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| Geneva Park Conference Center, Orillia, Ontario. Site of the 1986 conference on Environmental Criminology and Crime Analysis. I invited Ron Clarke as a presenter - photo Unique Properties |
by Gregory Saville
I want to share a short reflection on my old friend Ronald V. Clarke—known not just as a criminologist and recipient of the 2015 Stockholm Prize in Criminology, but as a pioneering crime scientist whose humanity, curiosity, and intellectual courage reshaped our understanding of crime and prevention.
Ron passed away on May 28, 2025, at the age of 84. His death marked the end of a life dedicated not merely to studying crime, but to reimagining how we can prevent it—not through punishment or psychology alone, but by redesigning our environments and systems.
It was Clarke’s co-authored 1976 paper, “Crime as Opportunity,” that truly turned the criminological world on its head. He urged us to stop fixating on criminals and instead look at the opportunities that allowed crimes to happen—changing the offense, not just punishing the offender. From better window locks and improved sightlines to dye-marked banknotes—his vision was pragmatic, grounded, and surprisingly effective. He’d say things like, “remove the opportunity and the crime collapses.”
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| Ronald V. Clarke - Professor/Crime Scientist/Friend. Also interested in preventing wildlife crime and poaching - photo Benefunder |
I first met Ron at a 1986 conference I sponsored at a conference center in Ontario overlooking Lake Couchiching. He had arrived in North America a few years earlier from his career at the UK Home Office, where he pioneered new studies on crime opportunity. I once told him I thought treating opportunity as a root cause of crime was a step too far, unsupported by the data. When he disagreed, it felt less like an admonition and more like a steady, hand guiding me back to the point.
I suspect he preferred “crime scientist” less for the scientific rigor in criminology —which remains limited—and more because the search for offender dispositions had done little to prevent crime. It was hard to argue that! Mainstream criminology often ignored his work and he expressed his frustration with big, elaborate statistical exercises when simple, real-life situational changes kept showing clear effects.
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| UK Home Office - London. Clarke headed a crime prevention unit for the British government prior to his tenure as Dean of Criminology at Rutgers University - photo CC-SA 2.0 by Steve Cadman |
Ron was also a leader in the practical application of theory. He served as head judge of the Herman Goldstein Problem-Oriented Policing Award—he was my head judge when I was serving as a judge on that program—and set a tone of rigor and fairness that inspired everyone on the panel.
He was a featured speaker at the 1986 environmental criminology search conference, and he immediately latched onto the action research method that was at the core of our work (the search conference is an action research method). It was about the direct application of theory into practice. That idea became a throughline in his later work - as it had been in his UK work - and it is still a core value we honor today in SafeGrowth.
A LEGACY OF OPPORTUNITY
Ron’s legacy is subtle but profound: he showed us crime isn’t destiny—it’s often a product of ill-placed opportunities, overlooked context, and uninspired design. And by treating the environment as part of the solution, he gave cities, planners, and communities tools that work—without trials, without ideology, but with practicality and empathy.
I honored him by applying his situational insights during our project work on homelessness —believing that when we change the settings of homelessness, we shift the narrative away from fear and blame, toward safety and support. That felt like the truest tribute to his spirit: evolving his ideas with compassion, not just application. His insistence on translating research into real-world change is woven into the DNA of SafeGrowth’s global network today—every project, training, and innovation we advance carries a trace of Ron’s vision for theory in action.
Thank you Ron, we owe you a debt.
