Policy Levels for Situational Crime Prevention

Roger Peter Roget was a man who liked to make lists. Long lists. Fortunately, he was also an expert at organizing those lists. In the early 1800s, Roget compiled his famous thesaurus. He began the project in his early 20s and worked on it for the next several decades (Kendall 2008) until its release midcentury (see Roget 1852). A British physician and polymath, he published treatises on electricity (Roget 1832) and physiology (1839) along the way.

Eventually the Internet would convert Roget’s Thesaurus into a quick source to be accessed one word at a time, robbing millions of users of the opportunity to understand how each word fits into its larger world, often on multiple relationship dimensions. Learning such relationships is important for thinking out a problem and making a systematic presentation. ¹ More generally, classification is an important component of scientific progress. In the natural science realm, the great contribution came from Linnaeus (known to fellow Swedes as Carl von Linne), who systematized the study of plants and animals. That helped Darwin to formulate evolutionary theory and has impelled thousands of subsequent scientists to do their research in an organized fashion, conversant with one another. ²

Crime science, too, can benefit from classification and systematization. The scientific process requires breaking problems down into their constituent parts, then putting those parts back together. This process produces a framework that serves beyond any single academic project, while creating more organized dialogue among scientific and policy initiatives. The framework itself gives rise to new ideas and research by showing how parts fit and what gaps remain. That is the great contribution of Roget (who helped people to formulate ideas and write tomes) and Linnaeus (who helped scientists to study life step by step while participating in a larger enterprise).

Although situational crime prevention defines itself as an applied area, it is also performing a basic science role. In breaking out specific crime problems to study and learning the modus operandi for each, these criminologists have provided pieces that could be reassembled into something bigger and clearer than the criminal code or a vague image of the crime world. What makes crime science more scientific is the process of disaggregation. Its successes have occurred through breaking down crime types, settings, times, and methods used by offenders and preventers. It distinguishes outdoor drug sales from those indoor. It separates residential and commercial burglary. It treats assaults near pubs differently from assaults near schools. It recognizes multiple types of prostitution. It especially disaggregates forms of theft. Researchers and practitioners have disentangled the criminogenic process into many constituent threads. Situational crime prevention now has hundreds of examples in many walks of life and many parts of the world. These are available at several websites, ³ providing an expanding repertoire of preventive ideas, empirical studies, and a multitude of constituent pieces. Fitting those pieces into a coherent framework is essential.

The best effort to provide such a framework is Ronald V. Clarke’s chart of twenty-five techniques for situational crime prevention (Clarke and Eck 2007). Other frameworks have been applied to crime and criminal law. The most famous legal example is Blackstone’s Commentaries, published from 1765 to 1769 (Watson 1988). A nonlegal taxonomy of criminal events is offered in Felson (2006). The Brantinghams (1984, 1993) have suggested important categories and dimensions for summarizing crime patterns and prevention efforts, widely applied in generating research.

This short article supplements prior efforts by considering another organizing dimension. I cannot offer a full framework, which would probably require years of additional work. I only look at a single dimension—the level at which situational crime prevention policy is applied—and propose seven categories, organized by distance from the criminal event:

The site level includes situational prevention applied to a barroom, an abandoned property, a single store, or any other location taken one unit at a time. The spot refers to a cluster of properties or a small local area containing a handful of sites that crime impinges upon. The zone might refer to an entertainment zone or a residential neighborhood, containing an appreciable number of households and/or businesses. Metro refers to the metropolis or region that could act to prevent crime over a wider span. Corporate prevention refers to multisite corporations that act to prevent crimes. The scope of prevention can be widened to the national or international level.

Although situational crime prevention can be applied at all these levels, it always thinks locally. It always disaggregates crime into local components and specific modus operandi. The basic principle underlying these categories is that forces beyond the immediate crime site can reduce local crime opportunity. That explains why situational prevention sometimes looks beyond the immediate area where crimes occur.

I apply these seven situational prevention levels to two examples, reducing liquor problems and diminishing the risk of motor vehicle theft. Liquor problems can be reduced by

I can apply the same seven categories to reducing motor vehicle theft:

Situational prevention thinks about crime as a very local matter with a very specific modus operandi. However, local and specific thinking can be applied more broadly and systematically. Such applications can be classified, and the classifications can give people ideas for new prevention measures and new research. Science is a process of gathering, organizing, and systematizing information. Classification and systematization are necessary for situational crime prevention to mature further.