Preventing Crime & Creating Safer Communities
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Creating Safer Communities in Europe: a crime prevention sourcebook

COMPARING CRIME CONTROL MODELS AND PREVENTATIVE MEASURES

3.1 How and what can we compare?

At the crudest, we could just look at all the per capita crime rates for individual European countries and state that those with the lowest rates had the "best" crime prevention measures and those with the highest had the "worst". This would tell us that Norway and Switzerland were better than France and Belgium, and much better than Holland and the Czech Republic, at controlling crime. End of story. But, firstly as we have seen, crime rates are unreliable indictors of offending prevalence (see Balvig 1987 for a rebuttal of the Swiss low crime "myth") and secondly, merely knowing which are low crime countries does not give us much of a guide to improving our own circumstances (apart from moving to those countries!).

The origins of crime, criminality and insecurity are found in such a dense web of interacting "causes" (everything from cultural norms, via urbanisation to the construction of external doors (- See Shaftoe and Pitts 1994) that to learn anything useful about why and how some places seem to be more successful at preventing crime than others, we need an analytical model which will help us to tease out significant factors that could be replicated.

A number of typologies or analytical "templates" have been developed to classify and compare crime prevention measures. The most widely used is the primary, secondary, tertiary stratification, based on the preventative medicine model. Primary crime prevention takes a broad sweep (or swipe) at the whole social or physical environment in an attempt to reduce the opportunities for crime or insecurity. This could include national media campaigns - encouraging people to secure their homes or the specification of improved locks on cars. Secondary prevention focuses on specific "at-risk" communities or groups of individuals, and might include security upgrading of all homes in a high-crime neighbourhood or a project to set up training for disaffected youths. Tertiary crime prevention focuses on people who have already offended in an attempt to stop them re-offending, through rehabilitative means. This could include offending behaviour confrontation groups and reparation schemes run by prisons and probation officers. In the strict sense this is not really crime prevention, because, by definition, a crime must have already happened for tertiary prevention to be activated.

Van Dijk and de Waard (1991) added a vertical axis to this model which makes it possible to isolate whether the level of crime prevention intervention was targeted at: offenders, situations or victims, as shown below:

Thus, by way of example, primary prevention aimed at offenders might consist of moral education programmes in schools, secondary prevention aimed at offenders might consist of a detached youth project in a deprived neighbourhood and tertiary prevention might involve a probation officer mediating a meeting between a young offender and his burglary victim.

Graham & Bennett (1995) came up with a three part classification for preventative approaches: criminality prevention, situational crime prevention and community crime prevention. This classification has similarities to the vertical grid of van Dijk & de Waard's typology (above), although "victims" could only loosely be equated with "community". In fact the community category in Graham & Bennet's classification is rather loose as it embraces not only community organisation but also some defensive and criminality prevention measures where these are contained "within a community-based framework of action".

Perhaps the most useful classification (for practical rather than academic analysis) is the grid developed by Marnix Eysink Smeets in Holland. He calls this classification "putting crime behind bars" and it is shown graphically below:

Using this "behind bars" scheme it is possible to crudely compare the type and quantity of crime prevention activity in various European countries.

What such a schematic analysis cannot do is compare quality - this can only be done through programme monitoring and evaluation which is rare and has not yet been carried out in a consistent framework throughout Europe (see next section).

3.2 Summary Comparisons

The country-by-country descriptions later in this publication will enable the reader to make detailed comparisons of different approaches (although it is difficult to compile consistent information categories for each country), but, by way of an overview, here are some general comparisons, based on the Eysink Smeets grid.

Arguably, the European countries with the most developed crime prevention policies and quantity of practice are: France, Denmark, Holland and the United Kingdom, along with Finland, Sweden, Belgium, Germany and Spain. This could be partly a reflection of the scale of neighbourhood crime in those countries, and indeed countries such as Austria and Switzerland are comparatively low both in recorded crime and crime prevention activity.

In some countries, the intensity of crime prevention activity is unevenly distributed. Two examples of this are Spain, which has a disproportionate amount of activity in Barcelona and Italy where most seems to be happening in Turin. This suggests that the municipalities are taking the lead, rather than a pro-active central government, as it is difficult to believe that Barcelona and Turin have significantly higher crime problems than Madrid or Rome.

Generally speaking, the countries with less developed crime prevention policies and practices tend to rely on the police as the principal protagonists and aim their practice at the criminal justice system and tertiary prevention. The more "sophisticated" countries tend to have a separate national crime prevention "board" or "department" which, although linked, is separate from the police system. Denmark and Sweden have national crime prevention councils (recently copied by Britain). France has an inter-ministerial "delegation" on crime prevention, while in Holland crime prevention is subsumed under the Ministry of Justice.

France is probably the leader in criminality prevention, closely followed by Denmark which has a very pragmatic, "can do" approach to crime prevention. Sweden tends to have a rather more academic approach which is heavy on controlled experiments and rigorous evaluation. Britain is historically known for its focus on opportunity reduction, but is veering (in lip service at least) towards a greater interest in "root cause" criminality prevention. Holland has a thoroughly eclectic approach which touches all the horizontal and vertical bars of the classification grid. Through the sponsorship of the Ministry of Justice, Holland has also put a lot of effort into monitoring and evaluation.

The youngest European partner to go wholeheartedly for crime prevention is Belgium, which was doing virtually nothing preventative in the 1980s, but since then has put massive political, strategic and financial resources into a range of initiatives (see van Limburgen 1996)

3.3 Evaluation

The multi-dimensional nature of crime and its prevention makes evaluation of projects and interventions notoriously difficult. How do you know that what you did was responsible for the reduction in crime? Do you even know that crime reduced and where do you draw the "boundary of influence"? These and many other interacting variables turn crime prevention evaluation into a minefield of uncertainty. As a result, some countries or organisations develop amazingly sophisticated (and complex) research methodologies. The National Swedish Council for Crime Prevention has published numerous theoretical treatises such as "the systematisation of prevention strategy" and "towards a theoretical framework for victimological risk analysis" (see Kulhorn and Svensson 1981), while further afield many an American academic has made a comfortable living developing theoretical paradigms of criminality causation, while street crime continues unabated downtown. At the other end of the spectrum the innovative staff of the Danish Crime Prevention Council are so busy doing crime prevention that they have to rely on a "gut" feeling that it is working well.

Until we have a standard evaluation scheme that can be applied to crime prevention initiatives anywhere in Europe, it is going to be very difficult to make accurate comparisons of what works. At the moment it is even difficult to compare different approaches within a single country, or even municipality!

A simple but practical evaluation framework was used by Osborn (DoE 1993, SNU 1995) to compare the effectiveness of various crime preventative measures taken on British housing estates. He measured each initiative against the following questions:

• ? did crime go down? (measures changes in number of offences and victimisation rates)
• ? were crime problems reduced? (measures fear and qualitative issues)
• ? was the initiative responsible for the changes?
• ? which specific measure led to the changes?
• ? does the effect last?
• ? is the initiative replicable or generalisable?

If we could start submitting a range of European crime prevention initiatives to the above assessment criteria, then we would be well on the road to useful comparative learning. But it is important to note that monitoring and evaluation measurements would have to be built into initiatives from the start - like crime prevention itself, you can't achieve much after the event.

3.4 A Caveat

Useful as they may be, none of the classifications above can encompass the pre-disposing factors that may make it easier for some countries to maintain lower crime levels without even have to adopt specific crime prevention strategies. Our original mention of Norway and Switzerland as apparently having the lowest crime rates in Europe, are cases in point. Both of these countries are characterised by relative prosperity and equality, comparatively stable population networks and only moderate urbanisation. Criminologists and sociologists will agree that such conditions are not breeding grounds for crime and that civilised societies should strive for policies that lead to such a good quality of life for the majority. However in the immediate term, such lofty aspirations are of limited help to countries such as Holland with the highest urban concentration in the western world and England with high population mobility and relative poverty.

There is also a possible down-side to countries with little crime - they tend to be characterised by conforming pressures, often imposed by draconian means. Switzerland would be regarded by some as an oppressively conservative culture, and looking internationally, Japan may have the lowest crime rate of any advanced industrialised society, but its citizens are culturally pressurised from the cradle onwards. Russia, Poland and the Czech Republic had much lower crime rates under their former communist regimes and crime free Singapore would not be as it is had not the government "intervened in very personal matters - who your neighbour is, how you live, the noise you make, how you spit or what language you use. We decide what's right. Never mind what the people think" asserts Lee Kwan Yew, the architect of modern Singapore.

So it may be that a certain level of crime and insecurity is the price we have to pay for living in a society that encourages true democracy, civil liberties, free expression and cultural diversity. How we minimise that level without sacrificing individual freedom and communal rights is the challenge for enlightened European societies. The various ways that a number of European countries have risen to this challenge are described in the following chapters.