The decline of crime prevention

Curtailing UK crime prevention funding - photo by IgnisFatus, Creative Commons

GUEST BLOG
Calvin Beckford is one of the founder members of the UKs Designing Out Crime Association. He joined the London Metropolitan Police Service in 1978. He was one of the UK representatives for a European project on good practice models of crime prevention across Europe. In 2005 he joined ACPO Secured by Design, a police initiative for designing out crime. He currently runs The Crime Prevention Website.

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The Metropolitan London police now employs 32 Crime Prevention Design Advisers, one per London Borough, and there are perhaps 6 or 7 'old fashioned' Crime Prevention Officers left. Crime prevention advice is now delivered by way of leaflet, website (including mine as they link to it) and by a visit from a Police Community Support Officer, who try their best, but are largely untrained.

The economic depression, I think, simply speeded up the process of downsizing the police crime prevention service here, but I'm still not entirely sure why it's happened.

My own experience seems to have been different from my contemporaries insomuch that I had tremendous support from my Commanders and essentially became one of the 'right-hand men'; especially in respect to partnership working with local authorities and other partners.

THE ROT

The rot really started during my 5 years working for ACPO's Secured by Design (2004 - 10).  During that period most of our supportive senior commanders across the country began to retire and the ones coming up behind seemed to know next to nothing about the positive effects of CPTED or even good old fashioned Situational CP.

Then the depression hit and then we had a change in government to a Conservative led coalition who don't like anything to stand in the way of making money.

For example, in spite of our efforts and evidence that building secure (SBD) homes was profitable they only see SBD as an obstruction to house building and have been less than supportive. They got rid of a raft of planing guidance (which included our CP stuff) and I know that SBD are fighting a rear guard action to keep crime prevention on the agenda.

DESIGN OUT CRIME

While this was going on the Community Safety Departments at our Local Authorities have been stripped to the bone. When I worked in Camden in central London I had two planning officers assigned by the local authority to help me 'design out crime' across the Borough - we did a huge amount of work, which i know has prevented a lot of crime.  These positions are long-gone.

How can our government do this?  Well they have the current luxury of falling crime figures, which I am sure has a lot to do with reduced opportunity, so this is the very moment they can do these things.

These are difficult times.

The future is here? And there...

Computer algorithms solving future crime? Photo by WallPapersUS

For ages criminologists settled on the idea that it is not the quantity of officers on patrol that matters most, but rather what they do. Respected police scholar James Q. Wilson (co-founder of the broken windows theory) pointed out it was the style, strategy and behavior of cops that mattered most.

Whatever! Regardless what police scholars thought, the math and computer types spent years figuring how to maximize the quantity and deployment of patrol cars. Squirreled away in dark basement rooms (at least in my imagination), they dedicated themselves to getting the quantity just right.

Disclosure: At one point I haunted those same basement rooms! I was a police planner for a few years and I evaluated PCAM - a computerized program for allocating patrol vehicles into geographic areas.

PCAM - THE LATEST AND GREATEST? 

In the 1980s PCAM was the latest and greatest of its class. It  was supposed to estimate workload peaks, predict hourly call loads, maybe even better deploy cops to cut crime. All very cool stuff. It didn't work of course. PCAM just couldn't handle high priority calls. Still, it was pretty cool.

Unfortunately, no police allocation model received any level of wide acceptance throughout the 80s and 90s. That didn't change the fact that knowing where crime will happen is no small feat and so those basements remained very busy places. In fact, research continues today.

I've written all this before in blogs on predictive policing and the Precog Paradox.



THE BRITS GET IN THE ACT

Now for the latest! It looks like 007 is asking about the most recent variation on that old theme: Predpol. And compared to the others, Predpol is even cooler - in a shaken, not stirred, kind of way.

Predpol has crossed the Atlantic to the Kent Police. The Brits, it seems, are grasping at the same quantity straws that we are. Let's hope they don't obsess on where crime happens and ignore programs and funding on why they happen in the first place!

And now, for something completely different...

RoboCop portray's a failed policing system in a dystopian future - photo Sony Corp.

While governments in the UK are taking the remarkable step of hiring security to privatize police, something equally remarkable, and almost unnoticed, is unfolding in Detroit. 

Resident groups, fed-up with declining resources, a cash-strapped police department and crime and disorder, have decided to take advantage of a recently updated Michigan law - the Home Rule City Act - and hire their own private security to police their neighborhoods. Council has yet to approve the proposal. 

The Act allows neighborhoods to levy a service fee on residents for private security. In America, neighborhood's hiring their own security is not new. Allowing neighborhoods to tax themselves to fund it…that is!  

Drastic times call for drastic measures! Really? Without clearly thought out public policy? Without proper hiring benchmarks? Without quality control for training and selection? Who will do that? The Detroit police? How can Detroit police monitor, control, or audit quality of neighborhood security when they are too cash-strapped to deliver services themselves? 

Pythonic thinking to solve the privatization crisis

In a stunning leap of Monty Python logic, I'm told the British Home Office thinks it can do all that quality control, monitoring and auditing of UK police privatization themselves. After all, as this Pythonic thinking goes, they did it for public police…that is to say the same "inefficient" public police the government is now privatizing. 

In other words, more bureaucracy to control outsourcing due to funding shortfalls for inefficient policing from government funding. Blimey! That circular logic makes one's head spin. It's the Ministry of Silly Walks through and through.

And how's that working for them? I just read news that a former division of Hallibuton Inc was a leading bidder to privatize UK police services. That's Halliburton - the same military-industrial giant of Iraq infamy. The same Halliburton implicated in the Gulf Oil spill a few years ago. 

There is nothing wrong with private security (in fact the opposite) as long as it is administered properly and monitored for quality by qualified experts. But does Detroit really want in on this game without well-thought policy mechanisms? 

Is it just me, or does the dystopian RoboCop future seem just a bit closer today?

Explaining homicide

British Bobbies - first urban police in the world. How's it going?

I just came across a Wall Street Journal article debunking a poverty and crime theory called "blocked opportunities". Puh-leese! For op-ed writers, debunking crime theories is like stealing lolipops from tots. Simple, unethical and just silly.

Take criminologists (like me) who say routine activity patterns (road networks, travel habits, bar locations) produce higher/lower crime opportunities like crime hotspots. The routine activity theory suggests crime drops by disrupting routine activities and targeting those hotspots with arrests, CPTED, dealing with prolific offenders, etc.

The most comprehensive demonstration of a routine activity approach is Britain's Crime and Disorder Act, 1998.

The Act links crime prevention accountability to municipalities, creates partnerships among relevant agencies, sets prevention goals, and uses multiple strategies to tackle crime hotspots.

Convincingly, since 1998 UK police agencies have been finalists at the International Problem Oriented Policing Award program every year but two. They've won the coveted award eight times.

Some claim routine activity goes beyond street corners to whole countries. They predict Western countries have more goods, more cash for illicit drugs, more things to steal, and will therefore have larger criminal opportunities. This results in higher crime rates than in poorer countries. Voila: poverty doesn't cause crime - routine activities do. The International Crime Victimization Survey, they say, proves it.

It doesn't.

Why? Because that is a logic error called the non sequitur. Consider this:

I constructed this graph from that same survey. It shows the US homicide rate plummeting throughout the 1990s. Canada's rate dips slightly. In the UK, where the Crime and Disorder Act has been in place for the entire period, homicide flatlines and then slightly increases.

You could say this is because crime opportunities between the three countries is worse in the UK. That is unlikely. The US has more gangs, drugs, guns and plenty of crime opportunities.

It is more likely routine activity theory just breaks down at this scale and predicts nothing.