to a hot spot; a store owner decides to attach electronic tags to expensive goods; a local authority decides to install CCTV cameras in the city centre; the owner of a shopping mall decides to exclude bikers; a government decides to apply minimum sentences of imprisonment to those who are convicted of their third crime; a state passes laws to require that licences be obtained prior to the purchase of firearms; and a school begins restorative conferencing as a method of dealing with bullying. All these are done with the aim of preventing crime. All involve theories, as we use that term here, in the sense that they are premised on beliefs (a) that these actions will bring about their intended outcomes, (b) that any unintended negative outcomes will not outweigh the accrued benefits and (c) that the practices are normatively admissible.

To say that all crime prevention is washed through with theory does not mean that all theories and all practices reflecting these theories are equally good. Nor are those theories used to inform preventive action routinely acknowledged or made explicit. Many efforts to prevent crime derive from ‘craft’ theories, forged through practical and experiential learning and with little reference to more formal ‘academic’ theory, which is often dismissed by practitioners and policymakers as irrelevant to the realities of everyday crime prevention. Craft theories are, however, seldom formally articulated. The same is true of other fields. In healthcare improvement, for example, Davidoff and colleagues (2015, p. 229) argue that:

The key challenge for practitioners is not simply to base their work on theory (they always work from implicit assumptions and rationales, whether or not they do so consciously), but to make explicit the informal and formal theories they are actually using.

They go on to suggest that:

The need for more effective use of formal theory in improvement is increasingly pressing, because personal intuition is often biased, distorted and limited in scope and the application of formal theory enables the maximum exploitation of learning and accumulation of knowledge, and promotes the transfer of learning from one project, one context, one challenge, to the next.

(2015, p. 228)

The same might also be said of crime prevention. Bringing theories to the surface and subjecting them to critical scrutiny and empirical test is a means, as Popper argues, to developing better ways of achieving objectives including the prevention of crime. At a higher level of abstraction, it is the process through which a scientific field advances. This is a challenging task, however. There is a good deal of devil in the detail of crime prevention theory and practice and in sorting and sifting the better from worse.

In this chapter we consider what constitutes ‘good’ theory for crime prevention. We begin by proposing six requirements for a ‘good’ theory. An example of ‘good’ theory that combines these six requirements is then presented, as are the associated benefits of good theory for crime prevention. This is contrasted with practice that less fully adheres to these requirements. We then describe some of the complexities known to characterise crime prevention and which pose challenges for crime prevention theory. The ways in which broad theoretical frameworks can usefully be drawn upon to navigate these complexities is then discussed. We conclude by summarising the main points in the chapter.

Six requirements for crime prevention and community safety theories

What constitutes a ‘good’ theory? In the behavioural sciences, Davis et al. (2014) suggest nine criteria to judge the quality of a theory. A good theory, they argue, should (1) clearly articulate its concepts, (2) clearly specify the relationship between theoretical concepts, (3) be measurable, (4) be testable, (5) be explanatory, (6) account for the causal processes at work, (7) be parsimonious, (8) be generalisable and (9) be supported by evidence. Those in the natural sciences might add that to pass muster theory should be grounded in controlled and repeated experiments, and build on and progress that which came before it.

Criminology is awash with theory. In Chapter 2 of this Handbook, Felson lists 38 criminological theories. His list is avowedly incomplete. Tittle (2016) usefully organises criminological theory into seven groups: (1) theoretical science, (2) problem solving, (3) ‘verstehen’ analysis, (4) descriptive approaches, (5) critical work, (6) nihilistic thinking and (7) amelioration. Each group denotes a different way of doing criminological work, often based on different underlying assumptions and involving different research methods. Tittle (2016) goes on to suggest five features of adequate criminological theory, that which (1) provides satisfactory explanation of observed phenomena (‘why’ and ‘how’), (2) exhibits sufficient breadth to explain a wide range of relevant criminological phenomena (such as being applicable to a variety of crime types), (3) is comprehensive (accounting for all relevant causes of a phenomenal), (4) is precise (about what is causing what) and (5) exhibits sufficient depth to provide a complete account of a phenomenon’s causes.

The branch of criminological theory most relevant to this Handbook is what Tittle (2016) calls ‘problem-solving criminology’. Scholars of this orientation ‘work toward finding solutions to crime and crime-related problems … from international threats of terrorism to very focussed concerns with how best to prevent littering on public streets in particular towns or cities’ (p. 11). We might then ask, what constitutes a ‘good’ theory for crime prevention and community safety? Listed below are six conditions that we tentatively present as criteria for ‘goodness’. They are written from the perspective of a policy, practice or programme being put in place in the interests of preventing crime and/or improving community safety. Note that we deliberately refer to ‘theories’ rather than ‘theory’, to capture the need for and utility of more than one theory, the reasons for which will become obvious in what follows.

1. Theories must specify plausible causal mechanisms that will be activated by the policy, practice or programme.
2. The causal mechanisms must speak to one or more of the conditions judged to be responsible for crime genesis.
3. The conditions (or context) for the activation or deactivation of relevant causal mechanisms must be articulated.
4. Plausible casual mechanisms that are liable to produce unintended outcomes must be explicated.
5. The conjectured mechanism/context/outcome configurations need to be testable, by which we mean they must be open to refutation.
6. The normative assumptions behind the policy, practice or programme must be defensible and generally acceptable.

We now discuss each requirement in turn. We make quite extensive references to other chapters in this Handbook to illustrate the points being made.

Specifying plausible causal mechanisms

To effect positive change, crime prevention activities have either to deactivate/degrade crime producing mechanisms and/or introduce/strengthen mechanisms that will counter those liable to generate crime (Ekblom, 2011; Tilley and Laycock, 2002). Within this volume, for example, Clarke and Bowers present a raft of situational crime prevention measures categorised according to the mechanisms they activate or deactivate (Chapter 6), Kennedy et al. discuss the delivery of focused deterrence mechanisms (Chapter 8), Homel and Thomsen consider the mechanisms that may be at work in the continuation and discontinuation of criminal careers (Chapter 4) and Innes outlines mechanisms implicated in producing fear of crime (Chapter 22).

Bjorgo (2016) has listed nine general mechanisms through which crime can be prevented: (1) building moral barriers to criminal behaviour; (2) reducing recruitment into criminal social environments and activities; (3) deterrence; (4) disrupting criminal acts; (5) incapacitation (disabling crime); (6) protecting vulnerable targets; (7) reducing the harmful consequences of crime; (8) reducing the rewards from crime; and (9) desistance and rehabilitation. Although these nine general mechanisms are not all consistent with mechanism as understood in this chapter (i.e. a specification of how an outcome is brought about by a policy, programme or practice), notably reducing the harmful consequences of crime, which is an aim or outcome, Bjorgo’s list usefully brings out the many ways in which crime can plausibly be prevented, provided that the means can be found to activate relevant causal mechanisms. Of course, each of these general mechanisms calls for greater specification of how they can be activated in practice, for example, how do we ‘build moral barriers to criminal behaviour’ or ‘reduce recruitment into criminal social environments and activities’?

We argue that one measure of a good theory is whether it clearly specifies how the associated policy, programme or practice is expected to produce the sought-after outcome patterns.

Speaking to the essential conditions for crime genesis

Marcus Felson (Cohen and Felson, 1979; Felson, 2008; Felson and Eckert, 2016) has identified the basic conditions needed for a crime to be committed: there must be a likely offender who encounters a suitable target in the absence of anyone or anything to prevent him or her committing the offence. This means that crimes can be prevented by subtracting the likely offender or suitable target or by adding an effective intermediary, who may either protect the target (a ‘capable guardian’) or inhibit the offender (a ‘handler’). The question is then that of determining how we subtract likely offenders, for example by reducing their access to suitable targets, reducing their overall supply or reducing the crimes through which recruitment into offending takes place; how we subtract suitable targets, for example by designing products to be unusable to offenders or by removing access to them; or how we add capable guardianship or handling, for example by installing CCTV or by assigning police to places where likely offenders and suitable targets converge or by mobilising significant others (for example mothers, girlfriends, peers or teachers) to intervene when likely offenders and suitable targets converge.

For those turning to theory to inform efforts to prevent crime and improve community safety, any derived policies, programmes or practices must in some way be directed towards the spatio-temporal convergence of offender, target and guardian.

Articulating the conditions for the activation or deactivation of relevant causal mechanisms

Mechanisms are seldom activated unconditionally. Specific conditions are usually required. To produce fire, there has to be heat, fuel and an oxidiser (typically oxygen). Remove one of these conditions and the fire is extinguished. As mentioned previously, good theory should describe the causal mechanisms through which a given policy, programme and practice might plausibly produce its effects. The articulation of causal mechanisms is one thing. Their effective activation is another, and again requires statement in any satisfactory theory, at least in principle. Suppose a conjectured mechanism is the restriction of likely offenders’ (prospective burglars’) access to the rear of properties that had alleyways to the back that provided cover for making a covert entry (a version of target subtraction or protection of vulnerable targets). What are the conditions necessary for this mechanism to prevent crime? These would include (a) the identification of a method of restricting offender access, such as the installation of gates that limited access to alleyways, (b) the absence of alternative methods of easy entry to the same properties used by the same likely offenders and (c) likely offenders who do not simply find substitute suitable targets (see Sidebottom et al., 2015).

We argue that any adequate theory for crime prevention needs to specify both the mechanisms that will be ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• About the cover
• Abbreviations
• PART I Theoretical perspectives on crime prevention and community safety
• PART II Approaches to prevention
• PART III Methods of prevention
• PART IV Prevention in practice
• PART V The preventive process
• Index