Investigating the Crime Reduction Claims of NDC Partnerships

Abstract

Determining the impact of the New Deal for Communities (NDC) initiatives on levels of crime is important both for the evaluation of the NDC programme, and, more generally, to advance our understanding of what works in crime prevention (for reviews see, Hirschfield, Johnson and Bowers; Sherman et al.; Visher and Weisburd). However, measuring the impacts of crime prevention (or other) schemes is not necessarily a simple process and is one that is often misunderstood. A number of the NDCs have made claims regarding the impact of initiatives on levels of crime. In this report we examine the claims made by three NDCs, these being Bradford, East Brighton and East Manchester. We then discuss the method they adopted to generate these claims, and present our own analyses of the changes in the levels of crime for these areas using different techniques, where data has been made availabl