Good practice? invest in a framework!

M any reports on major national initiatives like the Crime Reduction Programme acknowledge ‘implementation failure’. Common explanations are ‘poor project-management skills’,or ‘short-term funding regimes’. Important as these are,Heraclitus’excellent Soapbox article (‘Good Practice - What’s it all about?’ Network News,Winter 2005) also blamed ‘dumbing down.’ Higher echelons in crime prevention often believe ‘The only information you can hope to get into practitioners’heads is a slogan or two,if lucky.’ I totally disagree. Crime prevention’s basic idea is simple (cutting the cause cuts the risk),but its practice is complex

Afterword: Safety research on the move

Question: What makes connections (often deep ones) between diverse areas, has a network of equally diverse participants, and the potential to significantly impact the life of cities and their inhabitants? Answer: The researchers who combined to produce this special issue, of course. I was privileged to see them, and others, in action at a workshop convened in Stockholm by the Editor of this special issue, and to read the papers published here. I am no specialist in transport crime, but have a broad interest in research and practice in crime prevention and particular concern with the built environment and with design in general. The Editor has already capably summarised the content of the articles in the Introduction, which allows me, in what follows, to reflect on some of the many issues raised, both specific to transport and common to the whole of crime science

Bike off 2: catalysing anti theft bike, bike parking and information design for the 21st Century

Project Bikeoff's Design for the 21st Century programme, followed earlier research and development work on preventing bike theft by colleagues at the Design Against Crime Research Centre, my own work over 15 years in developing conceptual frameworks for theoretical and practice knowledge in crime prevention, and work on crime pattern analysis and evaluation techniques for situational crime prevention at the UCL Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science. Bikeoff aimed to draw on this experience to develop and build capacity among designers to undertake innovative and focused work in design against crime, which could generalise from bike parking to other crimes/fields of design. Work Package A2 sought to apply my Conjunction of Criminal Opportunity framework (a criminological map of the immediate causes of crime and preventive interventions in those causes) to guide the thinking of designers and organise existing knowledge and experience of secure bike parking facilities. During the collaboration with designers CCO significantly evolved e.g. to match the original interest in 'abusers' to the designer's central interest in 'users', and to become more dynamic through the concept of the 'scripts' of users in parking bikes securely, and of abusers in seeking to steal them, culminating in the new and fundamental concept of 'script clashes' (e.g. surveil v conceal, pursue v escape). These clashes sharply focus the designers' task: it is their job to shape products, environments and services to tip the balance to favour users. Beyond this a particular procedure was developed, of wide application, to use the amended CCO to 1) systematically analyse the crime risks to and from a given product, and then 2) guide designers to reduce/mitigate the risks whilst maximising design freedom

Beccaria partner meeting - professional training in crime prevention: the UK situation

Keynote address to the European Crime Prevention Network (EUCPN) Best Practices Conference, Häämeenlinna, Finland

Grippa Prototypes: Comment Sheet Compendium

The document consolidates the responses of police, bar management and others to the Grippa prototype designs demonstrated in a workshop held in late 2007

Terrorism - Lessons from Natural and Human Co-evolutionary Arms Races

The potential for violent, destructive and threatening behaviour against fellow humans seems to be inherent in our psychological and anatomical nature (the latter arguably evidenced by special adaptations of our fists, and fist-resistant faces (Morgan and Carrier, 2013; Carrier and Morgan, 2014)). This is true whether that behaviour concerns an argument over an insult, careless driving, domestic relations, religious beliefs and practices, or who governs Eastern Ukraine. The kinds of tactics and strategies classed, at times, as acts of terrorism, fall within this set. Fortunately equally inherent in us are cooperation, empathy and altruism, although in a conflict these can be selectively applied to one’s own side, even by terrorists. We can look to our evolutionary origins to help understand, and hopefully to influence, what turns us – as individuals and groups – on and off violent conflict, who we target, over what moral/political causes and under what circumstances. This is the domain of beliefs, identities, ideologies and motivation. But we can also take another perspective, which is how conflicts tactically and strategically unfold, and how this process can be influenced for the differential benefit of the ‘good side’. The ‘how’ essentially concerns the process of adaptation, whereby organisms as individuals, groups or species change over some relevant timescale to become better fitted to survival, flourishing and reproduction in their habitual environment. Adaptation for potentially violent and destructive conflict such as carrying out terrorism or defending against it is the core concern of this chapter, although adaptation for cooperation and straightforward foraging with or without violence also play a part. The aim of the chapter as a whole is to explore the lessons for counter-terrorism from evolutionary studies of adaptation in both human and natural domains, with special focus on arms races. This is partly to come up with some practical suggestions at tactical and strategic levels; but partly also to foster a distinctive and, I will argue, promising way of thinking among policymakers, security services, engineers, planners and designers. I show in particular how evolutionary processes apply to cultural (including technological) change, opening the knowledge-transfer process up to a range of natural, and human, co-evolutionary struggles. Following that, I show how such a widened perspective can apply to terrorism and counterterrorism in particular. Before concluding, I discuss a range of lessons for how to run terrorist arms races, drawing heavily on those most human of culturally-evolved adaptive processes, design, research, theory and evaluation

Holding the line: The sustainability of police involvement in crime prevention

The opening lines of the handbook issued by Sir Robert Peel to all officers of the Metropolitan Police in 1829, were these: ‘It should be understood at the outset that the object to be attained is the prevention of crime. To this great end every effort of the police is to be directed. The security of person and property, the preservation of the public tranquility, and all the other objects of a police establishment will thus be better effected than by the detection and punishment of the offender after he has succeeded in committing the crime.’ Quoted in Reith (1948:62). Mayne, one of the first two Commissioners, added this principle: ‘To prevent crime and disorder, as an alternative to their repression by military force and severity of legal punishment.’ Quoted in Boyd (2012). What exactly they meant by prevention is open to interpretation, and whether this was just a ruse to help convince a suspicious public that in England ‘continental’ methods of repression would not be adopted is not clear. But by the late 19th Century the reactive approach of catching criminals or ‘feeling collars’ had come to predominate; and in the 20th, the politically-significant rhetoric of ‘fighting crime’ achieved consensual hegemony, delivered huge resources to policing over the years and of course powerfully shaped the policing organisation. It was not until the 1960s that the first signs of resurgence of an explicit, practical, preventive role were seen

Перевірка суб’єктів господарювання державного сектора економіки: ревізія чи аудит?

The house sparrow (Passer domesticus) is an important model species in ecology and evolution. However, until recently, genomic resources for molecular ecological projects have been lacking in this species. Here, we present transcriptome sequencing data (RNA-Seq) from three different house sparrow tissues (spleen, blood and bursa). These tissues were specifically chosen to obtain a diverse representation of expressed genes and to maximize the yield of immune-related gene functions. After de novo assembly, 15250 contigs were identified, representing sequence data from a total of 8756 known avian genes (as inferred from the closely related zebra finch). The transcriptome assembly contain sequence data from nine manually annotated MHC genes, including an almost complete MHC class I coding sequence. There were 407, 303 and 68 genes overexpressed in spleen, blood and bursa, respectively. Gene ontology terms related to ribosomal function were associated with overexpression in spleen and oxygen transport functions with overexpression in blood. In addition to the transcript sequences, we provide 327 gene-linked microsatellites (SSRs) with sufficient flanking sequences for primer design, and 3177 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) within genes, that can be used in follow-up molecular ecology studies of this ecological well-studied species

Richness, retrievability and reliability: issues in a working knowledge base for good practice in crime prevention

This paper focuses on descriptions of crime prevention projects identified as ‘good practice’, and how they are captured and shared in knowledge bases, with the purpose of improving performance in the field as a whole. This relates both to evidence-based approaches to practice, and to growing attempts at explicit knowledge management. There are, however, fundamental issues in the transfer of effective practice in the crime prevention field, which few working knowledge bases have properly addressed. Evaluation often remains weak and descriptions of successful projects do not always contain the right information to help practitioners select and replicate projects suitable for transfer to their own contexts. Knowledge remains fragmentary. With these concerns in mind this paper systematically examines the projects contained in the UK Home Office ‘Effective Practice Database’, a repository of project descriptions volunteered and self-completed on a standard online form by practitioners. The Home Office descriptions (and their equivalents elsewhere) reveal significant limitations of richness, retrievability and reliability. Ways of addressing these issues are discussed, ranging from the media and processes of ‘knowledge-harvesting’ to the use of more purpose-designed frameworks such as 5Is. But the fundamental issue remains one of taking knowledge management seriously and investing sustained time, money and leadership effort to make it work

Evolutionary Psychological Influences on the Contemporary Causes of Terrorist Events

In this chapter we integrate the concept of ultimate causation derived from evolutionary psychology (i.e., why have human behavioural tendencies evolved the way they did?) with the proximal situational perspective of causal mechanisms and goals (i.e. immediate causes of behaviour and events), with the view to better understand, predict and prevent terrorist behaviour and events. The developmental perspective, while important, is not central to our current analysis. Those working in crime science, and more especially situational crime prevention, have only recently begun to show an interest in terrorism, while to the best of our knowledge there appears to be little research linking situational theories, EP and crime or terrorist behaviour. It is our contention that EP has something useful to say about how we respond to and act on information in the immediate environment, and that a better appreciation of evolutionary influences on person-situation interactions might helpfully inform efforts to reduce the proximal causes of crime and terrorist behaviour or disrupt criminals'/terrorists' proximally-active, tactical goals. The chapter is structured as follows. We begin by setting out some prevalent misconceptions about EP that we argue account for the lack of interest in the approach among terrorist researchers, and that need to be dispelled before we can proceed with our proposed analysis. Next, we set out the parameters of our analysis, and describe terrorism in a manner that is amenable to an evolutionary perspective. Given the difficulties in defining terrorism, we select the concept of tribalism as a significant exemplar of a terrorism-supporting mechanism and our focus for analysis. We move then to the main goal of this chapter: integrating the proposed causes of terrorist behaviour, from ultimate causes rooted in our evolutionary past to proximal causes and goals in the immediate environment. This analysis is conducted within the framework of the Conjunction of Terrorist Opportunity, a conceptual model that seeks to link a range of situational and offender-based, proximal causes of terrorist events. We conclude by reflecting on the implications of our exercise for research and prevention