Better Crime Prevention provides a critical guide to theory, research, ethics, and politics in relation to crime prevention policy and practice. It concludes with an agenda for continuous improvement. The book also demonstrates what is involved in doing theoretically informed and realistically applied social science orientated to reducing harms.
The focus throughout this book is on ethical and effective ways to reduce crime-related harms. There are chapters on how to target crime prevention efforts, crime prevention theories and frameworks, ethical issues in crime prevention, the practical conduct of crime prevention, evidence-based crime prevention, the politics of crime prevention, and the need for continuous adaptation in crime prevention.
Student readers will obtain an overview of, and capacity critically to engage with, crime prevention theory and practice. Policymakers and practitioner readers will be able to make better-informed decisions about what to do and how to allocate crime prevention resources. Social scientists interested in contributing realistically to harm reduction will better understand how they can go about doing so.
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Preface
1 Introduction
- Crime prevention knowing and doing
- The focus of crime prevention
- The ubiquity of crime prevention
- Crime and crime prevention in human societies
- ‘Crime’ and ‘crime’ prevention in other species
- Chapter outlines
2 Crime prevention examples
- Vehicle theft
- Domestic burglary
- Commercial robbery
- Gang-related shootings
- Domestic violence
- Drink-driving
- Graffiti
- Criminality
- Conclusion
3 Targeting crime prevention: costs, harms, and concentrations
- Costs of crime and cost-effectiveness
- Harms and harm indexes
- Concentrations
- Victims
- Places
- Products
- Facilities
- Systems
- Offenders
- Overlapping concentrations
- Conclusion
4 Crime prevention theories
- What is ‘theory’?
- Examples of theory in crime prevention practice and what we learn from them
- Routine activities as a general framework for crime prevention theories
- Theories for crime prevention focused on opportunity
- Situational crime prevention
- Complementary theories for crime prevention emphasising situations and opportunities
- Theories for crime prevention focused on the supply, availability, and capacity of offenders
- Opportunity theory and offender supply and availability
- Adolescent-limited and lifetime-persistent offenders
- Deficits and dispositions to commit crime
- Turning points
- Offender treatment
- Enforcement
- Other theory
- Examples of potentially useful theories relating to crime
- Examples of potentially useful general theories
- Conclusion
5 Principled crime prevention?
- The dialogue
6 Doing crime prevention
- Private sector crime prevention: shoplifting
- Data on the crime problem
- Analysis and interpretation
- Developing a preventive strategy
- Evaluation
- Continuous monitoring
- Applying the problem-solving approach
- Private sector crime generation
- Public sector crime prevention
- Crime prevention roles, responsibilities, and competencies
- Doing effective and ethical crime prevention
- Scanning
- Analysis
- Response
- Assessment
- Conclusion
7 Evidence-based crime prevention
Being realistic about evidence, evidence needs, and evidence use
- Reading evidence
- Evidence hierarchies and gold standards
- The College of Policing Toolkit
- The need for the synthesis of diverse sources of evidence
- Case studies
- Advice on accessing and using evidence
- Discretion, evidence, and crime prevention decision-making
- The creation of evidence
- Conclusion
8 Politics of crime prevention
- Proposal for a generic framework
- Chicago: a case study
- Politics of crime effective prevention: priorities, responsibilities, and interventions
- Priorities
- Responsibilities
- Interventions
- Politics of research production and use
- Evidence analysis and use politics
- Data politics
- Conclusion
9 Better crime prevention
- Improvements over the past half century
- Maintaining improvement
- What’s to be done to build improvement into policy and practice?
Index
Biography
Nick Tilley has taught or conducted research at Coventry University, Nottingham Trent University, the University of Minnesota, Griffith University, the Home Office, and, most recently, University College London. He is an elected Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences (FAcSS) and has been awarded an OBE for services to policing and crime reduction. The Tilley Award for police problem-solving is named in his honour. He is Honorary Professor at UCL, Emeritus Professor at Nottingham Trent University, and Visiting Professor at Huddersfield University. He is the author or editor of 15 books and more than 200 chapters and journal articles, mostly to do with evaluation methodology, policing, and crime prevention.
