Leopard poaching - A problem-solving answer at the 2023 POP Conference

 

by Gregory Saville

Last month on Aug 7-9, I co-presented SafeGrowth and CPTED with Tarah Hodgkinson at the Problem Oriented Policing Conference (POP) in Boulder, Colorado. It was the 35th annual POP event drawing innovative policing and community problem-solving programs together to learn and compete for the prestigious Herman Goldstein problem-solving award.

The invention of my old friend and mentor, Professor Herman Goldstein, problem-oriented policing is one of the very few police reforms that lasted decades and, most importantly, works to cut crime and build relations with the community. At a time when police/community relations are strained, especially with minority communities, the POP movement is a ray of light showing a different kind of future.

This year, in addition to our training sessions on crime analysis, CPTED, and of course, SafeGrowth, there were projects from around the world on a full range of challenges facing communities.

• Better responses to mental health crises, more innovative ways to avoid unnecessary detentions, and more effective alternative treatments;
• Hotel fraud and problems with card processing machines that created opportunities for victimization;
• Sexual offences and sexual exposures in public areas, in one case along a 10 miles stretch of a canal with an adjacent walkway.

The Problem-Oriented Policing conference at the Embassy Suites hotel in Boulder, Colorado - Photo Orbitz

LEOPARD POACHING

Perhaps one of the most unique, and inventive, POP projects I saw was this year’s winner of the 2023 Goldstein Award – Saving Spots, Tackling Leopard Poaching for Ceremonial Leopard Skin Trade in Western Zambia.

I can say that in all the years I’ve participated in this POP conference, this is one of the most inventive applications of the model. Environmental crime is an understudied problem around the world and, in spite of that limitation, this project did not disappoint.

Photo Creative Commons By Lavindu Binuwara - [1], CC BY-SA 4.0

Watching the Saving Spots team describe their work in Africa, I was reminded how we always know if the police agency in the jurisdiction where we are implementing SafeGrowth trains their officers in POP methods. It is so much easier to implement difficult prevention programs when we have creative partners and leaders in the police department.  

It was exciting to see relevant, and effective, problem-solving methods when applied to such different crimes around the world.