Introduction
Lectures and Documents from the 4th Annual International Forum
IRVIN WALLER
Convincing governments to invest in prevention: Reducing crime, Protecting victim rights
PAUL EKBLOM
Citizen participation in crime prevention – capturing practice knowledge through the 5Is framework
HARALD WEILNBÖCK
‘Violence Prevention Network’ & ‘Cultures Interactive’: EU good-practice research on de-radicalisation work in prison and community – and the factor of culture
EUROPEAN FORUM FOR URBAN SECURITY (EFUS)
General Assembly – Berlin, 10-11 May 2010 “How cities reconcile security and fundamental rights”
WIEBKE STEFFEN
Expert Report for the 15th German Congress on Crime Prevention 10th & 11th of May 2010 Berlin
GERMAN CONGRESS ON CRIME PREVENTION AND CONFERENCE PARTNERS
Berlin Declaration of the 15th German Congress on Crime Prevention
Lectures and Documents from the 5th Annual International Forum
JÜRGEN STOCK
International Cybercrime: Results from the Annual International Forum
GERMAN CONGRESS ON CRIME PREVENTION AND CONFERENCE PARTNERS
Oldenburg Declaration of the 16th German Congress on Crime Prevention
Programs of the 4th and 5th Annual International Forum
Authors
The German Congress on Crime Prevention is an annual event that takes place since 1995 in different German cities and targets all areas of crime prevention: Administration, the health system, youth welfare, the judiciary, churches, local authorities, the media, politics, the police, crime prevention committees, projects, schools, organizations, associations and science. The desired effect is to present and strengthen crime prevention within a broad societal framework. Thus it contributes to crime reduction as well as to the prevention and the reduced risk of becoming a victim as well as fear of crime. The main objectives of the congress are:
Since its foundation the German Congress on Crime Prevention has been opened to an international audience with a growing number of non-German speaking participants joining. Because prevention is more than a national concern and should be focused internationally this step seemed crucial. Bringing together not only German scientists and practitioners but also international experts in crime prevention and therefore developing a transnational forum to foster the exchange of knowledge and experience constitutes the main focus of this approach. To give the international guests a discussion forum, the Annual International Forum within the German Congress on Crime Prevention was established in 2007. For non-German guests this event offers lectures in English language as well as other activities within the German Congress on Crime Prevention that are translated simultaneously. International guests are able to play an active role by presenting poster or displaying information within the exhibition.
Over the next few years we intend to develop this concept further. It is our wish to build an international forum for crime prevention that ensures a competent exchange of ideas, theories and applied approaches.
This fourth edition of “International Perspectives of Crime Prevention” includes the outcomes of both the 4th and 5th Annual International Forum.
The 4th Annual International Forum took place within the 15th German Congress on Crime Prevention on the 10th and 11th of May 2010 in Berlin and gathered together more than 4000 people from the field of crime prevention in Germany and worldwide. The event was presented in special cooperation and organization with the General Assembly of the European Forum for Urban Security (located in Paris, France) and titled „How cities reconcile security and fundamental rights“. Well known experts and a broad audience discussed important topics in the fields of Security and Freedom, Fundamental Rights, Immigration, Security Technologies, Involvement of Citizens and Civil Society. The articles from the 4th Annual International Forum come from Irvin Waller, Paul Ekblom and Harald Weilnböck which all presented important topics in Berlin. Also included is a summary of the event from the perspective of the European Forum for Urban Security, the expertise of the German Congress on Crime Prevention by Wiebke Steffen as well as the Berlin Declaration (a report about the key findings of the congress).
The 5th Annual International Forum took place within the 16th German Congress on Crime Prevention on the 30th and 31st of May 2011 in Oldenburg. This event was held in special cooperation with the Federal Criminal Police Office as well as the Federal Office for Information Security and titled „International Cybercrime - Occurrence, Development, Prevention“. The contributions include a summary of the Annual International Forum by Jürgen Stock, Vice-President of the Federal Criminal Police Office, as well as the Oldenburg Declaration.
All articles in this book reflect worldwide views on crime prevention as well as the current status, discussion and research in crime prevention from different countries.
We hope to find a broad audience, interested in the upcoming events of the Annual International Forum as well as the German Congress on Crime Prevention. For more information please visit our website at http://www.gcocp.org.
Marc Coester and Erich Marks
Mandela said violence can be prevented in his foreword to the landmark World Health Organization Report on Violence and Health in 2002. WHO looked at scientific research on the causes of crime and violence as well as scientific evaluations of the results of innovations to better tackle those causes.
In sum, we have the knowledge to reduce the number of crime victims significantly by 50% or more. The challenge to policy makers is to make the shift from over-reliance on what is expensive and limited in success to a balance between smart law enforcement and smart investments in what reduces crime and violence. Increasingly, policy makers are making that shift because it protects taxpayers and potential crime victims.
I have made this knowledge and the successes accessible to mayors, legislators, and taxpayers in a book written for them, called Less Law, More Order: The Truth about Reducing Crime – now translated into Chinese, French and Spanish with a German version on the way.
I have combined the science with examples of successful programs that show that national and local government could reduce the number of crime victims by 50 per cent or more by shifting from over-reliance on policing and corrections to smart use of police and smart investments in prevention. Incidentally, it protects taxpayers as most investments in prevention based on the scientific knowledge are much more effective and efficient than paying for reaction.
Indeed, my goal is to shift policy on crime from the reactive classic approach focused on punishing and rehabilitating offenders – that is failing victims and citizens - to a positive preventive approach focused on reducing the number of crime victims – that is meeting the needs of potential crime victims and taxpayers.
The book starts from where the US went wrong, what are the scientifically identified causes of interpersonal violence and crime, what has been proven to reduce crime and prevent victimization, and what are the innovative strategies to mobilize agencies such as schools, housing, children and youth services, as well as families and the police to use what is needed where it is needed most.
It is based on the accumulation of social science research from the last four decades that has been brought together by such prestigious organizations as the World Health Organization, the International Centre for Prevention of Crime affiliated with the United Nations and UN Habitat.
The USA in particular has taken the over-reliance and so over expenditures to extremes with mass incarceration holding one in four of all prisoners in the world for a country with only five per cent of the world´s population. Yet its rates of property and violent crime are little different from countries such as Canada or England and Wales who have made moderate use of more police and prisons. While its murder rates is 200% higher than both of those countries.
The good news is there is strong evidence to prove that specific projects which tackle causes of crime before it happens can reduce victimizations from both violent and property crime. So victimization is preventable. Much of this evidence is based ironically on careful experiments undertaken in the last 30 years in the U.S. These experiments focused on reducing the number of young males involved in victimizing by tackling remedies for negative life experiences such as abusive parenting, dropping out of school, and lack of positive role models.
Even the rampant rates of violence against women can be reduced. WHO has identified special courses in school that change male attitudes and so reduce violence against women. In the developing world, training and micro-finance show impressive results as in Lesotho.
There is also good news that when cities and governments follow a basic multi-sector problem solving process that resources are targeted to gaps in services and so to reduced crime. The City of Bogotá is one of those success stories. Efforts by Cape Town show how partial solutions can work.
But the book has led to much more. The government of the Province of Alberta has invested $500 million in new dollars over three years into a strategy that balances enforcement, treatment and prevention – the three pronged strategy. It is run by SafeCom which is a modern day responsibility centre that co-locates senior officials from five ministries and is mandated to follow a long term strategy to significantly reduce crime and prevent victimization over a ten year period. This strategy is expected to use surveys such as victimization surveys to measure performance.
The Canadian National Crime Prevention Centre has a $70 million a year program to test promising practices – many of these are also identified in Less Law, More Order. It also chose to fund a new Institute for the Prevention of Crime at the University of Ottawa to develop proposals for a national strategy, contract with experts across the world to inform Canadian crime prevention and launch a network of major Canadian cities to implement collaborative and evidence governance strategies. This institute and the network developed Action Briefs for Municipal Stakeholders as a significant tool for cities to plan better and invest smartly which are encouraging more cities to shift their policies in Canada and across the world.
The Spanish version of the book has momentum of its own with legislation based on the book under consideration by the Mexican parliament and two States with comprehensive policies based on the book. The Vice-President of Argentina recently held a meeting to look at application of the book in Argentina. Venezuela that competes with South Africa for levels of violence and lack of investment in proven strategies have begun to look more closely. It is now in French and Chinese with a German version to follow this year.
The Soros Foundation took interest in establishing a violence prevention fund inspired by the conclusions from the various chapters in the book. In 2010, the World Bank began to look at the book together with expertise from leading American crime prevention experts to solve violence in Latin America. My conclusions from that meeting re-emphasize:
They also provide a check list of programs with promise of short and/or long term reductions in violence including:
But these programs have to be directed by good governance strategies that are sustained, comprehensive and results oriented. These need a responsibility center at highest level, sustained investment in training, standards and capacity development as well as 3 year action plans with ten year vision. These must be multi-pronged (enforcement, design, social …) and a portfolio of short and long term investments. They need to be multi-agency problem solving:
Cost benefit analysis of projects suggests that increasing investment in ¨effective violence prevention¨ over a five year period to the equivalent of 10% of current expenditures on enforcement and criminal justice will reduce violence by 50% over a ten year period. Because of the political pressure to react, one strategy is to require every increase in expenditure on reaction to have an equivalent investment on ¨effective prevention¨.
Establishing the governance processes at all orders of government requires immediate investment and capacity development – a city of 100,000 will require two trained crime reduction planners – a national government of 10 million will require an initial group of 30-40 exclusive of statistical instruments and analysis.
The rights of citizens not to be victims of crime require national and local governments to get to know the results of scientific analyses of the causes of crime and the results of programs tackling those causes. Less Law, More Order makes this part easy.
Then they must engage in the reforms that shift from expensive over-reliance on reaction to making smart in investments in programs that are effective in reducing the number of crime victims and making our communities safer. Governments concerned about doing it right and protecting taxpayers are making this shift. Victims are taxpayers and they benefit.
Waller, Irvin (2008) Less Law, More Order: The Truth about Reducing Crime, Manor House, see www.irvinwaller.org
World Health Organization (2009) Violence Prevention: The Evidence, Geneva, see www.who.int/violence_injury_prevention/violence/en/
The field of practical crime prevention and community safety is complex. Knowledge of how to undertake the practice well, and how to replicate ‘success stories’ in new contexts, is vital. But it’s challenging to obtain, organise and apply that knowledge (Tilley 1993; Ekblom 2002, 2005, 2011). We can identify several distinct kinds of knowledge relevant to crime prevention2 practice (Ekblom 2002, 2011):
Knowing who to involve and how in crime prevention is arguably the most difficult and complex kind of knowledge to gather and apply. In effect we are here talking about the human condition – how individuals, groups and organisations work, or fail to work, together in society – and how to change people’s behaviour in line with societal or government goals (e.g. see Home Office 2006). Much of the pervasive implementation failure of crime prevention programmes can be attributed to human involvement issues. These are the subject of this chapter.
The chapter continues by noting that much crime prevention is delivered by third parties – citizens and organisations – rather than professional crime preventers. Given this, our tools for thinking, communicating and acting through and with such parties should be of good quality – but unfortunately they are not. Some arguably better tools are suggested – the Conjunction of Criminal Opportunity and the 5Is framework. These are introduced and finally, further elaborated in action in a case study of ‘Involvement failure’. The case study describes an attempt to develop and trial a table-clip to prevent bag theft in bars. Although successful on the product design side, the study encountered such a range of difficulties of collaboration with the various stakeholders at every level that the project was overwhelmed, despite such risks being anticipated and determined attempts being made to control them. The final such difficulty encountered was the world economic crisis of 2008, which brought the planned impact evaluation to a halt. This notwithstanding, the experience provided rich material for learning for both implementing crime prevention through the actions of citizens and other third parties in the real world, and for the design of ‘resilient evaluations’.
Some crime prevention interventions are directly delivered by professional preventers working in the police service (such as patrols or law enforcement), probation (supervision and support of offenders), local government (such as improving street lighting) or youth services (such as summer entertainment programmes or youth centres). However, the majority of preventive effort is delivered indirectly by ‘civil’ organisations and individuals often in their daily routines of work, travel, domestic activity, family life and leisure. Here, the role of the professionals is mostly to mobilise or work in partnership with the civil world. (See also the concept of ‘third party policing’ – Mazerolle and Ransley 2006.) And even direct implementation may require professional partnerships to share responsibility for addressing problems, and to span divisions of labour to bring together complementary perspectives and resources (Ekblom 2004).
Given that so much crime prevention is delivered through third parties, it’s unfortunate that the key dimension of ‘know-who’ for practice, delivery and policy has been understated, underdeveloped and under-structured. Consider these ‘methods’ – the kind we would expect to see brought together on a typical administrative ‘shopping list’ of preventive actions:
These may look superficially equivalent but in fact all involve professionals, citizens and organisations participating in very different ways. The limitations of our ability to describe and distinguish such forms of involvement affect how well we can think, communicate and act in the preventive domain.
One attempt to structure this involvement has emerged within the Problem-Oriented Policing approach – which explicitly recognises the need to identify and mobilise key stakeholders when dealing with persistent crime and disorder problems. The Crime Triangle (Offender, Place, Target/Victim) briefly summarises some of the main causes of criminal events and simultaneously indicates some fundamental approaches to prevention. In more recent formulations (e.g. on www.popcenter.org/about/?p=triangle) the inner triangle of causes is surrounded by an outer triangle of people or organisations who can influence those causes – thus ‘handlers’ influence (potential) offenders, ‘guardians’ targets and ‘managers’ places. Sampson et al. (2010) have more recently introduced the concept of ‘super controllers’ – the people or organisations that in turn influence the immediate handlers, guardians and managers. The Crime Triangle as a framework for cause and intervention is usually accompanied by the SARA model of the preventive process – Scanning, Analysis, Response and Assessment (e.g. Clarke and Eck 2003, www.popcenter.org/about/?p=sara).
Elsewhere (e.g. Ekblom 2005, 2006, 2011) I have criticised this twin formulation as ‘useful but limited’ in handling the messy complexity of crime prevention practice on the ground. There is insufficient detail beyond the first level of slogans; quite distinct processes are lumped together under ‘Response’, for example; and the underlying theories (such as routine activity theory and rational choice theory) are insufficiently integrated conceptually and terminologically. Moreover, for practitioners and researchers considering making offender-oriented interventions, the Crime Triangle and SARA are explicitly ‘not interested’. I have developed an alternative suite that attempts to be more sophisticated, flexible and comprehensive. This includes the Conjunction of Criminal Opportunity (Ekblom 2010, 2011, www.designagainstcrime.com/methodology-resources/crime-frameworks/#list-and-description) an integrated model covering 11 causes of criminal events and counterpart families of intervention aimed at interrupting, weakening or diverting those causes; and the 5Is framework for the model of the preventive process. Both CCO and 5Is have a structured place for all the tiers of human influence covered by the Crime Triangle and SARA respectively.
Conjunction of Criminal Opportunity (CCO)
The causes of criminal events identified by CCO comprise a juxtaposition of ‘things’ (material target of crime, enclosure, environment) and ‘people’ (offenders, preventers and promoters). Offenders are covered in much more detail than by the Crime Triangle. Preventers and promoters are roles that people play, that respectively make crime less or more likely to occur – as such they are of central relevance to the issue of citizen participation in crime prevention.
Preventers can range from dedicated police patrols, to parents controlling their wayward children, to drivers locking their car securely… to designers of secure products and local governments creating entertainment facilities for young people. The preventer concept covers all tiers of involvement including those people acting within the immediate crime situation, and those acting at one level removed (as with ‘supercontrollers’); but CCO focuses on the former.
Promoters could be the entirely innocent person who provides cover for a robbery by parking their car in the wrong place at the wrong time; the careless person who pushes pizza advertisements through people’s front door letter boxes leaving the end hanging out, which in fact advertises that here is a house with nobody at home; the careless motor manufacturer who designs and sells a car which is easy to break into; the shady electronics dealer who re-chips stolen mobile phones; or the criminal fence who buys them from the thief. Preventive interventions often work by adding or mobilising preventers, or by stopping people acting as promoters – better still, converting them to preventers (e.g. from ‘person often leaves door unlocked’ to ‘routinely locks door’).
The 5Is framework
5Is (Ekblom 2011; http://5isframework.wordpress.com; www.designagainstcrime.com/methodology-resources/crime-frameworks/#list-and-description; www.beccaria.de/nano.cms/de/5Is/Page/1/) comprises five task streams:
5Is is in many respects a second-generation SARA, and its main task streams map readily onto the earlier framework. The most significant difference for present purposes is that the amorphous ‘Response’ stage of SARA is divided, in 5Is, into the three analytically distinct task streams of Intervention, Implementation and Involvement.
Involvement as just defined connects with the ‘preventer and promoter’ concepts of CCO. As said, CCO focuses by convention on those people acting (or failing to act) in the immediate crime situation rather than several steps of cause and effect/social influence away, but Involvement covers the full range. (In POP terms it covers ‘supercontrollers’ rather than merely ‘guardians, handlers and place managers’ – but I regard these heuristic terms and distinctions as rather inflexible because, for example, even place managers may have ‘place-manager-managers’ on site).
Involvement is the obvious focus for describing, understanding and influencing citizen participation in crime prevention, but in fact, the three ‘Response’ concepts together enable a much more complete articulation of what is going on. Let’s re-examine the ‘shopping list’ set out above:
We can encapsulate the above examples, and in fact articulate the widest range of crime prevention activity in a structured way, by saying that the professionals Involve other parties in Implementing the Intervention or otherwise supporting it.
The reality is even messier than these brief descriptions allow, of course, as will become apparent. The case study that follows illustrates just how messy and complicated. It also shows how further concepts are needed to articulate the practice issues that arise, in order to aid thinking, communication and sharing of knowledge. Accordingly, as the case study unfolds, we go into progressively greater detail on the process of Involvement.
The issue of failure in crime prevention
Failure is, unfortunately, a pervasive phenomenon in evaluations of crime prevention initiatives (see Ekblom 2011 for a review). Rosenbaum (1986), discussing the problem in evaluations of community crime prevention programmes, did us the necessary but uncomfortable service of distinguishing between three kinds:
Learning from failure is obviously an important activity for practitioners, programme managers and theorists alike. Rosenbaum’s concepts are a helpful start in this respect, but aren’t detailed enough to help evaluators investigate, articulate and transfer useful knowledge to reduce the chances of failure in future initiatives. Bowers and Johnson (2006) usefully identify a range of more detailed failure risks in reviewing implementation issues. They organise them in terms of these headings: lack of experience, theory failure, under-resourcing, high staff turnover, no champion, lack of infrastructure, lack of exit strategy, red tape, slow implementation and displacement. They cross-classify these risks against operational features of preventive schemes: type of scheme, nature of targets, who is implementing (with obvious connections to Involvement) and how intense the scheme is. Finally, they produce a table which summarises empirical experience for each of the 40 combinations. But imposing even more structure can take this approach still further.
5Is offers just such a structure. As a detailed process model for crime prevention (and a ready-made framework for process evaluation) we can use 5Is to ask, of some wholly or partially failed project or programme, where the failure in question happened. Was it at the stage of Intelligence (e.g. failure to obtain valid crime statistics or to analyse them appropriately)? Intervention (e.g. failure to apply the right theoretical approach to the problem and context, or to select a sufficiently evidence-based method)? Implementation (e.g. failure to install sufficiently robust window locks on houses)? Involvement (as in the illustration that follows)? Or Impact (e.g. insufficient numbers of observations or too short a time period to give sufficient statistical power in an impact evaluation)? Did the failure reside in just one of these tasks, or in how the whole set was brought together?
Of course, 5Is goes into more detail under each of these tasks and allows a correspondingly finer analysis of what went wrong, and hence what needs to be put right next time. Such finer analysis can also pick up elements of what worked well even in the context of a wider failure, rather like a sieve filtering ore from base rock (an analogy similar to Pawson’s 2006 use of ‘gold nuggets’). For example, a burglary project may have had a badly-designed and implemented intervention, but the method of mobilising participants was excellent and innovative and worth salvaging for wider application, while the rest can be discarded or used as an example of what to avoid.
CCO can help here too. For example it can enable our investigation of Intelligence failure to systematically consider which causes of crime were misdiagnosed and why. Within Intervention failure it can guide consideration of a failure to apply the right theory. And within Implementation failure it can help us be systematic about which causal mechanisms (such as deterrence or discouragement) failed to be triggered (Pawson and Tilley 1997; Ekblom 2002, 2011).
The case study
This brings us to the case study of Involvement failure.
If you visit a public bar, cafe or library your bag, if you have one, is at risk of being stolen. Results from the British Crime Survey suggest that people who visit cafes and bars three or more times a week are at more than twice the risk of theft that those who do not (Kershaw, Nicholas and Walker 2008). Diverse attempts have been made to prevent this category of crime but the ones of interest here centre on the design of products – furniture and fittings – to help customers in such places to protect their property. Various items have been designed and tested at the Design Against Crime Research Centre (DACRC). One is the Stop Thief chair (www.stopthiefchair.com), which has two notches on the front of the seat to allow people to hang their bag securely behind their knees. Another – the subject of this case study – is the Grippa Clip (grippaclip.com) – a hinged loop fixed under the table edge for people to hang their bags on. The clip is easy for the legitimate user to operate but difficult for the thief to remove or steal from the bag because of the obvious, intentional hand/arm movements. The hanging bag moreover remains close to the owner’s body space and tactile/visual awareness zone. In terms of causal mechanisms, the Grippa clip sought to increase the effort and risk on the part of offenders attempting to unhook bags, and simultaneously empower preventers (the bag owners); in doing so to reduce opportunities for bag theft.
DACRC and UCL Jill Dando Institute of Security and Crime Science collaborated on what was intended to be a thorough design process informed by research and theory, followed by a large-scale and rigorous impact evaluation of the clips on crime. The study was designed in full awareness of the risks of failure (Ekblom and Sidebottom 2007) – the research team was not naive to these issues (all investigators had experienced and in some cases written on implementation failure). Indeed, following a collaboration with a previous company on bar security (Smith et al. 2006) we systematically undertook risk analyses. We also developed a spreadsheet application (CRITIC – Bowers et al. 2010 and see www.grippaclip.com/publications/academic-papers/critics-link-to-spreadsheet-calculator/) to resolve issues of statistical power on the one hand, and the scale and costs of affordable prototype manufacture on the other. Without being too immodest, the clip design was good, the evaluation design was good, but the people and organisations side, initially promising, let us down, despite receiving much close attention. This is how it happened.
We can go over some of these events in more diagnostic detail, using additional concepts of Involvement in particular to draw out and articulate what was going on, to provide both local feedback and generic, transferrable, lessons.
The task of Involvement is further differentiated, within 5Is, into partnership, mobilisation and climate setting.3