Crime Analysis For Problem Solvers

U.S.
Department of Justice
Office of Community Oriented Policing Services
COPS
COMMUNITY ORIENTED POLICING SERVICES
U.S. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE
CRIME ANALYSIS FOR PROBLEM SOLVERS

In 6 0 S mall S teps
Ronald V. Clarke & John E. Eck
Center for Problem-O

Oriented Policing
This project was supported by cooperative agreement #2003CKWXK048 by the Office of Community Oriented
Policing Services, U.S. Department of Justice. The opinions contained herein are those of the authors and do not
necessarily represent the official position of the U.S. Department of Justice. References to specific companies,
products, or services should not be considered an endorsement of the product by the author or the U.S. Department
of Justice. Rather, the references are illustrations to supplement discussion of the issues.
Crime Analysis for Problem Solvers

In 60 Small Steps
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John E. Eck
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his is a revised and extended version of a manual, Become a Problem-
Solving Crime Analyst, that we wrote for the Jill Dando Institute of Crime
Science at University College London, with financial support from the
Home Office. We are most grateful to the Institute and to the Home Office
for allowing us to produce this version for the United States. We are also
grateful to the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services for
commissioning the work. In the Acknowledgements page of the earlier
version we thanked many colleagues and friends on whose work we had
freely drawn. Those who have materially assisted us in completing this
version by supplying material for inclusion, commenting on drafts, or in
other ways, include: Stacy Belledin, Rachel Boba, Karen Bullock, Barbie
Brookover, Christopher Bruce, Andy Brumwell, Graham Farrell, Rob
Guerette, Samantha Gwinn, Shane Johnson, Johannes Knutsson, Gloria
Laycock, Nancy Leach, Deborah Loewen, Tamara Madensen, Mangai
Natarajan, Cynthia Pappas, Ken Pease, Nanci Plouffe, Barry Poyner, Jerry
Ratcliffe, George Rengert, Nick Ross, Kim Rossmo, Rana Sampson,
Matthew Scheider, Karin Schmerler, Michael Scott, Nick Tilley, Susan
Wernicke, Matt White, and Deborah Lamm Weisel. We thank all of them.
Crime Analysis for Problem Solvers in 60 Small Steps
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Ronald Clarke is university professor in the school of Criminal Justice at Rutgers,

The State University of New Jersey, and visiting professor at the Jill Dando
Institute of Crime Science, University College London. He worked for many years
in the Home Office Research and Planning Unit, where he contributed to the
development of situational crime prevention and the British Crime Survey. He is
associate director of the Center for Problem-Oriented Policing and chair of the
judges for the annual Herman Goldstein Award for Excellence in ProblemOriented Policing. He can be reached at: [email protected].
JOHN E. ECK
John Eck is professor of criminal justice at the University of Cincinnati. He has
contributed to the development of problem-oriented policing since 1984 when he
studied the first full-scale attempt to implement the concept in the United States
at Newport News, Virginia. He helped to develop a number of now standard
techniques in problem-oriented policing, including the SARA model and the
problem analysis triangle. Dr. Eck is an affiliate member of the Center for
Problem-Oriented Policing. He is a judge for the Tilley Award for Excellence in
Problem-Oriented Policing. Dr. Eck was a member of the Committee to Review
Research on Police Policy and Practice (2000-2003) of the National Academy of
Sciences. He can be reached at: [email protected].
AUTHORS
RONALD V. CLARKE
foreword
foreword
ne of the primary concerns in policing in the United

States today and for the foreseeable future is
the severe constraint on spending. The lion's share
of police budgets is consumed in personnel costs. As a
result, many police agencies are already operating
significantly below their authorized strength. Funds to hire
new officers to meet growing needs are hard to obtain.
And, of special relevance here, traditional forms of policing,
because they are so heavily dependent on personnel, are
being curtailed. Calls cannot be handled as completely and
quickly as in the past. Personnel cannot be as freely
assigned to increasing the police presence on the streets in
labor-intensive tactics, such as crackdowns, sweeps, and
special task forces.
Many advances have been realized under the umbrella of

problem-oriented policing since the concept was first
introduced in 1979. But these have not been
mainstreamed within policing. Their implementation has
been spotty, uneven, and without deep and lasting roots.
They remain overshadowed by the dominant, continuing
commitment to traditional policing and its heavy
dependence on lots of police officers patrolling and
making arrests.
Greater concern about police effectiveness in dealing with
specific behavioral problems need not start from scratch.
Collectively, we know much about the wide range of
behavioral problems that constitute police business and
how best to prevent them. This knowledge can be found in
the substantial literature on crime and crime prevention
especially in the literature on situational crime prevention.
Much of value can be found, too, among the practices of
police agencies and in the minds of experienced police
officers, but this experience and expertise must be tapped
and subjected to rigorous analysis.
This reality is a powerful new force for rethinking the way

in which we police. It connects with prior efforts to
promote greater concern for the effectiveness of the police.
And it lends fresh impetus to meeting a long-standing,
neglected need the need to equip the police with an
institutionalized capacity to examine its work product; to
routinely ask, before committing to more of the same, what
it is that the police are expected to accomplish and how
The Center for Problem-Oriented Policing (POP Center)
they can more effectively accomplish it.
(www.popcenter.org) now serves as a locus for the
collection of the growing body of knowledge regarding
Rethinking current methods requires a new understanding problems commonly encountered by the police. It
of the role of the police both on the part of the police
disseminates this material in various ways, but primarily
and the public they serve. It is essential to recognize that
through the publication of its problem-oriented guides.
the police function is not as simple as it is sometimes
Each guide synthesizes existing knowledge and evaluated
portrayed. It is incredibly complex. It is not a singular
practices regarding a specific problem, and stimulates
function, commonly defined as enforcing the law. It
police to advance their own thinking about how best to
requires dealing with a broad range of behavioral
handle the problem in its local context.
problems, each quite different from the other. It does not
consist simply of reacting to an endless array of incidents.
While the POP Center has documented hundreds of
Police are now expected to prevent them from occurring in successful cases in problem-oriented policing, a major
the first instance.
impediment to advancing the concept has been the
absence of an analytical capacity within police agencies.
A fresh perspective on policing requires that the police
Many police agencies do employ one or more crime
examine, in depth, each of the numerous behavioral
analysts, but some of the largest and more advanced police
problems that together constitute their business; that they organizations do not. When employed, the job of the crime
consider a broader range of strategies on how best to
analyst is often narrowly limited to tabulating crimes that
prevent, reduce, or eliminate each of them; and that they
occur. In others, it extends to identifying patterns of crimes
weigh more precisely their effectiveness upon adopting a
with the primary objective of identifying the likely offender
new targeted response. This is the essence of problemso that he/she can be apprehended. In its more ambitious
oriented policing.
form, the crime analyst's job may include identifying factors
contributing to a crime pattern, but the job of deciding
how to respond to these factors is usually deferred to
operational personnel, who then tend to use traditional
means for dealing with them.
domain of technicians. We hope that, everyone else in a

police agency, from officers on the beat to police
executives, and, more broadly, those in both the public
and private sector concerned about crime, will incorporate
the line of thinking set forth in the manual into the
perspectives they bring to their work.
Herman Goldstein
Professor of Law Emeritus
University of Wisconsin-Madison
In this manual, Ronald Clarke and John Eck set out a

much more ambitious and potentially productive agenda
for the analyst. They outline a role in which the crime
analyst invests heavily in seeking new responses to the
problems that are diagnosed and participates directly in
efforts to test and implement them. The analyst is
expected to contribute to exploring new, more creative,
and potentially more effective ways of carrying out the
police job. Through this manual, Clarke and Eck
demonstrate how one analyst, properly trained and
utilized, has the potential to increase many times the
productivity and effectiveness of perhaps hundreds of
police officers. Understood in this way, an investment in
crime analysts can be a smart way to increase the return
on the substantial investment that communities make in
sworn police personnel.
Blending their expertise as researchers and their
familiarity with policing, Clarke and Eck have collected all
of the knowledge and methodology that is relevant and
currently available; organized it in 60 small segments or
steps that build logically upon each other; and
communicated the material in a style that is both concise
and engaging. The volume is packed with vital and
sophisticated information that makes it one of the most
significant publications addressed to the policing field in
the past several decades.
The most immediate goal of the manual is to help the
relatively small number of individuals now commonly
employed in police agencies as crime analysts to expand
their function and thereby contribute more to the
effectiveness of their agency's operations. It is intended,
more ambitiously, to contribute to the training of new
crime analysts or problem-solvers, to increasing their
number, and to their development as a distinct and vital
profession. But problem analysis is not the exclusive
FOREWORD
Meanwhile, the field of crime analysis itself has grown

much more sophisticated. A strong literature on its
potential is now available. The ability to electronically
capture, store, and retrieve massive amounts of data that
police routinely collect is infinitely greater than it was just
a decade ago. The capacity to map crime geographically is
stunning, and is now a major, indispensable tool in crime
analysis. Standard approaches have been developed for
the collection, analysis, and dissemination of intelligence
across jurisdictional lines.
read this first
read this first
his 60-step manual assumes that you are an

experienced analyst and that you are accustomed to
providing the kind of information needed to support
police operations. This means that:
1. You use modern computing and know how to access
and manipulate comprehensive databases.
2. You know how to use software to map crime, to
identify hot spots, and to relate these to demographic
and other data.
3. You routinely produce charts showing weekly or
monthly changes in crime at departmental and beat
level, perhaps to support CompStat-style operations.
4. You are accustomed to carrying out analyses into such
topics as the relationship between the addresses of
known offenders and local outbreaks of car theft and
burglary.
5. You may have carried out some before-and-after
evaluations of crackdowns, such as on residential
burglaries or car thefts.
6. You have some basic knowledge of statistics and
research methodology such as is provided by an
undergraduate social science degree.
The manual builds on this experience to prepare you for a
different analytic role as a key member of a problemsolving team. Indeed, the latest writings on problemoriented policing see crime analysts as central to this new
way of policing communities. These writers argue that
many of the weaknesses of current practice result from
the insufficient involvement of well-trained crime analysts
at each stage of the problem-solving process.
The manual prepares you for this new role by providing
you with a basic knowledge of problem-oriented policing
and the related fields of environmental criminology and
situational crime prevention. You cannot adequately
function as a problem-solving crime analyst without being
conversant with these fields. Nor can you fill this role
without rethinking your job, and the early sections of the
manual explain how to take a more proactive approach.
You cannot simply wait for your police colleagues to come
to you with requests for information. Instead, you must
take the initiative at every stage of the project in defining
the scope of the problem-solving effort, in trying to
analyze the causes of the problem, in helping to find an
effective response, and in setting up the project so that it
can be evaluated and the police can learn from the
results. This means that you must be an integral member
of the problem-solving team, that you must explore

sources of information and data well beyond those that
you normally use in your work, that you must stick with a
particular project much longer than you normally would
and, finally, that you will share the credit for its success, or
the disappointment for its failure, equally with the other
members of the team.
The manual assumes that analysts who take on this new
role are interested in contributing to the development of
their profession. Assisted by vastly improved data-bases
and powerful computing hardware and software, crime
analysis is on the verge of becoming an exciting new
specialty. Indeed, it has already begun to attract a cadre
of well-trained and highly motivated professionals who
are vital to the development of policing in the 21st
century. You can make your contribution by
communicating the results of your work in professional
meetings and in the journals of your profession. By doing
so, you will not only help your profession and policing in
general, but you will become a more informed and
valuable resource to your own force.
The manual is short enough to get through in a weekend.
It would be hard work and probably worth doing, but it
was not designed to be read and then shelved. Instead,
we hope that you will find it to be an indispensable
reference source that you will keep near your desk,
consulting it whenever needed in the course of a
problem-solving project. This is why it is designed to be
robust, allowing for continuous use. When open at a
particular step it is designed to lie flat on your desk so
that you can consult it easily when working at
your computer.
We have arranged the steps to follow logically one from
another, in line with the SARA model (Scanning, Analysis,
Response and Assessment), though each is self-contained
and deals with a specific topic. This should make it
unnecessary for you to leaf through the manual, jumping
from place to place, when dealing with a particular topic.
To get the best out of the manual you should be
thoroughly familiar with the list of contents and you
should have browsed through sections that interest you to
get an idea of the coverage. But you need only study a
particular step when you have an immediate need for the
information it contains. In any case, this is the best way to
learn: to seek and apply information when you have a
practical need for it.
We have not referenced the manual as fully as an

academic publication for several reasons. We have already
tried to distill the essentials of the literature at each step.
We also doubt that busy crime analysts will have much
time for academic reading. Lastly, few of you will have
ready access to the specialized libraries that hold this
material. But occasionally you will need to know more
about a topic, and at each step we identify key articles or
books that you should be able to obtain more easily.
We use examples from other countries as well as from the Where possible, we have chosen those that are accessible
United States. We sought the best examples to make our on the Web. If you need help with references, feel free to
email one of us at the addresses given earlier. We would
point, so even if the context is foreign, the principles are
also be glad to receive any comments on the manual,
universal. We hope this diversity of ideas stimulates
creative thought: "Could that approach be adapted to
especially suggestions for improvement, which could be
useful if we prepare later editions. Most important, please
this problem? How could we do it?"
don't be shy about suggesting your own analyses
for inclusion!
The Home Office and the British Police

As explained in the Acknowledgements, we have developed this manual from an earlier version that we
prepared for the Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science at University College London. We have removed
British terms and spelling and have replaced many of the British examples with American ones. But you
will still find many references to things British. In particular you will see frequent mention of the Home
Office, which is equivalent to the U.S. Department of Justice. It has overall responsibility for matters
relating to crime and justice in England and Wales, including the police. There are only 43 police forces in
England and Wales (for a population of about 50 million), so the forces are much larger than most
American police departments. There is also much more uniformity among British police forces in policies,
rank structures, equipment, and deployment. This is partly due to the oversight provided by the Home
Office (which provides 51 percent of each force's budget) and regular inspections by Her Majesty's
Inspectors of Constabulary. The Home Office also funds a great deal of research on crime and criminal
justice and has its own large research department that publishes many studies of direct, practical
relevance to police. Recently, it has sponsored much work on problem-oriented policing, including the
original version of this manual.
READ THIS FIRST
In some cases, we do deal with a particular topic in more

than one place. For example, Step 12 provides a general
introduction to the concept of displacement, while Steps
48 and 49 explain how to check for various forms of
displacement at the evaluation stages. The combined
glossary and index at the end of the manual should help
you find where a topic is mentioned in more than
one place.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Crime Analysis for Problem Solvers in
60 small steps
Acknowledgements
Authors
Foreword
Read This First
Prepare Yourself
1.
Rethink your job
2.
Be the local crime expert
3.
Know what is effective (and not) in policing
Learn About Problem-Oriented Policing
4.
Become a POP expert
5.
Be true to POP
6.
Be very crime specific
7.
Be guided by SARA - not led astray!
Study Environmental Criminology
8.
Use the problem analysis triangle
9.
Know that opportunity makes the thief
10. Put yourself in the offender's shoes
11. Expect offenders to react
12. Don't be discouraged by the displacement doomsters
13. Expect diffusion of benefits
Scan for Crime Problems
14. Use the CHEERS test when defining problems
15. Know what kind of problem you have
16. Study the journey to crime
17. Know how hot spots develop
18. Learn if the 80-20 rule applies
Analyze in Depth
19. Research your problem
20. Formulate hypotheses
21. Collect your own data
22. Examine your data distributions
23. Diagnose your hot spot
24. Know when to use high-definition maps
25. Pay attention to daily and weekly rhythms
26. Take account of long-term change
Know how to use rates and denominators

Identify risky facilities
Be ready for repeat victimization
Consider repeat offending
Know the products that are CRAVED by thieves
Conduct case control studies
Measure association
Look for crime facilitators
Understand the crime from beginning to end
Be sure to answer the five "W" (and one "H") questions
Recognize that to err is human
Find a Practical Response

38. Embrace your key role at response
39. Increase the effort of crime
40. Increase the risks of crime
41. Reduce the rewards of crime
42. Reduce provocations
43. Remove excuses for crime
44. Find the owner of the problem
45. Choose responses likely to be implemented
Assess the Impact
46. Conduct a process evaluation
47. Know how to use controls
48. Consider geographical and temporal displacement
49. Examine displacement to other targets, tactics and crime types
50. Watch for other offenders moving in
51. Be alert to unexpected benefits
52. Expect premature falls in crime
53. Test for significance
Comunicate Effectively
54. Tell a clear story
55. Make clear maps
56. Use simple tables
57. Use simple figures
58. Organize powerful presentations
59. Become an effective presenter
60. Contribute to the store of knowledge
Glossary/Index
TABLE OF CONTENTS
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
1 1. Rethink your job
ike most crime analysts, you probably think of your

job in rather modest terms. You do not solve crimes
single-handed. Nor do you take the lead in setting
departmental crime-fighting priorities. Instead, you crunch
data for those who do the "real" work of finding better
ways to arrest criminals. You respond to requests for the
latest statistics on burglary or car theft from beat officers
and sergeants. You map crime for weekly meetings so that
the lieutenant knows where to demand more effort. And
you compile monthly statistics that others need for their
reports. In other words, you sit in the back seat while
others do the driving, asking for your help only when they
need it.
often are crimes solved later through patient detective

work or forensic evidence? How productive are stakeouts
and surveillance in terms of arrests? How much do
crackdowns cost in officers' time? What are the arrest
rates for different kinds of crimes? How many crimes of
different kinds are even reported to the police? Knowing
answers to these questions will tell you why even the
most hard-working officers are relatively ineffective in
preventing crime, and why an increasing number of police
forces are now turning to problem-oriented policing.
The main purpose of this manual is to tell you about

problem-oriented policing and the vital part you can play
This manual will help you rethink your role. Even someone in its implementation. The manual helps you distinguish
sitting in the back seat can help the lost driver find
problem-oriented policing from other forms of community
direction. Control over information is crucial, and the
policing. It shows you how problem-oriented policing can
ability to analyze it is all-important. The person who
become more effective by using environmental
learns how to do so becomes an essential member of the criminology and situational crime prevention. It describes
team. But we are not talking here about power or status. each of the four stages of a problem-oriented project scanning for crime problems, analyzing a specific problem
We are referring instead to a challenge facing all police
in depth, responding to the problem by implementing
forces: how to solve enduring and repetitive crime
solutions and assessing the results of the project - and
problems. Think of yourself as a member of a team
gives examples of the data and information that you
helping to solve these problems, with a particular role in
could provide at each stage. Finally, it illustrates the kind
that team. As you use this manual you will begin to see
of analyses that you can undertake at all four stages to
how to perform that role and you will also see how
work effectively as a member of the
essential it is.
problem-solving team.
To play that essential role, you need to know more. We
are not referring to improved computer skills or mapping These stages of a problem-oriented project will require
that you remain working on a single project much longer
ability, important though these are. You need to learn
than your traditional analytic role requires. You can expect
more about crime itself, to become a resource to your
to stay with a problem-solving project for weeks or
department as an expert on crime in your local area. If
months, rather than just the few hours needed to plot a
there is a new burglary wave, you should be the first to
burglary hot spot or provide a monthly report. Where a
know and the first to tell. Analyze and map the statistics
and get the basic facts yourself. If you wait, others will say detailed assessment of results is needed, your involvement
might even stretch for more than a year. You may have to
what is happening without any factual basis. Once more
you will be relegated to the back seat. You are the "facts" explain this to officers who come to you for help. At first
person and you must find things out as soon as possible, they may be surprised that you expect to stick so long
using the best means possible. This will often mean going with a project, but soon they will appreciate your
commitment to making the effort worthwhile.
beyond police data, and this manual will tell you how to
use other data sources, including interviews with victims
Your time has been wasted if you cannot communicate
and offenders and records of crime kept by businesses.
Becoming a source of information is a first step. The ideal the results of your work. Later sections of the manual give
suggestions for communicating more effectively by telling
is to also be a source of advice. Whether you can do this
a story using simple maps and tables. Your presentations
depends on your supervisor's openness, but at least you
should try to lead to a course of action, but you must
can provide options or support the suggestions of others
always explain the limits of your data and tell officers
with information and data.
where your recommendations are based on best guesses
In particular you should know what works in policing and rather than facts.
what does not. How effective is random patrol? How
often do police come upon a crime in progress? How
PREPARE YOURSELF
This manual cannot tell you everything you must know or

do to become a problem-solving analyst. You must seek
constantly to enhance your professional and technical
skills and keep up-to-date with the latest developments in
relevant fields. You must take the initiative in finding more
effective ways to capture information and more efficient
ways to process it, as time freed up from routine tasks
means more time for the new work of problem analysis.
You must read more widely and explore other sources of
information. Additional readings are recommended
throughout this manual, but you will also have to find
material for yourself. A good way to do this is through
networking with analysts in other departments and by
attending professional meetings of analysts, police and
criminologists. And try to pass on lessons you have
learned by making presentations at these meetings of
valuable or novel analyses you have undertaken.
In short, you should begin to see yourself as more than
just a technician, skilled in manipulating and presenting
data. You should become more like a researcher - albeit
with a highly practical focus - one who is bringing the
very best that science can offer to make policing more
effective. By the same token, also recognize that you are
part of an emerging profession, which you can help
to develop.
Rethink your job:
Become a crime expert
Know what works in policing
Promote problem solving
Take your place on the project team
Learn about environmental criminology
Hone your research skills
Communicate effectively
Enhance your profession
Read More:
Braga, Anthony (2002). Problem-Oriented Policing and
Crime Prevention, Monsey, NY: Criminal Justice Press.
22. Be the local crime expert
ow often have you been asked the following sorts

of questions in your work?
Crime scenes receive a good deal of attention in serious

crimes, but not usually in ordinary crimes. You can learn a
lot by visiting them, especially when trying to understand
What locations are hot for auto theft right now?
a particular crime problem. Comparing incident reports
Which convenience stores are repeatedly robbed
with your own observations could reveal that important
and why?
details about the setting and the circumstances of
What are burglars taking from shops and where do they
incidents might not have been recorded - perhaps
fence the goods?
because the report form did not specifically request them.
Is there less crime in the better-lit streets?
Armed with this knowledge, you can suggest changes to
Which apartment complexes harbor drug markets?
the forms to capture information that is helpful both for
detecting offenders and for thinking about how to prevent
Some of these you might not have been able to answer at these crimes in the future.
all - others only after a special analysis. But suppose you
had the answers to them and many more at your
Try to keep abreast of new trends in crime. Read through
fingertips? Suppose you were the expert on crime in your a batch of crime reports each week to see if there is
force area? In fact, nobody else can fill that role:
anything new. Try also to pay attention to failed crime
attempts (see box). Some offenders have a trial-and-error
Individual officers are too busy answering calls.
process as they look for new ways to get something for
Detectives are focused on specific cases.
nothing. Those trying to cheat ticket vending machines or
Sergeants are supervising their officers.
ATMs may have difficulty in finding a method that works.
Lieutenants are overseeing patrol responses for large
But when they do, the word will spread. If you know their
geographic areas.
method, you might be able to warn officers and others.
The chief, his or her assistants and captains are busy
with administrative issues.
Very often a local crime problem is also found elsewhere.
Your force may experience a rash of thefts from building
In short, nobody can see the whole crime picture. But if
sites when this has never been a problem before. But you
you became the local crime expert it would help make
can be sure that somewhere else has suffered this
your department more informed, efficient, and capable of problem. That's why it is important to be alert to changes
using its resources to reduce crime. It would provide more in crime targets and modus operandi. The Internet is a
opportunity to warn citizens, to detect offenders, and to
good source of information about what crime others are
initiate prevention efforts. In short, you could help a lot of seeing. You should also ask your analyst colleagues in
people by gathering the right information.
nearby forces. They may be experiencing exactly the same
problem, with perhaps the same group of
To become the local crime expert, sit in regularly with
offenders involved.
dispatchers and talk to officers about what they are
seeing. Remember the late shift might not see officers on Do not limit yourself to the police because many other
the early shift, and those on one side of town might not
people know a lot about particular crime problems:
see officers on the other. They often talk about exceptions,
not the rules, about what made them angry, not about the City code inspectors can see blight developing before
this is apparent to others.
routine. Yet the routine is the bread and butter of
Bar owners know about underage drinking, poor serving
crime analysis.
practices and sloppy management (in other bars, of
course!).
Take ride-alongs as often as time permits. Not only will
you get to know more of the officers in your department, Principals know all too well about bullying and
vandalism on school premises.
but you will also get a better feel for their work and the
Small business owners are alert to problems involving
problems they face on the street. Matt White, crime
their premises. For example, a pharmacist knows what is
analyst with the Jacksonville, Florida Sheriff's Office,
being stolen from his shop or whether intoxicated
recommends taking along a laptop loaded with
people are hanging out nearby.
Geographic Information System (GIS) data. You can then
Emergency room personnel see many injuries from crime
compare information about the area with the
that they record but might not report to the police.
officers' perceptions.
refuges or rape crisis centers know far more

How to become expert on crime in your area:
about patterns of domestic violence than most
Get away from your computer!
police officers.
Private security guards are often the first to know about
Talk to officers about what they are seeing.
a particular incident. But they also have information that Go on ride-alongs and sit with dispatchers.
Visit crime scenes and examine crime reports.
can contribute to your general understanding of local
crime patterns.
Check failed attempts to learn exactly what happened.
Talk to city officials about specific crime problems.
Exchange information with businesses and
Offenders themselves are surprising sources of
private security.
information. Although they might not admit doing
Ask analysts in nearby cities about changes in crime
anything themselves, they are often willing to talk about
targets and methods.
"how it is usually done." Many offenders are actually
Ask officers to question offenders about their methods.
quite talkative about the craft of offending, and will tell
Get information from victims about exactly when, where,
you exactly how they pick targets, fence valuables, what
and how.
offenders are looking for these days, and the like. Asking
Help to improve crime incident forms and data capture.
your police colleagues to obtain this information from
offenders can sometimes be very useful.
Last, victims can tell you a good deal about the crime. For
offenses such as burglary, they may not be able to give a
precise time of offense, but they can still tell you where
an offender broke in, what is missing, what room or floor
was left alone, etc.
Learning from Unsuccessful Attempts
The Chula Vista, California Police Department was aware that the city's building boom could worsen the residential burglary
problem. The new houses were intended for affluent couples who would be out during the day when burglaries were most likely
to happen. The police, therefore, decided to examine the effectiveness of existing security precautions to see if any of these could
be built into new homes or suggested to homeowners. Cathy Burciaga, one of the department's crime analysts, compared
completed burglaries with unsuccessful attempts for an 18-month sample of 569 homes in the city. This indicated that deadbolts
should be installed on both the side and front doors of new houses. Interviews conducted with 250 victims and 50 burglars
revealed that not one burglar had tried to enter a house by breaking a double-glazed window. This led to the recommendation
that all windows in new housing be double-glazed and meet strict forced-entry standards.
Completed Burglaries
Unsuccessful Attempts
Effective?*
Dusk to dawn light
28%
29%
No
Indoor light on
26%
29%
No
Indoor timer light
9%
11%
No
Deadbolt on front door
28%
25%
No
Deadbolt front & side doors
15%
29%
Yes
Outdoor motion detector
23%
36%
Yes
Radio/TV left on
9%
18%
Yes
Alarm company sign
19%
36%
Yes
*"Yes" means present in a larger proportion of unsuccessful attempts than completed burglaries.
PREPARE YOURSELF
Women's
33. Know what is effective (and not) in policing
vidence on what makes police effective points to the

vital role of crime analysis in 21st century policing.
Understanding this research can help you apply the
lessons the police profession has learned over the last
third of a century.
strategy must diversify its approaches to crime and

disorder. That is, policing must address crime and disorder
using a greater range of tools than simply enforcing the
law. This idea is expressed on the vertical axis. There is
evidence that working with the public, and going beyond
law enforcement, can have modest crime and disorder
There has been considerable research into which police
reduction affects, and the more personal the police-citizen
practices are effective at reducing crime and which
contacts the more likely it is that they will have an effect
practices are not effective. Recently, the National Academy on crime.
of Sciences established a panel of social science experts to
review all police research including the question of police The second element necessary to highly effective policing
effectiveness. The figure is adapted from this report. The
is focus. This element is expressed in the horizontal axis of
least effective approaches to crime reduction are in the
the figure. There is generally solid evidence that
lower left quadrant and the most effective are in the
geographically concentrated enforcement at crime or
upper right.
disorder hot spots can be effective, at least in the short
run. That is, focused patrolling of very small high-crime
In the lower left corner of the figure, we have the
places (e.g., street corners and block faces) has a modest
"standard model" of policing. This is the dominant
effect on crime and a large effect on disorder. This can be
policing strategy in North America. The standard model is accomplished with or without intensive arrest actions.
characterized by its reliance on law enforcement and a
CompStat and other related innovations of the late 1990s
lack of focus. Here we find general patrolling to deter
seek to take advantage of these findings. The Office of
offenders, rapid responses to a wide variety of calls for
Community Oriented Policing Services has published a
police service, follow-up investigations of crimes, and
Problem-Oriented Guide about when crackdowns and
other law enforcement activities that make little
related tactics are and are not effective (see Read More).
distinction among the characteristics of the people, places,
times, or situations. Faced with a public demand to reduce If a few individuals are responsible for most crime or
crime, public officials and the press who are wedded to
disorder, then removing them should reduce crime. Though
the standard model will request more police officers,
sound in principle, the research testing this idea is very
decreases in response time, greater police visibility, higher poor so we do not know whether repeat offender
success rates in investigations, and more arrests. Equally
programs work in actual practice, or if they are a
important is what the press and public officials do not call seemingly promising notion that cannot effectively be
for - increased precision as to who, what, when, where,
carried out.
why, and how crimes take place, distinctions among crime
types, the involvement of other public and private
Problem-oriented policing applies both elements institutions to address crime, or the application of non-law combining the use of diverse approaches with focused
enforcement alternatives.
action. How effective is it? There is a large body of
evaluation evidence here applying weak-to-strong
Some of the earliest research into police effectiveness
research methods that consistently finds that this
addressed aspects of the standard model. This research
combination does reduce crime and disorder. First, many
has consistently failed to find that the standard model has problem-solving efforts have been applied after
any noticeable effect on crime, disorder, or fear of crime.
concentrated enforcement has failed to produce long
Random patrol, rapid response, follow-up investigations,
lasting effects on crime, so something else needs to be
and arrest policies may be very beneficial for other
done. In one of the earliest examples, police in Newport
purposes, but we should not expect any of these practices News, Virginia, had been struggling with the exceptionally
to have an impact on crime or disorder. Nor is there solid high burglary rate in the New Briarfield apartments for
evidence that adding police to carry out these practices
well over a decade. They had obtained some short-term
will affect crime.
results from various enforcement methods, such as foot
patrols and mini-station programs. But each time the
To have an effect on crime, research strongly suggests
police redeployed away from New Briarfield the burglary
that police strategies must include two elements. These
rate surged. It was only after applying a problem-oriented
are represented on the axes of the figure. First, the
approach - involving citizens, the public housing authority,
The lessons during a third of a century of research are

now clear. Effective police work requires both focused
attention and diverse approaches. The least effective
policing uses neither element. The explanation for this is
also clear. If diverse approaches are used without focus, it
is difficult to apply the appropriate approach to the places
and people who most require it. If police are focused on
hot spots, but only enforce the law, they limit their
effectiveness. A fully effective police agency must take
advantage of the details of crime situations to reduce

crime opportunities. Crime analysts have important roles
in applying both elements - focusing with precision using
their analytical methods, and helping to craft appropriate
police tactics that fit the details of problems they have
uncovered. This makes the 21st century the century of
crime analysis in policing.
Read More:
Scott, Michael (2003). The Benefits and Consequences of
Police Crackdowns. Problem-Oriented Policing Guides.
Response Guides Series No. 1. Washington, DC: Office of
Community Oriented Policing Services. (accessible at
www.popcenter.org and www.cops.usdoj.gov).
Weisburd, David and John Eck (2004). "What Can Police
Do to Reduce Crime, Disorder and Fear?" The Annals of
the American Academy of Political and Social Science
593: 42-65.
Effectiveness of Policing Strategies
Diversity of Approaches
Great:
Apply a diverse array of
approaches, including
law enforcement
Little:
Rely almost exclusively
on law enforcement
Community Policing
Problem-oriented Policing
Little or no evidence of
effectiveness
Impersonal community policing (e.g.,
newsletters)
Weak to moderate evidence
Personal contacts in community policing
Respectful police-citizen contacts
Improving legitimacy of police
Foot patrols (fear reduction only)
Moderate evidence of effectiveness

Problem-oriented policing
Strong evidence of effectiveness
Problem-solving in hot spots
Standard Model
Focused Policing
Little or no evidence of
effectiveness
Adding more police
General patrol
Rapid response
Follow-up investigation
Undifferentiated arrest for domestic
violence
Low
Inconsistent or weak
Repeat offender investigations
Moderate to strong evidence of
effectiveness
Focused intensive enforcement
Hot-spots patrols
Focus
High
Adapted from National Research Council (2003), Fairness and Effectiveness in Policing: The Evidence.
Committee to Review Research on Police Policy and Practice. Edited by Wesley Skogan and Kathleen Frydl.
Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. Figure 6.1 and Table 6.1, pp. 248-249.
PREPARE YOURSELF
the fire department, the city codes department, and the

U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development that they were able to substantially reduce burglaries.
Second, when problem-solving at drug hot spots was
compared to traditional law enforcement at drug hot
spots in a Jersey City, New Jersey, randomized experiment,
David Weisburd and Lorraine Green found that problemsolving had the greater impact. So, even though focused
law enforcement is more effective than unfocused law
enforcement, focused problem-solving is even
more effective.
4 4. Become a POP expert
hen a serious crime occurs, the police are

expected to react immediately. They must provide
help and reassurance to victims and move fast to
arrest offenders. Yet we have seen that many times the
police are not able to arrest the culprits and may not be
able to secure a conviction when they do. We have also
seen that random patrolling, which the public expects, is
not an efficient way to apprehend criminals. This means
that much police work that is carried out to meet public
expectations is of limited value in controlling crime.
If they knew these facts, people would not be content for
police to abandon patrol or down-grade their response to
serious crimes. Rather, they would expect the police to
find new and better ways to control crime, while
continuing their traditional work. In fact, this is what the
police leadership has been trying to do by experimenting
with CompStat, zero tolerance, community policing, and
problem-oriented policing (or problem-solving as it is
often called). While crime analysts have a role in all these
innovations, problem-oriented policing (POP) thrusts them
into the limelight and gives them an important team
function. That's why you should learn about it.
Herman Goldstein originated the concept of problemoriented policing in a paper published in 1979. His idea
was simple. It is that policing should fundamentally be
about changing the conditions that give rise to recurring
crime problems and should not simply be about
responding to incidents as they occur or trying to forestall
them through preventive patrols. Police find it
demoralizing to return repeatedly to the same place or to
deal repeatedly with problems caused by the same small
group of offenders. They feel overwhelmed by the volume
of calls and rush around in a futile effort to deal with
them all. To escape from this trap, Goldstein said the
police must adopt a problem-solving approach in which
they work through the following four stages:
1. Scan data to identify patterns in the incidents they
routinely handle.
2. Subject these patterns (or problems) to indepth
analysis of causes.
3. Find new ways of intervening earlier in the causal
chain so that these problems are less likely to occur in
the future. These new strategies are not limited to
efforts to identify, arrest, and prosecute offenders.
Rather, without abandoning the use of the criminal law
when it is likely to be the most effective response,
problem-oriented policing seeks to find other potentially

effective responses (that might require partnership with
others) with a high priority on prevention.
4. Assess the impact of the interventions and, if they have
not worked, start the process all over again.
SARA is the acronym used to refer to these four stages of
problem solving - Scanning, Analysis, Response and
Assessment. Later sections of this manual will discuss
these in detail, but you can already see why you have a
central role in problem-oriented policing. You are the
person most familiar with police data and you know how
best to analyze and map that data to identify underlying
patterns. You may know better than anyone else in the
department how to use data in evaluating new initiatives.
If you make it your business to become the local crime
expert, you will also know where to find other relevant
information about problems; where to find information on
the Internet and in specialist literature about successful
responses used elsewhere; how to use insights from
environmental criminology in developing a problem
analysis; and how to anticipate and measure any possible
displacement. Without your day-to-day involvement at all
four stages, the POP project will not achieve a substantial
and sustained reduction in the problem.
Problem solving can be difficult. The greatest difficulties
are found at analysis and assessment, precisely where you
could make your greatest contribution. Indeed, from the
very first, Goldstein has argued that problem-oriented
policing depends crucially on the availability of high-level
analytic capacity in the department an argument repeated
in his most recent publications. In fact, he has been very
supportive of the idea of writing this manual, which is
addressed directly to the role of the crime analyst in
problem-oriented policing.
You might agree that you have a substantial role in
problem-oriented projects, but you might ask how you
could ever succeed in that role given the realities of your
job. How could you devote the time needed for the kind
of careful analyses required? How could you make a longterm commitment to a project, when you are continually
being asked to produce statistical reports and maps
immediately, if not before? How would you ever be
accepted as an equal member of the team, especially if
you are a mere civilian? How could you function as an
equal member when your boss wants to approve every
analysis you suggest and wants to see all your work
before it leaves the unit? How could you restrain the
These are good questions, but we believe that policing is

changing and that you can help speed up these changes.
There is slow but increasing pressure on police to become
more effective and the time is long past when chiefs
could say they would cut crime if only they had more
resources. Now, at least in larger departments, they must
make a detailed evidence-based case for these resources
and must explain precisely how they would use them.
Their performance is being watched more closely every
day, and the crime reductions that police in many cities
claim to have achieved have undermined excuses
for failure.
Read More:
Goldstein, Herman (1979). "Improving Policing: A
Problem-Oriented Approach." Crime & Delinquency April:
234-58.
Goldstein, Herman (1990). Problem-Oriented Policing.
New York: McGraw Hill.
Goldstein, Herman (2003). "On Further Developing
Problem-Oriented Policing. In Problem-Oriented Policing.
From Innovation to Mainstream." Crime Prevention
Studies, Volume 15, edited by Johannes Knutsson.
Monsey, NY: Criminal Justice Press.
In short, there is no doubt that police will become

increasingly reliant on data to acquire resources and
manage them effectively. By providing these data, you can
ride this tide of change to a more rewarding career in
policing, though you will have to work patiently to supply
timely information in a form that is helpful to the
organization. If you do this, and you remain firmly focused
on crime reduction, you and your profession will gradually
move into a more central policing role - and problemoriented policing provides you with the perfect vehicle. We
all know that policing is beset by new fads that follow hot
upon one another and almost as quickly disappear when
something new arrives. Many seasoned officers play along
for a while, waiting for management to lose interest so
that they can get back to business as usual. But problemoriented policing is not just a fad. It delivers results and is
here to stay.
LEARN ABOUT PROBLEM-ORIENTED POLICING
natural impatience of officers to move to a solution before

the analysis is complete? How could you persuade them
to consider solutions other than identifying and arresting
offenders? How would you deal with criticisms that you
are more interested in research than practical action? In
short, you may be wondering what planet we are living
on because it certainly resembles nothing you have seen.
55. Be true to POP
ome police managers attracted to problem-oriented

policing also apply other strategies, such as
community policing, "broken windows" policing,
intelligence-led policing, and CompStat. Depending on
how these other strategies are implemented, they may or
may not be compatible with POP. Even when
implemented in a compatible manner, they are not the
same as POP. For these reasons it is critical to understand
how POP differs from these other strategies.
Problem-oriented policing is a method for analyzing and
solving crime problems. Community policing, on the other
hand, represents a broader organizational philosophy.
Community policing includes problem-solving as
addressed in problem-oriented policing, but it also
includes the development of external partnerships with
community members and groups. Additionally, community
policing addresses organizational changes that should
take place in a police agency (such as decentralized
decision-making, fixed geographic accountability, agency
wide training, personnel evaluations) designed to support
collaborative problem-solving, community partnerships,
and a general proactive orientation to crime and social
disorder issues. Community policing is therefore more
focused on police-public interaction than is problemoriented policing and represents a broader organizational
philosophy that incorporates the principles of problemoriented policing within it. When done well, community
policing provides a strong overarching philosophy in
which to engage in POP, but community policing that fails
to incorporate the principles of POP within it is unlikely to
have a substantial impact on reducing crime.
Problem-oriented policing identifies partners whose help
is needed in dealing with specific problem. In an ideal
case, community policing does this as well. If the problem
is assaults around bus stops, a necessary partner will be
the local transit authority. If the problem is shoplifting,
then the cooperation of local businesses is needed.
Community members often identify problems. Specific
members of the public (including offenders) can have
important insights useful for problem analysis.
Community members can help implement solutions (for
example, in fitting deadbolts or not giving money to
beggars). And the success of a problem-solving effort
might be defined in terms of community reaction. But
rarely can the community at large help with the
specialized technical work involved in problem analysis,
solution development, and evaluation. In addition to
partnering around specific problems, community policing
also seeks out partnerships among the community at
large (and government organizations) in order to increase
the level of trust and general cooperation with them. In

this sense, it goes beyond the partnerships described
under problem-oriented policing. Agencies that adopt the
broader general philosophy of community policing should
be careful not to let these partnerships with a different
purpose (building trust and cooperation) dilute the more
focused problem-solving partnerships and efforts that the
community policing philosophy also encourages.
These distinctions are most easily confused when the
focus of a problem-oriented project is a deprived
neighborhood. In this case, the project should proceed by
identifying the collection of individual problems that
together make up the greater one (see Step 14). Rather
than attempting to build a relationship with the
community at large, a problem-oriented project focuses on
solving the specific problems of, say, drug houses,
commercial burglaries, and bar fights. To the extent that
members of the community become productively involved
in solving these discrete problems, they may be a rather
different group of individuals in each case. Broader
partnerships with the community could be developed in
order to build trust between police and the community
and this can make the problem-solving process easier;
however, even in the absence of widespread community
support, problems need to be systematically addressed.
It is also important to understand the difference between
problem-oriented policing and broken windows policing.
Under the former, specific solutions to the variety of
problems confronting the police emerge from careful and
detailed analysis of the contributory causes of each. By
contrast, "broken windows" advocates the same general
solution - policing incivilities and maintaining order whenever crime shows signs of becoming out of hand.
This approach is based on two principles, the first of
which is that small offenses add up to destroy community
life. For example, littering one piece of paper is nothing
terrible, but if everybody does it the neighborhood
becomes a dump. The second principle of broken windows
is that small offenses encourage larger ones. For example,
abandoned and boarded up properties often become the
scene for drug dealing and can spawn more serious
crimes. This important insight has led some cities to pay
much more attention to policing against small offenses.
All policing requires discretion, and broken windows
policing requires some very important decisions to be
made by officers on the street. (This is why it should not
be confused with "zero tolerance" which is a political
slogan, impossible for the police to deliver because it
would soon result in clogged courts and an alienated
implementing a crime reduction initiative in the way that

the SARA model is intended to do. Nor does it give a
central role to crime analysts at every stage in such an
initiative. This is why problem-oriented policing has a
great deal more to offer crime analysts and why it expects
much more of them.
Finally, problem-oriented policing is not the same as

CompStat, though they share some common features.
Both focus police attention, though CompStat as normally
practiced restricts itself to geographic hot spots while POP
Problem-oriented policing also addresses these less
can be applied to a wider array of crime concentrations.
serious offenses even if there is no expectation that they
Though both use data to drive police action, the variety of
will lead to worse problems. Vandalism in a public park
data and depth of analysis used in POP is greater than
might not increase the chances of robbery, but it does
quick-paced CompStat targeting. CompStat uses law
destroy public facilities, so it is a problem that needs to be enforcement tactics almost exclusively, while POP uses
addressed. Citizens in a neighborhood may be very
these along with a wider variety of responses. CompStat
concerned about speeding, traffic congestion, or noise. As may have short-term impacts on geographic hot spots of
long as these meet the criteria for a problem (Step 14)
crime that wear off and require more enforcement. A
they are addressable by POP, even if there is no
problem-oriented approach seeks longer-term solutions. If
expectation that the neighborhood will deteriorate should CompStat is used as a "first-aid" response while POP is
these go unaddressed.
applied to enact a longer-term cure, then the two
approaches can work well together.
Crime analysts are given a central role in intelligence-led
policing, which puts a premium on the need for sound
Read More:
information to guide policing operations. However,
intelligence-led policing is primarily a methodology for
Wilson, James Q. and George Kelling (1982). "Broken
producing sound, useable intelligence. It does not guide
Windows." The Atlantic Monthly March: 29-38.
police through the whole process of designing and
Differences Between Problem-Oriented Policing and Other Strategies
Focus
Objective
Rationale
Method
First Steps
Problem-oriented
policing
Specific, recurring crime

problems
Remove the causes of

these problems
Prevention is more
effective than
enforcement
Undertake focused
action-research (SARA)
Identify problems
requiring attention
Community policing
Public-police relations,
organizational changes,
problem-solving
Proactive prevention of
crime and social
disorder and increased
public confidence in and
support of police
Support is critical for

police effectiveness.
Organizational changes
are essential to
maintain changes,
problem-solving is a
central method to
dealing with crime and
social disorder issues
Build trust by contacts

with residents and
community meetings,
enacts organizational
changes to support
efforts, engages in
problem-solving
Appoint a community
officer for the
neighborhood, identify
problems requiring
attention, identify
organizational changes
necessary to support
efforts
Broken windows
Deteriorating
neighborhoods
Halt slide of
neighborhood into
serious crime
Nip trouble in the bud
Policing incivilities/order
maintenance
Identify a deteriorating
neighborhood
Intelligence-led
policing
The process of
collecting, analyzing,
and disseminating
intelligence
Base policing strategies

and tactics on sound
intelligence
Action only effective

when based on sound
intelligence
Promote the intelligence

cycle of collection,
evaluation, collation,
analysis, and
dissemination
Development of data
gathering, processing,
and dissemination
CompStat
Acute, short term

geographic crime
patterns
Reduce crime hot spots
Fewer hot spots reduce

overall crime
Computerized hot spot

identification and
intensive patrols and
enforcement
Build crime mapping

and geographic
accountability
population.) One has to figure out which of the small

offenses multiply into more crimes and which do not. For
example, New York City subway system managers learned
that young men jumping turnstiles to travel free often
committed robberies within the system. Controlling the
minor crime helped reduce the major one. But the subway
managers also learned that those painting graffiti did not
normally commit more serious crimes. Although their
efforts to control graffiti were very effective (see Step 41),
they did not reduce robbery.
66. Be very crime specific
our department will sometimes mount a crackdown

on a particular crime such as auto crime or burglary,
and you might be asked to map these offences or
provide other data to support the operation. But these
categories are too broad for problem-oriented policing.
They include too many different kinds of crimes, all of
which need to be separately analyzed. For example, "auto
crime" could include:
Stealing hubcaps for resale or badges for collections.

Breaking into cars to steal items left inside.
Breaking into cars and stealing radios and other fittings.
Joyriding by juveniles.
Taking a car for temporary transport.
Stealing a car for use in another crime.
Stealing and keeping a car.
Stealing cars for "chopping" and sale of the parts.
Stealing cars for resale.
Stealing cars for export overseas.
Carjacking.
You can see these crimes are committed for a variety of

motives, by different offenders, with varying degrees of
organization, knowledge and skills. Stealing hubcaps is
the least difficult and daring and is committed by juvenile
wanabees. Joyriding requires more courage and some
basic knowledge about starting and driving cars. Stealing
cars for export is a much more complicated crime
requiring high levels of organization, with many more
stages and people involved. The offenders are as likely to
be dishonest businessmen as career criminals. More
ruthless, hardened criminals commit carjacking.
These differences between crimes explain why the
solutions to each cannot be the same. Joyriding can be
reduced by better built-in security, which explains why
immobilizers are now bringing down overall levels of car
theft. However, immobilizers cannot prevent carjacking
because victims can be forced to hand over the keys if
these are not already in the ignition. In fact, some
commentators believe that carjacking has increased
because newer cars with ignition immobilizers are difficult to steal in the usual way. Immobilizers can also be
overcome by those with sufficient technical skill and they
may do little to reduce theft of cars for export. The
solution to this problem may lie in better port and border
controls and documents that are harder to forge.
Breaking down a larger problem of crime into smaller

categories is merely the first step in tightening the focus
of a POP project. For example, a recent POP project in
Charlotte, NC, originally focused on downtown thefts from
cars, became progressively more specific as the analysis of
the problem unfolded. First, it became clear that the
problem was concentrated in the car parks. Only 17%
involved cars parked in residences or on the streets. Then
it was found after counting parking spaces that cars in
surface lots were six times more at risk than those in
parking garages, which were generally more secure (see
Step 27). This meant the project could focus on improving
security in the surface lots through better lighting and
fencing, and more supervision by attendants. This would
be much easier than trying to reduce the already low
levels of theft in the parking garages. Tightening the focus
of a POP project in this way increases the probability of
success and uses resources effectively.
There are few rules for determining precisely the level of
specificity needed for a successful POP project. Tightening
the focus too much could result in too few crimes being
addressed to justify the expenditure of resources, though
this depends on the nature and seriousness of the crimes.
If only a few hubcaps are being stolen, then this problem
would not merit a full-blown POP project. On the other
hand, a POP project to reduce corner store robberies
could be worth undertaking, even if only a few such
robberies occur each year, because these can escalate into
worse crimes such as murder, and because they increase
public fear.
"Because so much effort has been concentrated on
crude groupings of crime types, such as burglary,
robbery or auto theft, it has been virtually impossible to
find truly common facts about the conditions which lead
to each of these groups of crimes. This implies that we
have to be very patient and try to solve the problems of
crime gradually and progressively, piece by piece."
Source: Poyner, Barry (1986). "A Model for Action".
Situational Crime Prevention, edited by Gloria Laycock
and Kevin Heal. London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office.
Barry Poyner and Barry Webb have argued that preventing residential burglaries targeted on electronic goods
requires quite different measures from those to prevent burglaries targeted on cash or jewelry. This is because they
found many differences between these two sorts of burglaries in the city they studied. When the targets were cash or
jewelry, burglaries occurred mostly in older homes near to the downtown area and were apparently committed by
offenders on foot. When the targets were electronic goods such as TVs and VCRs, the burglaries generally took place
in newer, more distant suburbs and were committed by offenders with cars. The cars were needed to transport the
stolen goods and had to be parked near to the house, but not so close as to attract attention. The layout of housing
in the newer suburbs allowed these conditions to be met, and Poyner and Webb's preventive suggestions consisted
principally of means to counter the lack of natural surveillance of parking places and roadways. Their suggestions to
prevent inner city burglaries focused more on improving security and surveillance at the point of entry.
Source: Poyner, Barry and Barry Webb (1991). Crime Free Housing. Oxford: Butterworth-Architecture.
Some serious crimes, such as school shootings, are so rare
that they cannot be properly addressed at the local level
by problem-oriented policing. This is because the
methodology depends upon a certain level of repetition to
permit underlying causes to be identified. For these kinds
of crimes, police forces must ensure that routine security
measures are in place and that they have a well-worked
out plan for responding to incidents.
While one should avoid beginning with a solution, some
solutions for specific crimes are so promising that they
might help define the focus of a POP project. To return to
the example of robbery at corner stores, there is good
research showing that having at least two members of
staff on duty can reduce late night robberies of these
stores. You could therefore take a look at how many
corner store robberies occur late at night in your area. If

there were enough of them, you might persuade your
department to mount a POP project focused on these late
night robberies simply because you know that an effective
solution exists.
Finally, as you learn more about a problem in the analysis
stage, you might decide that it is so similar to a related
problem that it is worth addressing the two together. For
instance, when working on a problem of assaults on taxi
drivers, you might discover that many of these are related
to robbery attempts and that it would be more
economical to focus your project on both robberies and
assaults. In this way you may identify a package of
measures that would reduce the two problems together.
Separate Problems, Common Solutions

Specific problems in a dilapidated neighborhood or apartment complex should always be separately analyzed, but, for cost- effectiveness
reasons, solutions ought to be considered together. In the hypothetical example below, the last identified solution, a gatekeeper and
closed circuit television (CCTV) system, is the most costly of all those listed. But it is also predicted to be the most effective solution for
each problem. It might therefore be chosen as a solution to all three problems when costs might have ruled out its selection for just one
of the problems.
IDENTIFIED SOLUTIONS
(from least costly to most)
Trim bushes to improve surveillance ($)
Block watch scheme ($)
Alarms for elevators ($$)
Electronic access to parking lot ($$)
Installation of entry phone ($$$)
Security patrol ($$$$)
Window locks and strengthened doors for apartments ($$$$)
Gatekeeper and complex-wide CCTV cameras ($$$$$)
$ Predicted costs
VANDALISM TO
ELEVATORS
THEFTS
OF/FROM CARS
BURGLARIES OF
APARTMENTS
**
*
**
*
****
****
**
****
**
****
***
****
**
*
****
* Predicted effectiveness
Being More Specific about Residential Burglary
77. Be guided by SARA but not led astray!
ithin problem-oriented policing, the police are

required to: (1) carefully define specific problems
(see Step 14 for the definition of "problem"); (2)
conduct in-depth analyses to understand their causes; (3)
undertake broad searches for solutions to remove these
causes and bring about lasting reductions in problems;
and (4) evaluate how successful these activities have
been. This is a form of action research, a well-established
social science method in which researchers work
alongside practitioners, helping to formulate and refine
interventions until success is achieved. This can be
contrasted with the usual role of researchers, in which
they work apart from the practitioners, collect background
information about problems, and conduct independent
evaluations. In action research, however, the researcher is
an integral member of the problem-solving team. This is
the role of the crime analyst. Your analyses must inform
and guide action at every stage.
However, the four problem-solving stages do not always

follow one another in a strictly linear fashion. In fact,
projects rarely follow a linear path from the initial
scanning and analysis stages through the stages of
response and assessment. Rather, the process often has
loops, so that an unfolding analysis can result in
refocusing of the project, and questions about possible
responses can lead to the need for fresh analyses. The
longer and more complicated the project, the more loops
of this kind are likely to occur. The set of smaller inner
arrows in the figure illustrate this dynamic process. For
example, one might jump from scanning to the
implementation of a short-term emergency response to
stabilize the problem while further analysis is undertaken.
An assessment of the short-term response could add to
the analysis and contribute to the formulation of a new
response, which is then assessed. This might lead back to
scanning as new information forces a revision of the
problem definition or the discovery of new problems. The
You will find that SARA will help you and your team keep important point is that analysis and evaluation are
on track. This is the acronym formulated by John Eck and meaningfully incorporated into the sequence of events
Bill Spelman to refer to the four problem-solving stages of and one does not simply jump from scanning to response
Scanning, Analysis, Response and Assessment. This
and declare victory.
process is very similar to many other analytical processes,
including the standard crime analysis process of
THE SARA PROBLEM-SOLVING PROCESS
collection, collation, analysis, dissemination, and feedback.
By dividing the overall project into separate stages, SARA
helps to ensure that the necessary steps are undertaken in
proper sequence - for example, that solutions are not
adopted before an analysis of the problem has been
SCANNING
ANALYSIS
undertaken. This is a useful check on the natural tendency
to jump straight to a final response, while skimping on
definition of the problem and analysis and forgetting to
assess their impact on the problem.
Problem-solving projects can be complex. In action
research, the team is expected to persist until success is
achieved, refining and improving an intervention in the
light of what is learned from earlier experiences. The
process is not necessarily completed once the assessment
has been made. If the problem persists, or has changed its
form, the team may have to start over. This is represented
in the figure where the outer arrows describe the
feedback between assessment and scanning.
ASSESSMENT
RESPONSE
Because the solution had so many advantages, we

decided to return to the analysis stage to find answers to
the builders' objections. Ultimately, this information was
useful in persuading builders to adopt the solution and
thus reduce the number of appliance thefts.
This shows how problem-oriented policing is a process in
which the gradual acquisition of data and information
informs the project, leading to more questions, to
redefinition, and even to changes in focus as it moves
along. As soon as a promising response is identified, its
costs and benefits need to be analyzed in depth. The
alternative of comprehensively exploring all available
response options runs the risk that the project will lose
momentum and the support of those involved.
One of us (Clarke) recently worked with Herman Goldstein

SARA and the "5 I's"
on a project to reduce thefts of appliances from houses
under construction in Charlotte, North Carolina. The
Paul Ekblom of the British Home Office has recently
housing developments were often in fairly isolated rural
proposed a development of SARA consisting of:
areas and were impossible to patrol effectively. They were Intelligence, Intervention, Implementation, Involvement,
difficult to secure because builders wanted to encourage
and Impact and process evaluation. The "5 I's" are
prospective buyers to tour the sites in the evenings and
supported by a wealth of practical concepts and tools.
on weekends. Because few offenders were ever caught,
A summary can be found at:
we knew little about them or how they disposed of the
www.crimereduction.gov.ukwww.jdi.ucl.ac.uk
appliances. We considered a wide range of possible
solutions including storing appliances in secure containers
on site and the use of portable alarms and closed-circuit
television cameras. Then we hit on a solution being used
Read More:
by some small builders - to delay installation of the
appliances until the day that the buyer took possession.
Clarke, Ronald and Herman Goldstein (2002). "Reducing
Theft at Construction Sites: Lessons from a ProblemMany builders were hostile at first to the idea. Sales staff Oriented Project." Crime Prevention Studies, volume 13,
edited by Nick Tilley. Monsey, New York: Criminal Justice
believed that having the appliances installed made a
home more saleable, and that the absence of appliances, Press. (accessible at: www.popcenter.org/library.htm)
if attributed to theft, might alarm purchasers about the
Eck, John (2003). "Why Don't Problems Get Solved?"
area they were moving into. Site supervisors felt that
Community Policing: Can It Work?, edited by Wesley
delivering and installing appliances as houses were
occupied would be more difficult than batch delivery and Skogan. Belmont, California: Wadsworth.
installation. Some erroneously believed that building
inspectors would not certify the houses as suitable for
occupancy unless appliances were in place. Others
wrongly believed that this was a mortgage requirement.
Finally, individual installation would mean that builders
could no longer arrange for building inspectors to visit a
site and issue certificates of occupancy wholesale.
88. Use the problem analysis triangle
de
en
Ha
nd
le
Off
Target/Victim
Guardian
CRIME
ge
ce
Pla
By directing attention to the three major components of

any problem, the inner triangle helps to ensure that your
analysis covers all three. Police are used to thinking about
a problem in terms of the offenders involved - indeed, the
usual focus is almost exclusively on how to identify and
arrest them. But POP requires that you explore a broader
range of factors and this requires information about the
victims and the places involved.
na
Ma
ost criminological theories focus on what makes

The latest formulation of the problem analysis triangle
people "criminal". They find causes in distant
adds an outer triangle of "controllers" for each of the
factors, such as child-rearing practices, genetic
three original elements (see figure):
makeup, and psychological or social processes. These
For the target/victim, this is the capable guardian of the
theories are very difficult to test; are of varying and
original formulation of routine activity theory - usually
unknown scientific validity; and yield ambiguous policy
people protecting themselves, their own belongings or
implications that are mostly beyond the reach of police
those of family members, friends, and co-workers.
practice. But you will find that the theories and concepts
Guardians also include public police and private security.
of environmental criminology (and of the new discipline of
crime science) are very helpful in everyday police work.
This is because they deal with the immediate situational
For the offender, this is the handler, someone who
causes of crime events, including temptations and
knows the offender well and who is in a position to
opportunities and inadequate protection of targets. You
exert some control over his or her actions. Handlers
will be a stronger member of the problem-oriented team
include parents, siblings, teachers, friends and spouses.
if you are familiar with these concepts.
Probation and parole authorities often augment or
substitute for normal handlers.
The problem analysis triangle (also known as the crime
For the place, the controller is the manager, the owner
triangle) comes from one of the main theories of
or designee who has some responsibility for controlling
environmental criminology - routine activity theory. This
behavior in the specific location such as a bus driver or
theory, originally formulated by Lawrence Cohen and
teacher in a school, bar owners in drinking
Marcus Felson, states that predatory crime occurs when a
likely offender and suitable target come together in time
establishments, landlords in rental housing, or flight
and place, without a capable guardian present. It takes
attendants on commercial airliners.
the existence of a likely offender for granted since normal
Problem Analysis Triangle
human greed and selfishness are sufficient explanations
of most criminal motivation. It makes no distinction
between a human victim and an inanimate target since
both can meet the offender's purpose. And it defines a
capable guardian in terms of both human actors and
security devices. This formulation led to the original
problem analysis triangle with the three sides representing
the offender, the target, and the location, or place (see
inner triangle of the figure).
1. Repeat offending problems involve offenders attacking

different targets at different places. These are ravenous
WOLF problems. An armed robber who attacks a series
of different banks is an example of a pure wolf problem.
Wolf problems occur when offenders are able to locate
temporarily vulnerable targets and places. The
controllers for these targets and places may act to
prevent future attacks, but the offenders move on to
other targets and places. It is the lack of control by
handlers that facilitates wolf problems.
3. Repeat location problems involve different offenders

and different targets interacting at the same place.
These are DEN of iniquity problems. A drinking
establishment that has many fights, but always among
different people, is an example of a pure den problem.
Den problems occur when new potential offenders and
new potential targets encounter each other in a place
where management is ineffective. The setting continues
to facilitate the problem events.
Note that pure wolf, duck, and den problems are rare.
Most problems involve a mixture. The question is, which is
most dominant in a given problem: wolves, ducks,
or dens?
When crime is occurring, all inner elements of the triangle

must be present and all outer elements weak or absent.
If potential offenders are constantly present, for example,
2. Repeat victimization problems involve victims
but crimes occur only when guardians are absent, then
repeatedly attacked by different offenders. These are
rescheduling guardians might be a useful solution. Ask
sitting DUCK problems. Taxi drivers repeatedly robbed in yourself, "What does the problem analysis triangle look
different locations by different people is an example of a like before, during, and after crimes?"
pure duck problem. Duck problems occur when victims
continually interact with potential offenders at different Understanding how problems are created by opportunities
places, but the victims do not increase their
will help you think about what might be done to: prevent
precautionary measures and their guardians are either
offenders from reoffending by making better use of
absent or ineffective.
handlers; help victims reduce their probabilities of being
targets; and to change places where problems occur, be
these schools, taverns, or parking lots. In short, right from
the beginning, it helps you to focus data collection on
those six aspects most likely to lead to practical solutions.
What is Crime Science?
Traditional criminology seeks to improve understanding of the psychological and social forces that cause people to
become criminals in the hope of finding ways to change these causes. Crime science takes a radically different
approach. It focuses not on the reasons why criminals are born or made, but on the act of committing crime. It seeks
ways to reduce the opportunities and temptations for crime and increase the risks of detection. In doing so, it seeks
contributions from a wide range of disciplines, including psychology, geography, medicine, town planning, and
architecture. Crime science explicitly seeks to be judged by the extent to which it helps to reduce crime on our
streets, and in our homes and businesses.
Source: Jill Dando Institute for Crime Science. (2004). www.jdi.ucl.ac.uk
STUDY ENVIROMENTAL CRIMINOLOGY
The problem analysis triangle is the basis for another

useful analytic tool - a classification of the three main
kinds of problems that confront police and a theory about
how these problems arise. John Eck and William Spelman
have proposed classifying such problems as "wolf,"
"duck" and "den" problems:
99. Know that opportunity makes the thief
or environmental criminologists, "opportunity makes

the thief" is more than just a popular saying; it is the
cornerstone of their approach. They believe that if
opportunity increases so will crime. To see if you agree,
consider the scenario suggested by Gloria Laycock and
Nick Tilley of the Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science:
Suppose all situational controls were to be

abandoned: no locks, no custom controls,
cash left for parking in an open pot for occasional
collection, no library check-outs, no baggage
screening at airports, no ticket checks at train
stations, no traffic lights, etc., would there be no
change in the volume of crime and disorder?
If you answer that of course crime and disorder would
increase, then you, too, think opportunity is a cause of
crime. Incredibly, most criminologists would not agree.
They believe that opportunity can only determine when
and where crime occurs, not whether it occurs. In their
view, whether crime occurs is wholly dependent on
offenders' propensities and these propensities collectively
determine the volume of crime in society.
In fact, crime levels are as much determined by the
opportunities afforded by the physical and social
arrangements of society as by the attitudes and
dispositions of the population. This is difficult to prove
without conducting experiments, but it would be unethical
to create new opportunities for burglary or robbery and
wait to see what happens. However, experiments have
been undertaken with minor transgressions. In the 1920s,
researchers gave children the opportunity to cheat on
tests, to lie about cheating, and to steal coins from
puzzles used. Other researchers have scattered stamped
and addressed letters in the streets, some containing
money, to see if these were mailed. In a third group of lab
experiments, subjects were instructed to "punish" others
for disobeying test instructions by delivering severe
electric shocks through the test apparatus. (In fact, no
shocks were actually delivered).
The results of these experiments support the causal role of

opportunity. Most of the subjects, even those who
generally resisted temptation, took some opportunities to
behave dishonestly or aggressively - opportunities they
would not have encountered but for their participation in
the studies. But you cannot generalize from these minor
transgressions to crimes of robbery or car theft. We,
therefore, must turn to some other sources of evidence
about the importance of opportunity in causing crime.
Suicide and opportunity. Suicide is not a crime, but
like much crime is generally thought to be deeply
motivated. However, there is clear evidence from the U.K.
that opportunity plays an important part in suicide. During
the 1950s, about half the people who killed themselves in
the U.K. used domestic gas, which contained lethal
amounts of carbon monoxide (CO). This was known as
"putting your head in the gas oven." In the 1960s, gas
began to be made from oil instead of coal. The new gas
had less CO and the number of gas suicides began to
decline. By 1968, only about 20 percent of suicides
involved gas. This is when a second change began:
manufactured gas was replaced by natural gas from the
North Sea. Natural gas contains no CO and is almost
impossible to use for suicide. By the mid-1970s, less than
1 percent of suicides in the U.K. used this method.
What is deeply surprising is that suicides did not displace
wholesale to other methods. The table shows that
between 1958 and 1976 suicides dropped by nearly 30
percent from 5,298 to 3,816. (This was during an
economic decline when suicide could have been expected
to increase and, indeed, was increasing in other European
countries.) People did not turn to other methods because
these all had drawbacks. Overdoses are much less lethal
than carbon monoxide. Hanging requires more knowledge
as well as courage. Not everyone has access to guns,
which can result in disfigurement instead of death. On the
other hand, domestic gas was readily available in most
homes. It was highly lethal and using it was bloodless and
painless. It is not surprising it was the preferred method
for so long and that when the opportunity to use it was
removed, the number of suicides declined.
Year
1958
1960
1962
1964
1966
1968
1970
1972
1974
1976
Total
Suicides
5,298
5,112
5,588
5,566
4,994
4,584
3,940
3,770
3,899
3,816
Suicides by Percent of
Domestic Gas
Total
2,637
2,499
2,469
2,088
1,593
988
511
197
50
14
49.8
48.9
44.2
37.5
31.9
21.6
13.0
5.2
1.3
0.4
Source: Mortality Statistics, England and Wales: Causes. London:

Her Majesty's Stationery Office, Annual
Murder and opportunity. Opportunity also plays an

important causal role in murder, as shown by a
comparison made some years ago of homicide rates in the
United States and the U.K. For 1980-84, the period
covered by the study, the overall homicide rate in this
country was 8.5 times greater than in England and Wales.
The gun homicide and handgun homicide rates were,
respectively, 63 times and 75 times as great. In the whole
of England and Wales in this period (with about 50
million people), only 57 handgun murders occurred. In the
United States, with a population of about 230 million
(less than five times greater) a total of 46,553 people
were murdered with a handgun.
These findings tended to be dismissed because the overall
crime rate in the U.S. was generally higher than it was in
England and Wales during that period. However, in the
past 15 years the overall crime rates of the two countries
have converged so that there is now little difference
between them, with the glaring exception of homicide.
There is still a much higher rate of murder in this country
because far more people here own guns, especially
handguns, than in the U.K. Even the police in the U.K. do
not routinely carry guns! So, when people fight here,
someone is much more likely to get shot than in the U.K.
Similar, but not such striking findings, emerge from
comparing murder rates in the U.S. and Canada (see box).
Taken together, these comparisons show that gun
availability (an opportunity variable) plays an important
causal role in murder.
Understanding the arguments in this section, and

accepting that opportunity causes crime, does not mean
you must deny the importance of other causes, such as
inherited personalities, broken homes, and inconsistent
discipline. But there is little you can do to change people's
personalities or the divorce rate or poor parenting.
However, you can alter the criminogenic situations in
which they find themselves. Understanding that
opportunity makes the thief will help direct your attention
to practical means of preventing crime, and help you
defend them from criticism.
Guns and Homicide in the
United States and Canada
A classic study compared the rate of homicides and
assaults in Seattle (U.S.A.) and Vancouver (Canada) from
1980-1986 to determine the effect of handgun
availability on the crime rate. Although similar to Seattle
in many ways, Vancouver has a more restrictive
approach to handgun possession. The study found that
wider availability of handguns increases the rate of
homicide. The key findings were:
1. The two cities differed little in their rate of assaults.
2. The murder risk was significantly higher in Seattle
than in Vancouver, mainly due to a five times
greater risk of being murdered with a handgun in
Seattle.
3. Rates of non-gun homicides differed little between
the two cities.
Source: Sloan, John and colleagues (1988). "Handgun
Regulations, Crime, Assaults, and Homicide." The New
England Journal of Medicine, 319: 1256-1262.
Read More:
Felson, Marcus and Ronald Clarke (1998). Opportunity
Makes the Thief. Police Research Series, Paper 98.
London: Home Office
Suicides in England and Wales

1958-1977
1010. Put yourself in the offender's shoes
henever you analyze a crime problem or think

about solutions, try to see the crime from the
offender's perspective. Try to understand why
they commit the crime - not the distant social or
psychological causes, but the benefits they are seeking. A
radical critique of criminology pointed out 30 years ago
that is not their genes that propel bank robbers through
the doors of the bank: they rob banks because they want
to get rich.
In many cases of theft and robbery the benefits are
obvious, but they may not be clear for gang violence or
so-called "senseless" vandalism and graffiti. In fact,
graffiti can mark the territory of a juvenile gang, can
indicate where to purchase drugs, or can simply be a way
to show off. Knowing which of these reasons is dominant
helps to define the focus of a problem-solving project and
unravel the contributory factors. It can also help the
project team identify solutions. Thus, the New York City
subway authorities succeeded in eradicating graffiti only
when they understood the motivation of the "taggers,"
which was to see their handiwork on display as the trains
traveled around the system (see Step 41).
Learning how offenders commit crimes is as important as
learning why they commit them. You will find rational
choice theory helpful in thinking about these questions.
The name is misleading because the theory does not
assume that offenders plan their crimes carefully; it
assumes only that they are seeking to benefit themselves
by their crimes, which is rational enough. The theory does
not even assume that offenders succeed in obtaining the
benefits they seek. This is because they rarely have all the
information they need, they do not devote enough time to
planning their actions, they take risks, and they make
mistakes. This is how we all behave in everyday decisionmaking and is what theorists call limited or bounded
rationality.
Offenders must often decide quickly how to accomplish
their goals and how to get away without being caught.
Interviewing offenders will help you understand how they
make these decisions. (The COPS Guide on interviewing
offenders will help you think about the legal and technical
difficulties of conducting these interviews. See Read
More.) Surprisingly, it is usually not difficult to get
offenders to talk, especially if you confine yourself to the
general nature of the problem you are trying to solve, and
avoid specific questions about crimes they have

committed. Offenders are no exception to the rule that we
enjoy talking about ourselves and about the work we do.
On the other hand, always retain some skepticism as
people who habitually break the law may also habitually
exaggerate and lie.
Martin Gill of Leicester University in England tells a story
of interviewing an experienced offender in prison. When
dealing with the crime that had led to his arrest, Gill
asked: "Did you think you'd get caught?" The prisoner
leaned back in his chair and gave him a long look
before saying: "I never expected to hear someone from
a university ask such a stupid question. Do you think I'd
have done it, if I thought I'd get caught?"
If you cannot interview offenders, try to imagine the

course of a crime (see Step 35). What must be done at
each stage? How are targets selected? How can victims
be subdued or tricked? The police escaped? The goods
disposed of? Even if you cannot answer all these
questions about modus operandi, your attempt to enter
the offender's mind can help you think about responses.
This is not an invitation to try your hand at
psychoanalysis. Instead of delving into the offender's
unconscious you should try to understand the tangible
benefits the offender is seeking and how he must manage
the commission of crime without too much effort or risk.
This is what Paul Ekblom of the Home Office Research
Department means when he advises problem solvers to
"think thief."
Paul Ekblom interviewed thieves on the London
Underground (subway system) who told him that they
would stand near signs warning that "pickpockets"
were operating. On noticing the signs, passengers
would reassuringly pat whichever pockets contained
their wallets, which was a considerable help to the
thieves.
Read More:
Decker, Scott (2004). Using Offender Interviews to Inform
Police Problem-Solving Guide No. 3. Problem-Oriented
Guides for Police, Problem Solving Tool Series.
Washington, D.C.: Office of Community Oriented Policing
Services, U.S. Department of Justice. (Accessible at
Armed Robbers Talking

Motives
"You are sitting there alone and you feeling light in your pocket, your rent is due, light and gas bill, you got these bill
collectors sending you letters all the time, and you say, 'I wish I had some money. I need some money.' Those are the
haints. [You haint got this and you haint got that.] Your mind starts tripping cause you ain't got no money and the
wolves are at the door... [After my last stickup] I gave my landlord some money and sent a little money off to the
electric company, a little bit off to the gas company. I still had like twenty or thirty dollars in my pocket. I got me
some beer, some cigarettes, and [spent] some on a stone [of crack cocaine]; enjoy myself for a minute" (pp. 43-44).
Advantages of robbery
"Robbery is the quickest money. Robbery is the most money you gonna get fast... Burglary, you gonna have to sell
the merchandise and get the money. Drugs, you gonna have to deal with too many people, [a] bunch of people. You
gonna sell a fifty-dollar or hundred dollar bag to him, a fifty-dollar or hundred-dollar bag to him, it takes too long.
But if you find where the cash money is and just go take it, you get it all in one wad" (pp. 51-52).
Choosing the victim
"See, I know the places to go [to locate good robbery targets]. Usually I go to all the places where dope men hang
out... but I [also have] done some people coming out of those instant tellers" (p. 78).
"That's all I done robbed is drug dealers ... they not gonna call the police. What they gonna tell the police? He
robbed me for my dope? They is the easiest bait to me. I don't want to harm no innocent people, I just deal basically
with drug dealers" (p. 64).
Violence
"Well, if [the victim] hesitates like that, undecided, you get a little aggressive and you push them ...I might take [the]
pistol and crack their head with it. 'Come on with that money and quit bullcrapping or else you gonna get into some
real trouble!' Normally when they see you mean that kind of business they ... come on out with it" (p. 109).
Source: Wright, Richard and Scott Decker (1997). Armed Robbers in Action. Boston: Northeastern University Press.
Another alternative to interviewing your own group of

offenders is to search the literature for reports of
interviews with similar groups of offenders. Environmental
criminologists have greatly expanded our knowledge
about the methods that criminals use by interviewing car
thieves, muggers, shoplifters, and residential and
commercial burglars. The offenders may not be quite the
same group as your own, but carefully looking at the
results of these interview studies can suggest hypotheses
that you might explore in regard to your own problem.
1111. Expect offenders to react
ffenders make choices based on their perceptions

of opportunities. Understanding how offenders see
things is important to preventing crime because
almost all crime prevention involves changing offenders'
perceptions of crime opportunities. Some prevention
programs work directly on offenders' perceptions, as when
police inform offenders that they are being closely
watched. But most prevention schemes work through one
or more intermediate steps, as in property marking
schemes, for example, where residents apply window
stickers showing participation. Changes in the
environment change offender perceptions. These
perceptions influence offenders' behaviors that, in turn,
alter crime patterns.
In many cases, the preventive measures deter offenders
from further criminal activity. They can also have the
positive unintended effects of: (1) reducing crime beyond
the focus of the measures, which is known as diffusion of
benefits (see Steps 13 and 47); and (2) reducing crime
before they have actually been implemented, known as
anticipatory benefits (Step 52). However, preventive
measures do not always achieve the desired effects,
sometimes because offenders are quite unaware of the
interventions in place. For example, offenders may
continue to offend in the face of covert enforcement
because they might not perceive that their risks of being
caught have increased. In other cases, offenders may
adjust negatively to the preventive measures. These
negative adjustments include displacement and long-term
adaptation.
Displacement occurs when offenders change their

behavior to thwart preventive actions. Displacement is
the opposite of diffusion of benefits. Displacement is a
possible threat, but it is far from inevitable. Reviews
show that many situational prevention programs show
little or no evidence of displacement, and when
displacement is found, it seldom fully offsets the
prevention benefits (Step 12).
Adaptation refers to a longer term process whereby
the offender population as a whole discovers new crime
vulnerabilities after preventive measures have been in
place for a while. Paul Ekblom, Ken Pease, and other
researchers often use the analogy of an arms race
between preventers and offenders when discussing this
process. So, in time, we can expect many crimes that
have been reduced by preventive measures to reappear

as criminals discover new ways to commit them.
Adaptation may occur as the original offenders slowly
discover new methods, or it may occur as new offenders
take advantage of changing opportunities.
A good example of adaptation is credit card fraud (see
the Box). Another more recent example of adaptation
involves bike locks. Bike thieves discovered that they
could defeat a widely used and effective lock by using a
common and cheap ballpoint pen. But not all preventive
measures are so vulnerable to criminal ingenuity. For
example, Neal Shover has argued that technology has
brought a lasting respite from safecracking, which is now
very rare though it was once quite common.
In some circumstances preventive actions may stimulate
defiance. This occurs when offenders challenge the
legitimacy of prevention efforts and commit more crimes
rather than fewer. Police are legitimately concerned, for
example, that premature displays of force can sometimes
stimulate crowds to engage in riotous behavior, so police
often refrain from dressing in full riot gear until there is
strong evidence that serious misbehavior is likely. There is
some research evidence that defiance is more likely when
the police are perceived to be unfair and heavy handed,
and that people are more law abiding when police treat
them fairly, even if the outcome is not what people desire.
In general, defiance is not a well-documented
phenomenon, but it cannot be ruled out as a possibility,
particularly when police use enforcement as the principal
prevention tool.
Read More:
Ekblom, Paul (1997). "Gearing up Against Crime: a
Dynamic Framework to Help Designers Keep up with the
Adaptive Criminal in a Changing World." International
Journal of Risk, Security and Crime Prevention, 2: 249265.
(Accessible at www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs/risk.pdf)
Michael Levi and his colleagues have described how a partnership between the police, the British Home Office
(similar to the U.S. Department of Justice), and the credit card issuers led to successful action in the mid-1990s to
reduce credit card frauds. The measures introduced included new lower limits for retailers for seeking authorization
of transactions and more secure methods of delivering new credit cards to consumers via the mail. As the figure
shows, there was a resulting marked reduction in fraud losses (total, lost & stolen, and mail non-receipt). In recent
years, however, credit card losses have begun to climb again. This is due principally to a growth in losses resulting
from "card not present frauds" (due to the rapid expansion of Internet sales) and in counterfeiting of cards (said to
be the work of organized gangs in East Asia).
Credit Card Fraud Losses, UK
300-
millions
250200150-
Total
Lost & Stolen
Mail Non-Receipt
Card Not Present
Counterfeit Card
Application Fraud
1005001991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000
Offender Adaptation and Credit Card Fraud
1212. Don't be discouraged by the displacement doomsters
roblem-oriented policing often tries to reduce

opportunities for crime. For example, window locks
may be fitted to prevent burglary in an apartment
complex, or closed circuit television cameras installed to
prevent thefts in parking lots. These ways of reducing
opportunities for crime often meet the same objection: all
they do is move crime around, not prevent it. This theory
of displacement sees crime as being shifted around in five
main ways:
1. Crime is moved from one place to another
(geographical).
2. Crime is moved from one time to another (temporal).
3. Crime is directed away from one target to another
(target).
4. One method of committing crime replaces another
(tactical).
5. One kind of crime is substituted for another (crime
type).
In each case, the theory assumes that offenders are

compelled to commit crime, whatever impediments they
face. The basis for the assumption is either that the
propensity to commit crime builds up and must be
discharged in the same way that sexual release is sought,
or that "professional" criminals or drug addicts must
obtain a certain income from crime to maintain their
lifestyles. There is no evidence that offenders must satiate
some deep physiological appetite to commit crimes. In
fact, there is plenty of evidence that people make choices
about whether, where, and when to offend. Whatever its
basis, the displacement assumption neglects the important
role of temptation and opportunity in crime (Step 9).
This does not mean that we can ignore displacement.

Indeed, rational choice theory predicts that offenders will
displace when the benefits for doing so outweigh the
costs. For example, in the early 1990s the New York City
Police deployed its Tactical Narcotics Teams to several high
drug-dealing neighborhoods. Dealers responded by
shifting their sales locations from curbside to inside the
foyers of apartment buildings. But numerous other studies
have found that displacement did not occur at all, or only
to a limited extent. For example:
Intensive gun patrols reduced firearms crimes in a

Kansas City, Missouri high gun-crime neighborhood
without displacing these or other crimes to
nearby communities.
New identification procedures greatly reduced check

frauds in Sweden, with no evidence of displacement to a
range of "conceivable" alternative crimes.
Extensive target hardening undertaken in banks in

Australia lowered robbery rates, but there was no sign
that corner stores, gas stations, betting shops, motels, or
people in the street began to experience more robberies.
Burglary was not displaced to nearby apartment

complexes when a problem-solving approach drove
down burglary in a high-crime apartment complex in
Newport News, Virginia.
When
streets were closed in the London neighborhood

of Finsbury Park and policing was intensified, there was
little evidence that prostitutes simply moved to other
nearby locations. According to the researchers, many of
the women working the streets in Finsbury Park were
not deeply committed to prostitution, but saw it as a
relatively easy way to make a living. When conditions
changed so did their involvement and many seem to
have given up "the game" (Step 50).
Even in the case of more committed offenders, the

displacement theory fails to give enough importance to
opportunity. Thus, research on drug addicts has shown
that they adapt to variations in the supply of drugs. Nor is
there any simple progression in drug use. Rather, addicts
might be forced to use smaller amounts or less agreeable
drugs because the supply of drugs has been cut.
As for professional criminals like bank robbers, there is no

reason to assume that they must obtain a fixed amount of
money from crime. They would surely commit fewer
robberies if these became difficult and risky, just as they
would commit more robberies if these became easy. Bank
robbers, like everyone else, may sometimes have to adjust
to reduced circumstances and be content with lower
levels of income.
In these examples and numerous others, the offenders'

costs of displacing seemed to have outweighed the
benefits and the examples bear out the argument that
displacement occurs much less than commonly believed.
This is the consensus of four different reviews of the
Redesign of a trolley stop to curb robberies and assaults

resulted in a reduction in violent crime at a San Diego,
California location without shifting these crimes to other
trolley stops.
Displacement is usually limited because offenders have

difficulty adapting quickly. If they do make changes they
are most likely to change to places, times, targets,
methods, and crime types that are similar to those the
prevention program blocks because these are the easiest
changes for them to make. This suggests that
displacement can be predicted by anticipating the easiest
changes for offenders to make. If there are obvious easy
changes, then you should consider how to incorporate
these in your prevention plan. And if you cannot include
them, then you should consider monitoring them to detect
possible displacement.
To sum up, displacement is always a threat, but there are
strong theoretical reasons for believing that it is far from
inevitable. In addition, the studies of displacement show
that even when it does occur, it may be far from complete
and that important net reductions in crime can be
achieved by opportunity-reducing measures.
Claims of Displacement Often Evaporate under

Closer Scrutiny
In the mid-1980s, John Eck observed a displacement
dispute within the Newport News Police Department
(VA). A crackdown on a street corner marijuana market
resulted in the market's closure. Some police officials
asserted that the offenders had merely moved to a
nearby corner to deal drugs. However, close inspection
by other officers revealed several important facts:
The
nearby corner dealers were selling heroin, not

marijuana.
None of the offenders from the marijuana market
were found at the heroin market.
The heroin market was a much smaller scale
operation.
It predated the opening of the marijuana market.
The claims of displacement were probably due to
selective perception. Prior to the marijuana market,
street corner drug dealing had been low key and did
not attract much public notice. Consequently, drug
markets were not a high police priority. When
neighborhood members complained about the
marijuana market, greater attention was paid to other
drug markets as well.
Read More:
Hesseling, Rene (1994). "Displacement: A Review of the
Empirical Literature." Crime Prevention Studies, volume
3, edited by Ronald Clarke. Monsey, NY: Criminal Justice
Press (accessible at www.popcenter.org).
displacement literature undertaken in the United

Kingdom, Canada, the United States, and The
Netherlands. The Dutch review (the most recent one)
reports that in 22 of 55 studies from around the world in
which displacement was examined, no evidence of it was
found. In the remaining 33 studies, in which evidence of
displacement was found, only some of the crime seems to
have been displaced. In no case was the amount of crime
displaced equal to the amount prevented. And in no case
did displacement increase crime.
1313. Expect diffusion of benefits
esearchers looking for displacement have sometimes

found precisely its reverse. Rather than finding that
crime has been pushed to some other place or time,
they have found that crime has been reduced more widely
than expected, beyond the intended focus of the
measures. This is a relatively recent discovery, but already
many examples exist:
more local traffic, this effect might be short-lived as

people learned exactly which junctions had cameras.)
The
implementation of added security for houses that

had been repeatedly burgled on a U.K. public housing
estate in Kirkholt reduced burglaries for the whole of
the estate, not just for those houses given
additional protection.
As
expected, electronic tagging of books in a University

of Wisconsin library resulted in reduced book thefts.
However, thefts of videocassettes and other materials
that had not been tagged also declined.
These are all examples of the "diffusion of benefits"

resulting from crime prevention measures. It seems that
potential offenders may be aware that new prevention
measures have been introduced, but they are often unsure
When a New Jersey discount electronic retailer
of their precise scope. They may believe the measures
introduced a regime of daily counting of valuable
have been implemented more widely than they really
merchandise in the warehouse, employee thefts of these have, and that the effort needed to commit crime, or the
risks incurred, have been increased for a wider range of
items plummeted - but thefts also plummeted of items
places, times, or targets than really is the case. This means
not repeatedly counted.
that diffusion can take several forms, paralleling the
When LoJack vehicle tracking systems were introduced in different kinds of displacement (see table).
six large cities, rates of theft declined citywide, not just
for car owners who purchased the devices.
Diffusion of benefits is a windfall that greatly increases
the practical appeal of situational crime prevention, but
Simon Hakim and his colleagues at Temple University
we do not yet know how to deliberately enhance it. One
have shown that widespread ownership of burglar
important method may be through publicity. A publicity
alarms in an affluent community near Philadelphia
campaign helped to spread the benefits of video
resulted in reduced burglary rates for the community
surveillance cameras across an entire fleet of 80 buses in
at large.
the North of England, although these were installed on
just a few of the buses. One of the buses with the
When red light cameras were installed at certain
cameras was taken around to schools in the area to show
junctions in Strathclyde, a large city in Scotland, not only students they could be caught if they misbehaved and
did fewer people run the lights at these locations, but
vandalized the bus, and the first arrests resulting from the
also at other traffic lights nearby. (In a smaller city, with cameras were given wide publicity in the news media.
Displacement and Diffusion of Benefits for Burglary of Apartments
Type
Definition
Displacement
Diffusion
Geographical
Geographic change
Switch to another building
Reduce burglaries in targeted

building and in nearby buildings
Time switch
Switch from day to evening
Reduce burglaries during day

and evening
Switching object of offending
Switch from apartments to

houses
Reduce burglaries in apartments

and houses
Change in method of offending
Switch from unlocked doors to

picking locks
Reduction in attacks on locked

and unlocked doors
Switch from burglary to theft
Reduction in burglary and theft
Temporal
Target
Tactical
Crime Type
Switching crimes
At a practical level, diffusion is important as a counterargument to displacement from those resisting the
introduction of preventive measures. And you will certainly
encounter many of those! Second, it is important that you

plan your evaluation to take account of diffusion. Ways to
do this are discussed in Step 51, by using two sets of
control areas, both near and more distant. Otherwise, you
might find that people question the effectiveness of the
preventive initiative on grounds that crime fell across a
broader area than was targeted.
Read More:
Clarke, Ronald and David Weisburd (1994). "Diffusion of
Crime Control Benefits: Observations on the Reverse of
Displacement". Crime Prevention Studies, volume 2.
Monsey, NY: Criminal Justice Press
(accessible at www.popcenter.org).
Diffusion of Benefits and Video Surveillance in a University's Parking Lots

A new head of security at the University of Surrey in the U.K. decided to deal with a plague of thefts in the
university's parking lots by introducing video surveillance (or CCTV - closed-circuit television). He installed a CCTV
camera on a mast to provide surveillance of the parking lots. As the diagram shows, the camera could not provide
surveillance equally for all four parking lots because buildings obscured its view of parking lot 1.
Security Gate
1
CCTV
2
3
Parking Lots
University Buildings
It might have been expected, therefore, that if the camera had any value in preventing crime this would only be for
the parking lots it covered adequately. It might also have been expected that crime would be displaced by the
camera from these parking lots to the one not given proper surveillance. In fact, in the year following the
introduction of the camera, incidents of theft and vandalism in the lots were cut in half, from 138 in the year prior to
65 in the year after. Incidents declined just as much in parking lot 1, not covered by the cameras, as in the other
three lots. This diffusion of the benefits of the video surveillance probably resulted from potential offenders being
aware that it had been introduced at the university, but not knowing its limitations. Many probably decided that it
was no longer worth the risk and effort of going to the university parking lots to commit crime.
Source: Poyner, Barry (1997). "Situational Prevention in Two Parking Facilities". Situational Crime Prevention:
Successful Case Studies, edited by Ronald V. Clarke. Monsey, NY: Criminal Justice Press.
We should expect the diffusion of benefits to decay when

offenders discover that the risks and effort of committing
crime have not increased as much as they had thought.
Research has shown that this occurred in the early days of
the breathalyzer in the U.K., which had a much greater
immediate impact on drunk driving than expected, given
the actual increase in the risk of getting caught. However,
as drivers learned that the risks of being stopped were
still quite small, drunk driving began to increase again.
This may mean that ways will have to be found of
keeping offenders guessing about the precise levels of
threat, or about how much extra effort is needed if they
are to continue with crime.
1414. Use the CHEERS test when defining problems
problem is a recurring set of related harmful events

in a community that members of the public expect
the police to address. This definition draws
attention to the six required elements of a problem:
Community; Harm; Expectation; Events; Recurring; and
Similarity. These elements are captured by the
acronym CHEERS:
Community. Members of the public must experience

the harmful events. They include individuals, businesses,
government agencies, and other groups. Only some not all or most - community members need experience
the problem.
Harmful. People or institutions must suffer harm. The

harm can involve property loss or damage, injury or
death, serious mental anguish, or undermining the
capacity of the police (as in repeat fraudulent calls for
service). Illegality is not a defining characteristic of
problems. Some problems involve legal behavior that
the police must address. Noise complaints arising from
the impact of legitimate commercial activity on
neighboring residents is a common example. Some
problems are first reported as involving illegal behavior,
but on closer inspection do not involve illegalities. If
such reports meet all the CHEERS criteria, they
are problems.
Expectation. Some members of the community must

expect the police to address the causes of the harm
(their numbers do not have to be large). Expectation
should never be presumed, but must be evident through
processes such as citizen calls, community meetings,
press reports, or other means. This element does not
require the police to accept at face value the public's
definition of the problem, their idea of its causes, or
what should be done about it. The public may be
mistaken as to its cause and characteristics. It is the
role of analysis to uncover the causes.
Events. You must be able to describe the type of event

that makes up the problem. Problems are made up of
discrete events. Examples of events include a break-in
at a home, one person striking another, two people
exchanging money and sex, or a burst of noise. Most
events are brief, though some may involve a great deal
of time - some frauds, for example.
Recurring. These events must recur. Recurrence may

be symptomatic of acute troubles or a chronic problem.
Acute troubles suddenly appear, as in the case of a
neighborhood with few vehicle break-ins suddenly
having many such break-ins. Some acute troubles
dissipate quickly, even if nothing is done. Others can
become chronic problems if not addressed. For this
reason, acute troubles should be investigated to
determine if they signal something more entrenched.
Chronic problems persist for a long time, as in the case
of a prostitution stroll that has been located along one
street for many years. Unless something is done, the
events from chronic problems will continue to occur.
Similarity. The recurring events must have something in

common. They may be committed by the same person,
happen to the same type of victim, occur in the same
types of locations, take place in similar circumstances,
involve the same type of weapon, or have one or more
other factors in common. Without common features, you
have an arbitrary collection of events, not a problem.
Common crime classifications - such as used by the
Uniform Crime Reports - are not helpful. Vehicle theft,
for example, includes joyriding, thefts for chop shops,
thefts for export to other countries, thefts for use in
other crimes, and a host of other dissimilar events. So a
cluster of vehicle thefts may not be a single problem.
More information is needed. With common features, we
have a pattern of events that could indicate a problem for example, thefts of minivans in suburban
neighborhoods to be used as gypsy cabs in the
inner city.
Problems need to be examined with great specificity (see

Steps 6 and 15) because small details can make a
difference between a set of circumstances that gives rise
to harmful events, and a set of circumstances producing
harmless events. CHEERS suggests six basic questions
you need to answer at the scanning stage:
Who
in the community is affected by the problem?

What are the harms created by the problem?
What are the expectations for the police response?
What types of events contribute to the problem?
How often do these events recur?
How are the events similar?
Single events. A single event, regardless of how

serious, is not a problem unless there is a reasonable
prospect that another similar event will occur if nothing
is done. A single event may deserve investigation or
some other police action, but problem solving cannot be
applied to isolated events because nothing can be
prevented.
Status conditions. Truant schoolchildren, bored

teenagers, vagrant adults, and convicted criminals are
not problems because of their status of not being in
school, having nothing to do, not being employed, or
having been found guilty of an offense. A community
might expect the police to do something about them,
but status conditions lack the characteristics of harm
and events. Some of these people may play a role in
problems, as targets, offenders, or in some other
capacity, but that does not make them a problem.
Defining a problem by status conditions is evidence of
lack of precision and a need to examine the issue in
greater depth. Status conditions may point to pieces of
a larger problem.
Always use the CHEERS test - does the possible problem

Neighborhoods. Small areas, such as city centers or
have all six elements? If it does not, it is probably not a
particular residential apartment complexes, sometimes
suitable focus for a problem-oriented policing project.
get reputations as problems, but these neighborhoods
are seldom problems. Rather they are usually areas
containing several problems. The individual problems
might be related, but not always. Tackling an entire area
as a single problem increases the complexity of the
effort and reduces the chances you will find effective
responses. Instead, you should identify specific problems
within a neighborhood and tackle them individually. If
the problems are linked (e.g., the street network
contributes to several problems) then tackling the link
might be helpful. Do not assume problems are linked
just because they are near each other. In some cases, of
course, there may be common solutions to distinct
problems (see Step 6).
SCAN FOR CRIME PROBLEMS
Not everything the police are asked to address is a

problem. CHEERS can help identify demands that are not
problems. We are using the term "problem" in the
technical, POP sense, not as we would in everyday
speech. So things that are not problems may be
troublesome and may require police attention. These are
as follows:
1515. Know what kind of problem you have
ecause local police have to deal with a wide range

of problems that meet the CHEERS definition (Step
14) we have developed a classification for these
problems. This classification scheme can help you precisely
define the problem. It helps separate superficially similar
problems that are really distinct. It also allows you to
compare your problem to similar problems that have
already been addressed, and it helps identify important
features for examination. For example, an extensive set of
guides to addressing common problems are available from
the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services and
the Center for Problem-Oriented Policing websites (Step
19). Knowing the type of problem you are investigating
can help you identify guides that might be helpful, even if
they do not directly address your problem. The
classification scheme is based on two criteria: the
environments within which problems arise, and the
behaviors of the participants. (The scheme is different
from the wolf/duck/den classification in Step 8, which is a
classification of persistent problems.)
Agricultural
- Locations for growing crops and

raising animals.
Education - Places of learning or study, including day

care centers, schools, universities, libraries, and place
of worship.
Human services - Places where people go when

something is wrong. Courts, jails, prisons, police stations,
hospitals and drug treatment centers are examples.
Public ways - Routes connecting all other environments.

Roads and highways, foot-paths and bike trails, and
drives and parking facilities are examples.
Transport
- Locations for the mass movement of people.

These include buses, bus stations and bus stops,
airplanes and airports, trains and train stations, ferries
and ferry terminals, and ocean liners and piers.
Open/transitional - Areas without consistent or regular

designated uses. These differ from parks in that they
have not been designated for recreation, though people
may use them for this. Transitional areas include
abandoned properties and construction sites.
Environments regulate the targets available, the

activities people can engage in and who controls the
location. Specifying an environment allows comparisons of
environments with and without the problem.
Environments have owners who can be important for
Behavior is the second dimension for classifying a
solving the problem (see Step 44). There are 11 distinct
problem. Specifying behaviors helps pinpoint important
environments for most common police problems:
aspects of harm, intent, and offender-target relationships.
Residential - Locations where people dwell. Houses,
There are six types of behavior:
apartments, and hotel rooms are examples. Though most
are in fixed locations, a few are mobile, such as
Predatory - The offender is clearly distinct from the
recreational vehicles.
victim and the victim objects to the offender's actions.
Most common crimes are of this type. Examples include
Recreational - Places where people go to have a good
robbery, child abuse, burglary, bullying, and theft.
time. Bars, nightclubs, restaurants, movie theaters,
Consensual - The parties involved knowingly and
playgrounds, marinas, and parks are examples.
willingly interact. This typically involves some form of
Offices - Locations of white-collar work where there is
transaction. Examples include drug sales, prostitution,
little face-to-face interaction between the workers and
and stolen goods sales. Note, however, that assaults on
the general public. Government and business facilities
prostitutes are predatory behaviors.
are often of this type. Access to these locations is
Conflicts - Violent interactions involving roughly coequal
often restricted.
people who have some pre-existing relationship. Some
Retail - Places for walk-in or drive-up customer traffic
forms of domestic violence among adults involve this
involving monetary transactions. Stores and banks
type of behavior, though domestic violence against
are examples.
children and the elderly is classified as predatory
because the parties involved are not coequal.
Industrial - Locations for processing of goods. Cash
Incivilities - Offenders are distinguishable from victims
transactions are not important activities in these
but the victims are spread over a number of individuals
environments and the public is seldom invited. Factories,
and the harms are not serious. Many concerns that are
warehouses, package-sorting facilities are examples.
annoying, unsightly, noisy, or disturbing, but do not

involve serious property damage or injury fall into this
category. Loud parties are an example. Whether
vandalism fits in this category depends on the details.
Some forms of vandalism are predatory. Some
incivilities are troublesome regardless of the
environment, while others are only troublesome in
specific environments.
Endangerment - The offender and the victim are the

same person or the offender had no intent to harm the
victim. Suicide attempts, drug overdoses, and vehicle
crashes are examples.
Misuse of police - A category reserved for unwarranted

demands on the police service. False reporting of crimes
and repeated calling about issues citizens can handle
themselves are examples. This is a category of last resort
- for use when the sole harm stemming from the
behavior is the expenditure of police resources and
when none of the other categories fit.
Though most problems fit into a single cell, on occasion a

problem might involve multiple behaviors or
environments. For example, the Staffordshire Police
(England) had a problem created when protesters
occupied abandoned buildings along a construction right
of way. These were open/transitional environments. The
protests involved incivilities, but the tactics for occupying
these buildings also posed a danger to the protesters.
Thus, endangerment was another relevant behavior (H in
the table). Though multiple types of behaviors or
environments are sometimes needed, excessive use of
multiple types can lead to imprecision.
By classifying problems, police agencies can compare

separate problem-solving efforts that occur in the same
environments and involve the same category of behavior.
Are there common analysis issues or effective responses
to these problems? Do analysis and response issues for
The table shows the full classification. A problem is
problems of this type differ from other types of problems?
classified by putting it in the cell where the appropriate
Answering questions like these can improve problem
column intersects with the appropriate row. So, for
solving as well as problem-solving training, and help us
example, the 2001 Tilley Award winner dealt with glass
increase our understanding of what might work for
bottle injuries around pubs, a conflict-recreational
different types of problems in different types
problem (A). Officers in San Diego had to deal with repeat of environments.
fraudulent calls of gang member threats at a convenience
store (B). Notice how this differs from the 2003 Goldstein Read More:
award runner-up, addressing stores selling alcohol to
minors in Plano, Texas (C). The 2002 Goldstein Award
Eck, John and Ronald Clarke (2003). "Classifying
winner dealt with motor vehicle accidents involving
Common Police Problems: A Routine Activity Approach."
Crime Prevention Studies, volume 16, edited by Martha
migrant farm workers, an endangerment-public ways
Smith and Derek Cornish. Monsey, NY: Criminal
problem (D). The 1999 Goldstein Award winner dealt
Justice Press.
with litter and vagrancy, a public way/incivility problem
(E). Consider the difference between a problem of street
A Classification Scheme for Common Problems Facing Local Police
BEHAVIORS
ENVIRONMENTS
Residential
Recreational
Offices
Retail
Industrial
Agricultural
Educational
Human service
Public ways
Transport
Open/Transition
Predatory
Consensual
Conflicts
Incivilities
Endangerment
Misuse of Police
A
C
corner drug sales (F) and a robbery-retaliatory shooting

problem stemming from disputes between the dealers (G).
These two problems overlap, but they are not the same.
1616. Study the journey to crime
hile the problem analysis triangle (Step 8)

identifies the three essential elements of crime, it
does not explain how offenders find suitable
targets. According to Marcus Felson, they do this in three
main ways:
1. Through personal knowledge of the victim (your
neighbor's son might know when you are away from
your house).
2. Through work (a burglar working as a telephone
engineer might overhear that you will be taking
vacation next week).
3. Through overlapping "activity spaces."
The concept of activity spaces is central to crime pattern

theory, which was developed by the Canadian
environmental criminologists Pat and Paul Brantingham
(see figure). They use the concept to describe how
offenders find targets in the course of their daily routines.
Starting with a triangle, they consider offenders going
from home to work to recreation. Around each of these
three nodes and along each of these three paths
(excepting a buffer zone where they might be recognized)
offenders look around for crime opportunities. They may
find these a little way off the path, but they usually do not
go far beyond the area they know. This is because it is
easier to commit crimes in the course of their daily routine
than by making a special journey to do so.
The Brantinghams also use the term edges to refer to the
boundaries of areas where people live, work, shop, or
seek entertainment. Some crimes are more likely to occur
at these edges - such as racial attacks, robberies, or
shoplifting - because this is where people from different
neighborhoods who do not know each other come
together. In an early study, the Brantinghams found that
residential burglaries in Tallahassee, Florida tended to
cluster where affluent areas bordered on poor areas. Their
explanation was that the affluent areas provided
attractive targets to burglars from the poorer areas, but
the burglars preferred not to venture too far into them
because they were unfamiliar with the territory and might
be recognized as not belonging there. They would also be
more vulnerable because they would have further to travel
with the proceeds of the crime.
The paths that people take in their everyday activities and
the nodes they inhabit explain risks of victimization as
well as patterns of offending. This is why the
Brantinghams and other crime pattern theorists pay so

much attention to the geographical distribution of crime
and the daily rhythm of activity. For example, these
researchers generate crime maps for different hours of the
day and days of the week, linking specific kinds of crimes
to commuter flows, school children being let out, store
closing hours, or any other process that moves people
among nodes and along paths. Pickpockets and some
shoplifters seek crowds, while other offenders pay closer
attention to the absence of people. For example, the flow
of people to work generates a counterflow of burglars to
residential areas, taking advantage of the commuters'
absence. The flow of workers home at night and at
weekends produces a counterflow a few hours later of
burglars targeting commercial and industrial sites.
Many studies have shown that the journey to crime is
typically very short - offenders generally commit crimes
within 1 or 2 miles of their homes. For example, Andy
Brumwell, a crime analyst with the West Midlands Police,
one of the U.K.'s largest police forces, has recently
completed an analysis of 258,074 crime trips made over a
2-year period. He found the following:
About
half the journeys were less than a mile. (In most

U.S. studies the journeys might be a little longer because
of lower population densities and greater access to
vehicles.)
Distance traveled varied with the offense. For example,
shoplifters tended to travel further than many other
kinds of offenders.
Females traveled further than males, possibly because
many committed shopliftings.
Individual offenders varied considerably in crime trips.
Some usually committed crimes in their local
neighborhoods. Others traveled further, particularly
when working with co-offenders.
The youngest offenders committed crime very close to
home, while those in their 20s traveled the furthest.
Susan Wernicke, a crime analyst with the City of Overland
Park, Kansas, presented more detailed information on
juveniles at the National Institute of Justice's 2000
National Crime Mapping Conference in San Diego,
California. She showed that in Overland Park the 11-yearolds arrested had committed crimes an average of 1.05
miles from home. This distance gradually increased with
age, and by age 17 was 2.7 miles. She attributed part of
the increase to greater access to cars.
Andy Brumwell has developed the "self-containment

index," which looks at the percentage of crimes in an
area that is committed by offenders who also live in
that area. A value of 100 indicates that local offenders
are responsible for all the crimes, whereas a value of
zero indicates that local offenders commit none of
them. This value should be calculated when analyzing a
local problem. Whether predators are local or come
from a distance will have an influence on the type of
situational crime prevention measures that could be
successfully introduced. For example, closing streets in a
particular neighborhood will only be effective if many of
the offenders drive to the neighborhood to commit
crime.
You can use the concepts of crime pattern theory to
understand crime in your jurisdiction. You should try to
piece together offender and offense patterns by finding
nodes, paths, and edges. You can begin to distinguish
between how offenders search for crime and when they
find it by accident. You can find where offenders are
absent and where they congregate in hot spots and think
about the reasons for this (Step 17). You will find that
very local crime patterns tell the story. Thus a high-crime
district will have some streets with no crime at all and

some addresses which generate most of the problem.
Residents may know it is fairly safe to walk down one
street but not to walk down another. They may even
choose one side of the street over the other. If residents
know their local turf this well, what's to stop you from
finding out about it? Crime pattern theory helps you do
just that, and it will help to define a specific problem at
the scanning stage and understand the contributory
causes at analysis.
Read More:
Brantingham, Patricia and Paul (1993). "Environment,
Routine, and Situation: Toward a Pattern Theory of
Crime." Routine Activity and Rational Choice, Advances
in Criminological Theory, volume 5, edited by Ronald
Clarke and Marcus Felson. New Brunswick, NJ:
Transaction Publishers.
Felson, Marcus (2002). Crime and Everyday Life. Thousand
Oaks, CA: Sage.
Wiles, Paul and Andrew Costello (2000). The Road to
Nowhere: The Evidence for Travelling Criminals. Home
Office Research Study 207. London: Home Office
(accessible at www.homeoffice.gov.uk)
Brantingham Crime Pattern Theory
Residence
Crime Sites
Buffer Zone
Work
Activity Space
Target Areas
Recreation
Kim Rossmo prepared this diagram to represent the Brantinghams' theory. It shows an offender's activity space (residence, work, recreation, and the
travel routes between them), the buffer zone close to the home in which offenders do not usually commit crimes, and five potential target areas (for
example, parking lots). Where an offender's activity space intersects a target area, this is where crimes happen (crosses). Note that in this example no
crimes occur around the offender's workplace, because there are no suitable targets there. Also, there are two target areas with no crimes in them
because this offender is not aware of those places.
Source: Rossmo, Kim (2000). Geographic Profiling. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.
The Journey to Crime and the Self-Containment

Index
1717. Know how hot spots develop
nalysts often examine hot spots by use of

geography alone. This can often be a useful
starting point, but to reduce or eliminate the hot
spot you must look deeper to understand why it is a hot
spot. We focus on developing an understanding of the
processes that create hot spots. Later, in Steps 23 and
55, we examine how to analyze and map hot spots
without letting your mapping software call the shots. As
we have seen in previous steps, small areas - places - are
critical to understanding many problems and developing
effective responses. We, therefore, focus on hot spot
places in this step. In later steps we will build on this
idea to examine hot spot streets and areas.
There are three kinds of hot spot places, each with its
own underlying causal mechanisms:
Crime generators are places to which large numbers

of people are attracted for reasons unrelated to criminal
motivation. Providing large numbers of opportunities for
offenders and targets to come together in time and
place produces crime or disorder. Examples of
generators include shopping areas, transportation hubs,
festivals, and sporting events. The large number of crime
or disorder events is due principally to the large number
of place users and targets.
they simultaneously protect the children (guardianship)

and keep their children from misbehaving (handling). If
parenting styles slowly change so that the children are
increasingly left to themselves, their risk of victimization
and of becoming offenders can increase.
Patricia and Paul Brantingham suggest that areas can be
crime neutral, i.e., they attract neither offenders nor
targets, and controls on behaviors are adequate. These
areas tend to have relatively few crimes, and the crimes
tend to be relatively unpatterned. For this reason, crimeneutral areas seldom draw police attention. Though they
seldom require crime analysis, they are important because
they provide a useful comparison to the other types of
areas. Comparing crime-neutral areas, for example, to a
hot spot can help identify the differences that create the
troubles in the crime generator, crime attractor, or crime
enabler. Case-control studies (Step 32) are useful for
this purpose.
In summary, when a crime or disorder hot spot becomes a

greater problem it is generally because the number of
targets has increased, the number of offenders taking
advantage of the hot spot have increased, or because the
level of control being exercised at the site declined. Often,
all three are at work. Shoppers might increase in an area,
for example, due to new roads. This might lead to
Crime attractors are places affording many criminal
increased thefts as offenders take advantage of the new
opportunities that are well known to offenders. People
theft opportunities. Successful offending might attract new
with criminal motivation are drawn to such locales. In
offenders. Increased offending might cause the number
the short run, offenders may come from outside the
of shoppers to decline. This removes guardianship
area, but over longer time periods, and under some
(shoppers). But it has another effect. It could reduce
circumstances, offenders may relocate to these areas.
place management as the resources of the businesses
Prostitution and drug areas are examples. Some
decline. So, a problem that started out as a crime
entertainment spots are also well known for allowing
generator evolved into a crime attractor and then into a
deviant activity. Such places might start off being known crime enabler.
only to locals, but as their reputation spreads increasing
numbers of offenders are drawn in, thus increasing the
We can compare numbers and rates to diagnose which of
number of crime and disorder events.
these mechanisms may be operating. Dividing the crimes
in question by the number of possible crime targets
Crime enablers occur when there is little regulation of creates rates (Step 27). This is often expressed as the
behavior at places: rules of conduct are absent or are
number of crimes per 100 targets available. So, for
not enforced. The removal of a parking lot attendant, for example, if a parking lot has 15 car break-ins during a
example, allows people to loiter in the parking area. This year, and the lot contains 150 spaces and operates at
results in an increase in thefts from vehicles. This is an
near capacity, its break-in rate is 15/150 or .1. This
example of an abrupt change in place management.
translates to 10 break-ins per space per year. Note that
Sometimes place management erodes slowly over time, this analysis is only useful if the lot is operating near
leading to problem growth. Crime enablers also occur
capacity. If only 50 spaces are used on most days, then
with the erosion of guardianship and handling. For
the rate is three times as high (15/50=.3 or 30 break-ins
example, if parents attend a play area with their children per vehicle per year).
of targets is not particularly great, their crime rate will

also be low (Place D). Table 2 summarizes
these relationships.
The rankings of numbers and rates are relative, so this

process is useful for comparison purposes. And there may
be multiple mechanisms operating. Low behavioral
Let's look at how hot spot mechanisms generate
controls (enabler) may also attract offenders (attractor),
indicative combinations of numbers and rates. Crime
for example. Nevertheless, such comparisons provide an
generators have many crimes, but as their number of
early indicator of how to proceed and establish
targets is high, they have low crime rates (Place B in Table hypotheses for later examination (see Step 20). Such
1). Crime attractors also have many crimes, but as they
analysis will help suggest the types of responses that
have relatively few targets, their crime rates are high
could be effective. This is summarized in Table 3.
(Place A). Crime enablers, with their weakened behavior
controls, tend to be unattractive to targets. However,
Read More:
those few available targets have high risks. So a place
with relatively few crimes but a high crime rate suggests a Brantingham, Patricia and Paul (1995). "Criminality of
crime enabler (Place C). Finally, the number of crimes at
Place: Crime Generators and Crime Attractors". European
crime-neutral locations will be low, so even if the number Journal on Criminal Policy and Research 3(3):1-26.
Table 1: Numbers and Rates
Table 2: Diagnosing Hot Spot Mechanisms
Place
Crimes
Targets
Rate
Per 100
targets
A
B
C
D
341
148
117
28
898
1,795
243
638
.350
.082
.481
.044
35
8
48
4
Number
Rate
Crime Attractors
High
High
Crime Generators
High
Low
Crime Enabler
Low (High)
High
Crime Neutral
Low
Low
Table 3: What To Do about Worsening Hot Spots

Hot spot type
Cause
Type of Response
Questions to Answer
Crime Generator
Many unprotected targets
Increase protection
In what circumstances are

targets vulnerable?
How can vulnerability be
changed?
Crime Attractor
Attracts offenders
Discourage offenders from

coming
What is attracting
offenders?
How can this be changed?
Crime Enabler
Erosion of controls
Restore guardianship,
handling or place
management
Who could control

behaviour?
How can they be
encouraged to exert
controls?
Table 1 illustrates the differences in ranking the

importance of hot spots depending on whether numbers
or rates are used. Place A is the "hottest" spot in terms
of numbers but second in terms of rates, and place C goes
from third hottest to first when one switches from
numbers to rates.
1818. Learn if the 80-20 rule applies
very important principle of crime prevention is that

crime is highly concentrated on particular people,
places, and things. This suggests that focusing
resources where crime is concentrated will yield the
greatest preventive benefits. These concentrations (dealt
with in more detail in later steps) have attracted labels
that are becoming well known to most crime analysts:
Repeat Offenders In Wolfgang's famous Philadelphia
cohort, about 5 percent of all offenders in the study
were responsible for more than 50 percent of the
crimes.
Repeat Victims According to the British Crime Survey,
repeat victims (just over 4 percent of all victims) endure
40 percent of the crimes reported in the survey (see
Step 29).
Hot Spots In the landmark paper that put this concept
on the map, so to speak, Lawrence Sherman and
colleagues found that 6 percent of the addresses in
Minneapolis accounted for 60 percent of the calls for
police service.
Hot products Annual data produced by the Highway
Loss Data Institute show that theft claims for some
automobile models are as much as 30 times greater
than for other cars (see Step 31).
Risky Facilities In Danvers, Massachusetts, 3 out of 78
stores (5 percent) accounted for 55 percent of
shoplifting incidents reported to the police (see
Step 28).
In investigating any problem, you should therefore always

ask if the 80-20 rule applies. A simple six-stage procedure
shows how to answer this:
1. Make a list of the people, places, or products, with a
count of the number of events associated with each
of these.
2. Rank order them according to the number of events
associated with each - most to least.
3. Calculate the percentages of the events each person,
place, or product contributes. In the table, there are
386 incidents of theft and burglary. Sixty of these
incidents (15.5 percent) occurred at construction sites
owned by Builder 1.
4. Cumulate the percentages of incidents starting with
the most involved person, place or product (or in this
example, home builders).
5. Cumulate the percentages of the people, places, or
products (in our example, the cumulative percentage
of home builders in column 5).
6. Compare the cumulative percentages of people,
places, or products (column 5) to the cumulative
percentage of outcomes (column 4). This shows how
much the most involved people or places contribute
to the problem.
These kinds of calculations can be very helpful at the

scanning stage in directing preventive effort. Thus, in the
Jacksonville example, just five builders experienced more
than 50 percent of the incidents. In theory, focusing
This kind of concentration is not peculiar to crime and
preventive action on these five builders, rather than on
disorder, but is almost a universal law. A small portion of
the total group of 55, could be a very efficient strategy for
the earth's surface holds the majority of life on earth. Only reducing the city's overall problem of theft and burglaries
a small proportion of earthquakes cause most of the
in construction sites.
earthquake damage. A small portion of the population
holds most of the wealth. A small proportion of police
At the analysis stage, these kinds of tables can help in
officers produce most of the arrests.
determining if there are important differences among
people, places, or products at the top and those at the
This phenomenon is commonly called the 80-20 rule,
bottom of the list. In our example, Stacy Belledin found
where in theory 20 percent of some things are responsible that an approximate measure of the numbers of homes
for 80 percent of the outcomes. In practice, it is seldom
built correlated fairly well with the numbers of thefts and
exactly 80-20, but it is always a small percentage of
burglaries experienced by each builder, but it did not
something or some group involved in a large percentage
explain all the differences in risk. Other possibly important
of some result. The table shows this rule in practice. It
sources of these differences could be the neighborhoods
reports an analysis made by Stacy Belledin of construction where builders were operating, their police reporting
site thefts and burglaries for 55 homebuilders in
practices and their standard security precautions.
Jacksonville, Florida. Eleven of the builders (20 percent of
the group) experienced between them 85 percent of all
the thefts and burglaries at construction sites reported to
the Jacksonville Sheriffs Department during JanuarySeptember 2004.
Percentage Of
Incidents
4
Cumulative
Percentage Of
Incidents
5
Cumulative
Percentage Of
Builders
15.5%
10.1%
9.8%
8.8%
8.8%
8.0%
7.5%
6.7%
4.9%
2.9%
2.1%
1.8%
1.8%
1.6%
1.3%
3.0%
2.4%
0.5%
2.3%
0.0%
100%
15.5%
25.7%
35.5%
44.3%
53.1%
61.1%
68.7%
75.4%
80.3%
83.2%
85.2%
87.1%
88.9%
90.4%
91.7%
94.8%
97.2%
97.7%
100.0
100.0
100%
1.8%
3.6%
5.5%
7.3%
9.1%
10.9%
12.7%
14.6%
16.4%
18.2%
20.0%
21.8%
23.7%
25.5%
27.3%
32.7%
38.2%
40.0%
56.4%
100.00
100%
Home Builder
Incidents
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
3 Builders, 4 Incidents
9 Builders, 1 Incident
55 builders
60
39
38
34
34
31
29
26
19
11
8
7
7
6
5
12
9
2
9
0
386
Reported Thefts and Burglaries at Construction Sites

55 Home Builders, Jacksonville, FL , Jan. - Sept 2004
1919. Research your problem
ther police agencies might already have dealt with

the problem you are tackling or researchers might
have studied it. You could save a lot of time by
finding out how they analyzed it and what they did, in
particular which responses seemed to be effective and
which not. Studying the efforts of others can provide you
with useful hypotheses to test on your problem (Step 20).
Begin with the Problem-Oriented Guides for Police (POP
Guides) available online at www.cops.usdoj.gov and
www.popcenter.org. Each guide summarizes the research
on a particular problem and discusses ways of responding
to it. (The website versions of the guides include links to
source materials that are not available with the print
versions.) New guides are continually being produced, but
if there is not one on your problem, look for related
guides. For example, there is presently no guide on drug
dealing in public housing, which might be the problem
you are tackling. However, guides are available on "Drug
dealing in privately-owned apartment complexes" and
"Open-air drug markets," and reading them could
be helpful.
The Home Office, United Kingdom

(www.homeoffice.gov.uk). The Home Office, roughly
equivalent to the U.S. Department of Justice, undertakes
and sponsors excellent research on police topics. Start
with a "quick search" using the search box on the
home page. A summary is given for each entry. Clicking
on this will take you to the full text.
Crime Reduction Website, Home Office
(www.crimereduction.gov.uk). Browse the "toolkits"
and "mini-sites," which provide practical guidance in
dealing with many crimes including robbery, residential
burglary, domestic violence, street crime, and
victimization of college students.
Australian Institute of Criminology
(www.aic.government.au). Begin searching this website
from the opening page. A short description is provided
of each entry yielded by the search. You can get a fuller
description by clicking on the title. Full text downloads
are available of many of the documents.
Other Useful Resources
Google. If the websites yield little of value, try

"googling" the problem. Google is considered the
premier search tool on the Internet. To enter a query,
just type in a few descriptive words and click on the
To expand your search, visit the websites listed below.
search button for a list of relevant web pages. These are
Don't be tempted to skip those from Australia and the
listed in order of importance as calculated by the
U.K. because problem-oriented policing is widely practiced
number of links to the site. Narrowing your search is as
in those countries and the crime problems are similar to
simple as adding more words to the search terms that
those here. In fact, crime in San Francisco may be more
you have already entered. Your new query will return a
like that in Sydney, Australia, than in a small town in
smaller subset of the pages found for your original "tooLouisiana or Tennessee.
broad" query.
Center for Problem-Oriented Policing
Other police departments. If you find that other
(www.popcenter.org). Apart from the POP Guides, the
police departments have tackled the same problem as
website also contains hundreds of reports of problemyours, try calling them. Try to speak to the crime analysts
oriented projects submitted over the years for the
or officers originally involved in the project. Unless a
Goldstein and Tilley Awards. The website's search engine
report is available, do not rely too heavily on what you
allows you search these projects by topic and you can
are told because memory is notoriously unreliable.
Local faculty. Particularly when your local college has a
read and download them.
NCJRS Abstracts Database
criminal justice program, you might obtain useful advice
(http://abstractsdb.ncjrs.gov). Only a small proportion of
from a faculty member. Learn about faculty interests
the abstracts on this huge database deal directly with
from the college website before attempting to contact
policing, but it might contain material useful to you.
anyone. For anything more than an hour or so of
Abstracts are sometimes linked to the full text of the
consultation, the faculty member might expect
article or report, which you can download. In other
compensation, although some state universities consider
cases, you can ask to borrow a copy. This service is free
assistance to government agencies as part of their
and efficient - it generally takes no more than 2 to three
faculty's regular service mission.
weeks to receive the material.
Useful Websites
Unless your problem is very common, do not expect to

find many relevant police projects. Be skeptical about
claims of success unless supported by evaluative data.
Even projects that have received Goldstein or Tilley
awards may not have been well evaluated. Be warned
also that a response that worked in a particular town or
neighborhood might not work in yours because of
specific circumstances that make your situation different.
However, past police experience of dealing with the
problem is always an important source of ideas about
what might be helpful in your situation.
Scanning Academic Articles
Most academic articles begin with a short Abstract. If
this looks interesting, read the Summary, Discussion
and/or Conclusions. If these also seem useful, scan the
literature review at the beginning of the article. You can
usually skip the methods sections dealing with data,
analysis, and results. Even if the article is not directly
relevant, you might still find useful material listed in the
References.
Limitations of the Information

Your best sources of information are likely to be (1)
articles by researchers who have studied the problem you
are facing and, (2) reports of police projects dealing with
the problem. However, both have their limitations,
as follows:
If you need more detailed information for a response (for

example, CCTV surveillance), returning to your computer
and the library again should let you find the facts you
need and enable you to profit from the experience
of others.
Read More:
Most criminologists are more interested in crime and

delinquency in general than in specific forms of crime.
They are also more interested in distant causes of crime,
such as social disadvantage and dysfunctional families,
than the near causes of a problem, such as poor security
or lack of surveillance. So even when you find academic
articles dealing with your problem, you might find the
causes they identify help little in developing an
effective response.
Clarke, Ronald and Phyllis Schultze (2004). Researching a

Problem. Problem-Oriented Guides for Police, ProblemSolving Tool Series No. 2. Washington, DC: Office of
Community Oriented Policing Services. (accessible at
Identifying responses
Summarize the responses you identify by constructing a table like that found in the POP
Guides, with one row for each response and five columns as below:
Response
Source
How It Works
Works Best If...
Considerations
1
2
ANALYZE IN DEPTH
National experts. If you repeatedly see an expert's

name during your search, try e-mailing that person for
advice. Ask only for specific information that the expert
can provide quickly. When asking for references, list
those that you have already found, which will let the
expert see whether you have missed
anything important.
Interlibrary Loan. Most large public libraries and
college libraries subscribe to this service, which allows
them to obtain books and articles that you might need
from other libraries. You must complete a form that the
library will supply, and expect to wait about 2 weeks for
the material to arrive.
Criminal Justice Abstracts (CJA). Online access to
CJA is a vital resource that you will usually find only at
colleges with a criminal justice program. Try to persuade
your department to subscribe to it. It covers the major
journals, books and reports in the field. It provides
greater coverage of the academic literature than NCJRS
Abstracts, though the latter provides more coverage of
government research and professional magazines.
2020. Formulate hypotheses
henever we confront some new and perplexing

crime pattern we form hypotheses about its
causes, often based on incomplete information.
Experience and theory are good sources of hypotheses.
You should (1) clearly state your hypotheses, (2) not be
wedded to them, and (3) use data to objectively test
them. Expect all hypotheses to be altered or discarded
once relevant data have been examined because no
hypothesis is completely right. For this reason it is often
best to test multiple conflicting hypotheses.
If, after you collected the relevant data, you found that
your city has an abnormally high number of problem bars,
you might ask the question, "What is common to most
bars in the city that produces a large number of
assaults?" One hypothesis is that it is the way liquor
licenses are dispensed and bars regulated. Another
hypothesis is that there is something about the nature of
bar customers in your city. Testing each would require you
to collect relevant data and assess the validity of
the hypothesis.
A set of hypotheses is a roadmap for analysis. Hypotheses

suggest types of data to collect, how this data should be
analyzed, and how to interpret analysis results. If you
were investigating drinking-related assaults in bars you
might begin with the question, "How many bars are
problem locations?" Based on the 80-20 rule (Step 18),
you would state the hypothesis that some bars will have
many fights, but most will have few or none. You would
then test this hypothesis by listing the licensed drinking
places and counting the number of assault reports at each
over the last 12 months.
Notice how the questions and hypotheses structure the

analysis. Test results - positive or negative - reveal new,
more specific questions. The objective is to start with
broad questions and hypotheses and, through a pruning
process, come to a set of highly focused questions that
point to possible responses.
If your hypothesis was supported, you might ask the

question, "What is different about the bars with many
fights compared to the bars with few assaults?" The
concept of risky facilities (Step 28) would help you form a
set of three hypotheses:
1. Risky bars have more customers.
2. Risky bars have features that attract assaulters.
3. Bar staff in risky bars either fail to control behaviors, or
provoke fights.
Hypotheses suggest the type of data to collect. In the bar

assaults example, the test of each hypothesis requires
specific data. Sometimes the same data can test multiple
hypotheses (as is the case with choosing among the three
alternative explanations for risky bars). Often a variety of
data is required to select among alternative hypotheses
(as is the case with the last set of hypotheses). The more
specific your hypotheses, the more focused your data
collection will be. This is why it is more important to have
a clear hypothesis you personally dislike, than an unclear
hypothesis you approve of, or worse, no hypothesis at all.
Paralysis by Analysis
The lack of explicit hypotheses can lead to "paralysis by
analysis," collecting too much data, conducting too
much analysis, and not coming to any useful conclusion.
You can test these hypotheses by gathering data on the

number of customers at high- and low-risk bars, analyzing
the number and rate of assaults per customer, observing
Hypotheses can help direct the analysis of data. Every
the interactions of people at troublesome and trouble-free clear hypothesis suggests a pattern of data that you
bars, and interviewing staff and customers.
should be able to observe, if the hypothesis is correct. In
the example above, the hypotheses derived from the
If your first hypothesis was contradicted by the data, and concept of risky facilities can be tested using a simple
you found that there was no great difference in numbers
analytical procedure. If a bar is a crime generator, then
of assaults across drinking establishments, then you might you should see a high number of assaults, a high number
ask the question, why are so many bars troublesome?
of customers, but a low assault rate (see Step 17). Failure
This suggests another hypothesis: It's a perception
to find this pattern suggests the hypothesis is wrong. So
problem; the city has about as many bar assaults as other it is important to have a clear idea of what you should
comparable cities. This hypothesis suggests that you will
observe if your hypothesis is correct, and what you should
need data from comparable cities.
observe if your hypothesis is wrong (see third column of
the table). If you cannot do this, then this is an indicator
that your hypothesis may be too vague.
In summary, hypotheses are important for guiding

analysis. To formulate hypotheses you need to ask
important questions, then create simple and direct
speculative answers to these questions. These answers are
your hypotheses. These speculations must be bold enough

that they could be wrong, and there must be a way of
showing whether they are right or wrong. If possible,
create competing hypotheses.
Hypothesis formation is a useful group exercise, as it
allows participants with contrary views to put their
perspectives on the table in a way that allows clear and
objective tests. In this way, participants contributing
invalid hypotheses make substantial contributions to the
analysis of the problem. If each hypothesis is linked to a
potential solution, the test of these hypotheses
simultaneously directs attention to feasible responses and
rules out ineffective approaches.
Questions, Hypotheses, and Tests

Question
Example Hypothesis
Possible Test
Why is this place risky?
It is due to a large number of targets

being available.
Count the targets at the location and

calculate the crime rate. Compare
this rate to rates for the surrounding
area. If the risky place has a higher
rate, the hypothesis is false, if it is
about the same or lower, then the
hypothesis is true.
Why are there more car thefts in the

problem area than in nearby areas?
Residents park their cars on the

street, unlike residents of other
areas.
If the problem area has similar or

lower on-street parking rates than
the others, reject the hypothesis. If
higher, accept it.
Why did the theft of copper piping

from new construction suddenly
increase?
A new owner bought a nearby scrap

metal dealership.
Compare the thefts of piping before

and after the change in owners. If
the theft rate is the same before and
after, or the trend in thefts was
already going up before the change,
then the hypothesis is probably false.
If otherwise, the hypothesis appears
reasonable.
ANALYZE IN DEPTH
Hypotheses help interpret the analysis results. Let's

assume that the analysis of bar fights showed that a few
bars had most fights, and observations of the high- and
low-risk bars indicated that the security staff of the risky
bars provoked fights. This immediately suggests a
possible avenue for intervention. In short, the validity of a
hypothesis must make a difference. That is, if the
hypothesis is true you will take a different decision than if
it is false. If you will make the same decision regardless of
the test results, then the hypothesis and its test
are irrelevant.
2121. Collect your own data
n the course of your routine analytic work, you

probably use mainly crime incident and arrest data, but
for problem-oriented projects, you will need to use a
much wider array of data. For example, calls-for-service
data could give you a better handle on the amount of
drug dealing at troublesome locations than arrest data.
And data kept by the city and by businesses could be
helpful in analyzing problems of vandalism or shoplifting,
both of which are poorly measured by police reports. But
for most problem-oriented projects you will find it
necessary to go into the field - to use research
terminology - and gather data yourself. For example, you
and your project team might have to make systematic
observations of the environmental features of crime sites;
you might have to survey victims; and you might have to
interview offenders or persuade officers to do this for you.
The need for your own data collection can arise at any
one of the four stages of SARA as the following
examples show:
1. Ronald Clarke was involved in a project focused on
vehicle-related thefts in downtown parking lots in
Charlotte, North Carolina. It turned out that the city did
not have up-to-date maps showing the location of every
parking lot because new lots were continually being
opened on the sites of demolished buildings and new
buildings were being erected on the sites of former lots.
Consequently, police officers working on the project had
to survey the entire downtown area to make a complete
inventory of lots. Later in the project, officers counted
the spaces in each lot so that the risks of theft per
parking slot could be calculated. This enabled the lots to
be ranked for their risks of theft, from highest to lowest.
Then, in order to explain these variations in risk, officers
collected detailed information about the security of each
lot, including the adequacy of its lighting and fencing
and the use of attendants or security patrols.
2. In another Charlotte project focused on thefts from
construction sites, two police officers working on the
project, Dan Cunius and Eric Rost, regularly checked
each house in the project to make sure that builders
were implementing the agreed preventive measures. By
the time that the study was completed, the officers had
completed a total of 8,050 separate checks on
individual houses - a truly enormous data-gathering
exercise conducted in all kinds of weather.
3. In a report for the National Law Enforcement &

Corrections Technology Center, Karin Schmerler, a public
safety analyst in Chula Vista, Calirfornia, has collected
some other examples of primary data collection in
projects submitted for the Goldstein Award for
Excellence in Problem-Oriented Policing, including
the following:
For
a project that reduced prostitution-related calls for

service in Buffalo, New York, the police conducted 15 indepth interviews with prostitutes and 116 surveys of
"johns". The information obtained was used to garner
community support for increased enforcement against
johns and increased drug treatment and court options
for prostitutes.
In the course of a California Highway Patrol project that
reduced deaths by 35 percent on a deadly stretch of
rural roads, a 30-member task force spent 5 hours by
bus inspecting 20 miles of roadway. A key
recommendation made by the task force was to adopt a
24-hour "headlights on" policy.
In a project to reduce school bullying in South Euclid,
Ohio, police conducted focus group interviews with
students to determine where and when they felt unsafe.
The students identified hallways and class change-overs
as being high-risk times and places for bullying, which
the police confirmed by looking at school incident
records. Based on these findings, class change-over
times were staggered and teachers worked in teams to
increase supervision of hallways. This led to a 60 percent
drop of bullying in hallways.
In her article, Karin Schmerler points out that even ad hoc
data collection can be useful - she gives the example of a
quick visit to a frequently targeted ATM to inspect the
location and the lighting. In other cases, data collection
might require the help of a local university in designing
and conducting the exercise.
Be Careful in Collecting Your Own Data
Problem-oriented policing makes many demands on
you, but it does not require you to expose yourself to
the risk of mugging or assault.
3. Involving police officers in data collection (and in the

design of the exercise) provides a valuable opportunity to
train them in the need for a rigorous, systematic approach
in a problem-oriented project.
4. Undertaking your own data collection gives you the
1. Getting into the field can give you an understanding of opportunity to hone your research skills and be
the problem that you would never get from sitting in front genuinely creative.
of your computer, however rich the data that you
manipulate.
Read More:
2. Designing a data-collection instrument can force you to
think very hard about the nature of the problem, about
Schmerler, Karin and Mary Velasco (2002). "Primary Data
the kind of responses that might be effective, and how
Collection: A Problem-Solving Necessity". Advanced Crime
best to evaluate your efforts.
Mapping Topics. Denver, CO: National Law Enforcement &
Corrections Technology Center, University of Denver.
Tabulating Temporary Tags
Matt White and Charles Dean, working in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department, became convinced that
many offenders were using forged temporary tags on their vehicles. These tags allowed them to operate untaxed,
uninsured vehicles for months or even years, and made it safer for them to use their cars in committing other crimes.
To build a case for reform of the temporary tag system, White and Dean undertook an evening's informal survey of
two same-sized, contiguous neighborhoods in Charlotte - one high crime and the other low. The high crime area
(Belmont on the left in the map) had 6.4 times as many reported violent offenses in the 12 months prior to the
survey and 5.6 times as many resident arrests as the low crime area (Plaza-Millwood). As expected they spotted 12
cars (black dots on map) with temporary tags in Belmont and none in Plaza Millwood. This was despite similar onstreet parking in both neighborhoods and a higher proportion of cars in Belmont backed into driveways to hide their
tags from passing patrols.
Source: White, Matt and Charles Dean (2004). "Abuse of Temporary License Tags in North Carolina". Understanding
and Preventing Car Theft, Crime Prevention Studies, Volume 17, edited by Michael Maxfield and Ronald Clarke,
Monsey, NY: Criminal Justice Press.
ANALYZE IN DEPTH
While you might resist collecting your own data because

of the difficulties and time involved, it is sometimes
essential for a problem-oriented project and it always
brings benefits, as follows:
2222. Examine your data distributions
fter collecting your data you need to know what it

is telling you. Suppose you collected incidents of
assaults on taxi drivers. Are assaults concentrated
among a very few drivers? Are the assaults concentrated
on some days of the week or times of day?
Mode. This is the value possessed by the greatest

number of cases. In this example the mode is 0
homicides because the biggest group of
neighborhoods have no homicides.
The Spread of Cases. There are three common

To answer these questions you need to look at the
methods to measure spread:
distribution of the data. The figure below displays the
Range. This is most basic measure of spread. This is
distribution of homicides across Cincinnati's 53
the lowest and highest value. In our example, the
neighborhoods for a 36-month period. The horizontal axis
range is 0 to 27 homicides.
shows the number of homicides in a neighborhood. The
Inner quartile range looks at the lower and upper
vertical axis shows how many neighborhoods had each of
bounds of the middle 50 percent of the cases. In the
these numbers (so in the first column, 13 neighborhoods
Cincinnati example, the inner quartile range is one to
had zero homicides). Most neighborhoods had few
five homicides. Half the neighborhoods fall into this
homicides but there is a long tail stretching to the right
bracket. Another 25 percent of the neighborhoods
where a few neighborhoods have many homicides.
have one or no homicides and the last 25 percent
have 5 or more homicides. To find the inner quartile
Often you need to summarize a distribution. There are
range, rank the cases and divide them into four equal
two basic descriptions of distributions: the typical, or
groups. The two middle groups are the inneraverage, case and the variation, or spread of cases.
quartiles. The inner quartile range is the lowest and
the highest value of these two middle groups.
The Average Case. The average can be calculated
Standard deviation. This measure of spread
three ways:
indicates the mean difference from the mean of the
distribution. The smaller the standard deviation, the
Mean. This is the most common measure of
smaller the average spread around the mean. The
average. The mean number of homicides in the
formula is rather tedious, but any spreadsheet or
Cincinnati neighborhoods is 3.7 homicides per
statistical software package can calculate it. Two
neighborhood - calculated by dividing the 198 killings
by the 53 neighborhoods.
thirds of the cases fall within one standard deviation
Median. This is the value that divides the cases into
on both sides of the mean. In the Cincinnati
two equal groups. Half the Cincinnati neighborhoods
example, the standard deviation is 5.2 homicides.
have two or more homicides and half have two or
fewer.
Number of Neighborhoods
FREQUENCY DISTRIBUTION OF HOMICIDES IN CINCINNATI NEIGHBORHOODS
Range 0 to 27 homicides
14
Mode=0 homicides
12
Inner quartile 1 to 5 homicides
10
Median=2 homicides
66.7% of neighborhoods within one std. deviation of mean (std. dev.=5.2)
Mean=3.7 homicides
4
2
0
Number of Homicides
10
14
22
27
If the distribution is asymmetrical, then the mean and

standard deviation should not be used. Use the median
or the mode and the inner quartile or full range. In
problem analysis, asymmetry is very common.
The second characteristic used to select measures of
typicality and spread is the measurement scale used for
the data. There are three common types of scales.
Ordinal scales rank cases as well as label them. An

ordered list of neighborhoods, from greatest to fewest
homicides produces an ordinal scale (first, second,
third, through fifty-third). You cannot add and
subtract, multiply and divide ordinal data. You can
only determine if a case has a greater, lesser or equal
rank to another case. If the data is ordinal, neither
the mean nor the standard deviation can be used.
Use the median and inner quartile range.
Ratio scales allow you to add, subtract, multiply and
divide because the difference between each value is
equal and there is a meaningful zero. The number of
homicides in a neighborhood is measured with a ratio
scale: the difference between 0 homicides and 1
homicide is the same as the difference between 26
homicides and 27 homicides, and 0 homicides has
meaning. You can use a mean and standard
deviation with this type of data.
Read More:
Nominal scales simply apply labels. Gender

(male=1, female=2) is measured with a nominal scale
because the numbers simply substitute for word
labels, and the categories could be relabeled, male=2,
female=1 without creating a problem. If your data is
nominal, then only a mode is appropriate.
Help for elementary to advanced statistics with many

useful links
www.prndata.com/statistics_sites.htm - Hyperstat
HyperStat Online Textbook
http://davidmlane.com/hyperstat/index.html
TYPES OF DATA, THEIR USE, AND THEIR LIMITATIONS

Nominal
Description
Names categories
Ordinal
Ratio
Ranks & names categories
Has equal intervals between numbers, and zero is

meaningful.
Example
0= not victim
0= no crime
Number of crimes: 0, 1, 2,
1= victim
1= one crime
(0= no crimes)
is as valid as
2= more than one crime
0= victim
1= not victim
Scales to the right have all the properties of those to their left, plus their own properties (e.g., anything you can do with nominal and
ordinal data you can do with ratio data, plus more).
Allowable Math
Same or not same
Greater, lesser, or equal
Addition, subtraction, multiplication, & division
Allowable Average
Mode
Median & Mode
Mean, Median, & Mode
Allowable Spread
Range
Inner quartile range & Range
Standard deviation & others
Comments
Used when dealing with
Use when there is a natural
Use for percents, counts, and a host of other
categories (e.g., gender)
ranking or order to categories
measures.
and groups (e.g. chain
(e.g., police ranks) but the
stores, not chain stores).
differences between ranks is not

always the same or unclear.
ANALYZE IN DEPTH
Which measures of typicality and spread are best depends

on two characteristics of the data. The first is the
symmetry of the distribution. In a symmetrical distribution,
the shape on one side of the mean is mirrored on the
other side. The mean equals the median in symmetrical
distributions. If the value with the most cases is in the
center, then the mode will be the same as the other two
measures of average. But the mode need not equal the
median or the mean. The distribution could have two
modes, one on each side of the median. If the distribution
is roughly symmetrical, the mean and standard deviation
may be appropriate.
2323.
Diagnose your hot spot
hen mapping crime, it is helpful to distinguish

between acute and chronic hot spots (Step 17).
Acute hot spots show abnormal spikes in crime,
which may decline naturally, while chronic hot spots have
persistently higher crime levels than other areas and are
unlikely to decline unless something is done. There are
three basic forms of chronic hot spots, each of them
linked to particular theories and types of responses.
Hot dots are locations with high crime levels. These

show crime concentrated at facilities or at addresses of
repeat victims (see Steps 28 and 29). Multiple crime
events at places are represented by dots.
Hot lines are street segments where crime is

concentrated. These might occur, for example, if vehicles
parked along particular streets suffer high rates of
break-ins. Multiple crimes along street segments are
shown with lines.
those that have a tightly grouped pattern of

events and
those that have a relatively even spread of events over
the hot spot area.
The figure depicts these three forms of hot spots.

Troublesome entertainment locations are shown as dots
because the assaults are located at addresses. Vehicle
break-ins, however, are along continuous street segments,
so this concentration is shown as two intersecting lines.
Finally, the graduated contours for the residential hot spot
suggests that risk for break-ins is highest in one small
area but declines as one goes away from the center. The
dots within this graduated area depict repeat
burglary locations.
Clarifying the nature of your hot spot gives an inkling
of response:
Hot dots suggest changing the physical environment of

Hot areas are neighborhoods where crime is
particular places or changing their management. They
concentrated. Hot areas arise for a variety or reasons.
also suggest intervening with high-risk victims.
Area characteristics may give rise to crime. Or a hot area Hot lines suggest changing streets, paths and other
routes, or the environments along them.
may contain many separate and discrete problems. On
Hot areas suggest large-scale partnerships to change
maps, hot areas are shown as shaded areas, contour
neighborhoods.
lines, or gradients depicting crime levels. Jerry Ratcliffes
hot spot typology (see box) differentiates between two
The table shows how crime concentration is related to the
kinds of area hot spots:
way it is mapped, and where the response is focused.
Concentration, Mapping and Action

Concentration
Hot spots shown as:
Action level
Action examples
Places - at specific
addresses, corners, or
facilities
Dots
Facility, corner, address
Closed circuit television in a

parking garage, changing
the way alcohol is served in
bars.
Victims
Dots
Victims' addresses
Helping victims prevent

further crimes through
target hardening.
Lines
Along paths, streets, and

highways
Creating cul-de-sacs,
changing traffic patterns,
altering parking regulations.
Streets - along streets or

block faces
Area - neighborhoods
Shaded areas
Neighborhoods, regions and Community partnerships,

other areas
neighborhood
redevelopment.
Hot lines representing

thefts from vehicles along
a side street parallel to
an arterial route
A hot area represented

as a gradient of risk for
residential burglary
One of four hot dots representing

entertainment venues with a
high numbers of assaults
One of five hot dots

showing repeat
burglary locations
Ratcliffe's Hot Spot Typology

Jerry Ratcliffe differentiates among three types of hot spots. He begins with a hot spot area and then examines the
point pattern. If all events occur at the same location then the hot spot is a "hot point." Hot points describe the
same phenomena as hot dots. If the events are tightly grouped within the overall area, Ratcliffe calls this a
"clustered" hot spot. Finally, if the events are spread relatively evenly across the hot spot area, he calls the hot spot
"dispersed." Clustered and dispersed hot spots are subcategories of our category of "hot area." Ratcliffe's
approach draws attention to the concentration of the events and requires the analyst to define the perimeter of the
hot spot area prior to classifying the hot spot.
Source: Ratcliffe, Jerry (2004). "The Hotspot Matrix: A Framework for the Spatio-Temporal Targeting of Crime
Reduction". Police Practice and Research 5:5-23.
Analysis of hot spots should begin with places, then move
to streets, and finally to areas. Consider, for example, the
problem of burned-out cars. Are they repeatedly found at
specific addresses? If yes, then you should ask why these
places are chosen instead of other nearby sites. If no, you
should move on to examine streets. If you find street-level
concentration, you should compare streets to find out why
some attract burned-out cars and others do not. If there is
little street-level concentration (i.e., crime is spread
relatively evenly across many streets), then you should
consider community concentration and compare high- and
low-concentration neighborhoods. This approach assures a
highly focused response.
single event, and then look at the area. If it is no longer

hot, then the problem is driven by a few hot places. If the
area is still hot, then these repeat burglary dots are
fragments of an area concentration of burglaries.
In the figure, the hot burglary dots indicate repeat victims

within the overall neighborhood problem. An area hot
spot alone would not reveal this. Before proceeding
further, you should determine if the area hot spot is
largely due to the few repeat burglary spots. You can do
this by treating each crime location as if it had only a
Read More:
Hot spot analysis can be a valuable tool early in the

problem-solving process, but having discovered hot spots,
you need to ask why some spots are hot and others are
not. Stopping analysis after the discovery of hot spots
can result in superficial analysis and the implementation
of ineffective responses. If there is no geographical
component to the problem, hot spot mapping has little
utility and you must use other analytical approaches.
Eck, John, Spencer Chainey, and John Cameron (2005).

Mapping Crime: Understanding Hot Spots. Washington,
DC: U.S. Department of Justice, National Institute
of Justice.
ANALYZE IN DEPTH
Types of Hotspots
2424. Know when to use high-definition maps
onventional software is of little use when mapping

crime in a downtown area, a college campus, a
public housing project, or any site with many large
buildings. This is because most buildings, however large,
have only one street address, and crimes occurring
anywhere in the building are assigned to that address.
Mapping might therefore suggest that a particular
building or facility has a crime problem, but this may only
be because it is so large. When account is taken of the
many people working in the building or using the facility,
it could prove to be relatively safe. For example, George
Rengert showed that a parking garage in central
Philadelphia identified as an auto crime hot spot actually
had a lower rate of auto crime than the surrounding
streets, once account was taken of the large number of
cars that could be parked in the facility.
In fact, many large buildings are not safe. In his
devastating critique of 1960s American public housing,
Oscar Newman showed that the taller a tower block, the
higher the rate of crime per 100 residents. He argued that
very large blocks invited crime because residents did not
know their neighbors and the design and layout of the
buildings made it difficult for them to exercise any
supervision of the public spaces, including corridors,
elevators, and play areas. His ideas have since been
developed into a set of principles - Crime Prevention
through Environmental Design (CPTED) - for designing
and laying out secure buildings and public spaces.
In many cases, these problems will simply rule out highdefinition mapping, but they can be overcome, as George
Rengert and his colleagues showed in their study of crime
on Temple University's campus in Philadelphia. They
developed a high-definition GIS by combining mapping
software with AutoCAD drawings of the campus. Features
such as water pipes and electrical wiring were eliminated,
and the maps were altered so that streets were
represented as lines (with lines on either side representing
pavements), while polygons were used to represent the
footprints of buildings and the shapes of athletic fields
and parking lots. Shrubbery, fences, lighting, and other
physical features were also represented on the maps.
Crimes recorded by the campus police were then plotted
exactly where they occurred, allowing them to be related
to environmental features such as poor lighting or a blind
corner allowing the attacker to lie in wait.
Crime was mapped for the floors of each building and a

picture of the horizontal arrangement of crime within the
building was projected onto its ground floor footprint.
Figure 1 shows the result for one of the buildings Gladfelter Hall. Crime is distributed among all floors, with
the exception of the 10th floor. The map also shows a
clear cluster of crime common to most floors, the area
closest to the bank of four elevators near the center of the
building. This is where each academic department's
fishbowl offices for secretaries and receptionists are
located - fishbowls because they are surrounded by glass
windows, which allow thieves to look into them to see if
To understand why a particular building is insecure, crimes anyone is there and if anything is worth taking. The
need to be divided into specific categories and their
Department of Criminal Justice - Rengert's own
locations within the building need to be charted. This is
department - has now installed blinds, which can be
where high-definition or 3-D mapping comes into play.
lowered in the evenings to prevent people seeing into
Unfortunately, high-definition mapping is difficult and time the fishbowl.
consuming. It suffers from two principal problems:
Commercial software is already available that will produce
1. Police records of crime rarely give the precise location
photo-realistic city models, and technological
of incidents within the building, though building
developments, such as 3-D laser imaging, will simplify the
managers or security departments can sometimes supply production of computer maps like those of Gladfelter Hall.
this information. When they cannot, special crimeMeanwhile, when the number of incidents is small, good
recording procedures may have to be established for a
clear drawings with the location of crimes clearly indicated
period of time in order to obtain this information
can sometimes do just as well. Figure 2 is a plan of the
(Step 21).
Lisson Green public housing estate in London, drawn by
2. For new buildings, it may be possible to obtain plans in Barry Poyner, showing the locations of robberies and purse
digitized format, which can make mapping easier. But
snatches on the walkways connecting the buildings for
when the building is old, it may be difficult to obtain up- two 6-month periods: before any preventive changes were
made and after four of the blocks were fitted with entry
to-date plans so you may have to get these drawn.
Crowe, Tim (1991). Crime Prevention Through

Environmental Design. Applications of Architectural Design
and Space Management Concepts. Boston:
Butterworth-Heinemann.
Rengert, George, Mark Mattson, and Kristin Henderson
(2001). Campus Security. Situational Crime Prevention in
High-Density Environments. Monsey, NY: Criminal
Justice Press.
Figure 1: 3-D Map of Gladfelter Hall, Temple University Campus

Crime on Building Floors
High Definition
Geographic
Information
System
Crime Projected
on Building Footprint
Figure 2: Locations of Robberies and Snatches on the Walkway System on the Lisson Green Estate
Before Entry Phones
After Entry Phones
Key
Housing blocks
Blocks fitted
with entry
phones
Walkways
Robbery or
snatch
Elevator and
stair towers
ANALYZE IN DEPTH
Read More:
phones. In effect, the entry phones closed access to the

walkway system from the main street entrance. In this
case, high-definition mapping assisted with the
assessment of preventive action. But Figure 2 also helped
with diagnosis of the problem because it showed that
robberies and purse snatches tended to occur on those
parts of the walkway system that lacked surveillance from
neighboring buildings or ground level.
2525. Pay attention to daily and weekly rhythms
ycles of activities have tremendous influences on

problems. The ebb and flow of vehicles caused by
commuting and shopping rhythms, for example,
changes the number of targets and guardians in parking
facilities. This, in turn, influences when vehicle thefts and
break-ins are most frequent. Robberies of drunken
revelers may be more likely around bar closing time on
Fridays and Saturdays, because the number of targets is
higher. In this example, two important rhythms
concentrate problem activities. The first is the
workday/weekend cycle that makes Friday and Saturday
nights so popular for entertainment and recreation. The
second involves the daily cycle of opening and closing of
bars. In this step we will discuss short-term fluctuations
occurring over hours and days. In Step 26, we will look at
longer time periods covering months and years.
murder. If there are few events, then you can look at a

longer period to collect more events. But if the problem
changes in the longer period, the picture that emerges
may be distorted or out of date.
Different facilities have different cycles of activities that

can contribute to their associated problems. School
rhythms are similar though distinct from job rhythms. Bus
stops are influenced by the rhythm of commuting and
shopping, but also by the more frequent coming and
going of buses.
Jerry Ratcliffe also has identified three forms of temporal

clustering. First, events may be relatively evenly spread
over the entire day. He calls this a diffused pattern.
Second, focused patterns show clustering within distinct
time ranges. Events clustered around rush hours follow
focused patterns. Third, acute patterns are tightly packed
within small periods. Disturbances immediately following
bar closing time might be an example. Focused and acute
patterns immediately suggest temporal cycles that should
be investigated.
Charting the rhythm of crime or disorder events helps

identify important activity cycles that may contribute to a
problem. As shown in the figure below, calculate the
average of the number of events occurring in each hour
(or other time interval) over several days (data matrix at
top), then plot the results (Chart A). Chart B shows the
percentage of the week's events occurring on each day.
Because some days routinely have very different rhythms
than other days, Rachel Boba recommends charting days
and hours together (Chart C). The result shows hot time
periods throughout the week. Such charts are easy to
produce; all three of these charts were created on a
spreadsheet, using standard graphing routines.
Having reasonably exact times of occurrence helps

temporal analysis. Contact crimes, such as robbery, rape,
and assault, can be accurately pin-pointed as victims can
often describe when these crimes took place. Property
crimes, such as vehicle crimes, burglary, and vandalism,
are much harder to pin down because victims usually
provide only a time range during which such crimes could
have occurred. Though it is common to use the midpoints
in these ranges to estimate the times crimes occurred, this
can lead to distortion and should be avoided for long
periods (e.g., more than 8 hours).
Though Ratcliffe developed his typology for daily patterns,

the basic idea can be applied to weekly cycles. If no
particular day of the week is routinely troublesome, this
indicates a diffused weekly pattern. A cluster of days
showing a marked increase in troublesome events
indicates a focused pattern. Finally, if one or two days
have a marked concentration of events, this indicates an
acute pattern.
Read More:
Temporal analysis is easiest when problem events are

frequent. So temporal analysis will be more useful for
common minor events, like noise complaints and minor
traffic accidents, than for uncommon serious events, like
Boba, Rachel (2005). Crime Analysis and Crime Mapping:

An Introduction. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Example of Number of Events by Hour and Day of Week

Days
Mon
Tues
Wed
Thur
Fri
Sat
Sun
Mean
Hours
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 Mean
7
3
6
9
9 11 10 17 16 17
5
6 12
7
9
5 20 18 16
8
7 10
8
7 10.1
10
9 10 11
7
6 13 15 15 18
6 12
7
7
8
5 16 18 17 12
5 11 10
4 10.5
4 11 12
6
8
3 18 17 24 14 10
7
4
2
4
9 23 24 24
7
5 12
3
4 10.6
8
8
7
9
4 10 17 21 20 11 10
5
4
3
9
6 17 24 18
4
5
4 10
6 10.0
3 12
6
7
9 12 13 19 20 19
3
4
3
4
9
3 15 16 17
8 10 18 12 13 10.6
10 12
3
1
1
1
1
1
2
3
4
3
4
5
6
4
7
8
7
5 10 21 24 23
6.9
21 22 10
2
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
3.1
9.0 11.0 7.7 6.4 5.6 6.3 10.4 13.0 14.0 11.9 5.6 5.4 5.0 4.1 6.6 4.7 14.1 15.6 14.3 6.4 6.1 11.0 9.7 8.3
ANALYZE IN DEPTH
EXAMINING TEMPORAL RHYTHMS

A. Average Hourly Rhythm
16
14
Events
12
10
8
6
4
2
0
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24
Hours
B. Percent of Week's Events
Mon
Tues
Wed
Thur
Fri
Sat
Sun
.0
5.0
Percent
10.0
15.0
C. Daily and Hourly Rhythms

Mon
Tues
Wed
Thur
Fri
Sat
Sun
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24
20-25
15-20
10-15
5-10
0-5
Hours
2626. Take account of long-term change
s your problem getting worse or better? Does it

fluctuate regularly or randomly? To answer these
questions you need to study your problem by graphing
either the number of events or a rate against time. A rate
is typically the number of crime or disorder events divided
by the number of targets at risk (Step 27).
The time course of a problem can be divided into three
basic components:
overall trend, which may be obvious from visual
inspection, and which shows whether the problem is
getting worse, better, or staying the same over a
long period.
The
Seasonal, daily, and weekly cycles.
Random fluctuations that are caused by a large

number of minor influences.
Systematic study of the time course of crime is called

"time series analysis."
homicide per 100 months). May 2001 was a particularly

bad month, and October and November of 2000 were
particularly low months.
Throughout the 58 months there is considerable monthly
variation, shown by the jagged peaks and valleys. Low
frequency problems tend to have this characteristic,
whereas problems with many events per time period often
show smoother changes. These random fluctuations can
hide systematic variation. One method for revealing a
trend obscured by random variation is to use a moving
average. This is called "smoothing". A 3-month moving
average was used in this example. The July value, for
example, is the average of June, July, and August while
the August value is the average of July, August, and
September. Notice that there is no data for the first and
last months of the series because we do not have 3
months of data for these months. Moving averages fill in
the valleys and knock off the peaks. Longer moving
averages produce smoother graphs than shorter ones, but
they can also hide useful information by making the graph
too smooth.
Figure 1 shows homicides in Buffalo, New York. The

straight line through the middle of the chart shows the
overall trend. It is virtually flat, indicating very little
upward trend (though it is increasing slightly at about 1
Figure 1: HOMICIDES IN BUFFALO, NY
Jan. 00 through Oct. 04
18.0
Trend
16.0
Smoothed
14.0
Homicides
12.0
10.0
8.0
6.0
4.0
2.0
t0
1
Ja
n
02
Ap
r0
2
Ju
l0
2
Oc
t0
2
Ja
n
03
Ap
r0
3
Ju
l0
3
Oc
t0
3
Ja
n
04
Ap
r0
4
Ju
l0
4
Oc
t0
4
Oc
l0
r0
Ju
01
Ap
Ja
n
t0
Oc
l0
r0
Ju
Ap
00
0.0
Ja
n
Number of homicides
20.0
non-domestic homicides (or firearm and non-firearm). So

if the non-domestic homicides were trending upward
while domestic homicides were declining, this would
suggest that attention should be focused on
non-domestic homicides.
Time series analysis is a powerful tool for evaluating the

effectiveness of a response. The basic principle is to obtain
a good idea of a problem's natural trends, cycles, and
Obvious seasonal cycles can be seen in Figure 2. Here we variation before the response is implemented, using the
see the number of bicycle thefts per month over 32
techniques just discussed. This tells you what you can
months. Thefts consistently peak in July and August, and expect from the problem in the future, if you did nothing
consistently reach their minimum in January and February. about the problem. This provides a basis for examining
time frames after the response. Changes in the trend,
We can also see that on a month-to-month basis 2001
was usually worse than 2002 and the months of 2003 for cycles, or even the random fluctuation suggest the
which we have data. This makes some sense, as there are response had an impact. The longer the time frames
before and after, the greater the confidence you can have
more bicycles available to steal in the summer and even
thieves have little use for bicycles in the winter (especially in your conclusions.
in Buffalo!).
Time series analysis can also be very complex, so if there
is a great deal depending on a precise answer to a time
Separating a time series into component parts is very
frame analysis, it may be useful to seek the help of a
useful for revealing possible causes of a problem. The
statistician specializing in this area.
homicide trend, for example, could be decomposed into
two charts showing domestic homicides and
Figure 2: SEASONAL EFFECTS IN BUFFALO BICYCLE THEFTS
Jan. 01 through Aug. 03
Number of Bicycle Thefts
120
100
80
2001
2002
2003
60
40
20
0
Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
ANALYZE IN DEPTH
Cycles can be detected by comparing the same months of

the year (or same weeks of the month, or same days of a
week, or same hours of a day, depending on the time
periods you are examining). It is important to note that
months are of different lengths (and do not forget
February in leap years) as this might influence the number
of problem events. Some analysts use 4-week periods,
rather than months, to address this issue.
2727. Know how to use rates and denominators
hen one place has more crimes than another

place, one possible reason is that one has more
targets than another. Examining rates helps you
understand if number of targets contributes to your
problem (see Step 17).
Rates describe the number of crimes per target at risk,
during a period of time: one burglary per 1,000
households during 2002, for example. Target rates show
the risk the average target has of being involved in a
crime during the time period.
To calculate target rates you will need to:
1. Define the type of event you are interested in (e.g.,
thefts from vehicles).
2. Define the at-risk population (e.g., vehicles).
3. Define the locations and time period (e.g., downtown
area parking lots in 2004);
4. Find sources of data that that provide counts of events
of interest and targets for each location being
examined (e.g., police reported crime data has
information on address of theft, which can be
associated with specific parking lots, and observations
of downtown parking lots can provide estimates of the
number of vehicles in each lot).
5. For each location, divide the number of events (the
numerator) by the number of targets
(the denominator) to obtain rates.
Defining the targets at-risk requires careful thought. If
you are analyzing burglaries, is your target people or
homes? "Homes" is the more reasonable answer.
Everything being equal, if a population of a 1000 people
lived in 500 units we would expect it to have more
burglaries than if the same population lived in 250 units.

If you are analyzing street robberies, then the at-risk
population is the number of pedestrians in the area
being examined.
Police incident reports usually contain data describing the
events of interest, including address information, so
counts of events at locations can be obtained. However,
it is often difficult to obtain information describing the
number of targets at risk at locations. For example,
reported thefts from vehicles may be available for parking
lot addresses, but the number of vehicles using the lots
may not be readily available (see box).
To overcome this problem, you might have to find proxy
measure of targets. The number of vehicles using parking
lots, for example, may be proportional to lot size. Thus, a
proxy measure for vehicles at risk might be square
footage or number of parking spaces. The table gives
some examples of estimating at-risk target rates.
Proxy measures of targets must have two characteristics.
First, they must be logically associated with the targets.
One would expect spaces to be associated with the
volume of vehicles, but we would not expect number of
feet of parking lot street frontage to be associated with
number of vehicles, because very deep lots could have
little street frontage but contain many vehicles. Second,
the association between the proxy and at-risk targets
cannot vary too greatly across locations. If all parking lots
in the downtown area are about two thirds full during the
week, number of spaces is a useful proxy. But if some
lots are used to capacity and others get little use, then
number of spaces is not a good indicator of targets.
Example of Rates for Different Crimes

Type
Apartment burglaries
Location
Apartment buildings
Shoplifting
Retail stores
Motorcycle Theft
Neighborhood
Graffiti
Commercial areas
Taxi robberies
Company
Disorder calls from

motels
Motels
Rate
Burglaries per apartment, or per
household
Thefts per item on shelves, or per
square foot of retail space
Motorcycle thefts per registered
motorcycle
Graffiti per square foot
Comments
Burglaries per resident places too much emphasis on
large families.
Thefts per customer gives an offending rate.
Problematic for areas cyclists use but do not live in.
Difficult to measure.
Robberies per cab, or per driver, or Hours of exposure is preferable, but data may not be
driver-hours
available.
Disorder calls per guest or per
Might also look at numbers of non-guest visitors.
room
Calculating rates can be very helpful in finding risky

facilities (Step 28). Karin Schmerler and her colleagues in
the Chula Vista, California, Police Department investigated
calls from the city's motels. The 10 national chain and 16
local independent motels generated similar numbers of
calls, but the national chains contained more rooms.
When they added up all the calls for the local

independents and divided this by the rooms in these
motels, Schmerler found that the average call rate for the
independent motels was 1.8 per room. Doing the same
for the national chains yielded a call rate of 0.5. Clearly,
the local independents generate many more calls
per room.
Should you put more emphasis on high numbers or high
rates? If your objective is to reduce the volume of crime,
then focusing on numbers may the best choice. But if
your objective is to reduce the chances of harm, then
focus on rate.
Using Rates to Identify Risky Parking Lots

Rates of theft from cars by block, Charlotte NC, 1999
The value of calculating rates is illustrated by a project

in Charlotte, North Carolina on which one of us
(Clarke) worked with Herman Goldstein. Assisted by
local analysts and police officers, we examined
larcenies from autos (LFAs) in parking facilities in the
downtown area of the city (locally known as Uptown).
Hot spot analysis had shown a large undifferentiated
cluster of these thefts centered in the middle of the
area, but a map based on rates of theft was far more
revealing. This map was produced by crime analyst
Matt White, who enlisted the help of precinct officers
in counting the number of parking spaces in each
facility. He then calculated theft rates for each lot and
parking garage. The resulting map revealed a much
more detailed picture of risk. Further analysis showed
that cars parked in lots were six times more at risk
than ones in garages and that some lots were crime
enablers due to inadequate security.
Uptown Study
Area and Analysis
Legend
Parking Areas
1999 LFA by block
Lower
Higher
Read More:
Clarke, Ronald and Herman Goldstein (2003). Thefts from
Cars in Center City Parking Facilities. From Innovation to
Mainstream. Crime Prevention Studies, vol. 15, Monsey,
New York: Criminal Justice Press. (available at:
www.popcenter.org)
ANALYZE IN DEPTH
Even with proxy measures, it can be difficult to obtain

target data. Government agencies might have some of
the information you need. For example the Hamilton
County, Ohio, auditor has information on every land
parcel in the county, including the square footage and
location. Businesses and business associations sometimes
have information about sales volume. And state supplied
sales tax information can be used as proxy for the
numbers of customers (when comparing stores selling
similar items).
2828. Identify risky facilities
acilities are environments with special functions (Step

15). Educational facilities involve teaching and study.
Industrial facilities produce and process materials.
Office facilities process information. Retail facilities involve
sales and monetary transactions. Some facilities are
frequent sites for crime and incivilities. These include
taverns, parks, railway stations, payphone booths,
convenience stores, and public housing projects. These
facilities make a disproportionately large contribution to
crime and disorder - they are "risky facilities."
But the term has also a more precise meaning. It refers to
the fact that within each type of facility a few of them are
especially risky. When we described the 80-20 rule in Step
18, we mentioned that 5 percent of the stores in Danvers,
Massachusetts, accounted for 50 percent of the reported
shopliftings (see the table provided by Christopher Bruce,
crime analyst in the Danvers Police Department). Here are
some other documented examples of risky facilities:
Convenience stores. A national survey found that 6.5
percent of convenience stores experience 65 percent of
all robberies.
Gas Stations. Ten percent of Austin, Texas gas stations
accounted for more than 50 percent of calls for driveoffs and drug crimes in 1998-1999.
Banks. Four percent of U.K. banks have rates of
robbery four to six times higher than other banks.
Schools. Eight percent of Stockholm schools suffered
50 percent of the violent crimes reported in the 19931994 school year.
Bus stops. Andrew Newton's recent doctoral
dissertation reported that 9 percent of the shelters at
bus stops in the British city of Liverpool experienced
more than 40 percent of the vandalism incidents.
Parking facilities. In another British city, Nottingham,
just one parking deck (The Royal Moat House)
accounted for about 25 percent (103) of the 415 crimes
reported for all 19 downtown lots in 2001.
There are at least eight reasons why facilities are "risky"

and different analysis procedures can help determine
which reasons are operating in particular circumstances:
1. Random Variation. It is possible to get
concentrations of crime in a few places through some
fluke of randomness. This is more likely to occur when
you are looking at only a few facilities with few
incidents. Try checking the same facilities for a different
time period. If the rank order of incidents is roughly the
same in both periods, then the variation is not random.
2. Reporting practices. Some facilities might always

report crimes to the police, while others experiencing
the same number of incidents might report many fewer
of them. This can be difficult to check, but you should
ask officers who are familiar with the facilities whether
the recorded crime rates match their own perceptions of
the crime problems in the facilities.
3. Many targets. Some facilities contain many targets.
The store with the most shopliftings in Danvers was one
of the largest in the city. But this was not the whole
story because when account is taken of its size by
calculating shopliftings per 100 square feet (see the
final row of the table), it is still one of the riskiest for
shoplifting (see Step 27).
4. Hot products. A risky facility may not have a large
number of targets, but it might have targets that are
particularly "hot." Store 15 in the Danvers list had the
highest rate of shoplifting in the city per 1,000 square
feet. This store specializes in selling small, high value
electronic items that meet the CRAVED criteria described
in Step 31.
5. Location. Facilities located in high-crime areas,
perhaps where many habitual offenders live, are more
likely to be crime risks. This is because offenders prefer
not to travel far to commit crime (Step 16).
6. Repeat victimization. Some places attract people
who are particularly vulnerable to crime. Compare the
people being victimized in risky and non-risky facilities.
If the re-victimization rates are different, then repeat
victimization may be the cause of the elevated risk (Step
29).
7. Crime attractors. Facilities that draw in large
numbers of offenders are crime attractors (Step 15).
Crime attractors have high numbers of offenses and
high offense rates. Additional diagnostic checks involve
analysis of arrest records and other information
containing offender names.
8. Poor management. When owners or managers do
not exercise proper control or management a risky
facility can develop. The box shows how a slumlord's
negligent management turned the properties he
acquired into risky facilities (Step 44).
Store*
Shopliftings
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
7 stores with 2 incidents
28 stores with 1 incident
26 stores with 0 incidents
Total stores = 78
78
42
28
16
15
12
11
11
9
7
5
5
4
4
3
3
3
14
28
0
298
Percent of Cumulative Percent of Cumulative Percent

Shopliftings
Shopliftings
of Stores
26.2
26.2
1.3
14.1
40.3
2.6
9.4
49.7
3.8
5.4
55.0
5.1
5.0
60.1
6.4
4.0
64.1
7.7
3.7
67.8
9.0
3.7
71.5
10.3
3.0
74.5
11.5
2.3
76.8
12.8
1.7
78.5
14.1
1.7
80.2
15.4
1.3
81.5
16.7
1.3
82.9
17.9
1.0
83.9
19.2
1.0
84.9
20.5
1.0
85.9
21.8
4.7
90.6
30.8
9.4
100.0
66.7
0.0
100.0
100.0
100.0
100.0
100.0
Shopliftings per
1000 Sq. Ft.
1.54
0.70
0.22
0.24
0.28
0.31
0.09
0.16
0.28
2.82
0.16
0.10
0.35
0.12
3.32
0.90
0.02
0.08
0.06
0.00
0.15
* The top 17 stores were (in alphabetical order): Best Buy, Boater's World, Circuit City, Costco, CVS Pharmacy, Galyan's, Home Depot,
Kohl's, Linens & Things, Lowe's, Marshall's, Old Navy, Radio Shack, Stop & Shop, Target, and Wal-Mart
Slumlords, Crime in Low Rent Apartments and Neighborhood Blight

Property
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
Year
No. of Units
Acquired
4
1977
15
1982
8
1983
8
1985
10
1985
16
1986
6/8
1986
5
1987
12
1987
6
1988
10
1991
10+
1991
4+
1992
4
1992
Average Yearly Arrests

Pre-Owning
0
0
0
0
0.1
0.2
0
0
0
0.4
0.2
2.3
1.1
0.2
Post-Owning
1.6
16.9
2.3
4.5
6
27.9
3.4
8.3
11.3
8.1
9.3
21.8
0.7
10.7
In every large city, a few low-cost rental apartment

buildings make extraordinary demands on police time. These
"risky facilities" are often owned by slumlords unscrupulous landlords who purchase properties in poor
neighborhoods and who make a minimum investment in
management and maintenance. Building services
deteriorate, respectable tenants move out, and their place is
taken by less respectable ones - drug dealers, pimps, and
prostitutes - who can afford to pay the rent but who cannot
pass the background checks made by more responsible
managements. In the course of a problem-oriented policing
project in Santa Barbara, California, Officers Kim Frylsie and
Mike Apsland analyzed arrests made at 14 rental apartment
buildings owned by a slumlord, before and after he had
purchased them. The table clearly shows a large increase in
the number of people arrested at the properties in the years
after he acquired them. There was also some evidence that
the increased crime and disorder in these properties spilled
over to infect other nearby apartment buildings - a finding
that supports the widespread belief that slumlords
contribute to neighborhood blight.
Source: Clarke, Ronald and Gisela Bichler-Robertson (1998). "Place Managers, Slumlords and Crime in Low Rent Apartment Buildings".
Security Journal, 11: 11-19.
Read More:
Eck, John, Ronald Clarke and Rob Guerette,
"Risky Facilities: Crime Concentration in Homogeneous
Sets of Facilities." Crime Prevention Studies, in press.
ANALYZE IN DEPTH
Reported Shopliftings by Store, Danvers, MA.

October 1, 2003 to September 30, 2004
2929. Be ready for repeat victimization
ome people are repeatedly victimized and, in

conformity with the 80-20 rule (Step 18), a small
proportion of victims account for a large proportion
of all victimizations. Ken Pease and Graham Farrell
carefully documented this fact in a seminal Home Office
publication called "Once Bitten, Twice Bitten". Using
British Crime Survey data (see the table), they showed
that about 4% of people experience about 40% of all
victimizations in one year. They showed that repeat
victimization occurs for a variety of crimes including
domestic violence, sexual assault, burglary and car-related
thefts. They also showed that repeats occur quite quickly,
often within a week of the first victimization, though this
varies with the offense.
About 4 Percent of People Experience About 40

Percent of All Crimes
Number of
Percent of
Percent of
Crimes
Respondents
Incidents
Experienced
0
59.5
0.0
1
20.3
18.7
2
9.0
16.5
3
4.5
12.4
4
2.4
8.8
4.3
5+
43.5
Source: British Crime Survey, 1992, all offenses
Research has shown that it is easy to miss the extent of
repeat victimization for several reasons:
Many victims do not report crimes to the police, which

means that repeat victimization is undercounted in
official police records. This is why researchers have tried
to use surveys, in which people can be asked about
crimes they did not report to the police. Unfortunately,
the National Crime Victimization Survey, the United
States equivalent to the British Crime Survey,
undercounts repeat victimization because it uses only a
6-month recall period and does not count all the crimes
committed in a series against a particular victim.
Crime analysts often look for repeat victimization by
counting the number of crimes at addresses, but police
data often contains incomplete address information,
especially for apartment units. This leads to higher
estimates of one-time only victimizations than is actually
the case. This difficulty is being reduced by the greater
availability of GIS systems and through the use of
address matching in mapping software (i.e., geocoding).
Repeat victimization can be underestimated because of

the "time-window effect". If only victimizations during a
specific time period are counted - a time window of
January 2002 through June 2002, for example - then
someone who had been victimized in December 2001
and once during the six-month window would not be
counted as a repeat victim. If they had the misfortune to
be victimized in July 2002, we would not know that this
person had three victimizations. Ideally, a moving
window should be used where each new victim is
followed for a year after the first reported event.
In explaining repeat victimization, Ken Pease distinguishes

two kinds of accounts:
1. Boost accounts explain repetitions in terms of
positive experiences at the initial offense. A burglar, for
example, learns a great deal about a home during a
break-in. This knowledge may encourage him to come
back for another break-in. A burglar may also tell others
about goods he left behind, leading to subsequent
break-ins by other burglars.
2. Flag accounts explain repetitions in terms of the
unusual attractiveness or vulnerability of particular
targets that result in their victimization by a variety of
offenders. Some occupations have much higher
victimization rates than others (taxi drivers, for example)
and people who spend time in risky facilities (such as
convenience store clerks) are also more prone to
repeated victimization. Finally, the ownership of hot
products, such as cars attractive to joyriders (Step 31),
will also increase the probability of repeat victimization.
"Lightning never strikes twice in the same place"
Well-intentioned police officers sometimes say this to
reassure burglary victims that they won't be victimized
again. Unfortunately, the research reviewed here shows
that it is not true.
"Virtual" or "near" repeats involve victims with
characteristics similar to the original victim or target. After
successfully attacking the first target, offenders generalize
to targets with similar characteristics. Houses with the
same lay-out and in the same neighborhood as the first
burglary, for example, can be expected to have higher
risks because the offender has learned something about
them from breaking in before.
Many police agencies now also use a "graded response"

when dealing with repeat victims. This means that the
more often someone has been victimized the more
intensive the preventive action taken by the police.
Knowing the time period between repeats also makes it
possible to temporarily deploy crime prevention for short
periods when the risk of crime is the greatest. For
example, some police agencies will install temporary
burglar alarms where the risk is high of a repeat burglary
occurring soon.
Read More:
Weisel, Deborah (2004) Analyzing Repeat Victimization,
Problem Solving Tool Series, No. 2. Washington, D.C.:
Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, U.S.
Department of Justice. (accessible at www.popcenter.org
and www.cops.usdoj.gov).
Johnson, Shane and Kate Bowers (2004). "The Burglary
as Clue to the Future: The Beginnings of Prospective HotSpotting." European Journal of Criminology, 1(2),
237-255.
Neighbor Beware!
Repeat victimization tells of an elevated risk that the same victim will suffer again, most often in the immediate days
or weeks following the preceding crime. But risk can be communicated to nearby places. Kate Bowers and Shane
Johnson of the Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science have shown how burglary risk is communicated down a street.
This is illustrated in the graph. A home is burgled, which we will call the reference burglary. The numbers at the
bottom are a measure of distance from the reference burglary. A distance of one tells of a home next to a burglary
location on the same side of the street, or the home immediately opposite. A distance of two refers to homes two
doors down on the same side of the street, or diagonally opposite, and so on. The ordinate shows the number of
burglaries following reference burglaries. The data come from Merseyside Police in the UK. You can see that the risk
of another burglary declines the further the distance from the reference burglary. For any given distance, the risk is
greater for homes on the same side of the street. This shows which homes one should seek to protect in the wake of
a burglary. Priority should be given to homes close to the burgled home and especially on the same side of the street.
4500
number of burglaries
4000
same side equivalent
opposite side
3500
3000
2500
2000
3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
house numbers apart
ANALYZE IN DEPTH
Knowledge of repeat victimization is useful for predicting

who is most at risk and when they are at risk. This means
that crime prevention resources can be focused on these
people, rather than spreading resources over a number of
people, most of whom have a very low risk of crime.
3030. Consider repeat offending
ne of the fundamental facts of criminology is that a

small proportion of individuals commit a large
proportion of crime. Data from Marvin Wolfgang's
famous Philadelphia cohort study suggested that around
5 percent of offenders account for 40 percent of crimes.
There are two explanations for repeat offending, the first
of which is that impulsive individuals, with weak social
attachments to others tend to get into trouble more
frequently than less impulsive and more attached
individuals. The second explanation is that people exposed
to more crime and disorder opportunities take advantage
of them and adjust accordingly (see Step 9). Both of these
theories can be true. Impulsive individuals with weak
attachments require routine exposures to crime
opportunities to become repeat offenders.
Repeat offending can be detected by testing for the
presence of the 80-20 rule (Step 18). This can be difficult
in practice because offenders try to remain anonymous, so
the data are seldom comprehensive, and may not even
exist. Intelligence information can provide evidence of
repeat offending, but the quality of this information is
highly variable and seldom comprehensive about the
offender population. We often know far more, and know
it with greater validity, about places and victims than we
know about offenders. Nevertheless, systematic
interviews with offenders and their associates can reveal
very useful information for understanding and addressing
problems (Step 10).
Understanding repeat offenders' objectives and motives
can help create prevention strategies. It can make a
difference to the solution of a vehicle theft problem if the
thieves want to have a good time riding around in a fancy
car, to obtain transportation home after a late night of
partying, or to sell it for cash to support a drug habit. It
can make a difference to the solution of a graffiti problem
if the offenders are marking gang territories, creating
"public art", displaying their affection, or trying to
terrorize local residents of a different religion, race,
or ethnicity.
Successful offending can lead to more offending. This
occurs in three ways:
Offenders, like others, learn from doing. A successful

crime teaches important lessons. This can lead to the
offender attacking the same target again (see box). But
offenders, like everyone else, can generalize. So they

learn that they may be successful if they attack similar
targets (see Step 29).
Offenders learn from each other. Information can spread

through individuals working in small groups, group
breakup and new group formation. This underscores the
need to understand offender networks. Police can use
networks to spread information that enhances
offenders' perceptions of risks or of the undesirability of
the target or place. Part of the effort to reduce juvenile
homicides in Boston, Massachusetts for example,
involved highly targeted messages to gang members.
Successful offending can erode prevention, thus making

subsequent offending easier. A small break in a fence,
for example, will become larger with use. If the influx of
offenders and offensive behaviors is faster than the
responses of guardians and place managers, then a
small problem will become worse.
Catch Prolific Criminals by Focusing on Repeat
Victimization
Ken Pease has recently written about the benefits for
detection resulting from a focus on repeat victimization.
Evidence is accumulating that repeat victimizations are
the work of the most committed offenders. He points out
that this raises the intriguing possibility that offender
targeting may be achieved simply by detecting repeated
offenses against the same household or person, since
these offenses are committed by offenders whom one
would in any case wish to target. This kind of offender
targeting avoids allegations of violations of civil liberties,
since it focuses on the most troublesome subset of acts
that prolific offenders commit.
Many crime prevention techniques rest on the assumption

of a credible threat (Step 40). Closed circuit television
(CCTV) provides a deterrent threat to the extent that
potential offenders believe either that someone is
watching who will take action should they see
misbehavior, or that offenders can be identified and
arrested later based on CCTV recordings. This does not
mean that there have to be many arrests, but a few wellpublicized arrests can reinforce an important message.
And the message may be powerful if it is communicated
through offender networks.
Tackling repeat offending by removing facilitating

environments can be effective. For example, in Staining, a
village in England, a scrap yard served as a receiver for
stolen vehicles, parts, and other loot from thefts. Many of
the associated offenders were known. But despite police
enforcement efforts this problem could not be resolved.
The local constable was able to close the site using laws
governing pollution and other environmental hazards. This
substantially reduced crime in the village. Similarly, police
in the United States often use civil laws to close down
facilities that foster drug dealing, prostitution, and other
crimes and disorder.
Newport News, Virginia Police Department used offender

interviews to help analyze thefts from vehicles. An
important piece of intelligence they gained was that
thieves targeted vehicles that the thieves believed
contained drugs. More recently, when the Chula Vista,
California Police Department interviewed car thieves they
found that the thieves had a much simpler method for
stealing cars than investigators had suspected. This
alerted investigators to an unknown vulnerability of older
cars of a particular make. Such information is available
from no other source.
Read More:
Cullen, Francis and colleagues (2002). "Environmental
Corrections: A New Framework for Effective Probation and
Parole Supervision." Federal Probation, 66 (2):28-37.
Kennedy, David and colleagues (2001). Reducing Gun
Violence: The Boston Gun Project's Operation Ceasefire.
Research Report. Washington, D.C.: National Institute
of Justice.
Conversely, creating crime opportunities to catch

offenders can make things worse. In the late 1970s and
early 1980s, a number of U.S. police departments
experimented with "sting" operations in which they
created fake markets for stolen goods, documented who
sold such goods to them, and then arrested many thieves.
A number of these operations were evaluated. There is
no evidence that these operations reduced crime. There is
some evidence that they may have increased crime by
providing lucrative and convenient ways to sell stolen
goods. Throughout this manual we have noted the strong
influence facilitating environments can have on promoting
criminal behavior. So one should be very cautious about
creating artificial crime opportunities to round up
unknown prolific offenders.
Information from repeat offenders and their confederates
can be used to identify features of the environment that
facilitate offending. Much of the early crime prevention
implemented in convenience stores was developed from
offender interviews (Step 9). In the early 1970s, the
Lakewood, Colorado Police Department interviewed
convicted burglars and learned a great deal about how
they targeted dwellings and handled stolen goods. The
ANALYZE IN DEPTH
When there is specific information that a few people are

responsible for most of a problem, it can be productive to
focus on these individuals. The Boston Police Department
reduced homicides among young males by monitoring a
relatively few gang members. Francis Cullen and
colleagues suggest that probation and parole authorities
should learn the specific circumstances under which each
offender gets into trouble, then help offenders develop
plans to avoid these circumstances, and finally monitor
compliance with these plans.
3131. Know the products that are CRAVED by thieves
n line with the 80-20 principle (Step 18), not all

products are equally at risk of theft because thieves are
very picky about what they will steal. They focus on
relatively few "hot products," such as cars, laptop
computers, DVD players, and cell phones. The hottest
product of all is cash, which Marcus Felson describes as
"the mother's milk of crime." It is the most frequently
stolen item in larcenies, burglaries, and robberies. It fuels
robberies of banks and off-track betting shops, attacks on
payphones, and muggings near ATMs.
People's possessions can help explain their victimization
risks. For example, owning a car doubles the risk of
becoming a crime victim, even when account is taken of
relevant demographic and social variables. And the
particular model of car owned can raise this risk many
times over. To inform people about high-risk cars and to
put pressure on manufacturers to improve security, the
Highway Loss Data Institute in Washington, D.C. publishes
annual data showing the number of theft-related
insurance claims made for each model on the road. The
table shows the five models with the highest and lowest
theft claim frequencies (per 1,000 vehicles on the road)
from among the 305 new models during 2001-2003. The
Cadillac Escalade and Nissan Maxima had claim
frequencies about 30 times higher than the five models
with the lowest claims. Escalades were targeted for their
custom wheels and Maximas for their high-intensity
headlights, which also fit earlier models supplied without
such lights.
Useful as these data are, they do not show which cars are
most at risk from specific forms of theft. However,
research undertaken in the 1980s found that the models
preferred by joyriders were "muscle" cars with powerful
acceleration, such as the Chevrolet Camaro. Those most
often stolen and never recovered were expensive cars
such as Lincolns and Mercedes, and those most often
broken into and stripped of contents were European
models, such as Volkswagens, with good radios that fit a
variety of models. Domestic station wagons, the staples of
family transport, were not at risk of any form of theft.
These were inexpensive, had terrible radios, and joyriders
wouldn't be seen dead in them.
Surveys undertaken by the Loss Prevention Research
Council show that shoplifters consistently choose CDs,
cigarettes, liquor, and fashion items such as Hilfiger jeans
and Nike sneakers. Many of these things can readily be
sold on the street or door-to-door in some places. Police
have paid little attention to the fencing of stolen goods
because it is difficult to prove and attracts relatively light
sentences, but many departments now receive regular
electronic reports on pawnshop transactions. Scanning
these reports will help you keep informed about what
burglars and others are stealing in your area. It will also
help you think about how stolen goods are sold and ways
of disrupting the market.
Highest Theft Claim Frequencies, 2001-03

Cadillac Escalade EXT (2002-03)
Nissan Maxima (2002-03)
Cadillac Escalade (2002-03)
Dodge Stratus/Chrysler Sebring
Dodge Intrepid
Large luxury pickup

Midsize 4-door car
Large luxury SUV
Midsize 4-door car
Large 4-door car
Lowest Theft Claim Frequencies, 2001-03

Large 4-door car
Buick LeSabre
Large 4-door car
Buick Park Avenue
Large station wagon
Ford Taurus
Midsize SUV
Buick Rendezvous 4WD (2002-03)
Midsize station wagon
Saturn LW
AVERAGE ALL CARS
Source: Highway Loss Data Institute (www.hldi.org)
Claim Frequency
20.2
17.0
10.2
8.3
7.9
0.5
0.5
0.5
0.7
0.7
2.5
Concealable. Things that can be hidden in pockets or

bags are more vulnerable to shoplifters and other sneak
thieves. Things that are difficult to identify or can easily
be concealed after being stolen are also more at risk. In
some cases, thefts may even be concealed from the
owners of goods, as when lumber or bricks left lying
around on building sites are stolen.
Removable. The fact that cars and bikes are mobile
helps explain why they are so often stolen. Nor is it
surprising that laptop computers are often stolen since
these are not only desirable but also easy to carry. What
is easy to carry depends on the kind of theft. Both
burglars and shoplifters steal cigarettes, liquor,
medicines, and beauty aids from supermarkets, but
burglars take them in much larger quantities.
Available. Desirable objects that are widely available
and easy to find are at higher risk. This explains why
householders try to hide jewelry and cash from burglars.
It also helps explain why cars become more at risk of
theft as they get older. They become increasingly likely
to be owned by people living in poor neighborhoods
with less off-street parking and more offenders living
nearby. Finally, theft waves can result from the
availability of an attractive new product, such as the cell
phone, which quickly establishes its own illegal market
(see box).
Valuable. Thieves will generally choose the more

expensive goods, particularly when they are stealing to
sell. But value is not simply defined in terms of resale
value. Thus, when stealing for their own use, juvenile
shoplifters may select goods that confer status among
their peers. Similarly, joyriders are more interested in a
car's performance than its financial value.
Enjoyable. Hot products tend to be enjoyable things to

own or consume, such as liquor, tobacco, and DVDs.
Thus, residential burglars are more likely to take DVD
players and televisions than equally valuable electronic
goods, such as microwave ovens. This may reflect the
pleasure-loving lifestyle of many thieves (and
their customers).
Disposable. Only recently has systematic research

begun on the relationship between hot products and
theft markets, but it is clear that thieves will tend to
select things that are easy to sell. This helps explain why
batteries and disposable razors are among the most
frequently stolen items from American drug stores.
Read More:
Clarke, Ronald (1999). Hot Products. Police Research
Series. Paper 112. London: Home Office. (Accessible
at: www.popcenter.org).
The Rise and Fall of the Cloned Phone
Jun- 99
Dec- 99
Jun- 98
Dec- 98
Dec- 97
Jun- 97
Jun- 96
Dec- 96
Dec- 95
Jun- 95
Dec- 94
Jun- 94
Jun- 93
Dec- 93
Dec- 92
Jun- 92
When cell phones became popular, criminals found ways to clone

Semi-Annual Fraud Dollar Losses
them so that they could use them without paying any bills. They used
United States, June 1992 - December 1999
scanners near airports and hotels to capture the numbers that each
$500m
phone transmits in order to send and receive calls. They then created $450m
"clones" of the original phones by re-programming the numbers into $400m
phones they had stolen. The original phone would then be charged
$350m
for calls made by the clone. This rapidly became big business. The top $300m
$250m
line in the graph shows that the cloning losses for all cell phone
$200m
companies increased quite rapidly from June 1992 to June 1996
$150m
when they totaled nearly $450 million for the previous 6 months.
$100m
(The losses were the charges that the phone companies wiped off the $50m
$0
bills of legitimate subscribers whose phones were cloned.) At this
point, the phone companies began to introduce a variety of
technologies that made it much more difficult to steal phone numbers
and to use a clone. There was a rapid reduction in cloning so that, by
Tumbling & Cloning Losses
December 1999, it was all but eliminated. Incidentally, the second
most common form of cell phone fraud, "subscription fraud"
Subscription Frauds
(opening an account with a false name and address), did not
skyrocket when cloning was closed down, as displacement doomsters
would predict. This could be because cloning was easy to "massSource: Clarke, Ronald, Rick Kemper and Laura Wyckoff (2001).
produce" by organized criminals, whereas subscription fraud is not.
"Controlling Cell Phone Fraud in the U.S.," Security Journal, 14:7-22.
ANALYZE IN DEPTH
The acronym CRAVED will help you remember which

goods are most stolen. These are Concealable, Removable,
Available, Valuable, Enjoyable, and Disposable:
3232. Conduct case-control studies
hen analyzing a problem, it is always useful to

ask, "why are these persons, places, times, or
events troublesome, when other similar entities
are far less troublesome?" Answering such questions
requires you to compare problem cases to
non-problem cases.
The simple example of Shawnee bars illustrates the first

four steps for a very small number of locations. We can
also examine a more complex example to point out some
of the details of case-control studies.
Define your cases precisely.

Select a representative sample of these cases.
Define a group of controls that could have been
troublesome but did not become troublesome even
though they were exposed to similar conditions (e.g., in
the same neighborhood or city, serve the same types of
clients, etc.).
Select a representative sample of these controls.
Compare the characteristics of the cases to the
characteristics of the controls.
Define a group of controls that could have been

troublesome. Controls were places in the neighborhood
that showed no evidence of drug dealing. Nearby places
were useful because drug sellers looking for a dealing site
would know them. Therefore, the nearby places were
exposed to dealers but had not been selected by dealers.
Controls should be entities that could have been cases,
but for mysterious reasons did not become so. The
objective of the study is to solve the mystery.
Define the cases precisely. In the early 1990s, John

Eck was interested in why a few places were persistent
This kind of comparison is called a "case-control study." A drug dealing locations and most other nearby places were
not. With the help of the San Diego Police Department,
case-control study involves comparing troublesome
California, over 300 cases of persistent drug places were
persons, places, times, or events with untroublesome
identified in one San Diego neighborhood. These were
persons, places, times, or events. The troublesome cases
identified based on citizen calls, drug enforcement actions,
are called the "cases." The cases to which they are
field interrogation records, arrest data, and patrol officer
compared are called the "controls."
observations. To be classified as persistent, each site
An example comes from data supplied by Susan Wernike, either had to have more than one drug arrest, call, or field
interrogation on separate days; or a warrant for a raid; or
a crime analyst for the Shawnee, Kansas Police
Department. For every bar in Shawnee, she calculated the be identified by a patrol officer. Because multiple
calls per 100 persons of rated capacity. This adjusted for indicators were used to locate these sites, it was
reasonable to believe that most persistent sites
bars of various sizes (see Step 27). The figure shows the
were located.
bars ranked from highest to lowest rate. A basic casecontrol study could be applied here. The bars with the
highest rates would be compared to those with the lowest Select a representative sample of cases that were
rates to see if there are systematic differences in the ways troublesome. For each block in the neighborhood with
a single dealing location, the dealing location was
they operate, the behaviors in the bars, and the types of
selected for study. If two dealing locations were on the
customers they attract.
block, both were selected. If there were more than two,
two were randomly selected. This provided a
Case-control studies are very helpful when the
troublesome cases are rare relative to the untroublesome representative sample of 189 locations. Selecting all the
cases was another valid option, but that would have
ones. This is frequently the situation in problem solving.
raised the costs of the study. Simple random sampling
could also have been used, but would not have
To conduct a valid case-control study you should do
guaranteed coverage of all affected blocks.
the following:
Substantial differences indicate characteristics that might

be contributing to the problem. Similarities indicate
characteristics that are probably not contributing to the
problem. Let's explore these steps with an example.
Select a representative sample of controls. On

each block the same number of non-dealing places was
selected as dealing places. These sites were randomly
selected (as would be the case if they were in a lottery)
from a list of places on each block that had no indicators
of drug activity. Selecting all non-dealing locations would
have been impractical, since there were thousands of non-
Compare the cases to the controls. Observers were

sent to the cases and the controls to record information
about the sites. This included information on: the type of
structure (business, apartment building, single family
home, vacant lot, etc.); the type of street it was on
(number of lanes, one-way/two way, etc.); the distance
from the nearest interstate highway; the types of
surrounding buildings; the proximity of lighting; the
number of apartment units; the presence of fences and
other security; adjacency to alleys and paths; and many
other factors. The objective was to see if the dealing
locations differed substantially from the non-dealing
locations with regard to any of these characteristics. Two
patterns were found, one for crack-dealing sights and the
other for methamphetamine sites. Compared to controls,
crack locations were more likely to be in small apartment
buildings and have a lockable gate in a fence. Compared
to controls, methamphetamine sites were more likely to
be in single-family homes and adjacent to paths. The

seeming preference of drug dealers for rental units in
small buildings (either buildings with few apartments or
single family homes) suggested that they were looking for
places with low place management. In a later
experiment, Eck found that intervening with landlords did
reduce drug-related crime.
Case-control studies are different from most other studies
and require special techniques to analyze data. Step 33
describes one technique that is particularly useful.
Case-control studies are very useful in problem analysis.
The approach is flexible enough to be applied to a small
number of places (as in the Shawnee example) or a very
large number (as in the San Diego example). Though the
examples focused on places, the same process can be
applied to people, times, and events.
Read More:
Loftin, Colin and David McDowall. (1988). "The Analysis
of Case-Control Studies in Criminology." Journal of
Quantitative Criminology 4:85-98.
Calls per 100 capacity
COMPARING HIGH AND LOW CALL RATE BARS - Shawnee, KS

Cases
8.00
Controls
6.00
compare
4.00
2.00
0.00
D E
Bars
Do Not Perform an Uncontrolled Case Study

A common mistake is to collect data only on the persons, places, times, or events that are troublesome. This can
provide misleading results because you learn only about characteristics common among the troublesome cases, but
not if they are different from untroublesome cases. An example of this is a study conducted by the FBI in the early
1990s to understand killings of police officers. The researchers collected information on officers killed in the line of
duty, but did not collect information on officers who were exposed to similar conditions but not killed.
Consequently, we do not know which, if any, of the characteristics of the dead officers contributed to their killing.
Living officers exposed to the same conditions may share many of these same characteristics.
ANALYZE IN DEPTH
dealing locations. By making sure cases and controls were

from the same block, the selection process assured that
the controls were exposed to drug dealers. Random
selection assured us that the controls were representative
of all non-dealing locations.
3333.
Measure association
o parking lots with gate attendants, for example,

have fewer thefts from vehicles than parking lots
without gate attendants? Are apartment buildings
with on-site managers at less risk of having drug dealing
than ones without such managers? To answer questions
like these you will need to determine if there is a
statistical association between some characteristic of
persons, places or events and some measure of the
problem (crime, injury, etc.).
There are many ways to calculate association. Often a
correlation coefficient is used. Correlation coefficients
range from -1 to 1. A negative correlation means an
increase in one characteristic is associated with a decline
in the other (and a decline is one associated with an
increase in the other). A positive correlation means that
an increase in one characteristic is associated with an
increase in the other (and a decline in one is associated
with a decline in the other). Big coefficients mean strong
associations (positive or negative). If a correlation
coefficient is near zero, there is an absence of association
- a change in one characteristic is unrelated to a change
in the other. Any spreadsheet or statistical analysis
program can perform the calculations.
The Crime Analysis Unit of the Jacksonville-Duval County
(FL) Sheriff's Department examined apartment complexes
over 50 units. They found that for the 269 apartment
complexes, the correlation between number of units and
number of crimes is about .57: a modest positive
correlation. There is a very high positive correlation (.91)
between the number of property crimes and the number
of violent crimes in these apartment complexes.
characteristic is absent. If an odds ratio is greater than 1,

the risk is higher when the characteristic is present than
when it is absent (a positive association). An odds ratio
of 3 means that the risk of the outcome is three times as
large when the characteristic is present than when it
is absent.
To use an odds ratio both the outcome and the
characteristic must have only two values. For example, for
the outcome, 1 means that a bar is a high crime bar and
0 means that it is a low crime bar. For the characteristic,
1 means that the staff has been trained how to prevent
assaults, and 0 means that the staff has not been so
trained. The odds ratio would tell you whether there is an
association between bars that have staff trained to
prevent assaults and a bar having a great deal of crime.
Here we would expect a negative association, so the odds
ratio would have to be less than one to meet
our expectations.
Table 1 shows how to calculate an odds ratio. The
outcome is in the row and the characteristic is in the
column. The number of cases with the appropriate value
for both outcome and characteristic is in each cell. Cell A
contains the number of cases that have the characteristic
in question. Cell C contains the number of cases without
the characteristic. Cell B contains the number of controls
that have the characteristic. Cell D contains the number
of controls without the characteristic. The odds ratio can
be computed with a hand calculator using the formula at
the bottom of the table, but many statistical software
packages will also calculate it.
Table 2 illustrates the application of odds ratios in a case

You cannot use a correlation coefficient to measure
control study of drug dealing places in San Diego (see
association in a case-control study (Step 32). Instead, you Step 32). The outcome is persistent cocaine or heroin
should use an odds ratio.
dealing. There were 58 apartment buildings in the study
that had indicators of persistent dealing (cases). There
Odds ratios can be any number greater than zero. When were also 47 apartments in the study that showed no
an odds ratio is equal to one, there is no association
indication of any drug dealing (controls). Does the
between the characteristic and the outcome. That is, the
presence of locked or unlocked gates or on-site managers
risk of the outcome is the same whether or not the
influence whether a drug dealer will select the location?
characteristic is present. If the odds ratio is between 0
When apartments with unlocked gates were compared to
and 1, risk is higher when the characteristic is absent than those locked or with no gates the odds ratio was greater
when it is present (a negative association). An odds ratio than one, but this was not significantly different from one
of .1 indicates the risk of the outcome when the
(see Step 53), so we cannot rule out the possibility that
characteristic is present is a tenth of that when the
there is no relationship between unlocked gates and drug
This is a statistically significant negative association.

But remember, correlation is not the same as causation. A
correlation suggests that the characteristic in question
might be a contributing cause, but by itself a correlation is
insufficient to demonstrate causation.
Table 1: Calculating Odds Ratios

Characteristic
Outcome
Yes (1)
Yes (1) -- Cases
A
No (0) -- Controls
B
No (0)
C
D
Total
A+C
B+D
Odds Ratio = (A/B)/(C/D) = (A*B)/(C*B)

Table 2: Apartment Building Security and Drug Dealing
Dealing
Non-Dealing
Dealing
Non-Dealing
Dealing
Non-Dealing
Unlocked Gates
16
8
Locked Gates
33
13
On-site Manager
14
24
Locked Gates or No Gates

42
39
Unlocked or No Gates
25
34
No On-site Manager
44
23
Odds Ratio
1.857
Odds Ratio
3.452
Odds Ratio
0.305
ANALYZE IN DEPTH
dealing (recall, when an odds ratio is one, there is no

association). The association between locked gates and
drug dealing is significantly positive. Buildings with
locked gates were almost three and a half times more
likely to have cocaine or heroin dealing than other
apartment buildings. Apartment buildings with on-site
managers had about three-tenths the chance of becoming
dealing sites as the apartments without on-site managers.
3434. Look for crime facilitators
rime facilitators help offenders commit crimes or

acts of disorder. There are three types of facilitators:
Physical facilitators are things that augment offenders'

capabilities or help to overcome prevention measures.
Trucks extend offenders' capacity to move stolen goods,
telephones allow people to make obscene phone calls,
and firearms help overcome resistance to robberies.
Some physical facilitators are tools, but others are part
of the physical environment. Felson and colleagues
describe how the old layout of the Port Authority Bus
Terminal in New York facilitated a variety of crimes.
Types of crimes had specific ecological niches created by
the variety of design features in the old station.
Social facilitators stimulate crime or disorder by

enhancing rewards from crime, legitimating excuses to
offend, or by encouraging offending. Groups of young
men, for example, can provide the social atmosphere
that encourages rowdy behavior at sporting events.
Gangs and organized criminal networks facilitate
criminal activity by their members.
Chemical facilitators increase offenders' abilities to

ignore risks or moral prohibitions. Some offenders, for
example, drink heavily or use drugs before a crime in
order to decrease their nervousness.
Each type of facilitator acts against particular forms of

situational crime prevention (Steps 39-43). This is shown
in the table. Each facilitator (in the columns) can counter
specific prevention methods (marked by dots). Physical
facilitators help offenders overcome preventive measures
that increase risk or effort. They can also act as
provocations to deviancy. Social facilitators can offset
each of the prevention methods. Bribes, for example,
offset risk. Some crimes require multiple offenders to
offset the effort. Perceptions of target desirability are
often influenced by what is desired by others. What is an
acceptable excuse often depends on what others will
accept. And acquaintances can provoke crime or disorder
through encouragement. Chemical facilitators allow
offenders to ignore the risk and effort involved in
committing a crime, and to make unacceptable excuses.
Because of their capacity to blunt crime prevention, it is
important to identify the role of facilitators in a problem.
Evidence about facilitators can be found in investigative
reports and from investigators, by interviewing victims and
offenders, and by observing social situations. Analysis of
crime reports can be used to determine the association
between crimes and various facilitators.
If facilitators do play a role in the problem, then the next

step is to find the sources of the facilitators. Sources will,
of course, vary by type of facilitator. Physical facilitators
might be readily available, as in the case of rocks for
rioters or public phones for drug dealers. Or they may be
purchased legitimately, as is the case for many burglary
tools. Or they may be stolen, as is sometimes the case
with vehicles used in serious crimes. Once their source is
found, it may be possible to do something about them.
The boxes show measures taken to address the use of
public phones in drug dealing and facilitating
environments around cash machines.
Facilitators Used by Offenders to Counter Crime
Prevention Methods
Crime prevention
Type of facilitator used
method
Physical Social Chemical
Increase Risk
Increase Effort
Reduce Rewards
Remove Excuses
Reduce Provocations
Measures to Prevent Use of Public Phones by
Drug Dealers in U.S. Cities
Before cell phones became widely available, drug dealers
often relied on the use of public phones to make contact
with suppliers and customers. Many ways to stop them
were tried, including:
City
ordinances to license public phones and ban them

or limit their number at specific locations or categories
of location.
Installation of rotary dials that do not permit outgoing
calls to pagers.
Modification of phones to block incoming calls.
Community pressure on local phone companies or the
city government to remove public phones or relocate
them in better lit or supervised areas.
Permitting only operator-assisted calls or emergency
calls during night hours by blocking coin operation of
the phones.
Removal or modification of public phones by businesses
such as convenience stores and gas stations.
Other types of intervention such as increased police
patrols, warning labels on phones, and "hotlines" to
report problems.
Source: Natarajan, Mangai and colleagues (1996). Drug
Dealing and Pay Phones: The Scope for Intervention.
Security Journal 7: 245-251.
Chemical facilitators are abundant and frequently

associated with crime and disorder. Alcohol is particularly
implicated as a facilitator. Various mixtures of facilitators
are common, particularly social and chemical in
entertainment venues. Several of the 25 techniques of
situational crime prevention are designed to reduce the
effect of the three kinds of crime facilitators (Steps
39-43).
Security Provisions for Bank Cash Machines in New York City and Los Angeles
New York City
Enclosed cash machine within a secured vestibule
Increased lighting
Transparent windows in facility enclosure.
Elevated mirrors for users
Reduced vegetation near machine
Surveillance cameras
Safety reminders to users
Security provisions notice to potential offenders
Crime assessment prior to installation of cash machine
Security guard personnel
Reduced cash machine operational hours based on temporal crime patterns in area
Los
Angeles
Required by legislation.
Not required under legislation, but commonly implemented at bank's discretion.
* Required only during non-banking hours for ATMs located inside bank buildings open for customer use.
Source: Guerette, Rob and Ronald Clarke (2003). "Product Life Cycles and Crime Automated Teller Machines and
Robbery." Security Journal 16: 7-18.
ANALYZE IN DEPTH
Social facilitators depend heavily on whom offenders

associate with, and the settings for the association. Risky
facilities (Step 28), for example, can provide settings for
social facilitation. Gangs provide the social support for
crime. But even legitimate activity can on occasion spark
social facilitation, as in the case with some politically
motivated violence, or college student disturbances
following games against historical rivals.
3535. Understand the crime from beginning to end
e think of crime as over in a flash. It takes just a

few seconds to snatch a necklace in the street,
pick a pocket, or to break into a car. And rare are
the burglars who search every conceivable hiding place.
Instead, they try to leave as soon as they have found
something worth stealing - usually within a few minutes
of entering the house. Snatching the necklace or breaking
into the house is, in fact, just one step in a series of steps
needed to complete each of these crimes.
You should try to understand the sequence of steps
involved in your crime or disorder problem. There are
several approaches that you can follow:
Leslie Kennedy of Rutgers University and his colleague

Vincent Sacco separate the steps into precursors,
transactions, and aftermath, and have produced a
criminology textbook, The Criminal Event, organized
around these three stages.
William Haddon has developed a similar classification to
assist thinking about road accident prevention. He
divides preventive actions into pre-crash, crash, and post
crash.
Derek Cornish uses the concept of crime "scripts" to
guide analysis. The underlying idea is that any particular
category of crime requires a set of standard actions to
be performed in a particular order, just as in the script of
a play. The scenes are the sequential stages of the
crime; the cast consists of the criminals, victims and
bystanders; and the tools they use are the props.
Whichever of these approaches you use, try to list the

sequence of steps the offender must make to complete
the crime. The table below is Cornish's simplified

representation of the many steps that joyriders must
complete, but it shows that the specific act we consider to
be the crime (in this case, taking the car) is preceded by
preparation, and followed by escaping and enjoying the
proceeds. This brings us to the reason for analyzing
crimes in this careful, step-by-step manner: understanding
clearly the sequence of actions required for the successful
completion of the crime will reveal to you many more
points of intervention. In other words, this will broaden
the choice of responses for to you consider in your
project. The final column of the table lists the possible
responses, keyed to each stage of joyriding.
Joyriding is one of the simpler crimes, but you can follow
the same process of breaking the crime down into its
constituent steps for more complex crimes as well. One
example is crowd disturbances (including riots). Clark
McPhail, a leading expert on crowds, created a three-step
process for analyzing all gatherings: the assembling
process, the assembled gathering, and the disbursal
process. Tamara Madensen, a graduate student at the
University of Cincinnati, added two earlier steps: initial
planning and pre-assembly preparation. Police might
send out warnings about hosting large drinking parties to
forestall initial planning. To prevent bonfires, easily
burnable trash should be removed during the preassembly preparations. Police might greet arriving
students to encourage lawful behavior during the
assembling process. When the crowd is assembled, police
can monitor behavior and intervene if trouble develops.
During the disbursement process, police want to make
sure the crowd breaks up quickly and peacefully.
Steps in Joyriding and Associated Responses

STAGES
Preparation
Entering setting
Enabling conditions
Selecting target
Completing the theft
Exiting the setting

Aftermath
STEPS
Get tools (e.g., screwdriver, duplicate keys, slidehammer, short steel tube)
Select co-offender
Enter parking lot
Loiter unobtrusively
Reject alarmed cars
Choose suitable vehicle
Enter car (duplicate keys, use screwdriver)
Break ignition lock (tube or slide-hammer)
Hot wire ignition and start car
Leave parking lot
Use car to joyride
Abandon car on wasteland
Set fire to car
RESPONSES
Control sales of equipment such as hand scanners and
duplicate keys
Parking lot barriers; attendants; few entrances
CCTV and/or regular patrols to deter loiterers
Visible protection of tempting vehicles
CCTV to monitor suspicious behavior; improve natural
surveillance of lot; vehicle alarm to alert security;
vehicle immobilizer
Attendants or other exit barriers
Vehicle-tracking system activated; vehicle curfew
program; surveillance of dumping sites
Source: Cornish, Derek (1994). "The Procedural Analysis of Offending and its Relevance for Situational Prevention." Crime Prevention Studies,
volume 3. Monsey, NY: Criminal Justice Press
In an unusual application of situational prevention, Rob

Guerette of Florida International University, has
undertaken a careful study for the U.S. Border Patrol of
the circumstances in which illegal migrants die crossing
the U.S.-Mexico border. Each year, some 300 migrants die
in tragic circumstances - for example, by drowning in
canals and rivers, by heat exposure in desert regions, or as
result of vehicle accidents. By tracing the steps that add
the illegal migrants take in crossing the border and trying
to understand the circumstances that lead to loss of life,
he came up with a number of life-saving suggestions. He
classified these suggestions in a two-way grid:
Across
the top, he followed William Haddon's method

and sorted the preventive suggestions into those that
applied before, during, and after the life-threatening
event.
Down the side of the grid, he followed the crime triangle
and sorted measures by whether they were aimed at (1)
the migrant or the "victim," (2) the "coyote," who is
employed by migrants to get them safely across the
border (the "offender"), and (3) the "place" or
environment, i.e., desert, rivers, urban areas, and
so forth.
Some of these suggestions were extensions or
improvements of measures already in place, but others
were novel, which shows the value of his approach. Most
of the suggestions are self-explanatory, but more
background is needed to understand some of them (the
numbering follows the table):
1. His research showed that proportionately more females

die from heat exposure.
3. Migrants typically gather in staging towns close to the
border in Mexico where they make contact
with "coyotes."
4. When highly trained search and rescue agents are
dispatched to make a rescue, Guerette found migrants
are more likely to survive than when regular line agents
are dispatched.
5. To prevent immediate attempts to re-cross the desert in
the very hot months, migrants apprehended at these
times in the Arizona desert were laterally repatriated in
2003 to Mexican towns near the Texas border. This
experiment was effective in saving lives.
6. In 2004, the Mexican authorities agreed to accept
repatriations from Arizona to destinations in the interior
of Mexico.
14. Motorists in Arizona commonly see small bands of
illegal migrants attempting to cross the desert in the hot
months. This campaign would seek their aid in saving
lives by calling a 1-800 number to report the sighting.
15. Border Patrol agents in Arizona told Guerette that
they often had great difficulty in locating a migrant
reported to be in distress by other migrants, whom they
had apprehended. This is because large swathes of the
desert are quite featureless and the directions given by
apprehended migrants are often vague. A systematic
program of temporary desert markings using colorcoding or symbols could ameliorate this difficulty.
Before life threatening

event
1. Inform female migrants
about dangers of crossing
the desert
2. Implement alert system for
hazardous conditions
During life threatening

event
3. Distribute instructions in
staging towns for migrants
to follow when in distress
4. Expand Border Patrol
search and rescue capacity
After life threatening

event
5. Lateral repatriation
6. Interior repatriation
Coyote
7. Implement alert system for

hazardous conditions
8. Warn coyotes of
prosecution in event of
migrant deaths
9. Target coyote for arrest
10. Create task force to

prosecute coyotes when
deaths occur
Environment
11. Target problematic times

and places
12. Erect barricades at
dangerous crossing points
13. Post visible warning signs
in risky areas
14. "Save a life/report a

migrant" publicity
campaign
15. Desert markers
16. Continually review data

to detect new patterns of
hazard
Migrant
ANALYZE IN DEPTH
Preventing Deaths of Illegal Migrants
3636. Be sure to answer the five "W" (and one "H") questions
hen you have completed your analysis using the

concepts discussed in the previous steps, you
should ask whether it meets the test of a good
newspaper story. Does it adequately answer the 5 W and
one H questions: what, where, when, who, why,
and how?
These same questions structure Barry Poyner's method of
crime analysis by breaking up a larger problem into its
constituent parts. For example, when he was asked by the
Home Office to study "street attacks" in downtown
Coventry and Birmingham (two large cities in England), he
found that the police classified these as robberies and
thefts from the person, but he found that the majority of
incidents fell into a number of quite distinct problems:
Robbery from street vending booths

Robbery of drunks
Money snatched while being taken to the bank
Snatching women's purses
Wallets/money snatched from the victim's hand after a
verbal ploy
Thefts from shopping bags
Pickpocketing at bus stops
When did it happen? Householders or car owners

might know only that their car was stolen or their house
burgled "sometime during the weekend." For many
interpersonal crimes, however, the victim will be able to
report precisely when the crime occurred, which may
permit inferences about such matters as whether the
streets were deserted.
Who was involved? There is always at least one

offender; there may be one or more victims even if they
have no direct contact with the offender; there may be
witnesses and other third parties. Statements in police
records made by witnesses and victims can provide
much useful information, but it might sometimes be
important to question a sample about the event.
Why did they act as they did? It is important to

understand the specific benefits that a particular kind of
crime brings to the offender. In many cases of theft, the
motive will be obvious, but for interpersonal crimes and
for vandalism the motives may only emerge from
interviewing offenders (Step 10). Equally important for
prevention may be to understand why victims and
witnesses behaved as they did and to answer such
questions as "What causes some victims to respond by
attacking the offender?" and "Why do witnesses often
fail to intervene?"
How did the offender carry out the crime? Crime

can be thought of as a process, with several steps from
initiation to completion, rather than a circumscribed act
occurring at a specific point in time. At each step the
offender must make decisions, might need to work with
others, and might need to employ specific knowledge
and tools. This is essentially the idea underlying
Cornish's "script" approach discussed in Step 35. It may
not always be possible to develop detailed scripts, but
the analysis should give a clear picture of how the crime
was accomplished.
This was a much more meaningful characterization of

"street attacks" and was an important first step in
understanding the events. He then began to sort through
the incident reports, trying to arrive at a picture of each
problem that would help him find a response.
Incident reports are quite variable in the information
recorded, especially when the victim is not present and
there are no witnesses. However, Poyner tries to piece the
reports together to get a picture of the particular problem
(see box). For each incident he tries to discover:
What happened? This entails spelling out the

sequence of events and the actions of those involved
(Step 35).
Where did it happen? Sometimes the sequence of
events takes place in several locations. For example, a
car might be stolen from a parking lot, moved to a
garage for stripping of valuable parts, and then dumped
on a piece of wasteland. Information may only be
available about the first and last locations. Visiting these
can help explain why the offender selected them.
Poyner's analysis of pickpocketing at bus stops illustrates

the approach. He was able to construct a detailed
description of the crime by supplementing the rather
sketchy incident report with observations of the lines
waiting for the bus. He found that the peak time for
pickpocketing was the afternoon rush hour, particularly on
Fridays when lines were long. Groups of three or four
youths would hang about near the lines, looking in the
As their victims began to board the bus, which used a

pay-as-you-enter system, the youths would run to the
front of the line, jump on the boarding platform of the
bus and jostle the riders. They would ask the driver some
irrelevant question about the destination of the bus.
Meanwhile one of the youths would pick the pocket of
the victim. The victim would be irate at being jostled and
would not realize what was happening. The driver would
shout at the youths to get off his bus and other
passengers would be complaining. The youths would step
off the bus and slip away into the crowd. The youths were
never caught. The victim would only find out later that
his wallet was gone.
This analysis suggested four possible responses:

Instead of pay-as-you-enter, tickets might be sold in
advance for use at these stops.
Bus stops might be re-sited away from main pavements
and organized in bays more like a bus station. This
would make it difficult for offenders to lie in wait.
Use a bus shelter to screen the waiting lines so the
offenders would be unable to identify potential victims
in advance.
Construct line-marshalling barriers at the boarding point
so offenders could not jump onto the bus platform.
Note that all these solutions are outside the normal remit
of the police. Officers rarely consider that their role
involves, for example, redesigning bus stops. But as a
problem-solving crime analyst your job is to cut crime, and
you may need gently to persuade police colleagues that,
in the widest sense, it is their job, too.
Working Like an Archaeologist

"There is a further advantage of combining incidents. In some cases we may have much less detail
than other cases but otherwise the facts we do know about are the same. It may be possible to
reconstruct the missing data in these less well reported incidents in much the same way as the
archaeologist reconstructs broken pottery from an excavation. He may only have a few pieces of the
broken pot but from knowledge of other similar pots he can be reasonably sure about the form of the
whole pot. This archaeological approach is quite helpful when, for example, we may have some
detailed accounts of what offenders do in a few cases where they have been caught. It seems
reasonable to believe that similar behaviour occurred in similar crimes even though the offenders
were not caught."
Source: Poyner, Barry (1986). "A Model for Action." Situational Crime Prevention, Gloria Laycock and
Kevin Heal. London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office.
ANALYZE IN DEPTH
windows of nearby stores to avoid arousing suspicion,

while watching at the same time for suitable victims.
These were invariably middle-aged or older men who kept
their wallets in the back pockets of their trousers.
(Younger men wore tighter-fitting trousers and did not
keep their wallets in their back pockets.)
3737. Know that to err is human
rime prevention often involves predictions. Will

offenders associated with the problem continue to
offend as they have done in the past? Will recent
victims become victims again in the near future? Will hot
spot places become cold spots, or will they stay hot?
Though past behavior may be our best predictor of future
behavior, it is not a perfect predictor.
The examples above deal with predicting the future. But
we also try to probe the unknown in other ways, including
in our responses to problems. A polygraph examiner tries
to assess whether the subject is lying or not. Drug tests
are used to determine if people have recently used illicit
drugs. Metal detectors and baggage screening devices at
airports are used to determine if passengers have
weapons on their person or in their luggage. In all these
examples the examiner is trying to draw a conclusion
about an unknown condition. And just like predictions of
the future, the examiner may make an accurate
assessment or an inaccurate one. Consequently, it is very
important to understand how predictions and other
judgments can fail.
A useful way to examine errors of prediction and
judgment is to compare the prediction to what actually
occurs. The columns in Table 1 show two possible
predictions: Yes, the outcome will occur; and No, the
outcome will not occur. The rows show two actual
outcomes: Yes, the outcome did occur; and No, the
outcome did not occur.
Table 1: Types of Prediction Errors
Actual Outcome
YES
NO
YES
NO
A. Accurate
True Positives
C. False Positives
Accuracy Rate
False Negative Rate
False Positive Rate
B. False
Negatives
D. Accurate
True Negatives
(A+D)/(A+B+C+D)
B/(A+B+C+D)
C/(A+B+C+D)
Imagine a large number of predictions. When a prediction

corresponds to the actual, then it is accurate. Cells A and
D contain counts of accurate predictions. You can
calculate an accuracy rate by adding the number of
predictions that fall into these two categories and dividing
by all the predictions made.
Lets look at cells B and C. When the decision-maker

predicts that the outcome will not occur, but it does occur
then it goes into cell B. This is called a False Positive.
Cases in cell C represent situations in which the decisionmaker has predicted that the outcome would occur, but it
did not. These are False Negatives. You can calculate
error rates for both types by dividing the number of
predictions in each cell by the total number of predictions.
Lets look at a hypothetical example. To curb crime in
rental housing, a police department facilitates and
encourages landlords to conduct background checks.
Prospective renters with recent histories of criminal
behavior are not accepted. Such a policy implies a
prediction that people with recent histories of criminal
involvement will continue that involvement on or nearby
the rental property and that people without such
backgrounds will not engage in this type of behavior.
Even advocates of such a policy would agree that such
predictions are not perfect, but it would be useful to know
two things. First, does such a policy reduce rental
property crime? An evaluation could answer this
question. But even if it does reduce crime, what are the
negative consequences? To answer this question requires
an analysis of the prediction errors.
If we were able to collect the relevant data we might be
able to create a table like Table 2. We see that the
policy's predictions are accurate. But how do we feel
about the errors? Should something be done about
people without a recent history of prior criminal
involvement who commit crimes? Are too many former
offenders who are not engaging in criminal behavior
being denied housing?
Table 2: Example of Prediction Error Analysis
Prior Criminal Involvement
Later
Criminal
Involvement
YES
NO
Total
YES
35
35
35
35
70
Accuracy Rate
False Negative Rate
False Positive Rate
NO
Total
10
496
506
45
531
576
92.2%
1.7%
6.1%
Further, we may regret one type of error more than

another. If the types of crimes being prevented by the
landlords are relatively minor, then the false positive rate
might be too high. But if these are crimes of serious
violence being averted, then the false negative rate may
be of greater concern. The consequences of the errors are
very important and people often disagree over these.
In some circumstances it is possible to use a pilot test to

accurately estimate the errors by making the predictions,
not acting on them, and carefully observing what
happens. This might be difficult to do with offenders, who
prefer to keep their misdeeds hidden, but it could work
with potential victims or crime places. For example, a
response to a problem might involve predicting which
places are most likely to be crime sites and then
intervening at those locations. Prior to implementing this
response, a pilot study could be conducted in which the
predictions are made, but no action is taken. If the error
rates are unacceptably high, then it might not be worth
implementing the response.
Another source of disagreement are the error rates

themselves. Such rates are often very difficult to estimate.
Consider the shaded boxes in Table 2. Under most
circumstances, these figures will be unknown. The
landlords might count how many people they turned away
because of a criminal record, but they cannot tell us what
such people would do if they had not been turned away.
In other situations the shoe is on the other foot; false
positives may be known with some precision, but false
negatives are unknown. In airport screening, false
positives are known because predictions of having
contraband are followed by closer scrutiny. A passenger
who security personnel believe is carrying a firearm will
be subject to a very careful search, thus revealing if the
initial prediction was accurate or inaccurate. However,
false negatives are not known with much reliability. A
passenger, who carries contraband past airport security
may not be checked again, So we cannot learn that she
was a false negative.
ANALYZE IN DEPTH
Tighter restrictions to curb offending by people who have

no recent criminal record might reduce the false negative
rate, but it could increase the false positive rate,
particularly if the information for making the decisions is
less accurate than the information currently used. On the
other hand, making distinctions among applicants with a
recent criminal history could decrease the false positive
rate, but at the expense of increasing the false negative
rate. Such tradeoffs are quite common.
3838. Embrace your key role at response
he first inclination of police, even when they have

been involved in a detailed analysis of a problem, is
to try to solve it by beefing up enforcement. You
should expect this and not oppose it, even if the impact is
usually short-lived. But from the beginning you should be
helping your police colleagues find more permanent
solutions. Local community partners could provide this
help, but instead they often promote their own agendas
and push solutions with limited impact. The result is often
a compromise package of measures, none of which is
effective, but each of which may satisfy one or other of
the parties. In fact, the disagreements over solutions may
lead to a loss of momentum and nothing may be
properly implemented.
You can help to stop this from happening, but you must
first become an expert on solutions. For example, if the
problem is one of car theft, you must be able to speak
authoritatively about the ineffectiveness of decoy vehicles
or "lock your car" campaigns. If it is a burglary problem,
you must know the results of research on burglar alarms
or improved street lighting, both of which may be
suggested as solutions. You should also be thoroughly
familiar with findings on displacement, since innovative
solutions are often blocked by knee-jerk invocations of
this theory.
To become an expert on solutions you must know how to
find out more about particular responses by undertaking
rapid literature searches (Step 19). You must also become
an expert on situational crime prevention, the science of

reducing opportunities for crime. Situational prevention
uses the same action-research methodology as problemoriented policing and has dozens of evaluated successes
to its credit. Much of the knowledge about displacement,
diffusion of benefits, repeat victimization, and many other
concepts discussed in this manual have been developed
by situational prevention researchers. The next five steps
discuss the 25 techniques of situational crime prevention,
which fall into five main groups (see box). These are
defined by what Nick Tilley of the University of
Nottingham Trent in the U.K. calls the mechanism through
which the techniques achieve their preventive effect:
increasing the effort of crime, increasing the risks,
reducing the rewards, reducing provocations and
removing excuses.
At this point, you might be asking yourself why you
should assume this responsibility for identifying solutions.
Isn't it enough that you carry most of the burden at the
scanning, analysis, and assessment stages? And even if
you did take on this role, why should anyone pay
attention to you? But to become a problem-solving
analyst you must go beyond your traditional analytic
function. You must become a full and equal member of
the problem-solving team. You may be relatively junior,
but your authority comes from your expert knowledge, not
your position. People will listen if you make novel
suggestions, or if you provide supporting evidence for
other people's good ideas.
Twenty-Five Techniques of Situational Crime Prevention

Increase The Effort
Increase The Risks
Reduce The Rewards
Reduce Provocations
Remove Excuses
1. Target harden
2. Control access to facilities
3. Screen exits
4. Deflect offenders
5. Control tools/weapons
6. Extend guardianship
7. Assist natural surveillance
8. Reduce anonymity
9. Use place managers
10. Strengthen formal surveillance
11. Conceal targets
12. Remove targets
13. Identify property
14. Disrupt markets
15. Deny benefits
16. Reduce frustrations and stress
17. Avoid disputes
18. Reduce arousal and temptation
19. Neutralize peer pressure
20. Discourage imitation
21. Set rules
22. Post instructions
23. Alert conscience
24. Assist compliance
25. Control drugs and alcohol
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
Criticism
It is simplistic and atheoretical.
It has not been shown to work; it displaces crime

and often makes it worse.
It diverts attention from the root causes of crime.
It is a conservative, managerial approach to the
crime problem.
It promotes a selfish, exclusionary society.
It promotes Big Brother and restricts
personal freedoms.
It blames the victim.
Rebuttal
It is based on three crime opportunity theories: routine
activity, crime pattern, and rational choice. It also draws
on social psychology.
Many dozens of case studies show that it can reduce
crime, usually with little displacement.
It achieves immediate results and allows time for finding
longer-term solutions to crime.
It promises no more than it can deliver. It requires that
solutions be economic and socially acceptable.
It provides as much protection to the poor as to the rich.
The democratic process protects society from these
dangers. People are willing to endure inconvenience and
small infringements of liberty when these protect them
from crime.
It empowers victims by providing them with information
about crime risks and how to avoid them.
You should always opt for solutions that could bring a

rapid reduction in the problem. This means that you must
focus on the immediate, direct causes of a problem rather
than the more distant, indirect ones. This important
distinction has been developed by Paul Ekblom of the
Home Office, and can be illustrated by the problem of bar
fight injuries caused by broken bottles and glasses.
Distant "root" causes might include racial discrimination
producing a generation of disaffected minority youths,
lack of local employment opportunities resulting in widespread social exclusion, and the premium placed on a
"tough" reputation in a deprived and lawless community.
More immediate, situational causes might include
irresponsible serving practices promoting drunkenness in
local bars and taverns, and the immediate availability of
bottles and glasses that can easily be used as
deadly weapons.
Rapid and sustained reductions in crime can only result
from addressing situational causes; addressing root
causes, even if we knew what to do about them, can only
pay off in the comparatively distant future - long after the
current stakeholders have any remaining interest in the
problem. Meanwhile, unless the immediate causes are
dealt with, broken glasses and bottles will continue to
claim victims.
Some situational solutions can also take a long time to
implement. For example, the danger posed by glasses and
bottles could be addressed by legislation requiring bars
and taverns to use only toughened glasses and bottles

that disintegrate into crumbs when broken. This would
probably take years to accomplish. Much more realistic
would be to bring community pressure to bear on local
taverns to serve beer only in toughened or plastic glasses
and to refuse to sell bottles at the bar. This ought to be
achievable in a much shorter time. You might have a
particular analytic role in promoting this solution by
assembling data about the likely costs for the pubs and
the reduced costs of injuries and emergency care. In fact,
it will probably fall to you (who else?) to collect data
about the feasibility, costs and the public acceptability of
any of the measures that are being seriously considered
by the problem-solving partnership.
The bottom line is that you must acquire knowledge of a
broad range of solutions, and be prepared to fight for
good ideas, if your careful analytic work is to bear fruit.
Read More:
Clarke, Ronald (1997). Situational Crime Prevention:
Successful Case Studies (2nd ed.). Monsey, NY: Criminal
Justice Press.
Von Hirsch, Andrew, David Garland and Alison Wakefield
(2000). Ethical and Social Perspectives on Situational
Crime Prevention. Oxford: Hart Publishing.
FIND A PRACTICAL RESPONSE
Seven Criticisms of Situational Crime Prevention - and Rebuttals
3939. Increase the effort of crime
ere we describe the most basic category of

situational measures - those designed to increase
the difficulties of crime - beginning with target
hardening. Situational prevention is sometimes dismissed
as being nothing more than this, though it is only one of
the 25 techniques that the approach encompasses. Note
that there is considerable overlap between the techniques.
For example, target hardening makes crime more difficult,
but it can also slow up offenders and increase their
chances of getting caught. Some measures can also serve
more than one purpose. When using this classification, do
not spend time worrying where a particular measure fits use it only to ensure that you consider the widest possible
repertoire of situational responses to a particular problem.
Harden targets. An obvious, often highly effective way
to obstruct the vandal or the thief is through physical
barriers such as locks, screens, or reinforced materials. The
introduction more than 30 years ago of steering locks in
this country and overseas brought about long-term
reductions in car theft, and ignition immobilizers are now
reinforcing these benefits. Anti-robbery screens in London
post offices have reduced robberies by 40 percent and
bullet-resistant passenger screens have cost-effectively
reduced assaults and robberies committed against cab
drivers in New York City (see Robbery of Taxi Drivers,
Problem-Oriented Guides for Police No. 27, accessible at
www.cops.usdoj.gov and www.popcenter.org).
Control access to facilities. Keeping people out of
places they have no right to be, such as military camps,
factories, and apartment blocks, has a long pedigree think only of the portcullises, moats, and drawbridges of
medieval castles. It is also a central component of Oscar
Newman's concept of defensible space, arguably the start
of scientific interest in situational prevention. Barry Poyner
has demonstrated that the installation of entry phones
and the demolition of walkways linking buildings
significantly reduced muggings at a London estate (Step
24). In some cases, access controls are intended to ensure
the possession of tickets and documents. The redesign of
tickets to make them easier to check produced a sharp
reduction in fare evasion on Vancouver, Canada ferries. In
the most famous example, baggage and passenger
screening at airports in the early 1970s contributed to a
reduction in the number of airline hijackings worldwide
from about 70 to 15 per year.
Screen exits. The purpose of exit screening is to ensure
that those leaving a building, a facility, or some other
place have not stolen anything or have paid all fees and
taxes. Passengers on the Washington, D.C. subway must
insert their tickets in the automatic gates not only when

entering the subway, but also on leaving. This provides
two opportunities to check that the fare has been paid.
On the New York City subway, passengers must insert
their tickets in the gates only once, when entering the
subway, thus reducing the chances of detecting fare
evasion. Other examples of exit screening include border
controls on leaving a country and the use of electronic
tags in library books and merchandise. These tags activate
an alarm if books have not been checked out or if a thief
tries to remove a tagged item from the store. Studies have
shown that they significantly reduce shoplifting and theft
of library books.
Deflect offenders. Rival groups of soccer fans in the
U.K. are segregated in the stadium to reduce fighting, and
their arrival and departure is scheduled to avoid the
waiting periods that promote trouble. Scheduling the last
bus to leave immediately after pub closing time is
intended to interfere with another of Britain's less
admirable traditions, the closing time brawl. These are
examples of deflecting offenders away from crime targets,
a situational technique suggested by routine activity
theory. Other examples are provided by road closure
schemes that have produced reductions in many kinds of
crime (see Closing Streets and Alleys to Reduce Crime,
Problem-Oriented Guides for Police, Response Guide No.2,
accessible at www.cops.usdoj.gov and
www.popcenter.org). Even drive-by shootings in Los
Angeles have been reduced by street closures (see box).
Increase The Effort Of Crime
Harden targets
Steering column locks and ignition immobilisers
Anti-robbery screens in banks and post offices
Bullet-resistant shields for cab drivers
Control access to facilities
Entry phones for apartment complexes
Electronic card access to garages and offices
Defensible space designs for public housing
Screen exits
Ticket needed to exit
Export documents
Electronic tags for stores and libraries
Deflect offenders
Separation of rival fans in stadium
Street closures
Separate bathrooms for women
Control tools and weapons
Safer guns
Toughened beer glasses
Stop incoming payphone calls to foil drug dealers
Photos on credit cards and thumbprints on checks
A Designer Solution to Drive-by Shootings

Rival gangs often settle disputes by shooting at
members of the other gang from moving cars. These
"drive-by shootings" are difficult to prevent through
youth work or by intensified policing. A novel solution,
Operation Cul de Sac, was tried in one 10-block area in
Los Angeles, which had experienced the city's highest
level of drive-by shootings and gang homicides. The
police installed traffic barriers on the most affected
streets. These dead-end streets prevented cars from
entering at one end and required those that did enter at
the other end to return the same way. This not only
made it more difficult for shooters, but also increased
their risks because when they returned the same way,
their targets could have their own guns ready.
The barriers brought about an immediate reduction in
drive-by shootings and homicides. In the year before
Operation Cul de Sac, 1989, seven homicides were
committed in the area. In the 2 subsequent years, after
the barriers were installed, only one homicide was
recorded. There was no evidence that homicides had
been displaced to another neighbourhood. At the
conclusion of Operation Cul de Sac, when the barriers
were removed, homicides increased again to their
previous level.
Source: Lasley, James (1998) "Designing Out" Gang
Homicides and Street Assaults. Research in Brief, National
Institute of Justice. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of
Justice.
Control tools and weapons. Saloons in the Wild West

routinely required customers to surrender their pistols on
entry because of the risk of drunken gunfights. More
recently, so-called "safer" handguns have been developed
that can only be fired by the owner or which shoot wax
bullets or tranquilizers. To prevent glasses being used as
weapons when broken, many pubs in the U.K. now use
"toughened" beer glasses. The first commercial use of
Caller-ID (in New Jersey at the end of the 1980s)
produced a 25 percent reduction in obscene telephone
calls. Step 34 lists the different ways in which cities have
attempted to control the use of public phones in drug
dealing, including blocks on incoming calls and banning
them from specific locations. Re-programming of public
phones at the Manhattan bus terminal prevented illegal
access to international phone service, thus wiping out a
multi-million dollar scam perpetrated by hustlers.
Improved security procedures for delivering credit cards
produced a substantial drop in credit card frauds in this
country in the mid-1990s (Step 11).
4040. Increase the risks of crime
ccording to interviews with offenders, they worry

more about the risks of being apprehended than
about the consequences if they are caught. This
makes sense because they can do little to avoid
punishment if caught, but they can do a lot to reduce the
risks of capture by being careful. This is why situational
prevention seeks to increase the risks of being caught and
makes no attempt to manipulate punishment.
Extend guardianship. Cohen and Felson showed that
the increase in residential burglary during the 1960s and
1970s was partly due to the increasing numbers of
women working outside the home. This meant that for
much of the day many homes, if not entire suburbs, had
no "capable guardians." Other research has found that
burglars prefer to commit their crimes on weekday
afternoons when people are likely to be out. This explains
why people should cancel newspapers and inform their
neighbors when they go on vacation. Carrying a cell
phone or going out at night in a group are other ways to
extend guardianship. Little is known about the
effectiveness of these routine precautions and evaluations
of neighborhood watch, the only systematic effort to
extend guardianship, have not been encouraging.
However, "cocoon" neighborhood watch, under which
surrounding homes were alerted after a burglary, was an
important element of a successful project in Kirkholt
in England.
Assist natural surveillance. Homeowners trim bushes
near their windows and doors and banks light their
interiors at night to capitalize on the "natural"
surveillance provided by people going about their
everyday business. Enhancing natural surveillance is also
the prime objective of improved street lighting and
defensible space architecture. Studies in the U.K. have
found that improved lighting in public housing reduces
crime with little evidence of displacement. One
component of an early CPTED intervention to reduce
burglary in a commercial strip in Portland, Oregon, was
improved lighting of the outside of stores. Oscar Newman
has reported successes in reducing crime in public housing
through the application of natural surveillance principles.
Finally, informant hotlines and crime-stopper programs are
attempts to capitalize on the natural surveillance provided
by the public.
Reduce anonymity. Expanded car ownership has

allowed people to work far from their homes. The
development of out-of-town malls has led to the decline
of downtown shopping. Low-cost travel has led to
increased tourism both at home and overseas. As a result,
people spend increasing periods of time among
anonymous strangers. The building of large schools has
contributed to this trend because pupils are less well
known to staff and other pupils. Reducing anonymity is a
promising but rarely used situational technique. Some
schools are now requiring uniforms, partly to reduce the
anonymity of pupils on their way to and from school. Cab
driver ID badges and "How's my driving?" decals with 1800 numbers on trucks are two further ways of
reducing anonymity.
Use place managers. In addition to their primary
function, some employees also perform a surveillance role.
These "place managers" include sales assistants, hotel
door-men, and parking lot attendants. Canadian research
has found that apartment complexes with doormen are
less vulnerable to burglary. Rewarding cashiers for
detection of forged or stolen credit cards helped to reduce
annual fraud losses by nearly $1 million at an electronics
retailer in New Jersey. Vandalism on a large fleet of
double-decker buses in northern England was
substantially reduced when a few of the buses were fitted
with video cameras for drivers. Having two clerks on duty,
especially at night, has consistently been found effective
in preventing robbery of convenience stores (see table).
Strengthen formal surveillance. Formal surveillance is
provided by police, security guards, and store detectives,
all of whom furnish a deterrent threat to potential
offenders. Burglar alarms, video cameras, and speed
cameras can enhance this surveillance. A study of an
affluent community near Philadelphia found that
widespread ownership of burglar alarms reduced police
costs by lowering burglary rates for the community at
large. Home Office studies have found appreciable
reductions in a variety of crimes following installation of
video cameras in British cities (see Video Surveillance of
Public Spaces, Problem-Oriented Guides for Police,
Response Guide No.3, accessible at www.cops.usdoj.gov
and www.popcenter.org). An evaluation of photo radar
deployed state-wide in Victoria, Australia, showed that it
reduced speeding and contributed to a 45 percent
Measures that Reduce Robbery of

Convenience Stores
(Results of 14 Studies)
Two or more clerks

Good cash handling
No concealed entrances
Nearby stores
Clear view of store front
Closed at night
Security technology
Cashier in secure booth
Employee training
Clear view inside store
Gas pumps at front
Cashier in center of
store
Store on busy street
Security guard present
Number of supporting
studies*
10
8
6
5
5
5
5
4
4
3
3
3
2
2
*Not all studies included all measures
claimed for rent allowance they were tempted to

understate income, but when they claimed sickness
benefits, they were tempted to overstate it. The ability to
crosscheck the income statements substantially reduced
these frauds.
Read More:
Painter, Kate and Nick Tilley (1999). "Surveillance of
Public Space: CCTV, Street Lighting and Crime
Prevention." Crime Prevention Studies, volume 10.
Monsey, NY: Criminal Justice Press. (Accessible in part at
www.popcenter.org).
Increase The Risks Of Crime
Extend guardianship
Promote routine precautions such as leaving signs of
occupancy when away from the house, carrying a cell
phone and going out at night in a group
"Cocoon" neighborhood watch
Assist natural surveillance
Improved street lighting
Defensible space design
Neighborhood watch and informant hotlines
Reduce anonymity
Cab driver IDs
"How's my driving?" decals
School uniforms
Use place managers
Train employees to prevent crime
Reward vigilance
Support whistleblowers
Strengthen formal surveillance
Speed cameras and random breath testing
Video surveillance of downtowns
Focused bike patrols in parking lots
Source: Hunter and Jeffery (1997). "Preventing

Convenience Store Robbery through Environmental
Design." Situational Crime Prevention: Successful
Case Studies, Ronald Clarke. Monsey, NY: Criminal
Justice Press.
reduction in traffic fatalities. A well-publicized bike patrol

provided by a private security company in a large parkand-ride lot in suburban Vancouver, Canada led to a
substantial drop in theft of cars. When security personnel
began systematic, daily counts of high-risk merchandise,
such as VCRs and camcorders, thefts by employees
dropped by more than 80 percent in the warehouse of a
New Jersey electronics superstore. Powerful new ways of
enhancing formal surveillance are provided by linking
data-sets on individuals, as shown in a study by Eckhart
Kuhlhorn. He demonstrated that computerized
crosschecking of statements of personal income made by
claimants to two separate Swedish government
departments reduced welfare frauds. When people
4141. Reduce the rewards of crime
ational choice theory holds that offenders are

always seeking to benefit themselves by their
crimes. These benefits may not simply be material,
as in theft, because there are many other rewards of
crime, including sexual release, intoxication, excitement,
revenge, respect from peers, and so forth. An important
strand of situational crime prevention is therefore to
understand the rewards of any particular category of
offending and to find ways of reducing or removing them.
Conceal targets. Householders often try to foil burglars

by hiding jewelry or other valuables. They also keep their
curtains drawn to stop thieves from looking through the
windows to see what they own. Some people don't wear
gold chains in public, and others avoid leaving their cars
overnight on the streets if these are models attractive to
joyriders, such as Hondas and Acuras. The table presents
British Crime Survey data showing that cars left on the
street are at very much greater risk of theft than those left
in the owner's garage or driveway. These are all ways to
conceal targets and reduce temptation. Some other
concealment strategies are less obvious. For example,
gender-neutral phone lists can help protect women from
obscene phone calls, and unmarked armored trucks can
reduce the risk of in-transit robbery.
Car Thefts and Parking Place, England and Wales, British
Crime Survey
Where parked
Garage at home
Drive/carport
Other street
Public parking lot
Car crimes* per 100,000 cars

per 24 hours
2
40
327
454
*Includes theft of, theft from, attempts and deliberate damage

Source: Clarke, Ronald and Pat Mayhew (1998). "Preventing Crime in Parking Lots."
Reducing Crime through Real Estate Development and Management, Marcus Felson and
Richard Peiser. Washington, DC: Urban Land Institute.
Remove targets. The installation of a machine that

accepted credit cards in a Spanish church brought several
benefits: donors received receipts for tax purposes, the
church received larger gifts, and, since cash was not
deposited, the church reduced its theft risk through
removing targets. An earlier application of this same
situational technique comes from the days of the
Californian Gold Rush. Plagued by robberies of
stagecoaches, one mine started casting gold in 400pound cubes. These were too heavy for robbers to carry
away on horseback. More up-to-date examples of target
removal are provided by changes made to pay phones. To

stop people from smashing glass, wall-mounted booths
have been substituted for kiosks in high-risk locations in
the U.K. and prepaid cards that dispense with the need to
store large sums of cash have removed an important
target for theft. Perhaps the most striking example of
target removal is the introduction of exact fare systems
and safes on buses, which dramatically reduced robberies
of bus drivers in New York and in 18 other cities in the
late 1960s.
Identify property. Motor vehicles in developed
countries must be registered and must carry a unique
Vehicle Identification Number (VIN). This is to assist
taxation, but these measures also reduce theft. One of the
last states to require vehicle registration was Illinois in
1934, whereupon vehicle thefts declined from 28,000 in
the previous year to about 13,000. More recently, the
federal Motor Vehicle Theft Law Enforcement Act of 1984
has mandated the marking of all major body parts of
"high-risk" automobiles with VINs. Police "operation
identification" programs have had limited success in this
country, but Gloria Laycock of the Jill Dando Institute of
Crime Science found that property marking undertaken in
three small communities in Wales, combined with
extensive media publicity, halved the number of reported
domestic burglaries.
Disrupt markets. Criminologists and police have
devoted rather little attention to understanding and
disrupting markets for stolen goods. Criminologists have
found it difficult to obtain data about these markets, and
the police have preferred to pay more attention to
catching thieves and burglars than fences, partly because
the penalties for fencing stolen goods are relatively light.
However, if there were no market for stolen goods there
would be few persistent burglars and few thefts of trucks
carrying large loads of tobacco and alcohol. Recent work
for the Home Office by Mike Sutton has awakened
interest in disrupting markets for stolen goods. The
disruptive measures need to be tailored to the nature of
the market and they include systematic monitoring of
pawn shop transactions by the police, crackdowns on
illegal street vendors, and monitoring of small ad sales in
newspapers to detect repeat vendors. Police "sting"
operations - such as bogus used goods stores - should be
avoided because research has found that they may
stimulate theft in the area around the sting.
Read More:
Sutton, Mike and colleagues (2001). Tackling Stolen
Goods with the Market Reduction Approach. Crime
Reduction Research Series Paper 8. London: Home Office.
Reduce Rewards
Conceal targets
Off-street parking for cars attractive to joyriders
Gender-neutral phone directories
Unmarked armored trucks
Remove targets
Removable car radios
Women's shelters
Pre-paid cards for payphones
Identify property
Property marking
Vehicle licensing and parts marking
Cattle branding
Disrupt markets
Checks on pawn shops
Controls on classified ads
License street vendors
Deny benefits
Ink merchandise tags
Graffiti cleaning
Disable stolen cell phones
Denying The Benefits Of Graffiti

Graffiti-covered subway trains became almost a trademark of New York City in the 1970s and 1980s, and they
frequently appeared in the opening sequences of movies that were set there. The subway authorities had tried
innumerable law enforcement and target-hardening strategies to rid the subway cars of graffiti, but with little result.
Eventually they hit upon a simple idea that brought them success: Once a car had been cleansed of graffiti it would
immediately be withdrawn from service and cleaned again if it attracted fresh graffiti. This effectively denied
"taggers" the benefits of "gettin up" and seeing their handiwork on public display. Because of the huge number of
subway cars, it took six years before all the cars were clean. Nowadays, they are no worse than subway cars in other
cities.
Year
Goal
Actual
1984
400
1985
1720
1915
Clean Cars
1986
1987
3434
4707
3454
4839
1988
5946
6077
1989
6221
6245
Source: Sloan-Howitt, Maryalice and George Kelling (1997) "Subway Graffiti in New York City: Gettin up vs. Meanin
it and Cleanin it." Situational Crime Prevention: Successful Case Studies, Ronald Clarke, Monsey, NY: Criminal Justice
Press.
Deny benefits. Installing speed humps is a sure way to

deny the benefits of speeding. Security-coded car radios
and ink tags provide further illustrations of crime
prevention techniques. Security-coded radios cannot be
used unless the thief knows the PIN and, according to
studies undertaken in the United States and in Australia,
cars with these radios have lower theft rates. Ink tags are
used in clothing stores to prevent shoplifting. They release
ink if tampered with and indelibly the stain garment to
which they are attached. The thief cannot wear the
garment or sell it, which removes the incentive for theft.
4242. Reduce provocations
Reduce arousal and temptation. Male doctors should

not conduct detailed physical examinations of female
patients without a nurse or receptionist present. This
protects the doctor from false accusations, but it also
reduces the temptation to sexually abuse the patient or
make inappropriate advances. Laws that prohibit
convicted pedophiles from taking jobs involving contact
with children not only protect children, but also help
adults to manage their sexual desires. That the very sight
of a gun has been found to trigger feelings of aggression
provides one good reason for regulating the display of
weapons. Similarly, the fact that high proportions of sex
Reduce frustration and stress. Everyone gets angry
offenders own or use violent pornography provides a
when treated rudely by waiters, when people push in front rationale for controlling these materials. Finally, reducing
to be served, or when trains are delayed with no
temptation is the basis for advice about being careful with
explanation. Sometimes they get so angry they become
one's money in public as well as advice to young women
violent. This could be avoided by improved service, which about being careful when out alone at night.
is increasingly being demanded and delivered. However,
complaints may be ignored when those mistreated have
Neutralize peer pressure. Many parents discourage
little power. For example, prisoners are often ignored
friends who are a "bad influence" on their children and
when they complain that they cannot eat when hungry or schools disperse groups of troublemakers into different
choose their TV programs, even though these complaints
classes. But adults as well as children are subject to peer
could be met quite easily by staggering meal times and
pressure. Existing staff may induct new workers into
providing more TVs. Waiting one's turn to use the phone, stealing from their employers, and young men are often
another source of frustration for prisoners, can be reduced encouraged to drink too much by friends. One publicity
by computerized systems to ration phone use (see box).
campaign mounted in Australia to reinforce the powerful
Outbursts of anger and violence can also result from
deterrent impact of random breath testing made use of
people being subjected to extreme discomfort - too much the slogan, "Good mates don't let mates drink and
noise, being jostled, and having nowhere to sit. These
drive." A publicity campaign in this country used "Friends
conditions exist in many clubs, bars, and delayed
don't let friends drive drunk."
passenger airline flights and have consistently been found
to induce trouble. More seating, soothing music, and
Discourage imitation. All new television sets contain a
muted lighting are all ways to reduce stress in
"V-chip" so that parents can program their TVs to prevent
these settings.
children from viewing violent programs. Though the link
between violent movies and violence in society is much
Avoid disputes. In the U.K., rival groups of fans are
disputed, there is some evidence of "copycat" crimes
segregated in soccer stadiums and their arrival and
because media reports of unusual crimes sometimes
departure is scheduled to avoid the periods of waiting
provoke imitation elsewhere. It has also been shown, for
around that promote trouble. Taxi fares from New York
example, that students who see their teachers engaging in
City's Kennedy Airport to Manhattan are fixed at a
illegal computer activity are more likely to commit
standard $45 to prevent cheating and disputes over fares. computer crimes themselves, and that other pedestrians
In an attempt to produce consensual crowd management will follow someone crossing against a red light. Indeed,
at the Australian Motorcycle Grand Prix, riders were
how often have you "run the red" only to find when
allowed to operate camp-sites for their fellow
glancing in your rear-view mirror that so has the car
motorcyclists and were encouraged to develop rules for
behind you? It has also been shown that picnic tables in
use of the facilities. This helped to eliminate the brawls
parks that had been scratched and carved are more than
between police and motorcyclists, which had marred the
twice as likely to attract further damage. Findings such as
event in previous years.
these provide the rationale for "rapid repair" programs to
hen studying prisons and pubs, Richard Wortley
noticed that crowding, discomfort, and rude
treatment provoked violence in both settings. This
led him to argue that situational prevention had focused
too exclusively on opportunities for crime and had
neglected features of the situation that precipitate or
induce crime. As a result of his work, Clarke and Cornish
have included five techniques to reduce what they called
"provocations" in their new classification of situational
techniques. These techniques are explained below,
drawing on Wortley's examples.
Read More:
Wortley, Richard (2001). "A Classification of Techniques
for Controlling Situational Precipitators of Crime." Security
Journal, 14: 63-82.
Reduce Provocations
Reduce frustration and stress

Efficient lines and polite service
Expanded seating capacity
Soothing music and muted lighting
Avoid disputes
Separate enclosures for rival soccer fans
Reduced crowding in pubs
Fixed cab fares
Reduce arousal and temptation
Controls on violent pornography
Prohibitions on pedophiles working with children
Advice about avoiding sexual victimization
Neutralize peer pressure
"Idiots drink and drive"
"It's OK to say No"
Disperse troublemakers at school
Discourage imitation
Rapid repair of vandalism
V-chips in TVs
Censor details of modus operandi to avoid
"copycat" crimes
Phone Fraud, Slot Time, and Victoria Secrets at Rikers Island

Rikers Island, a stone's throw from New York City's La Guardia Airport, is a huge system of 10 jails. These house
different categories of inmates, whose phone privileges vary with their status. Corrections officers were supposed to
use logbooks to record phone use and to regulate the amount of time each inmate spent on the phone. In the early
1990s, this system had broken down. Inmates had developed their own system, known as "slot time", and the
annual cost of calls had escalated to more than $3 million. The most powerful inmates controlled the phones, which
they often used to access their beepers and maintain their drug businesses in the outside world. Inmates were also
accessing "sex lines" and were using stolen credit card numbers to make long distance calls and purchases. Nancy
La Vigne, who studied this problem as a graduate student at Rutgers University, notes, "The female inmates did just
this, accessing the Victoria Secrets catalogue, which resulted in a jail that could boast the best-dressed inmates in the
country - until officials caught on."
The officials introduced a high-security computerized phone system that put strict limits on phone use, in line with
the status of the caller. Detainees gained access to the phones through bar codes on their ID cards and by entering a
PIN. This system immediately cut phone costs in half, but it was also noticed that fewer fights were erupting over
access to the phones. In fact, La Vigne's study showed that the monthly rate of these fights dropped from 6.7 per
1,000 inmates in the year before the new phone system to 3.6 per 1,000 after its introduction.
Source: La Vigne, Nancy (1994). Rational Choice and Inmate Disputes over Phone Use on Rikers Island". Crime
Prevention Studies, volume 3, Ronald Clarke. Monsey, NY: Criminal Justice Press.
deal with vandalism. Wilson and Kelling extended this

principle in their famous "broken windows" article by
arguing that the failure to deal promptly with minor signs
of decay in a community, such as panhandling or soliciting
by prostitutes, can result in a quickly deteriorating
situation as hardened offenders move into the area to
exploit the breakdown in control.
4343. Remove excuses for crime
his fifth category of situational techniques recognizes

that offenders make moral judgments about their
behavior and that they often rationalize their conduct
to "neutralize" what would otherwise be incapacitating
feelings of guilt or shame. They make such excuses as:
"He deserved it," "I was just borrowing it," and "I only
slapped her." These excuses may be especially important
for ordinary people responding to everyday temptations to
evade taxes, drive when drunk, sexually harass junior
employees and steal employers' property.
Set rules. All organizations make rules about conduct in
their fields of governance. For example, businesses
regulate employees' time-keeping and stores require sales
assistants to follow strict cash-handling procedures.
Organizations such as hospitals, public libraries and hotels
must, in addition, regulate the conduct of the clients they
serve. Any ambiguity in these regulations will be exploited
if it benefits the client. One important strand of situational
prevention, therefore, is rule setting - the introduction of
new rules or procedures (and the clarification of those
already in place) to remove any ambiguity concerning the
acceptability of conduct. For example, in attempting to
reduce "no-shows," many restaurants will now only
accept reservations if callers leave a telephone number
where they can be reached. Some also require a credit
card number so that a charge can then be made for noshows. Requiring anglers in California to wear their
fishing licenses was successful in getting more of them to
comply with license purchase rules.
Alert conscience. This situational technique differs from

"informal social control" in two important respects. First,
the focus is on specific forms of crime occurring in
discrete, highly limited settings and, second, the purpose
is to alert conscience at the point of committing a specific
kind of offense rather than attempting to bring about
lasting changes in generalized attitudes to law breaking.
For example, signs at store entrances announce
"Shoplifting is stealing," and in Manhattan's Port
Authority Bus Terminal signs proclaim "Smoking here is
illegal, selfish and rude." Roadside speed-boards give
immediate feedback (without issuing fines) to motorists
traveling above the speed limit.
Assist compliance. When Italian criminologist Cesare

Lombroso suggested in the 19th century that people
should be locked up for urinating in the streets, his pupil
Enrico Ferri suggested a more practical way to solve the
problem: build public toilets. This constitutes an example
of facilitating compliance, a technique of wide application.
It includes subsidizing taxi rides for those who have been
drinking, providing litter baskets and "graffiti boards" (for
people's public messages), and improving checkout
procedures in libraries, which reduce delay and thus
excuses for failing to comply with rules for book
borrowing. In a classic paper on Disney World, Shearing
and Stenning provide a fascinating glimpse into the ways
in which sophisticated crowd control and management involving the use of pavement markings, signs, physical
barriers (which make it difficult to take a wrong turn) and
instructions from cheerful Disney employees - greatly
Post instructions. Work rules are often set out in
reduce the potential for crime and incivility in the theme
employment contracts, and rules established by credit card park (see box).
companies, telephone providers, and insurance companies
are contained in the service contracts. Regulations
Control drugs and alcohol. Crime is facilitated by
governing public places or facilities may be publicly
alcohol and drugs, which undermine inhibitions or impair
posted, either to prevent people claiming ignorance of the perception and cognition so that offenders are less aware
rules or to show precisely where these apply. The roads, in of breaking the law. The value of situational controls on
particular, make extensive use of signs governing driving
drinking has often been demonstrated. Johannes
or parking. Studies have found that warning signs
Knutsson, research director at the Norwegian Police
significantly reduce illegal parking in spaces reserved for
College, has shown that limiting the amount of alcohol
disabled drivers. Many other facilities - parks, colleges,
that individuals could bring into a Swedish resort town on
transit lines and housing projects - also post signs to
Midsummer Eve helped to reduce drunkenness and
govern a wide range of behaviors. Despite their wide use, disorderly conduct. The small community of Barrow,
there have been few evaluations of the preventive
Alaska, instituted a total ban in 1994 on the sale of
effectiveness of posted instructions - but they are an
alcohol to curb binge drinking, which led to an 81 percent
essential tool of law enforcement and are often used in
drop in alcohol-related calls for service, a reduction of 43
problem-solving efforts.
percent in felonies, and drop of more than 90 percent in
Remove Excuses
Set rules
Rental agreements
Harassment codes
Hotel registration
Post instructions
"No Parking"
"Private Property"
"Extinguish camp fires"
Alert conscience
Roadside speed display boards
Signatures for customs declarations
"Shoplifting is stealing"
Assist compliance
Easy library checkout
Public lavatories
Litter bins
Control drugs and alcohol
Blood alcohol self-testing in bars
Server intervention
Alcohol-free events
Arriving at Disney World

Signs tell visitors arriving by car to tune into Disney radio for information.
Signs direct them to the parking lot they must use and road markings show the way.
Smiling parking attendants direct visitors to their space and loudspeakers remind them to lock their cars.
Visitors are directed to rubber-wheeled trains to take them to the monorail.
Recorded announcements direct them to stand safely behind guardrails.
They are reminded about the location of their parking space (e.g., Donald Duck 1).
They are (politely) asked to sit, to keep their arms and legs within the confines of the carriage, and to make sure
children do the same.
Before disembarking, they are told how to get to the monorail and barriers stop them from going the wrong way.
On the platform, attendants guide them into corrals the right size to fill one compartment of the monorail.
Safety gates at the platform edge open only when the monorail arrives.
Any delays in service are announced and expected times of arrival are given.
On board, passengers are asked to remain seated "for your own safety".
Passengers are told how to disembark and how to move to the first entertainment.
They are once again reminded to look after their children and to take their possessions.
While waiting to enter each exhibit, visitors are marshaled in lines, which indicate waiting times; those in line are
entertained by Disney characters.
On leaving the exhibit, they are guided by signs, barriers and attendants to the next one.
Source: Shearing, Clifford and Phillip Stenning (1997). "From the Panopticon to Disney World: The Development of
Discipline". Situational Crime Prevention: Successful Case Studies (2nd ed.), Ronald V. Clarke. Monsey, NY: Criminal
Justice Press.
removals of drunken people from public places (see

Goldstein Award submission at www.popcenter.org).
Voluntary agreements reached among local drinking
establishments to promote responsible drinking have
reduced alcohol-related crime in numerous nightlife areas
in Australia. Rutgers University has decreed that beer
must be served from kegs instead of cases at dorm parties
because cases are easier to hide and, as one student said:
"If you have one keg and a line of 20 people behind it,
people will get less alcohol than if you had a refrigerator
and people were throwing out beer."
4444. Find the owner of the problem
any problems arise through the failure of some

institution - business, government agency, or
other organization - to conduct its affairs in ways
that prevent crime rather than cause it. In short, many
problems occur because one or more institutions are
unable or unwilling to undertake a preventive strategy, or
because these institutions have intentionally established a
circumstance that stimulates crimes or disorder. This
creates risky facilities (Step 28) and other concentrations
of crime.
Solving problems usually requires the active cooperation
of the people and institutions that have failed to take
responsibility for the conditions that lead to the problem.
These problem owners have shifted responsibility for the
problem from their shoulders to the shoulders of the
public and the police. Consequently, an important
objective of any problem-solving process is to get them to
assume responsibility. So for any problem, you need to
answer three ownership questions:
Who
owns the problem?

has the owner allowed the problem to develop?
What is required to get the owner to undertake
prevention?
Why
Who owns the problem? When a problem is located at

a specific place, it is usually easy to identify who is
responsible. The owner of the problem is the owner of the
location. A problem in a park, for example, is the body
with the responsibility for operating the park - usually a
local government or some private agency.
It is more difficult to identify those responsible for
problems that are spread over larger areas. If a
widespread problem is focused on a specific location, then
that location may be the source for the events in the
surrounding area, and the owner of the central location
may be responsible. A real estate speculator, who owns
many derelict properties in a neighborhood, owns the
crime associated with these properties.
If there is a special group of individuals - the elderly,
children with special needs, or victims of domestic
violence - and these individuals are targets of crime or
disorder, then potential owners of the problem are family
members. If there are agencies charged with seeing to
the well-being of these special groups, these service
agencies are possible co-owners of the problems. While

trying to reduce the highway deaths of migrant workers,
the California Highway Patrol identified businesses that
specialized in the transportation of migrant workers. They
owned the problem but were not being responsible.
Fixing responsibility entailed stepped up regulation of
these businesses, including vehicle inspections, requiring
seats and seat belts for certain types of migrant transport
vehicles, and greater enforcement of safety violations. The
result was a large reduction in fatal accidents involving
migrant farm workers. This effort received the Goldstein
Award for Problem-Solving Excellence in 2002.
Why has the owner allowed the problem to
develop? There are four generic explanations that alone
or in combination fit most problems:
1. An institution may be unable to prevent crime. This
might be due to ignorance as to the effect of its
operations on crime or ignorance as to how to prevent
crime. Or this may be due to lack of resources, even
when the institution knows its operations help create
crime. It is also important to recognize the importance
of institutionalized procedures. Changing procedures
can be time consuming and costly in both monetary
resources and staffing. A new inventory control
procedure to prevent shoplifting and internal theft may
be difficult to implement because it requires disruptive
changes in the ways employees conduct their
normal business.
2. Some institutions may be unwilling to prevent crime
facilitated by their operations because they believe that
fixing crime is the exclusive responsibility of the police
(e.g., gas stations with a high rate of gasoline drive-offs
may see gas thieves as the problem rather than their
lack of a pre-pay policy). Rather than recognize the role
of opportunity in creating crime, some people dwell
exclusively on the role of offenders. From this
perspective, it is the function of police to reduce crime
by stricter enforcement. The limitations of this approach
have been noted in Step 3. Another source of
unwillingness is the belief that the police are intruding
on the property owner's rights. A retailer might claim
that he has the right to display goods any way he
wants, and that the police should not compel, or even
suggest, alternative displays that might
reduce shoplifting.
4. Some institutions may profit from the crimes, as can

happen when a used goods shop does little to verify
legitimate ownership of the merchandise they display.
Auto repair garages can purchase stolen car parts
cheaper than legal car parts, thus increasing their profit
margin.
What is required to get the owner to undertake
prevention? Herman Goldstein has outlined a rough
hierarchy of interventions designed to shift responsibility
for problems from the police back to the institutions that
own them (see box).
Moving from the bottom to the top of Goldstein's list,
interventions become less cooperative and increasingly
coercive. Because of this, the difficulty of intervention
increases, along with the costs of failure to the police, as
one moves up the list. Consequently, the value of
information and thorough analysis increases from the
bottom to the top. As Goldstein notes, this hierarchy is a

rough indicator of these trends rather than an exact
description. Nevertheless, it is useful for planning a
layered set of responses to a problem - beginning with
the most cooperative and working upward only if needed
and only when supported by information.
Shifting responsibility back to the owner of the problem
can create legal and political conflicts. Institutions that
had gained from the problem, or foresee a cost in taking
responsibility for it, are unlikely to simply agree to a
suggestion that they do something about it. The problem
of false alarms has been a plague for over two decades,
but in many jurisdictions it is difficult to overcome the
political and financial clout of the alarm industry who are
principally responsible for the high level of false alarms.
Clearly, the least costly and intrusive prevention measures
will meet the least resistance (Step 45). But if these
responses turn out to be ineffective, then the police often
face a difficult choice: demand greater responsibility from
problem owners and risk a political conflict, or continue to
spend the public's money on a problem created by a few
individuals. In the abstract the answer seems clear, but in
practice it is often a difficult decision.
Read More:
Scott, Michael (2005). "Policing for Prevention: Shifting
and Sharing the Responsibility to Address Public Safety
Problems." Handbook of Crime Prevention and
Community Safety, Nick Tilley. Cullompton U.K.: Willan.
Herman Goldstein's Hierarchy of Ways to Shift Ownership

Least cooperative/ Most difficult
Most cooperative/ Least difficult
Bringing a Civil Action

Legislation Mandating Adoption of Prevention
Charging a Fee for Police Service
Withdrawing Police Service
Public Shaming
Creation of a New Organization to Assume Ownership
Engaging Another Existing Organization
Targeted Confrontational Requests
Straightforward Informal Requests
Educational Programs
3. Some institutions are unwilling because of the costs of

addressing the problem; they gain more by ignoring
crime than they lose. They may perceive that the costs of
prevention outweigh any benefits to them. Security
personnel at an entertainment venue are costly, and
quality security personnel are more costly. If the costs of
the problem are not borne by the facility, then there is
little perceived need to bear the costs of prevention. In
essence, such facilities are exporting the costs of crime
and prevention onto others, and thereby reducing their
own costs.
4545. Choose responses likely to be implemented
inding a suitable response can be a troublesome

process. You may be repeatedly disappointed when
promising interventions are vetoed because of
expense or difficulty, or because of lack of cooperation.
But there is more than one way to solve a problem. So,
eventually your team will agree on a response that meets
some basic requirements:
It is not too ambitious or costly.
It focuses on near, direct causes rather than on distant,
more indirect ones, which gives it a good chance of
making an immediate impact.
The mechanism through which each response should
impact the problem has been clearly articulated.
So, at last your worries are over and you can relax, right?
Wrong! Even more difficult than agreeing on a good
response is to make sure that it is actually implemented.
You cannot ensure this on your own, but if you know the
pitfalls of implementation, you can steer the partnership
away from choosing responses that can fall prey to these.
Tim Hope and Dan Murphy identified these pitfalls when
studying a vandalism prevention project in eleven schools
in Manchester, England.
The responses to be implemented at each school were
selected by groups of local government officials, school
staff and police. Much of the damage was more careless
than malicious. This suggested two different solutions:
situational responses to protect the buildings or providing
recreational activities to divert children into less harmful
activities. Only one of the eleven groups recommended
improved leisure provision. The situational responses
recommended were mostly basic target-hardening
(window grills, toughened glass and high fences), though
proposals also included a plan to encourage local
residents to keep an eye on two adjacent schools and a
plan to move a playground to a less vulnerable area.
At only two schools were all the recommendations
implemented. In three, none was put in place and at the
remaining six schools one or more recommendations
failed to materialize. These failures to implement meant
there was little impact on vandalism. Hope and Murphy
identified five main obstacles to implementation, all of
which have been encountered in U.S. problem-solving
projects:
1. Unanticipated technical difficulties. For eight

schools, the groups recommended the replacement of
vulnerable windows with polycarbonate glazing or
toughened glass. However, not a single pane of either
type was installed. The city architects had prohibited
polycarbonate glazing because in case of fire it would
prevent escape and might give off toxic fumes.
Toughened glass had to be cut to size before it was
toughened, but the panes came in many sizes and it
would have been difficult to store a few of each size
in readiness. The alternative of supplying a pane to
order was ruled out by the long time (six weeks) it
would take to do this.
2. Inadequate supervision of implementation. At
one school it was agreed to move the playground to
a less vulnerable area. The original playground was to
be replaced with flowerbeds, but this had to be done
by a government agency that got no further than
providing an estimate for the work. The relocation of
the playground was sub-contracted to a private
builder, but due to a misunderstanding only half the
proposed area was resurfaced. After two years, therefore, vandalism was unchanged, there were no
flowerbeds, and the school had acquired a useless,
narrow strip of pavement.
3. Failure to coordinate action among different
agencies. Every recommendation that was the sole
responsibility of the buildings maintenance section of
the school system was implemented, while none of
those involving other departments or agencies ever
materialized. For example, it was recommended that
people living near two schools should be encouraged
to keep an eye on them after hours and report anything suspicious to the police. This required the
cooperation of the school system administration, the
principal, staff and pupils of the schools and three
branches of the police - crime prevention, community
relations and local police. All liked the idea, but no
one would take the lead.
4. Competing priorities. During the implementation
period many other demands were placed on the
school system as a result of widespread labor unrest
by local government employees and a school
reorganization made necessary by a declining schoolage population. School staffing changes resulted in
the reassignment of staff who were involved in the
vandalism project. It is not surprising that the staff
gave the vandalism project low priority.
You can see from the list above that some

implementation problems cannot be anticipated and that
a proportion of all responses selected will never be
implemented. However, it is also clear that certain kinds
of responses can be expected to encounter problems and
these are summarized in the box. In some cases, of
course, a response may be so promising that it is worth
pursuing despite the risks of implementation failure. But
being forewarned is to be forearmed.
Read More:
Hope, Tim and Daniel Murphy (1983). Problems of
Implementing Crime Prevention: The Experience of a
Demonstration Project. The Howard Journal, XXII, 38-50.
Laycock, Gloria and Nick Tilley (1995). Implementing
Crime Prevention. In Building a Safer Society, edited by
Michael Tonry and David Farrington University of
Chicago Press.
Expect implementation problems when a response:

Requires coordinated action among a number of separate agencies.
take a long time to introduce and involves a number of steps to be completed in sequence.
Must be implemented by staff with little understanding of its purpose.
Has no major supporter among the partnership team.
Lacks the support of senior administrators.
Will
Also expect problems when the response must be implemented by an agency:

That
is outside the partnership.

That is poorly resourced or in turmoil.
That will gain little direct benefit from the solution.
5. Unanticipated costs. In some cases, the wider

consequences of a particular course of action
outweighed its immediate benefits. For example, at
the school with the most serious vandalism problem it
was decided to mount a security patrol for the
upcoming holiday period. The school maintenance
workers were employed to patrol the school for
payment during their spare time. This was
immediately successful in reducing vandalism and was
extended beyond school holidays to provide coverage
at evenings and weekends. Other schools demanded
the same protection and more maintenance workers
wanted the additional overtime opportunities.
Ultimately the cost became too high and the project
was scrapped.
4646. Conduct a process evaluation
he first critical step in assessment is to conduct a

process evaluation. It answers the question,"Was the
intervention put into place as planned and how was it
altered for implementation?" As shown in the figure, a
process evaluation focuses on the resources that were
employed by the response (inputs) and the activities
accomplished with these resources (results), but it does not
examine whether the response was effective at reducing
the problem (outcomes). For that you need an impact
evaluation. An impact evaluation tells you whether the
problem changed (Steps 47 to 53).
ROLES OF PROCESS AND IMPACT EVALUATIONS
Both types of evaluations are needed in a POP project. The
table summarizes possible conclusions based on the
findings of both types of evaluation. A) The response was
implemented in accordance with the plans, and there are

no other reasonable explanations for the decline. So there
is credible evidence that the response caused the reduction.
B) The response was implemented as planned, but there
was no reduction in the problem. So there is credible
evidence that the response was ineffective.
But what if the response was not implemented as planned?
In this case, it is hard to come to a useful conclusion. C) If
the problem declined, it might mean that the response was
accidentally effective or some other factor was responsible.
D) If the problem did not decline, then no useful conclusion
is possible. Perhaps the implemented response is faulty and
the original response would have been effective, or neither
is effective. Unless the planned response was implemented,
it is hard to learn from an impact evaluation.
Focus of Process and Impact Evaluations

INPUTS
personnel
equipment
expenditures
other resources
Process evaluation focus
RESULTS
arrests
people trained
barriers installed
other tasks accomplished
OUTCOMES
crimes reduced
fear abated
accidents reduced
other reductions in problems
Impact evaluation focus
Interpreting Results of Process and Impact Evaluations

Process Evaluation Results
Impact
Evaluation
Results
Response implemented
as planned
Response not implemented as

planned
Problem declined
and no other likely
cause
A. Evidence that the

response caused
the decline
C. Suggests that the response was

accidentally effective or that other
factors may have caused the decline
Problem did
not decline
B. Evidence that the

response was ineffective
D. Little is learned
Scheduling of activities in a problem response is often

critical. For this reason, it is useful to create a project
timeline showing when key components were
implemented. It is also useful to show when other
unexpected events occurred and noting publicity so you
can check for Anticipatory Benefits (Step 52).
Though unexpected developments can force you to modify
a response, some of these developments can be
anticipated by understanding what can go wrong with
responses. Some of the possible answers are as follows:
1. You may have an inadequate understanding of
the problem. You may have focused too little on
repeat victims, for example. This can be caused by
invalid assumptions about the problem or insufficient
analysis (you did not look for repeat victimization, for
example). If, while developing the response, you can
identify weak spots in your analysis, then you can
create contingency plans (a plan to address repeat
victimization should this prove to be needed).
Further, it is sometimes possible to anticipate

components with high failure rates. Citizen groups in
general are quite variable in their ability to carry out
tasks, for example. Building in redundancy or
formulating backup plans can mitigate
component failure.
3. Offenders may react negatively to your
response (Step 11). Some forms of negative
adaptation can be anticipated and planned for.
Sometimes geographical displacement locations can
be identified before the response, for example, and
advanced protective actions can be taken to
immunize them.
4. There are unexpected external changes that
have an impact on the response. A partner
agency's budget may be unexpectedly cut, for
example, forcing it to curtail its efforts on the
problem. As the problem will not dissipate on its own,
the only recourse is to alter the plans.
Process evaluations require information. This information
will come largely from members of the problem-solving
team, so it is important that they document their
activities. Which activities they document and who
records it in what detail are questions that should be
resolved while planning the response.
2. Components of the project have failed. The

process evaluation checklist shows that there are
many potential points of failure. However, not all
components are equally important for success.
A Process Evaluation Checklist
Who is supposed to act?
Police units
Government partners
Community groups
Businesses
What are they supposed to do? _______
Do they have the capability to act?
Legal authority
Local authority
Resources
Expertise
When were they supposed to act?
Date and times_____ Coordination with others _____
Who or what is supposed to receive action?
People_____ Places_____
Was the action delivered appropriately?
Type _____ Intensity_____ Duration_____
Are there back up plans for . . .
Faulty plans ? Component failure ? Adaptation ? External changes
Others
ASSESS THE IMPACT
A response is a complex piece of machinery with a variety

of components, any of which can go wrong (Step 45). A
process evaluation examines which components were
carried out successfully. The process evaluation checklist
highlights the questions that you should ask.
4747. Know how to use controls
ou should address three questions when assessing

a response:
1. "What was the implemented response?" A process

evaluation answers this question (Step 46).
2. "Did the problem decline?" Comparing the level of the
problem after the response to the level of the problem
before answers this question.
3. If the response declined, then ask "Did the response
cause this decline, or was it something else?" There are
usually many alternative explanations for the decline in
the problem.
Answering the third question requires the use of controls.

The purpose of controls is to rule out alternative
explanations. Different alternative explanations require
different types of controls as described below:
Changes in size. If there had been a decline in the
number of tenants in an apartment building, we would
expect the number of burglaries to decline because there
are fewer potential victims. A reduction in targets is an
alternative to the explanation that the drop was due to
the intervention. To control for changes in size, divide the
number of burglaries before and after the response by the
number of occupied apartments before and after the
response. In the table, what appears to have been a
decline in burglaries was partially caused by the drop in
occupied units. When this is accounted for, we still notice
a response effect. If the time periods before and after are
of substantially different lengths, we control for this by
dividing again by the number of months before and the
number of months after to get burglaries per occupied
unit per month.
Using Rates to Control For Changes in Size
6 Months
Before
41
6 Months After
Change
20
-21
Occupied Units
83
73
-10
Burglaries/
Occupied Unit
.494
.286
-.208
Burglaries
Long-term trends in the problem. Problems may be

getting worse (or better) before the response (Step 26).
Without accounting for trends one could conclude that
the response was responsible, when in fact this might
have occurred anyway. There are two ways of controlling
for trend. The first method is to measure the problem for a
long period before the response so that any trend can be
identified. Substantial deviations from the existing trend
after the response are evidence of a response effect.
Anticipatory effects (Step 52) are drops in the problem
due to the response, but occurring before the response is
fully implemented. These need to be distinguished from
longer trends prior to implementation.
The second method is to compare the people or places
getting the response to a similar group of people or
places not getting the response. This is called a control
group or a comparison group. A control group must be
similar to the response group with regard to the problem,
but cannot receive the response. A control group tells you
what would have happened to the response group, if the
response group had not received the intervention. If the
response group changes differently from the control
group, this is evidence of a response effect.
Other unexpected events. Many other things are
changing as the response is implemented, one or more of
which could have caused the decline in the problem.
Instead of an accident-reduction response causing a
decline in accidents on a road, for example, slow traffic
from the road repairs, going on about the same time as
the response, might have been the cause. The standard
approach is to use a control group, as we discussed for
examining trends. The control area is only useful if it is
affected by the same factors as the response area. So,
counting accidents on the response and control roads,
both of which are influenced by the road repairs, could
tell you whether the road repairs contributed to the
decline in accidents.
Change in problem measurement. A before-after

comparison is only valid if the problem was measured in
the same way before and after the response.
Measurement differences can cause a perceived change in
the problem. Use the same measurement procedures
Cycles of activity. Human activity oscillates over days,
before and after. Before and after observations should
weeks, and months. Some of the most common cycles
occur at the same sites at the same times, watch the
include commuting and attendance at school, work, and
same things, and record things in the same way. Before
leisure, and seasons and holidays. Such cycles cause
and after photographs and videos should be taken in the
regular changes in problems. To control for cycles,
compare the same part of the cycle before the response to same light from the same angles, at the same distance,
and with the same size image area. Interviewers should
the same part of the cycle after the response.
Natural decline from an extreme high. Many

problems are addressed because things have become
extremely bad. So the response is implemented when the
problem is abnormally high. But even a relatively stable
problem will fluctuate. A problem that is now abnormally
bad will return to its normal level, even if nothing is done
(this is called "regression to the mean," and it applies to
abnormal lows as well). Comparison area controls may
not be useful here, if the response area is at a peak and
the control area is not. Instead, examine the long-term
fluctuation prior to the response to see if the problem was
abnormally bad.
The figure illustrates some of the uses of controls. Moving
clockwise around this figure, panel A shows a 24-month
time series with a response implemented in early
November of the first year. There is a pronounced yearly
cycle and a downward trend that are not due to the
response. The spike in November following the response
suggests that it backfired.
Panel B shows a before-and-after comparison (the

average of August-October, 2003 compared to the
average of November 2003-January 2004) that suggests a
worsening of the problem following the response.
In panel C, a comparison area has been added. The
immediate before-and-after comparison shows the
response area doing better than its comparison area, but
because of cyclical effects we would not have much
confidence in these findings. Comparing the 3 months
before the response to the same three months a year later
accounts for the cyclical behavior of the crime series.
But because some of the decline in both groups maybe
due to the general downward trend, panel D provides a
better picture of the impact of the response. Before the
response, the area being treated is consistently worse
than the comparison area. After the response, both do
about the same. Also, the troublesome November spike
seems to be unrelated to the response because it shows
up in the control trend, too. The response seems effective,
but is not dramatic, so its improvements were easily
hidden by factors that need to be controlled - trends,
cycles, and unexpected events.
Some Applications of Controls

B. Before 3 Month Average to After 3 Month Average
25.3
23.0
A. Monthly Time Series for Response Area

50
Response begins
40
30
20
10
03
c.
e.
0
De
Ju
n
02
De
c.
2
e0
Ju
n
Ja
n.
02
Response
Control
Response begins
40
Nov.02-Jan 30
C. Before 3 Month Average to Same After 3 Month

Average
25.3
23.0
22.3
Response
D. Monthly Time Series for Response and Control Areas

50
Aug-Oct, 02
16.3
30
Control
20
10
5.7
8.3
03
c.
Aug-Oct, 02 Nov.02-Jan 30 Aug-Oct, 03
De
3
ne
.0
Ju
02
c.
De
2
e0
Ju
n
Ja
n.
0
ASSESS THE IMPACT
be the same before and after, asking the same questions,

in the same order. Examine official records to determine if
recording practices are stable over time.
4848. Consider geographical and temporal displacement
eographical displacement occurs when the

intervention blocks crime or disorder opportunities
at a facility or in an area, and offenders move to
other facilities or areas to offend. Temporal displacement
also stems from successful prevention, but in this case
offenders shift offending in time to other hours or days.
displacement to the east. Knowing this, displacement

countermeasures can be applied with the response at the
most vulnerable locations.
If geographical or temporal displacement occurs, it is most

likely to shift crime to locations and times very similar to
the locations and times affected by the prevention. Such
Offenders can find it difficult to move to some other
shifts require less effort, learning, and risk for offenders
location because easy crime or disorder opportunities are than shifting to very different places and times. It is more
limited (Step 16). Targets may be concentrated at some
likely that offenders will try to outwait the response,
places and not others (Step 16). Vulnerable potential
which explains Lawrence Sherman's finding that the
victims can be found at some locations, but not others
effects of crackdowns decay. If offenders cannot outwait a
(Step 29). Some facilities have low behavioral controls, but response, it will be the most familiar locations and times
others do not (Step 28). Opportunities that exist are either that will have the greatest chance of receiving displaced
already hot spots or are hidden from offenders - either far crime. As Paul and Patricia Brantingham note, it is possible
away or not recognizable as fruitful places to offend.
to predict the most likely areas for displacement. But this
requires detailed knowledge of the crime opportunities in
Offenders will not usually spend time searching far from
the current situation.
their hot spot when it is suppressed. So, if offenders
move, they are most likely to move to a place close to the If geographical displacement occurs, it can distort
original hot spot. The likelihood that offenders will move
conclusions about effectiveness. Table 1 illustrates how
to an opportunity declines the further the opportunity is
this can happen. In this example there are three similar
from the original hot spot, as illustrated in the figure. Also, areas with equal numbers of crimes before treatment: (1)
not all spaces are suitable to offenders. Opportunities are a treatment area; (2) an area adjacent to the treatment
not spread evenly across the map.
area; and (3) an area distant from the treatment area. The
treated area has a decline of 25 crimes. However, the
In this map, the diamonds are places with characteristics
adjacent area has a 10-crime increase. This seems to
like the original hot spot. Those closest to the original
suggest that if nothing had been done in the treatment
location are most likely to be affected most by
area it too would have experienced a 10-crime increase.
displacement. In addition to distance, natural barriers to
So the net reduction is 35 (the 25 crimes reduced in the
movement can limit displacement. In the figure, the river treatment area and the 10-crime increase that
flowing northeast/southwest reduces the chances of
was averted).
Decline of Geographical Displacement with Distance from Hot Spot Epicenter
Treatment
Adjacent Area
Distant Area
Before
100
100
100
After
75
110
100
But these extra 10 crimes could have been due to

geographical displacement. One would be better off using
the distant control area for comparison. As a control, the
distant area suggests that if no treatment were
implemented, crime would not have changed in either the
treatment or the adjacent areas. The implication is that
the treatment caused a 25-crime decline in the treatment
area, but a 10-crime increase in the adjacent area
(displacement), for a combined reduction of 15 crimes.
Though effective, the program is not as effective as
originally estimated. Step 51 describes formulas to take
account of displacement when assessing effectiveness.
Try to select two comparison areas as part of evaluations:
one near the treatment area that has similar crime
opportunities to detect geographical displacement (and
diffusion, Step 51), and the other to serve as a control
area. The control area should be protected from
displacement contamination by distance or some other
barrier (e.g., a highway or river). Valid selection of control
and displacement areas requires you to have some idea of
offenders' normal movement patterns, as the control area
needs to be outside their roaming territory while the
displacement area should be within it.
Temporal displacement may be easier for offenders than
geographical displacement because it requires less effort.
Temporal displacement can occur within a 24-hour day, if,
for example, the prevention is restricted to certain times
but leaves other times unprotected. It can also occur over
a week. Or it can occur over longer periods.
Difference
-25
+10
0
Estimated Net effect

-35
-25
Table 2, a treatment takes place on Saturday and Sunday.

The average number of crimes on these days dropped by
25 crimes after treatment, while crimes on Mondays and
Fridays increased by 10. Was this due to temporal
displacement? Midweek days may be more valid controls
because they have less in common with weekends than
do Mondays and Fridays.
Waiting out the prevention is a common form of temporal
displacement. Enforcement crackdowns are particularly
vulnerable to this form of time shifting because they are
temporary by definition. If an intervention can be
maintained (unlike a crackdown), then offenders cannot
wait it out. They then face the difficult option of moving
to less attractive places or targets or undertaking new
tactics or other crimes. If these options are too difficult,
unrewarding, risky, or otherwise unattractive they may
commit fewer offenses.
Read More:
Brantingham, Paul and Patricia Brantingham. (2003).
"Anticipating the Displacement of Crime Using the
Principles of Environmental Criminology." Crime
Prevention Studies, volume 16. Monsey, NY: Criminal
Justice Press.
Eck, John (2002). Assessing Responses to Problems: An
Introductory Guide for Police Problem-Solvers.
Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of
Community Oriented Policing Services. (Accessible at:
www.popcenter.org and www.cops.usdoj.gov ).
If the evaluation compares times with a prevention

response to times without a prevention response,
contamination of temporal controls can take place. In
Table 2: Using Days of the Week to Control for Temporal Displacement
Treatment
Adjacent Area
Distant Area
Days of week
Before
After
Difference
Sat & Sun

Mon & Fri
Tues-Thurs
100
100
100
75
110
100
-25
+10
0
Estimated
Net effect
-35
-25
ASSESS THE IMPACT
Table 1: Use of Adjacent and Distant Control Areas in Controlling for

Geographical Displacement
4949. Examine displacement to other targets, tactics, and crime types
n addition to geographical and temporal displacement,

offenders can switch targets, change their tactics, or
change crimes.
Target displacement involves offenders shifting from newly

protected targets to other targets. In 1970, when steering
column locks became required in all new cars sold in
Britain, thefts of new cars dropped from 20.9 percent of
all cars stolen in 1969, to 5.1 percent in 1973. However,
the overall theft rate of automobiles stayed roughly
constant because offenders switched from the newer,
protected, vehicles to older, unprotected, vehicles. This is
one of the few documented cases where displacement
wiped out most prevention gains, at least in the short run.
Over a longer period, these devices appeared to have
curbed theft for temporary use. As this case illustrates, it is
easy for offenders to switch to very similar targets. Target
displacement is less likely when the alternative targets are
unlike the old targets.
Step 42 shows how geographical or temporal
displacement can contaminate control groups. If the
evaluation of a prevention effort uses a target control
group, then a similar form of contamination can take
place. Imagine a response to curb theft of purses from
women over 60 years old in a shopping center. To
estimate what the trend in elderly purse theft would be if
nothing had been done, the theft of purses from middleaged women of 45 to 59 is measured. If, unknown to us,
the thieves displaced from the protected older women to
unprotected middle-aged women, we would conclude that
purse theft would have gone up without a response.
When we compare this control target group change to the
treatment group change we would mistakenly inflate the
treatment effectiveness. A better control group might be
even younger women shoppers (ages 30 to 44, for
example), or even better, wallet theft of male shoppers.
Though neither of these alternatives is perfect, they are
improvements because one would expect far less
displacement to dissimilar targets. Or, select another
shopping district as a control area - in which case you
would have to guard against geographical diffusion or
displacement contamination, Steps 48 and 51.
Tactical displacement occurs when offenders change their
tactics or procedures. They might use different tools to
defeat better locks, for example. Or computer hackers
might alter their programs to circumvent improved
security. In medicine, some bacteria can mutate quickly so

a drug that is effective against one form of the bacteria
becomes less effective as mutant strains become more
prevalent. One way of countering this is to use broadspectrum treatments that are effective against a wide
range of mutations. Similarly, "broad spectrum" responses
protect against existing methods used by offenders and
many modifications of these tactics. Broad-spectrum
interventions require offenders to make big changes in
their behavior that they may not be able to do. Paul
Ekblom describes attempted tactical displacement
following the installation of barriers in British post offices
to prevent "over-the-counter" robberies; some offenders
tried using sledge-hammers. This change in tactics was
not particularly successful, however, and displacement was
limited. These barriers are an example of a
broad-spectrum intervention as they were able to defeat
new tactics.
Switching crime type is another type of displacement you
should look for. Offenders might switch from vehicle theft
to vehicle break-ins, or carjacking. We sometimes
evaluate responses to one type of crime by comparing the
trend in a similar type of crime that did not get a
prevention response. For example, we might select theft
from vehicles as a control in the evaluation of a theft of
vehicles intervention.
The same principles of contamination and protection
apply to tactical and crime type displacement as we found
with other forms of displacement. If the tactic or crime
type is very similar to the tactic or crime type being
addressed, then displacement could contaminate these
controls. Dissimilar tactics or crime types are less likely to
suffer contamination. But if they are too dissimilar it is not
a useful control.
There is no perfect solution to this problem and
compromises must be struck. The consequence is that it is
often difficult to know if displacement is occurring and
difficult to judge the effectiveness of the intervention.
Compounding these difficulties is that multiple forms of
displacement can occur simultaneously. Indeed,
sometimes one form of displacement will necessitate
another form as well. Target displacement may require a
change in tactics, and if the new targets are not in the
same places as the old targets, geographical displacement
will occur, too.
Read More:
Ekblom, Paul (1987). Preventing Robberies at Sub-Post
Offices: An Evaluation of a Security Initiative. Crime
Prevention Unit Paper 9. London: Home Office.
Webb, Barry (1994). "Steering Column Locks and Motor
Vehicle Theft: Evaluations from Three Countries". Crime
Prevention Studies, volume 2, Ronald Clarke. Monsey, NY:
Criminal Justice Press. (Accessible at: www.popcenter.org).
A study of target displacement: helmet laws and the reduction in motorcycle theft
In Germany (as elsewhere) the enactment of helmet laws was followed by large reductions in thefts of motorcycles.
After the laws were brought into place in 1980, offenders wanting to steal a motorbike had to bring a helmet or
they would be spotted quickly. The figure shows that by 1986 thefts of motorbikes had dropped to about one-third
of their level in 1980, from about 150,000 to about 50,000. (The gradual decline probably reflects stronger
enforcement and growing knowledge about the requirement.) This fact suggests that motorbike theft has a much
larger opportunistic component than anyone would have thought. The existence of excellent theft data in Germany
allowed researchers to investigate whether the drop in motorcycle theft had resulted in target displacement to theft
of cars or bikes, other forms of personal transportation.
The other two lines show the national totals for car and bike thefts during the same years. These provide some
limited evidence of displacement in that thefts of cars increased by nearly 10 percent between 1980 and 1986, from
about 64,000 to 70,000. Thefts of bicycles also increased between 1980 and 1983, but by the end of the period had
declined again to a level below that for 1980. Altogether, it is clear that at most only a small proportion of the
100,000 motorbike thefts saved by the helmet laws were displaced to thefts of other vehicles.
A little thought shows why this may not be surprising. Motorbikes may be particularly attractive to steal. They are
much more fun to ride than bikes for the young men who comprise most of the thieves. Even if the intention is
merely to get home late at night, a motorbike offers significant advantages, especially if the distance is more than a
few miles. Motorbikes may also be easier to steal than cars since the latter have to be broken into before they can
be started. Like bikes, cars also offer less excitement than motorcycles and they may require more knowledge
to operate.
500,000
Motorcyles
Cars
Bicycles
Number of Thefts
450,000
400,000
350,000
300,000
250,000
200,000
150,000
100,000
50,000
0
1980
1981
1982
1983
1984
1985
1986
Source: Mayhew, Pat and colleagues (1989). Motorcycle Theft, Helmet Legislation and Displacement. Howard Journal
of Criminal Justice 28:1-8.
ASSESS THE IMPACT
You cannot find displacement unless you look for it. This
means that you should examine a problem closely and
imagine the most likely forms of displacement. Are there
other opportunities for crime or disorder that are similar
to the opportunities your efforts are trying to block? Will
your offenders easily discover these opportunities?
Looking for displacement opportunities prior to finalizing
a response gives you two advantages. First, you can
develop measures for detecting it should it appear. More
important, you may be able to develop counter-measures
that prevent displacement.
5050. Watch for other offenders moving in
hree principles of this manual are: (1) it takes more

than offenders to create problems; (2) people cannot
offend if there is no opportunity structure to support
this behavior; and (3) altering the opportunity structures
can dramatically reduce problems. It follows that
responses focusing on only removing offenders have
limited effects on problems. After some offenders are
removed, there may be a decline in the problem for a
short time, then either the old offenders return to take
advantage of the opportunities, or new offenders start
taking advantage of them. This is sometimes called
perpetrator displacement. Natural replacement of
offenders can be slow, particularly if the opportunities are
obscure. But if someone discovered the crime
opportunities in the past, others will rediscover them in
the future. And if the old offenders were removed through
imprisonment, some may return to take advantage of the
opportunities upon their release.
New offenders attracted by opportunities might contribute
to long-term crime cycles. Bank robberies in parts of the
United States may be an example of this. For a few years
there will be a large number of these crimes and then
they will decline for several years, only to surge again
later to start the cycle over again. One hypothesis for
these cycles is that during peak robbery years, banks
begin instituting a host of preventive measures and most
offenders are caught and imprisoned. These efforts drive
bank robbery down. After several years with few bank
robberies, bank security becomes lax and the
opportunities for bank robbery increase. Then new
offenders start to take advantage of the lower security,
beginning a new wave of robberies and prevention. This
hypothesis draws attention to the fact that it takes more
than enforcement to be effective, and prevention gains
must be maintained to stay effective.
In fact, it is quite common to read descriptions of
problem-solving efforts that begin with a description of
failed enforcement efforts. In every situation either old
offenders keep coming back or new offenders have
replaced them. There are three ways in which new people
are exposed to offending opportunities:
1. They are exposed to them through their normal daily
routines. Police arrest young men stealing items from
unlocked cars in a city center, for example, but
unlocked cars with things in them remain there. Of
the many people who use the city center on a daily
basis, a few will notice these cars and try their hand
at theft. If successful, some of these individuals will
continue to steal from cars.
2. They are exposed to crime opportunities through

informal networks of friends and acquaintances.
People already experienced in taking advantage of an
opportunity to commit crime or disorder may invite
others in to help them or enjoy the experience. Since
we are seldom 100 percent successful at removing all
the offenders for long periods, there are usually many
people around who can introduce new people to
the opportunities.
3. They discover offending opportunities through
recruitment. A criminal receiver may employ new
burglars if the old ones can no longer supply him with
goods. If prostitution is organized, then a pimp may
recruit new prostitutes to fill the jobs left vacant by
the former prostitutes. Gangs may bring in new
members to replace old ones. It has been suggested
that adult drug dealers, faced with stiffer penalties for
drug convictions, started hiring juveniles to carry out
the riskiest tasks because the penalties for juveniles
caught with drugs were much less than for adults.
How do you find out if offenders are moving in? The most
straightforward method is to compare the names of
offenders associated with the problem before the
response to the names of offenders associated with the
problem after the response. If the names are different,
then offenders may be moving in. The difficulty with this
approach is that a complete roster of the offenders
involved is seldom available. So it is not clear if the new
names are really new offenders, or if they have been part
of the problem for some time, but have only recently
been discovered.
Offender interviews can also be helpful. Offenders may
tell you when they became involved in the problem, how
they became involved, and who else is involved. They can
also provide information on tactical and other forms of
displacement. However, offenders can be uncooperative
and unreliable (Step 10).
Sometimes detailed examination of the methods used to
commit crimes can provide insights into whether new
offenders are involved. If the tactics are radically different
than those used earlier, there is a possibility that new
offenders are working. However, it is also possible that
the old offenders have switched tactics.
Matthews, Roger (1997). "Developing More Effective

Strategies for Curbing Prostitution" Situational Crime
Prevention: Successful Case Studies (2nd ed.), Ronald
Clarke. Monsey, NY: Criminal Justice Press.
Combining Crackdowns with Environmental Modifications:
Controlling "Away Day" Prostitutes in Finsbury Park
Roger Matthews describes a London prostitution problem in the Finsbury Park neighborhood of London. Repeated
crackdowns by the police over many years had failed to control the prostitution market as the prostitutes simply
returned to the same area. When crackdowns were combined with street barriers to make it difficult for men to find
prostitutes by driving around the area in their cars, the level of prostitution activity dropped dramatically. Matthews
suggests that it was the combination of strategies - offender removal through enforcement and opportunity blocking
through street barriers - that was responsible for the decline. One important reason why these interventions were
successful was that the prostitutes were not deeply committed to this way of earning a living. Few of them were
addicts or under the control of pimps. In fact, the most common reasons they gave for working as prostitutes was
that they could earn more money than other forms of work, they enjoyed the independence and enjoyed meeting a
variety of men. Many of them came to Finsbury Park from outlying areas on cheap rail tickets. Together with other
women, they rented rooms in one of the many boarding houses or residential hotels in the area, or they conducted
business in the cars of clients. When not working as prostitutes, many of them worked as barmaids, go-go dancers or
as store clerks. Their relatively light commitment to prostitution and their alternative ways of making money might
help explain why the researchers could find little evidence of displacement of the Finsbury Park prostitutes to other
nearby areas in London.
ASSESS THE IMPACT
Read More:
5151. Be alert to unexpected benefits
ou can drastically underestimate the effects of your

intervention if you do not take account of diffusion
of benefits (Step 13). You may conclude that the
intervention is not worth the effort or that it failed to
suppress the problem. This is particularly true when
diffusion contaminates your control group.
Control groups show what would have happened to

problems if you did nothing (Step 47). They need to be as
similar to the treatment group as possible, but they must
not be influenced by the treatment. If prevention diffuses
into the control area, you will get the misleading
impression that things would have gotten better if no
response had occurred. This invalid conclusion will cause
you to underestimate the effectiveness of your program.
(See Step 48 for related issues with displacement.)
Kate Bowers and Shane Johnson suggest two ways to
select control areas when displacement or diffusion of
benefits are possible. The first is to create two concentric
zones around the treatment area. Prevention may diffuse
into the adjacent buffer zone but does not contaminate
the outer control area. This is feasible if the control and
treatment areas are very similar and diffusion or
displacement does not reach the control zone. If these
conditions are not met, then option 2 should be used.
Here a displacement/diffusion sites near the treatment
area are used, but the control areas are widely separated
from the treatment and diffusion/displacement areas.
Controls are selected specifically for their similarity to and
isolation from the treatment area. Multiple control areas
can be selected and their crime rates averaged.
The figure shows an example of option 2. Imagine a
response to the theft from vehicles in downtown Charlotte
parking lots (Step 27). One theft hot spot site is selected
for a response. The neighboring hot spots are good
diffusion/displacement sites. Earlier analysis showed that a
rail line through these lots facilitated the problem, so a
third hot spot lot to the south and west on this rail line is
also a useful diffusion-displacement site. Control lots are
not on the rail line and far enough from the response site
that diffusion and displacement are unlikely.
To determine the overall effect of the response on the
problem (including any diffusion or displacement effects)
you need to answer four questions. Each question has a
simple formula. The letters in the formulas follow
this pattern.
R is the number or rate of crimes in the response area.

D is the number or rate of crimes in the
displacement/diffusion area.
C is the number or rate of crimes in the control area.
The subscripts, a and b, indicate when crime is
counted; after or before the response began. For
example, Ra is the rate of crimes in the response area
before the response was implemented, and Cb is the rate
of crimes in the control area after the response
was implemented.
1. Did the problem change from before to after

the response? Subtract the crime in the treatment
area before the response from the treatment area
after the response to get the Gross Effect (GE):
GE = Rb - Ra
A positive number indicates a decline in the problem.
Zero indicates no change. And a negative number
indicates things got worse.
2. Was the response a likely cause of the change?
Browers and Johnson suggest looking at the difference
in the ratios of the treatment area to the control area
before and after; that is divide the before response by
the before control minus the after response divided by
the after control. This is the Net Effect (NE):
NE =
Rb
Cb
Ra
Ca
If the net effect is close to zero, the response probably

was ineffective, and if NE is negative the response may
have made things worse. In either case, displacement
and diffusion are irrelevant so you can stop with the
answer to this question. But if NE is positive, there is
reason to believe the response may have caused the
improvement. This raises the possibilities of diffusion
and displacement. So you need to answer the
next question.
Da is the crime rate in the diffusion/displacement area

after the program and Db is the crime rate in this area
before the program. The bottom term (denominator)
is a measure of the effectiveness of the response,
relative to the control. An effective program will
produce a negative number in the denominator. The
top term (numerator) shows the relative amount of
diffusion or displacement. The numerator is negative
when diffusion is present and positive when
displacement is present. If it is near zero, neither is
present and the WDQ is zero (so you can skip
question 4). If the WDQ is positive, there is diffusion
(remember, a ratio of two negative numbers is
positive), and if it is greater than one, then the
diffusion effect is greater than the response effect. If
the WDQ is negative, there is displacement. When the
WDQ is between zero and negative one, displacement
erodes some, but not all, of the response effects.
Theoretically, the WDQ could be less than negative
one, indicating the response made things worse.
However, research suggests that this is an
unlikely occurrence.
Read More:
Bowers, Kate and Shane Johnson (2003). "Measuring the
Geographical Displacement and Diffusion of Benefit
Effects of Crime Prevention Activity." Journal of
Quantitative Criminology 19(3):275-301.
Selecting Control and Diffusion/
Displacement Sites
Diffusion/Displacement
Sites
Response Site
Control Sites
Legend
Lower
Parking Areas
1999 LFA by block
Higher
4. What is the Total Net Effect of the response

(including diffusion and displacement)? Bowers
and Johnson suggest using the following formula to
calculate the TNE:
Ca
C
Ca
TNE= Rb
-Ra + Db
-Da
C
Cb
Cb
The first part shows the effect of the response in the
response area. The more effective the treatment, the
bigger this term. The second part shows the level of
diffusion or displacement. It will be positive when
there is diffusion and negative when there is
displacement. The more positive the TNE, the more
effective the response.
ASSESS THE IMPACT
3. What is the relative size of the displacement or

diffusion? Bowers and Johnson propose the
Weighted Displacement Quotient (WDQ) to
measure this:
Da
Db
Ca
Cb
WDQ =
Ra Rb
Ca
Cb
5252. Expect premature falls in crime
ffenders often believe that prevention measures

have been brought into force before they actually
have been started. This leads to what has been
called the "anticipatory benefits" of prevention. Though
these anticipatory effects can occur by accident, the police
can make deliberate efforts to create or intensify them. To
do so successfully, police must have useful insight into
how offenders perceive the situation and have methods
for deceiving offenders as to the true nature of
the intervention.
Martha Smith and her colleagues found evidence of
anticipatory benefits in 40% of situational prevention
studies whose data could have revealed such benefits.
They have suggested six possible explanations for
observed anticipatory benefits:
1. Preparation-anticipation effects occur when
offenders believe the program is operational before it
is actually working. For example, a property-marking
program may be announced to the public, but
residents have not yet been mobilized, or closed
circuit television cameras may be installed but not
yet monitored.
2. Publicity/disinformation effects occur when
offenders believe covert enforcement exists as the
result of publicity or rumor. Offenders' perception can
be manipulated, at least in the short run, through
disinformation. Rather than disinformation, targeted
communications can sometimes be effective. A Boston
project to reduce youth homicide used direct
communications with potential offenders to warn
them that certain specified behaviors would result
in crackdowns.
3. Preparation-disruption effects occur when
preparation for the prevention program causes
surveillance at the prevention sites. Surveys of
residents might alert offenders. Problem-solving
projects can create anticipatory responses during their
analysis stage if there is considerable visible enquiry
in the community. In the late 1980s as part of the
analysis of a burglary problem, members of the
Newport News Police Department conducted door-todoor surveys in a high burglary neighborhood. This
may have contributed to the subsequent fall in
burglaries. In their review of effective policing
strategies, Sherman and Eck noted that door-to-door
police contacts have generally been found to have a
crime reduction effect.
4. Creeping implementation occurs when parts of the

response are put into effect before the official start
date. The evaluator may use June 1st as the beginning
of the full program, but offenders detect staged
implementation in the weeks leading up to June 1,
and change their behavior accordingly.
5. Preparation-training effects occur when planning,
training, and surveys make the public or police better
prepared to address problems and they use this new
knowledge prior to the program going into effect. A
coordinated multi-business anti-shoplifting program,
for example, may be scheduled to begin on a
particular date, but the discussions and training of
employees makes them more attentive prior to
that date.
6. Motivation of officers or public occurs for similar
reasons as preparation training, except the people
involved are more highly motivated rather than better
equipped. The higher motivation leads to improved
performance in advance of response implementation.
Using a timeline to carefully document when pieces of the
response were implemented is helpful for showing that an
anticipatory effect is plausible (see Step 46).
Smith and her colleagues also identified four distinct
circumstances that masquerade as anticipatory effects, but
are really the results of misinterpretation or
incomplete analysis:
1. Seasonal changes can create pseudo anticipatory
effects when an intervention begins shortly after a
seasonal turndown in crime. Controlling for
seasonality (Steps 26 and 47) can eliminate
this problem.
2. Regression effects refer to natural declines in crime
from extreme highs that occur even if nothing is done
(Step 47). If a crime trend for a problem has just
dropped due to a regression effect and a prevention
program is implemented, the natural decline will look
like an anticipatory effect. Examining the long-term
average crime level (Step 26) prior to the response, as
suggested in Step 47, can reveal a regression effect
masquerading as an anticipatory effect.
4. Smoothing data (Step 26) to reveal a trend masked

by random variation can produce results that look like
anticipatory effects. The wider the moving average (5
periods rather than 3, for example) and the bigger
and more abrupt the decline in crime following the
intervention, the more likely smoothing could create a

pseudo anticipatory effect. Comparing smoothed and
unsmoothed data will reveal this pseudo
anticipatory effect.
Read More:
Sherman, Lawrence and John Eck. 2002. Policing for
Crime Prevention. Pp. 295-329 in Evidence-Based Crime
Prevention, edited by Lawrence Sherman and colleagues.
New York: Routledge.
Smith, Martha and colleagues (2002). Anticipatory
Benefits in Crime Prevention. In Analysis for Crime
Prevention. Crime Prevention Studies, Volume 13. Monsey,
New York: Criminal Justice Press.
Anticipatory Effects of Publicity

Paul Barclay and colleagues evaluated the effects of bike patrols on auto theft from a large commuter parking lot outside
Vancouver, British Columbia. Vehicle theft dropped after the response, but it had been dropping for several weeks prior to the bike
patrols, since the implementation of a publicity campaign that preceded the bike patrols. In this case, an anticipatory effect may
have added a great deal to the overall effectiveness of the patrols. Though a moving average was used to smooth out random
variation, the drop in thefts between the beginning of the publicity and the beginning of the bike patrols is too large to be due to
data smoothing.
Reported Vehicle Thefts
25
Pubilicity
campaign begins
Bike patrol period
20
15
10
5
0
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25
Two week periods: Aug. 1 94- Aug. 31, 95
Source: Barclay, Paul and colleagues (1996) "Preventing Auto Theft in Suburban Vancouver Commuter Lots: Effects of a
Bike Patrol." Crime Prevention Studies, volume 6, Monsey, NY: Criminal Justice Press.
ASSESS THE IMPACT
3. If a crime type (A) has been over-recorded by

changing the classification of another crime, it is
possible to get what looks like an anticipatory effect.
This might occur if one type of crime was inflated in
order to gain funding to address that type of crime,
and then following the receipt of funding, the
classification was changed back to normal. This bogus
anticipatory effect can be detected by looking at
opposite trends in the other crime. Finding two similar
crimes that have opposite trends provides a clue that
classification changes may be responsible.
5353. Test for significance
ow do you know that a response caused a problem

to decline? Most problems vary in intensity, even
when nothing is done about them. For example, on
average there are 32 vehicle thefts per week in a
particular city center, but seldom are there weeks with
exactly 32 thefts. Instead, 95 percent of the weeks have
between 25 and 38 thefts, and in 5 percent of the weeks
fewer than 25 or more than 38 thefts are recorded. Such
random variation is common. A reduction in vehicle thefts
from an average of 32 per week to an average of 24 per
week might be due to randomness alone, rather than a
response. Think of randomness as unpredictable
fluctuations in crime due to a very large number of small
influences, so even if the police do nothing crime
will change.
A significance test tells us the chance that a change in
crime is due to randomness. A significant difference is
one that is unlikely to be caused by randomness. It is
harder to discern whether a small difference is significant
than it is to find significance in a large difference. It is
also harder to find a significant difference in a normally
volatile crime problem, even if the response is effective.
And it is harder to find significance if you are only looking
at a few cases (people, places, events, or times) than if
you are looking at many (again, even if the response was
effective.) You cannot control the size of the difference or
the volatility of the problem, but you may be able to
collect data on more cases.
Consider the following common situation. You want to

determine if crime dropped in an area following a
response. You have a number of weeks of crime data
prior to the response and a number of weeks of data for
the same area following the response. You calculate the
average (mean) number of crimes per week for each set
of weeks and find that crime dropped.
The figure shows three possible results. In each panel
there are two distributions, one for the weeks before the
response and one for the weeks after the response. The
vertical bars in each chart show the proportion of weeks
with 0, 1, 2, or more crimes (for example, in the top chart,
6 crimes occurred in 20 percent of the weeks after the
response). In panel A, the distributions barely overlap
because the difference in means is large and the standard
deviations of the two groups are small (see Step 22).
Even with a few weeks of data, a significance test could
rule out randomness as a cause. In panel B, there is
greater overlap in the distributions, there is a smaller
difference in the means, and the standard deviations are
larger. It takes many more cases to detect a non-random
difference in situations like this. In panel C, there is
almost complete overlap, the mean difference is even
smaller, and the standard deviations are even larger. Only
a study with a very large number of cases is likely to find
a significant difference here. The moral is that the less
obvious the crime difference, the more cases you will need
to be sure randomness was not the cause of
the difference.
Proportion of of Crimes
0.200
0.100
Before Mean=16 Std Dev=2
0.050
After Mean=5 Std Dev=2
0.000
A. Clear Difference
0.150
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25
Number of Crimes
0.120
0.100
B. Ambiguous Difference
0.080
0.060
0.040
0.020
0.000
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24
Number of Crimes
C. Probably Random Difference
0.50
0.40
0.30
0.20
0.10
0.00
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24
Number of Crimes
Probability theory lets us use the mean, standard

deviation, and number of cases to calculate the
probability that randomness is the cause of the difference.
If there is less than a 5 percent chance that the problem's
change was due to random fluctuations, we reject the
explanation of randomness as a cause of the change.
Here, 5 percent is called the significance level. In short,
because the probability that randomness is the cause is
below the significance level (5 percent) we "bet" that
something other than randomness caused the change.
Though 5 percent is a conventional significance level, you
can pick a more stringent level, such as 1 percent. The
more stringent the significance level you select, the
greater the likelihood you will mistakenly conclude that
the response was ineffective when it actually worked.
This type of mistake is called a "false negative" (see Step
37). You might pick a stringent significance level if the
cost of the response is so high that you need to be very
certain it works.
Occasionally, analysts use a less stringent significance
level, such as 10 percent. The less stringent the level you
pick, the greater the possibility that you will mistakenly
endorse a response that has no effect. This type of error is
called a "false positive" (see Step 37). You might want to
pick a less stringent level if the problem is serious, the
measures of the problem are not particularly good, and
you are very concerned about accidentally rejecting a
good response.
There are two ways of using significance levels. In the
discussion above, we used them as rejection thresholds:
below the level you reject random chance and above the
level you accept it as the cause. Always pick the
significance level before you conduct a significance test to
avoid "fiddling" with the figures to get the
desired outcome.
It is better to use the significance level as a decision aid,
along with other facts (problem seriousness, program
costs, absolute reduction in the problems and so forth), to
make an informed choice. Many sciences, such as

medicine, follow this approach. If you follow this
approach, use a p-value instead of the significance test.
The p-value is an exact probability that the problem's
change is due to chance. So a p-value of 0.062 tells you
that there is about a 6 percent chance of making a falsepositive error by accepting the response. This can be
roughly interpreted to mean that in 100 such decisions,
the decision to reject randomness in favor of the response
will be wrong about six times. Whether you or your
colleagues would take such a bet depends on a
many things.
It is important to distinguish between significant and
meaningful. "Significant" means that the difference is
unlikely to be due to chance. "Meaningful" means the
difference is big enough to matter. With enough cases,
even a very small difference is significant. But that does
not mean it is worthwhile. Significance can be calculated.
Meaningfulness is an expert judgment.
The investigation of randomness can become very
complex, as there are many different types of significance
tests for many different situations. There are some very
useful websites, as well as books, which can help you to
choose among them, and there are many statistical
software programs that can make the required
calculations. But if there is a great deal riding on the
outcome of a significance test, or a p-value, and you are
not well educated in probability theory or statistics, you
should seek expert help from a local university or other
organizations that use statistics on a regular basis.
Read More:
Crow, Edwin and colleagues (1960). Statistics Manual.
New York: Dover.
Website with many useful statistical links
www.prndata.com/statistics_sites.htm
ASSESS THE IMPACT
0.60
5454. Tell a clear story
he purpose of your work is to help people make

better decisions. To assist decision-makers, you must
tell a clear story that leads from an important
question to possible answers and then to effective
actions. To communicate effectively you need to know
who your audience is and the questions they want
answered. Your story has to address their particular needs.
This story can be told in a written report or in an oral
presentation (see Step 58).
Do not simply recount what you did to detect, analyze,
respond, or assess. This is tedious and does not help
people make actionable decisions from your work. You
must translate your analytical work into a story that
addresses the needs of your audience.
Your work can help answer four basic questions. These
questions correspond to the stages of the SARA process:
1. What is the nature of the problem? (Scanning)
2 .What causes the problem? (Analysis)
3. What should be done about the problem? (Response)
4. Has the response brought about a reduction in the
problem? (Assessment)
Clearly, these questions must be made more specific
based on the facts of the problem being examined. Local
residents, for example, might complain about late night
noise and finding litter along their street. Instead of the
general scanning question, you could develop a set of
specific questions, based on the CHEERS test (Step 14):
Your first task in telling a coherent story is to decide

which kind of question you are seeking to answer. Next,
you should try to structure your account around the basic
theories and approaches described in this manual (e.g.,
the CHEERS test, the crime triangle, or the 80-20 rule).
These are frameworks. A framework is a general "story
shell" linking multiple interacting factors and that can be
applied to a variety of problems. Your choice of
frameworks depends on the problem, your findings, and
the needs of decision-makers. Be sure there is a logical
flow from the basic question, through the framework and
findings, to the answers. Check for gaps in logic. Now
outline your story. There are four basic story outlines that
can guide your work. The details of the story will depend
on the specifics of your problem.
Do not stick religiously to these outlines; we provide them
as a starting point to prompt ideas. Instead, tailor them
to the amount of time you have and, above all, to the
concerns of the people whom you are addressing. Try to
anticipate their questions, and modify the appropriate
outline accordingly. Though we have used technical terms
from this manual in these outlines, you may need to use a
common vocabulary in your presentation. If your audience
is not already familiar with the terminology of problem
analysis, you probably should use it sparingly, or not at all.
Four Story Outlines
1: What is the nature of the problem?
A. Organizing framework - e.g., CHEERS elements.
What
is the nature of the noise incidents? (Events)

In what ways are these incidents similar? (Similarity)
Are there recurring instances of late-night noise and
litter that disturb residents? (Recurring)
Who, when, and where do these incidents occur?
(Community)
How do these incidents disturb people? (Harm)
Who expects the police to address the problem?
(Expectation)
Answering the general question - What is the nature of
the problem? - requires you to answer a set of more
specific questions.
B. Systematic description of evidence about problem type

and existence:
What is the nature of the events?
In what ways are these events similar?
How often do these events recur?
When and where do these events occur?
Who is harmed by these events, and how?
Who expects the police to address the problem?
C. Implications for analysis and collaborative problem
solving:
Questions that need answering.
Definitional and measurement issues.
Partners who need to become involved.
D. Summary.
4: Has the response reduced the problem?
A. Organizing framework for problem - e.g., problem

analysis triangle.
A. Organizing framework - e.g., principles of evaluation.
B. Systematic description of problem answering the

following questions:
Who are the offenders?
Who or what are the targets?
At what places and times does the problem occur?
What brings the offenders and targets together at the
same places?
Why don't others step in to prevent these encounters?
What facilitates or inhibits the problem?
C. Implications for general form of responses that fit
the information:
Offender access or control.
Victim/target behaviors or protection.
Facility access or management.
B. Systematic description of evaluation:

Was the response implemented as planned?
Did the problem change?
Why it is likely that the response was a direct cause of
change.
The magnitude of displacement, diffusion and other
side effects.
C. Implications for further action:
Is this problem solving effort complete?
What further actions are necessary?
Should further analysis be conducted?
Should the response be changed?
D. Summary.
D. Summary.
3: What should be done about this problem?
A. Organizing framework for response - e.g., situational
crime prevention:
Offenders.
Targets/victims.
Places.
B. Systematic description of response strategy:
Increasing risk or effort.
Decreasing reward, excuses, or provocations.
Who will carry out actions, when, and where?
Additional resources required.
C. Implications and anticipated outcomes:
Direct results.
Displacement.
Diffusion.
Other side effects.
How evaluation should be conducted.
D. Summary.
COMMUNICATE EFFECTIVELY
2: What causes the problem?
5555. Make clear maps
aps have an important role in telling compelling

stories about problems. But they need to be clear
to accomplish this. That is, maps must contain as
much relevant information as possible and no irrelevant
information. There are a number of guides to good
cartographic principles available (see box and Read More).
Together, these three maps nicely illustrate the nature of

the problem and what was done about it. The result of
this project was the virtual elimination of the gypsy cab
problem in Tnsberg, without increasing disorder.
Knutsson and Svik heavily annotated these maps to

show features that a typical geographic information
We will illustrate the use of maps to tell stories with a set system would not show. This is good practice. Much
of maps from a problem-solving project undertaken by the information about problems is not contained
Norwegian Police. Figures 1 and 2 illustrate how maps
in computers.
can be used to describe problems and solutions.
Johannes Knutsson, of the National Norwegian Police
Still, there are a number of features of good maps that
Academy, and Knut-Erik Svik, of the Vestfold Police
are missing. There is no compass direction. However,
District, were attempting to address a problem of illegal
direction plays no part in the problem so its absence does
("gypsy") cabs in a small coastal town of Tnsberg
not detract from clarity of the maps. Also missing is a
(population 36,000). On weekends the 30 drinking
scale showing the relative size of map features. This
establishments draw large crowds and people move back impedes understanding of those who are unfamiliar with
and forth across a highway, so the highway is closed on
the area.
Friday and Saturday nights. A parking area is also closed.
However, legal taxis and busses can move along the
Read More:
highway. Unlicensed "gypsy" cabs have taken over most
of the business in this area, in part by intimidating the
Boba, Rachel (2005) Crime Analysis and Crime Mapping:
An Introduction. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
licensed cab operators. A number of serious crimes had
been attributed to the drivers of these illegal cabs and
Harries, Keith (1999). Mapping Crime: Principle and
they have been the subjects of numerous complaints.
Practice. Washington, DC: National Institute of Justice,
Crime Mapping Research Center.
The setting of the problem is shown on two maps in
Figure 1. The left panel is a street map. It shows many
features irrelevant to the problem and fails to show many Knutsson, Johannes and Knut-Erik Svik (2004) Gypsy
Cabs in Tnsberg. Submission to the Herman Goldstein
features that are important. The right panel is a highly
Awards. (accessible at www.popcenter.org)
edited version of this map. It contains only the relevant
features of the base map and adds the important omitted
Jerry Ratcliffe has a list of mapping tips at:
features, giving a much clearer picture of the setting.
www.jratcliffe.net
Figure 2 contains two maps summarizing conclusions
from the analysis and important features of the response.
The left map shows the primary travel routes of the gypsy
cab drivers. The gypsy cabs make use of the street
barricades and the parking lots to pick up customers. This
map also shows that the bus stand and (legal) cab stand
are too far from the people using the area. When the
bars close after 3:00 AM there is great demand for
transportation and the illegal cabs are in the best position
to fill the demand. The response map on the right of
Figure 2 shows how the highway barrier was moved to
prevent gypsy cabs from getting to potential customers,
the parking lots blocked off late at night to keep these
cabs out, and how the legal cab stand and bus stand
were moved to locations more convenient for the
customers. This map is an important part of the process
evaluation (Step 46).
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Know what information your audience will find useful (and what information is confusing).
Keep maps simple. Eliminate all features that do not contribute to understanding the problem.
Avoid graphics that draw more attention to themselves than the data.
Include details that help the viewer understand the problem, even if that means adding this information by hand.
Include a scale and, if needed, a compass orientation (usually North is to the top).
Use meaningful gradations to show intensity of hot spots. For example show colors becoming increasingly hot
(yellow to red) as the problem worsens.
7. Apply the correct dimension of crime concentration: dots for places (and sometimes victims); lines for
concentrations along streets and highways; and areas for neighborhoods.
8. Make use of tables and figures along with maps.
HIGHWAY
closed section
Tnsberg downtown
area - 30 bars,
taverns etc
Figure 1:
Locating The Problem And
Showing Its Setting
Barriers
P =parking lot
P =no admission
Base map of problem settting
HIGHWAY
closed section
Edited map of problem setting
HIGHWAY
closed section
Cab Stand
Figure 2:
Analyzing The Problem and
Showing Response
Section of highway
temporarily closed
off during weekend
nights
Cab Stand
New Cab
Stand
GYPSY CABS
Kiosk
Moved Barriers
Bus Stand
P =parking lot
P =no admission
Description of problem based on

analysis
Moved Bus
Stand
P =parking lot
P =no admission
Description of response
Creating Useful Maps
5656. Use simple tables
ables are effective tools for telling a compelling story two causes. The basic principles of table construction
if they are made simple. But the software used to
remain the same:
create tables adds unnecessary and distracting
packaging - the lines and labels used to interpret the data All the causes go in the same direction
(usually columns).
- and analysts do not always organize tables in a way that
Summation goes in the direction of the cause
makes intuitive sense.
(down columns).
Comparison of causes goes in the opposite direction
Assume that you are trying to show that the way beer is
(across rows, if causes are in columns).
displayed facilitates beer thefts from stores. Some stores
display the beer near the front entrance and some at the
Table 3 is called a three-dimensional table because three
rear. You are trying to show that rear display stores have
things are examined (the earlier tables were two
fewer incidents of beer thefts than those where the
dimensional). Table 3 answers the question: is the
display is in the front. Table 1 gets in the way of this
relationship between display location and theft different
message. The data are poorly organized and the
for two different store chains (Drink-Lots and Tippers). The
packaging is distracting.
answer is that it is not. There is the same basic pattern for
both chains that we saw in Table 2. In both cases, we sum
Table 2 properly organizes the data. The percentages are
the column and compare front-display stores to rearmade central to the story. Because the raw numbers do
not tell the main story, but may be useful to a reader who display stores. This implies that any store that displays
wants to look more closely, they are made subservient by beer at the rear will experience less theft, regardless of
which chain it belongs to.
enclosing them in brackets. Finally, instead of row
percentages (as in the first table), Table 2 uses
In effect, Table 3 holds constant the type of store. Other
column percentages.
factors can be held constant if we think they are
Whenever we examine a relationship in which something important. For example, we could group stores by size
may be causing something else, it is best to put the cause (small, medium and large), and separately analyze the
relationship between display location and theft for each
in the columns and use column percentages. Then, make
size category. This would require three panels, but
comparisons across the rows. Here, we see immediately
otherwise the same principles apply.
that 29 percent of the front-display stores had no thefts
compared to almost 83 percent of the rear-display stores.
Take note of several other features of Table 3:
At the opposite extreme, almost 46 percent of the frontdisplay stores had three or more thefts, but none of the
If you add the raw numbers (in brackets) in the Drinkrear-display stores did.
Lots cells to their corresponding cells under Tippers, you
get the raw numbers in Table 2. In other words, Table 2
Table 2 has less packaging. The bold borders have been
is a summary of Table 3. But you cannot derive Table 3
removed and replaced by thin lines. Inside, the only
from Table 2.
remaining line separates the title from the content.
Because Table 3 contains two possible causes of the
Instead of lines, space is used to guide the reader's eye
problem, we have added a vertical line to draw
across rows and down columns. By informing the reader
attention to the two types of stores.
in the title that the important numbers are percentages
(and the raw numbers are in brackets), there was no need The row labels apply to both store types, so there was
no need to duplicate them.
to include a percent symbol in each cell. Only the column
total remains. This tells the reader that the important sum Because of rounding in the percentages, they sometimes
add to over 100. In some instances these sums can be
is vertical. Finally, all percentages are rounded to one
just under 100, usually 99.9. Such small deviations are
decimal place, thus allowing the column figures to line up,
seldom of much concern.
making interpretation easier. With all of these changes,
most of the content of the table is data rather
If you routinely produce the same tables for the same
than packaging.
decision-makers, show them several different table
formats with the same data. Determine which format
A problem often has multiple causes. Though tables can
be constructed to show large numbers of causes, a single helps them the most, and then use this standard format.
table communicates poorly when you examine more than
Location of display
Number of theft reports
0
1-2
3 or more
Total
Front
Rear
Total
7 (17.5%)
6 (46.15%)
11 (100%)
24 (37.5%)
33 (82.5%)
7 (53.85%)
0 (0%)
40 (62.5%)
40
13
11
64
Table 2: Percent of Stores with Reported Beer Thefts

(Numbers in Brackets)
Location of display
Thefts in June
0
1-2
3 or more
Total
Front
29.2 (7)
25.0 (6)
45.8 (11)
100.0 (24)
Rear
82.5 (33)
29.2 (7)
0.0 (0)
100.1 (40)
Table 3: Percent of Stores with Reported Beer Thefts by Retail Chain

(Numbers in Brackets)
Drink-Lots Stores
Tippers Stores
Front Display
Rear Display
Front Display
Rear Display
Thefts in June
30.8 (4)
81.0 (17)
27.3 (3)
84.2 (16)
0
23.1 (3)
19.0 (4)
27.3 (3)
15.8 (3)
1-2
46.2 (6)
0.0 (0)
45.5 (5)
0.0 (0)
3 or more
100.1 (13)
100.0 (21)
100.1 (11)
100.0 (19)
Total
Table 1: Location and Beer Theft (June)
5757. Use simple figures
ike tables and maps, figures and charts are effective

tools for conveying information, but only if they are
kept simple. All figures consist of two parts packaging and content. Content is the information you
are interested in conveying to others. The purpose of the
packaging is to ensure that the content can be quickly,
easily, and accurately interpreted. Simplicity means
keeping the packaging to a minimum. The most common
mistake is adding elements that get in the way of the
story. To illustrate this, we begin with an example of a
poorly designed figure. Then we will show how figures
become clearer and more powerful by making
them simpler.
This chart has a number of other features that make it

hard to use: surface shading that masks contrasts
between the bars and background, redundant bar labels
and vertical axis labels, and distracting horizontal lines.
The frame around the figure is superfluous.
Figure 1 is a pie chart that is supposed to show how

burglars entered homes. The 3-D image distorts the
message. As we will see later, doors are the biggest
problem, and the rear window ranks fourth, behind
"other," as the entry of choice for these burglars. The 3-D
effect inflates the importance of the slices in the front (in
this example, front windows, the least likely point of entry)
while deflating the importance of the slices in the back.
The single valuable feature of a pie chart is that it shows
how the parts contribute to the whole. This is lost when a
3-D effect is used. Note that a variety of shades and
patterns need to be used to display the six categories. This
adds clutter.
Additionally, the data in Figure 3 have been reorganized.

Instead of raw numbers of burglaries, the chart shows the
percentage of the total. This communicates two points:
which methods are more frequent, and what part of the
whole each method represents. If you need to show the
relative contribution to a whole, use percentages in a bar
chart rather than a pie chart.
The simple bar chart in Figure 3 communicates

information very effectively because all the confusing
features of Figure 2 have been removed. If we wanted
each bar to show the exact percentage, we could label
the tops of the bars. But then we should remove the
vertical axis, as this feature communicates the
same information.
Another feature of Figure 3 is that the categories are

arranged in a meaningful order: from most to least. This
points to where your readers should focus their attention.
Meaningful order is hard to communicate in a pie chart
because it has no obvious beginning or end. There really is
no need to use a pie chart because bar charts can
Figure 2 shows the distortion that 3-D effects can produce communicate better. When you have data in categories,
in bar charts. Comparing bar heights is difficult because
bar charts are simple and effective.
one has to choose between the front top edge and the
back top edge of the bar. 3-D effects should never
be used.
Figure 1: Methods of Entry
Figure 2: Methods of Entry

54
60
front door
rear door
50
40
31
30
20
rear window
front window
unknown
other
10
0
20
16
rear
front
window window
front
door
rear
door
other unknown
The final figure depicts a line graph. These are typically

used when tracking data over time. In Figure 4, the data
cover 6 months. The dots symbolize the burglary count,
and the lines indicate a continuous connection over time.
You should label the vertical axis so the figure
communicates the story on its own. In this figure, we
know at a glance that the vertical axis shows the number
of burglaries, rather than the burglary rate.
If you prefer to show the number of events at each time

period, label the dots, but remove the vertical axis: it's
now redundant. Be careful, however. Numerical labels at
every time point can make a chart difficult to read. If
multiple graphs are shown in the same figure (for
example, the trend in burglaries for several police
districts), make sure the different lines are clearly marked
and easily differentiated over the chart.
Read More:
Kosslyn, Stephen (1994). Elements of Graph Design. New
York: W. H. Freeman.
Figure 4: Burglary is Declining
Figure 3: Doors are the Problem

60
50
Number of Burglaries
%
45.0
40.0
35.0
30.0
25.0
20.0
15.0
10.0
5.0
0.0 front
door
40
30
20
10
rear
door
other
window unknown
front
window
0 April
May
June
July
August
Sept
Designing Effective Figures

Keep them simple. Don't over-package.
Do not use superficial effects, like 3-D.
Avoid pie charts.
Use bar charts for data that comes in categories.
Use line graphs for trends over time.
Use labels effectively.
Choose titles carefully.
Make them stand on their own, without help from the
text.
Do not forget the figure title. In Figure 3 the title boldly

tells a story. Not only is this far more interesting than
"Methods of Entry," it makes the story unambiguous. In
short, Figure 3 can stand by itself. Without reading any
accompanying text, the reader gets the point.
5858. Organize powerful presentations
presentation should begin with a basic question,

use a framework to move through a description of
findings, and end with a set of specific conclusions
(see Step 54). Graphical material should be prepared
following the guidance in Steps 55 through 57. In this
step we will focus on the story you are telling. In Step
59, we will look at how the presentation should be
delivered, including the use of PowerPoint.
The main focus of your presentation should be to answer
specific questions that will aid decision-making, and it
should consist of the following:
A set of slides organized around your story.
A graphical motif or outline slide to keep your audience
focused on the story.
The slides illustrates a presentation of analysis findings.
The presenter, Sergeant Smith, has two goals. The first is
to answer the question, "What causes this problem?" The
second is to open up a discussion of possible responses.
The title slide asks the question (and introduces the
presenter). This and slides 2 to 4 constitute the
introduction. Slide 2 reinforces a set of already agreed
points that serve as a foundation for what follows. Slide 3
outlines the presentation and slide 4 summarizes
data collection.
The framework is presented in the fifth slide. Sgt. Smith
uses the crime triangle. He keys all of the findings that
follow to this triangle. (Note that this only works if
Smith's audience is already familiar with the triangle. If
they are not, then Smith should use a different
framework.) To reinforce this message, and to keep the
audience from getting lost, Sgt. Smith uses the triangle
motif throughout the presentation of findings, with slight
but important modifications: the shaded side and the
color change as slides move from targets and guardians,
to places and managers, and to offenders and handlers.
The circular arrow in slide 5 indicates the
counterclockwise order in which Sgt. Smith will present
the findings. So in this slide, Sgt. Smith has simultaneously
described his framework and provided an outline of the
main findings.
Slides 6 to 13 present tables, figures and maps that tell
the audience about the elements described in the
framework. A bar chart might show the actions used to
protect targets. A location map might show the places
where the problem is particularly prevalent in contrast to
where it is absent. Photos might show particularly
important features of these sites. A table might show the
frequency with which offenders are arrested.
Slide 14 summarizes these findings. Here, the triangle

shows all sides shaded, reinforcing the point that the
separate findings are part of a larger whole. The final
slides list response options that are consistent with the
findings and options that are inconsistent. Though Sgt.
Smith gives his expert opinion, these final slides are
meant to open up a discussion that is informed by the
earlier findings. It is the decision-makers who have the
final say in this matter.
It is important to keep your audience focused on the
larger story and from getting lost in the details. Two
methods for accomplishing this are to use an ongoing
motif (like the triangle in the figure) or a highlighted
outline slide. When using an outline slide, the outline is
shown before each topic. The topic to be presented is
highlighted on the outline and the other topics are
dimmed. In Sgt. Smith's presentation, the outline slide
would be shown four times, before each of the
main topics.
Handouts of your slides are useful, but there are some
limitations. You can make last-minute changes in the
slides more easily than in the handouts. If you expect
major last-minute changes, handouts may not correspond
to the images. Color slides are often not legible when
photocopied in black and white. If you are using
PowerPoint, then the "pure black and white" option in
the "Print" menu will temporarily convert your color slides
to black and white for printing.
Most decision-makers are not as interested as you are in
the methods you used to analyze your problem. Therefore,
do not spend a great deal of time describing your
methods, unless this is the objective of the presentation.
Rather, summarize the main elements (see slide 4). You
can prepare separate slides about methods, held in
reserve, should audience members have questions about
your methods.
Read More:
RAND, Guidelines for Preparing Briefings, Santa Monica,
CA, 1996,
www.rand.org/publications/CP/CP269/CP269.pdf
Ratcliffe, Jerry H, (2004) "Jerry's Top Ten Crime Mapping
Tips."
http://www.jratcliffe.net/papers/Jerry%27s%20top%20ten
%20mapping%20tips.pdf
What Causes the XYZ Problem ?
What is the XYZ Problem ?
Sgt. Rodney Smith

Problem Analysis Section
number of reported X events.

Concentrated in sector Y.
First documented in 1986.
Does not respond well to enforcement.
Common to other police forces.
This Presentation Shows
Analysis of XYZ Problem
Undertaken
sources used
the data was organized
Why we have this problem
Possible responses
by Problem Analysis Section

Data from a Variety of Sources
-Reported X events
-Interviews with Merchants & Shoppers
-Offender Interviews
-Review of CCTV recordings
Experts from other Police Forces
6-13
Data
How
Elements of the XYZ Problem
Pla
ers
nag
ces
Ma
Ha
n
Off dlers
end
ers
Slides describing targets and guardians
Slides describing places and managers
Targets
Gaurdians
Slides describing offenders and handlers

14
Causes of the XYZ Problem
A bulleted summary of the previous slides
15
Inconsistent Responses
Targets and Handlers

a.
b.
Places and Managers
a.
b.
Offenders and Handlers
a.
b.
Consistent Responses
16
Targets and Handlers
a.
b.
Places and Managers
a.
b.
Offenders and Handlers
a.
b.
High
5959. Become an effective presenter
ll professionals are required to make presentations,

and presentation skills are becoming as important
as good writing. The key to a good presentation is
thorough preparation. The following points come from a
variety of sources, including our own experiences good and bad.
Preparation
Never try to "wing it." Even experienced presenters are
often nervous, so do not be concerned about prepresentation jitters. Thorough preparation helps keep
nerves under control.
1. Know your topic.
2. Know your audience, including who else is
presenting.
3. Establish presentation length.
4. Prepare to finish a few minutes early, but take full
time if you need it.
5. Rehearse presentation and time it.
6. Rehearse again, if necessary.
Check out the room on the presentation day
Making sure you understand your presentation
environment accomplishes three objectives. First, it keeps
you from being surprised. Second, it allows you to make
contingency plans. Third, it helps you remain calm. This is
particularly true when you are presenting at a conference
or some other venue outside your agency. Hotel
conference facilities vary considerably in their layout.
1. Is the equipment you need in place?
Flip charts
Black/white boards
Chalk/marker
Projectors
Microphone
Laser pointer
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Do you know how to use the equipment?

Have you tried it out?
Do you know how to summon the technician?
Do you know how to dim lights?
Are there parts of the room where the audience will
have trouble seeing or hearing you?
Projector
Modern presentation equipment is both complex and
failure-prone. Be sure you know how it works and have
backup plans. If time permits, we always conduct a trial
run with the equipment in the room. And during this trial
run, we have found it useful to sit in different parts of the
room and view the most complex slides. Even if you
cannot make adjustments, you can forewarn your
audience later. (For example, "Those of you on the left
might want to move to the center as there are some
graphics that are hard to see from the left-most seats.")
1. Locate the projector in the best position for the
audience and yourself.
2. Make sure it does not block the view of the screen.
3. If necessary, get help with presenting slides.
4. Make sure slides can be read from the back of
the room.
5. Draw curtains or blinds if necessary.
6. Never assume things will work as planned!
Presentation style
Though knowing your material is critical, you need to
have a style the audience appreciates. At minimum, make
sure your audience does not have to work to overcome
your style to understand your presentation. Treating your
audience with respect is absolutely critical.
1. Do not read your paper even if you have supplied a
written version.
2. Speak from notes (using cards prevents you from
losing your place).
3. Begin politely (thank chair, introduce yourself, greet
audience, etc.).
4. If possible, stand up and speak (this helps keep
control of the audience).
5. For lengthy presentations, you can vary where you
stand (but don't walk about restlessly).
6. Do not block the audience's view of the slide images.
7. Make sure you can be heard.
8. Don't speak too fast (about 120 words per minute
is good).
9. Maintain eye contact with the audience (but not just
one person!).
10. Make sure your audience knows when it is
appropriate to ask questions - during the presentation
or after.
Presentation Software
PowerPoint and other similar presentation software allow
the audience to receive the information simultaneously in
two modes: visually and aurally. They are therefore more
likely to understand and remember key points. There are
four dangers from electronic presentations. First, they can
result in standardized presentations that quickly become
boring for more sophisticated audiences. Second, they
can become so complex that the audience pays more
attention to the media than the message. Three,
breakdowns become more common with greater
complexity. Four, they can stifle questions from the
audience. Watching you fix a multimedia extravaganza
bores your audience and wastes there time. Remember
the KIS principle: Keep It Simple.
1. Don't read your slides - your talk should not just be a
repetition of the slides.
2. Look at the audience - not at your slides!
3. Begin with the title of the presentation, your name
and affiliation (but not your qualifications).
4. Use only one form of slide transition throughout, and
only use a simple transition that does not distract the
audience from your main points.
Individual PowerPoint Slides
Keep each slide simple, too. Lots of text on a slide is hard
to read. Your objective is to make each slide telegraphic.
Each slide should focus attention on a critical point and
avoid distractions from that point. So make them easy to
read and understand.
1. Make only one point.
2. Present just enough detail to address the point and
no more.
3. Avoid distracting sound effects, animation, type fonts,
and transitions.
4. Use dark background (e.g., deep blue) and light colors
for text (e.g., yellow).
5. Use large fonts and contrasting colors (not clashing,

e.g., blue and deep orange is clashing, but blue and
yellow is contrasting).
6. Avoid thin lines and letters that cannot be easily
distinguished from the background. This can be a
particular problem with line charts and maps.
7. Avoid too much red - you should use red selectively to
emphasize important points.
8. Use visual graphics rather than words when possible.
9. Use clear and simple pictures, maps, figures,
and tables.
10. Use short bulleted phrases, not narratives, on
word charts.
11. Ensure that each bullet is related to the main point
of the slide.
Finally, be safe
Assume things will go wrong! If the projector fails, be
ready with overhead projection slides and a projector. If
that fails too, use your handouts as a substitute. If you
are prepared for a breakdown, you will be less nervous
and your audience will be sympathetic.
1. Avoid technologies that break down frequently or
ones that you are not familiar with.
2. Have a backup plan for equipment and
software failures.
3. Provide handouts of slides as supplements.
Read More:
Ratcliffe, Jerry H, (2004) "Jerry's Top Ten PowerPoint Tips."
%20powerpoint%20tips.pdf
Ratcliffe, Jerry H, (2004) "Jerry's Top Ten
Presentation Tips."
%20presentation%20tips.pdf
11. Repeat questions so others can hear, answer

concisely, and ask the questioner whether you have
addressed their question.
12. Make sure handouts are clear (and that you have
enough).
13. End on time.
14. Try to enjoy yourself!
6060. Contribute to the store of knowledge
uch of what we know about problems today was

unknown 20 years ago. This accumulation of
knowledge is largely due to the sharing of
knowledge by police practitioners and researchers in the
United States, Canada, United Kingdom, and other
countries. Steps 54 to 57 described how to communicate
to decision-makers in your police force and in your
community. You also have a duty to improve your
profession by sharing your work outside your local agency
and community.
There are two approaches to communicating with your
peers. The first is through written materials. These may be
published in reports, professional periodicals, or popular
press articles. The second is through presentations at
professional conferences and meetings. The most effective
strategy for communicating information is to use a
combination of these approaches.
Written reports can present a wealth of detailed, useful
information that others can use as reference material.
There are a number of ways of disseminating written
information. It can be made available in a downloadable
format from websites. It can be published in professional
periodicals. Shorter pieces designed to capture people's
attention can be published in professional newsletters and
other periodicals. Finally, encouraging professional
journalists to write about your efforts can reach even a
wider audience. Shorter and more easily accessible pieces
reach a wide audience, but contain less information.
conference proceedings, and the relatively small numbers

of people who attend. But attendees can spread
information to those not present.
A comprehensive communications strategy should include
the following:
1. For people interested in the details, a technical report
downloadable through an easily used website.
2. For a large audience of general interest, one or more
short articles in professional or popular periodicals,
with references to the website.
3. For professional colleagues and academics, a longer
article in a professional journal.
4. For a small but influential group of professional
colleagues, at least one presentation at a
professional conference.
Additionally, it is helpful to send copies of articles to
people who are interested in the topic you are
investigating. This not only communicates your ideas, but
also allows you to solicit advice as to how to
communicate your ideas to others.
Professionals are particularly interested in the following:
1. Discoveries of new or changing problems.
2. Advances in analytical techniques that can answer
new questions, or answer old questions more
precisely and with less error.
3. New responses to problems or new applications of
old responses.
4. Evidence about the effectiveness, lack of effectiveness,
or side-effects of responses.
Conferences allow face-to-face communications, questions

and answers, and discussions of the latest developments.
Informal discussions are useful for exchanging viewpoints
on ideas that have not developed enough to be
published. And they allow you to seek advice from peer
Each of these topics can be written as a case study of
experts on difficult problems.
your particular problem. The basic outline for a useful case
study covers four points:
The United States and the United Kingdom hold annual
conferences on problem-oriented policing. There are also a 1. Dissatisfaction with the old situation - why the
host of crime analysis and other police conferences
standard understanding or practice is insufficient in
around the globe where you can present new information
particular circumstances.
on problem solving.
2. Search for alternatives - how a new understanding or
practice was discovered.
Finally, you should also consider conferences of other
3. Evidence supporting alternatives - comparison of old
professions, particularly if you have been working with
and new approaches.
partners from other fields. The principal drawbacks to
4. Conclusions and implications - summary of what
conferences are the limited time available to present
people should consider, given this new information.
material, the lack of detailed permanent records of
The table shows how this outline can be applied to each

of the four case study topics. These types of case studies
can be combined, as circumstances require. A new
technique for problem analysis might reveal a new type of
problem, for example. In such a circumstance, the first two
types of case study can be combined.
Similarly, a description of a new response to a problem
might include evaluation information, thus combining the
last two types of case study. Other combinations
are possible.
Nothing is more likely to damage your reputation, and

that of your colleagues, than being seen to stretch the
facts. Other people may cut corners or leap to
conclusions. Crime analysts lend diligence and integrity to
what is sometimes a haphazard process. If you don't
know the answer or only partly understand the problem,
say so. That way, when you do know the answer, people
will be more willing to trust your professional judgment.
The 21st century is becoming the century of analysis in
policing, and you can make a large contribution. A
hundred years from now, analysis will be firmly
established in policing, and much will have changed. The
technology will certainly be different. But more
importantly, our successors will know a great deal more
about crime and its prevention than we do. And they will
know this because you and people like you asked
important questions, collected and analyzed data, and
reported your results with honesty and clarity.
Finally, we offer a plea on behalf of crime analysis as a

profession and crime science as a discipline. However
much you want to make yourself clearly understood, never
give in to the temptation to exaggerate your evidence.
Four Types of Case Studies
4. New Evidence
on Effectiveness
Uncertainty of
effectiveness of
response under
particular
circumstances
Difficulties in
evaluating response
in these
circumstances
Evaluation methods
used and their results
2. New Analytical
Technique
Why old technique is
limited
3. New Response
Exploration of what
is different
How the new

technique was
discovered
How the new

response was
discovered
III. Evidence
Comparison of old
problem to new
problem
IV. Conclusions
What this implies for

problem solving
Systematic
comparison of old
technique to new
based on objective
criteria
Circumstances where
new technique is
particularly helpful
Systematic
comparison of old
response to new
based on objective
criteria
Circumstances where Circumstances where
response should be
new response is
used and expected
particularly helpful
results
Outline
1. New Problem
I. Dissatisfaction
Discovery of an
anomalous situation
II. Search
Why old response is

limited
This outline follows the SARA process. Scanning reveals

dissatisfaction with a particular circumstance. Analysis is a
search for a new understanding of the problem. Response
requires a systematic comparison of alternative
approaches and the selection of a particular new
approach. And assessment summarizes what one has
learned from the experience.
GLOSSARY AND INDEX
Term
60 small steps
Definition
Step
3-D Mapping
High-definition mapping that

portrays locations within buildings
24
80-20 rule
The principle that a few people or

places are involved in a large
proportion of events
18, 20, 22, 30, 31, 54
Acute hot spots
Hot spots that suddenly appear,

i.e., have not been present for a
long time, not chronic (See
Chronic hotspots and
Chronic problems)
23
Acute temporal clustering
A very high concentration of crime

in a small part of 24-hour cycles
25
Acute troubles
Transient sets of recurring events

that might go away without
engaging in problem solving
activities, but could also evolve
into chronic problems
14
Adaptation
Long-term changes in offender

population behaviors in response
to crime prevention
11, 46
Analysis
The second stage in the SARA

process, involving systematic
examination of the problem to
identify possible causes that might
be susceptible to responses
4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 14, 15, 16, 18, 20,

23, 32, 33, 35, 36, 38, 44, 46, 52,
54, 55, 58, 60
Anticipatory benefits
Benefits from crime prevention

that begin prior to initiation of
crime prevention treatment
Anticipatory benefits, pseudo
The appearance of anticipatory

benefits caused by smoothing data
(i.e., the use of a moving average)
52
Aoristic analysis
A statistical method for

determining the 24-hour rhythm of
crimes when the exact time of
crime commission is unknown
25
11, 46, 52
Definition
Step
Assessment
The fourth stage in the SARA

process, involving evaluating the
effectiveness of the response
Attractors, Crime
Areas of criminal opportunities

well known to offenders
Behaviors
One of two criteria for classifying

problems describing aspects of
harm, intent, and offender-target
relationships (see Environments)
15
Boost accounts
An explanation for repeat

victimization that suggests that the
rewards to the offender for the
first crime encourage the offender
to repeat the offense against the
same victim or to tell other
offenders who then attack the
same victim (see Flag accounts)
29
Broad-spectrum treatments
Crime prevention measures that

are effective against a wide variety
of methods for committing a type
of crime
49
Broken windows policing
A proposed policing strategy based

on the principles that small
offenses add up to destroy
community life and that small
offenses encourage larger ones,
consequently police should pay
particular attention to disorders
Buffer zone
Area around a place or area.

Often an area around a facility, hot
spot, or treatment area
16, 51
Case-control study
A systematic comparison of
troublesome persons, places, times,
or events to untroublesome ones
to find out the characteristics that
might cause the problem. This
type of study is particularly useful
when troublesome cases are a very
small proportion of all cases
17, 32, 33
1, 4, 7, 24, 37, 38, 46, 54, 55, 60
17, 28
GLOSSARY AND INDEX
Term
GLOSSARY AND INDEX
Term
60 small steps
Definition
Step
Cases
The people, places, and events you

are studying - offenders, targets,
victims, facilities, time periods (e.g.,
months or weeks), crimes, and so
forth. In case-control studies,
cases are the problem people,
places, or events (see Case-control
and Controls)
22, 32, 33, 37, 53
CHEERS
Acronym for elements of defining a

problem: Community, Harm,
Expectation, Events, Recurring,
and Similarity
14, 15, 54
Chronic hot spots
Hot spots that persist for a long

time (see Acute hotspots)
23
Chronic problems
Long-term sets of recurring events

that show no sign of abating and
are largely resistant to traditional
police work
14
Community policing
Community policing focuses on

crime and social disorder through
the delivery of police services that
includes aspects of traditional law
enforcement, as well as
prevention, problem-solving,
community engagement,
and partnerships
1, 3, 4, 5
CompStat
A police management system,

pioneered in New York City, that
uses up-to-date crime pattern
information (often processed with
a geographic information system)
to hold geographic commanders
(e.g., precinct and district)
accountable for reducing crime
3, 4, 5
Content
The substantive information in a

table or figure
56, 57
Definition
Step
Control group
A group of people or an area that

is similar to the treatment group or
area, but does not receive
treatment. Used in evaluations to
control for the impact of other,
non-treatment influences on crime
47, 49, 51
Controls (for analysis)
Statistical and evaluation design

procedures to isolate the effect of
one factor on some outcome from
that of others. A group of people
or areas not getting a response
that are compared to those
receiving the response to show
what would have happened to the
response group if the response
group had not received the
intervention (see Control group)
47, 48, 49, 51
Controls (in case-control

studies)
In a case-control study, controls

are those people, places, times, or
events that do not have the
outcome being studied, in contrast
to cases which do have the
outcome. For example, in a casecontrol study of high-assault bars,
the cases are bars with many
assaults and the controls are bars
with few or no assaults (see Cases,
and Case-control study)
32, 33
Controls (on offenders)
People and situations that reduce

potential offenders' willingness or
capabilities to commit crimes
9, 15, 17, 39, 42, 43, 48
Correlation
A measure of association between

two characteristics
33
Costs
Expenses or hardships associated

with criminal events or
prevention measures
6, 12, 38, 40, 44,
CPTED
See Crime Prevention Through

Environmental Design
GLOSSARY AND INDEX
Term
GLOSSARY AND INDEX
Term
60 small steps
Definition
Step
CRAVED
An acronym describing the

characteristics of items most likely
to be stolen and standing for
Concealable, Removable, Available,
Valuable, Enjoyable,
and Disposable
28, 31
Crime Mapping/Maps
Examining how crime is spread

geographically by showing where
it is occurring on maps. See
Geographic Information Systems
1, 4, 5, 16, 17, 21, 23, 24, 29, 55,

58
Crime Prevention Through

Environmental Design
A set of principles for designing

and laying-out secure buildings
and public spaces
24
Crime triangle
See Problem analysis triangle
Crime-neutral areas
Areas attracting neither offenders

nor targets, with adequate controls
on behaviors
17
Cycles
Regular fluctuations in crime that

correspond to daily, weekly,
monthly, annual, or longer changes
in human activity
22, 25, 26, 47, 50
Defiance
Offenders challenge the legitimacy

of prevention efforts and commit
more offenses rather than fewer
11
Den (of iniquity) problems
Problem characterized by
substantial involvement of repeat
places (see Problem analysis
triangle, place). Occurs when new
potential offenders and new
potential targets encounter each
other in a place where
management is weak
8, 15
Diffused temporal clustering
A relatively even, or random,

spread of crime throughout
24-hour cycles
8, 35, 54, 58
25
Definition
Step
Diffusion contamination
Occurs when diffusion of benefits

influences the control group or
area during an evaluation. Leads
to undervaluing the treatment (see
Displacement contamination)
51
Diffusion of benefits
Reducing crime beyond the focus

of the prevention scheme; a
multiplier of effectiveness
11, 13, 38, 47, 49, 51
Diffusion of benefits, crime

type
Additional crime types blocked
13
Diffusion of benefits,
geographical
Additional prevention over space
13
Diffusion of benefits, tactical
Additional methods thwarted
13
Diffusion of benefits, target
Additional targets protected
13
Diffusion of benefits, temporal Additional prevention over time
13
Diffusion-Displacement sites
Areas used to detect diffusion of

benefits and displacement that are
separate from control group and
treatment group
51
Displacement
Offenders changing their behaviour

to thwart preventive actions
1, 4, 11, 12, 13, 38, 40, 46, 48,

49, 50, 51, 54
Displacement contamination
Occurs when crime is displaced

into the control group or area
during an evaluation. Leads to
inflation of effectiveness (see
Diffusion contamination)
Displacement countermeasures Prevention implemented to prevent

expected displacement
Displacement, crime type
Offenders change type of crime
Displacement, geographical
Offenders move spatially
Displacement, tactical
Offenders switch method for

committing crime
48, 49
48
12, 13, 49
12, 13, 46, 48
12, 13, 49
GLOSSARY AND INDEX
Term
GLOSSARY AND INDEX
Term
60 small steps
Definition
Step
Displacement, target
Offenders switch type of target

or victim
Displacement, temporal
Offenders switch time or day
Distribution
A distribution shows how many

cases, or what proportions of the
cases, have each of the values for
a variable
22
Duck (sitting) problems
Problems characterized by
victims (see Crime triangle). Occurs
when victims continually interact
with potential offenders at
different places, but the victims do
not increase their precautionary
measures and their guardians are
either absent or ineffective
8, 15
Edges
Boundaries between areas where

people live, work, shop, or seek
entertainment
16
Enablers, crime
Places with little regulation

of behavior
17
Environments
A criterion for classifying problems

describing where the problem
takes place (see Behaviors)
15, 28, 30
Facilitators
Physical items, social situations, or

chemical substances that help
offenders commit crimes or acts
of disorder
34
Facilitators, chemical
Substances that increase offenders'

abilities to ignore risk, reward,
or excuses
34
Facilitators, physical
Things that augment offenders'

capabilities, help overcome
prevention measures, or
incite deviancy
34
12, 13, 49
12, 13, 48, 49
Definition
Step
Facilitators, social
Situations that provide support

that stimulates crime or disorder
by enhancing rewards from crime,
legitimating excuses to offend, or
by encouraging offending
34
Facilities
Places that have special functions,

like schools, businesses,
and restaurants
15, 18, 20, 23, 25, 27, 28, 30, 34,

38, 39, 42, 43, 44, 48
Facilities, risky
Facilities that are frequent sites for

crime and disorder
18, 20, 23, 27, 28, 29, 34, 44
False Negative
An error in which the decision

maker predicts something will not
occur, but it does occur. Also
known as a Type 1 error
37, 53
False Positive
An error in which the decision

maker predicts something will
occur, but it does not occur. Also
known as a Type 2 error
37, 53
Flag accounts
An explanation for repeat

victimization that suggests that
some people are particularly
vulnerable because of their
occupation or their ownership of
hot products (see Boost accounts)
29
Focused temporal clustering
Clustering of crime in distinct time

ranges during 24-hour periods
25
Framework, story
A general "story shell" linking

multiple interacting factors and
that can be applied to a variety
of problems
54, 58
Generators, crime
Areas to which large numbers of

people are attracted for reasons
unrelated to criminal motivation
17
Geographic Information
System
See GIS
GLOSSARY AND INDEX
Term
GLOSSARY AND INDEX
Term
60 small steps
Definition
Step
GIS
Abbreviation for Geographic

Information Systems. These are
computer databases where all
information is linked to geographic
locations so that the data can be
mapped. This allows comparisons
of different areas and places for
the same information, and
examination of how two or more
types of information vary together
geographically. GIS is at the heart
of all modern crime
mapping processes
2, 24, 29
Graded response
The response increases in intensity

or form as the number of repeat
victimizations increases. An
intervention used to reduce
repeat victimization
29
Handler
Someone who knows the offender

well and who is in a position to
exert some control over his or
her actions
25, 28
Home Office
The British equivalent of the U.S.

Department of Justice, which has
funded much research on
crime prevention
10, 19, 36, 38, 40, 41
Hot areas
Types of hot spots showing

neighborhoods where crime
is concentrated
23
Hot dots
Types of hot spots showing

locations with high crime levels
23
Hot lines
Types of hot spots showing street

segments where crime
is concentrated
23
Hot products
Things that are particularly

attractive for theft
18, 28, 29, 31
Hot spots
Geographic concentrations
of crime
3, 5, 16, 17, 18, 23, 48, 55
Definition
Step
Hypothesis
An answer to a question about a

problem that can be true or false,
and may or may not be supported
by evidence
20, 50
Impact evaluation
A research study to determine if

the response changed the problem
46
Inner quartile range
The upper and lower bounds of the

50% of the cases centered on
the median
22
Input
Resources used in a response
46
Intervention
The response being applied to a

problem (also called a treatment or
response - see Response)
4, 7, 11, 20, 35, 40, 44, 45, 46,

47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52
Manager
A person who has some

responsibility for controlling
behaviour in a specific location
5, 8, 24, 28, 30, 33, 38, 40, 58
Mean
A measure of central tendency,

also known as the arithmetical
average, calculated by summing
the values for all the cases and
dividing the sum by the number of
cases. Useful for ratio data and
symmetrical distributions
22
Median
A measure of central tendency that

divides the cases into two equal
groups, half below the median
value and half above
22
Mode
A measure of central tendency that

shows the value that the largest
number of cases possesses
22
Moving average
A method for reducing random

fluctuation in a time series by
recomputing the value for every
data point based on the average of
preceding time periods
(see Smoothing)
26, 52
Near repeats
See Virtual repeats
29
GLOSSARY AND INDEX
Term
GLOSSARY AND INDEX
Term
60 small steps
Definition
Step
Nodes
Destination places such as home,

work, shopping, entertainment,
and school (see Paths)
16
Nominal Scale
Values only name and cannot

be ranked
22
Odds Ratio
A measure of association between

two characteristics; useful when a
case-control study is used
33
Offender
A person who commits a crime or

act of disorder
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12,

13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 21, 22, 28,
29, 30, 31, 34, 35, 36, 37, 39, 40,
41, 42, 43, 44, 46, 48, 49, 50, 52,
54, 58
Offenders, repeat
People who commit many crimes

or acts of disorder (see Wolf)
3, 18, 30
Opportunity
Short for "crime opportunity

structure" and meaning the
physical and social arrangements
that make crime possible
9, 12, 38, 44, 48, 50
Ordinal Scale
A measurement scale in which

values can be ranked but no other
mathematical process can be
applied to them
22
Outcome
The impact of the response on

the problem
Packaging
The lines and labels used in tables

and figures (see Content). Small
amounts are needed to help
interpret content, but large
amounts obscure content
Paths
Routes connecting nodes
Perceptions, offenders'
How offenders view situations and

prevention measures
11, 33, 37, 46, 54

56, 57
16
11, 34
Definition
Step
Place
A very small area, such as an

address, street corner, or block face
(see Crime triangle, den)
8, 12, 13, 17, 18, 20, 27, 30, 32,

38, 39, 40, 48
POP
See Problem-Oriented Policing
4, 5, 6, 8, 14, 19, 46
POP Guides
Summaries of research and

practice dealing with specific
problems and recommending
particular responses. Available
from www.popcenter.org
and www.cops.usdoj.gov
3, 19
Problem analysis triangle
A graphic showing the six principal

elements of routine activity theory
- offenders, handlers,
targets/victims, guardians, places,
and managers - and used to
organized the analysis of problems
8, 16
Problem-Oriented Policing
Policing that changes the

conditions that give rise to
recurring crime problems, and does
not simply rely on responding to
incidents as they occur or
forestalling them through
preventive patrols
1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 11, 15, 19, 21, 28,

38, 55, 60
Process evaluation
Assessing how a response

was implemented
Provocations
Physical designs or the way places

are managed that
provoke misconduct
34, 38, 42, 54
p-value
The probability that the difference

between two sets of statistics is
due to randomness (see
Significance test)
53
Random fluctuations
Short-term changes in problems

caused by a large number of very
small effects
26, 53
Range
A measure of dispersion showing

the minimum and maximum value
in a distribution
22, 25
46, 47, 55
GLOSSARY AND INDEX
Term
GLOSSARY AND INDEX
Term
60 small steps
Definition
Step
Rates, crime
The ratio of crimes to targets for

an area. Used to control for
differences in the number of
targets (see Risk, crime)
Ratio Scale
A measurement scale in which

there are equal intervals between
the ranked values and a
theoretically meaningful zero. Any
mathematical procedure can be
used on date measured on a
ratio scale
22
Regression to the mean
The tendency for abnormal high or

low levels of crime to move back
to their normal levels
47, 52
Response
The third stage in the SARA

process involving the development
and implementation of an
intervention designed to reduce a
problem. Also a term for the
preventive treatment or
intervention being applied (see
Intervention or Treatment)
2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 14, 15, 17, 19, 20,

21, 23, 26, 29, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39,
40, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51,
52, 53, 54, 55, 58, 60
Response group
People or places receiving

prevention, in contrast to
control group
47
Results
Activities accomplished in
a response
46
Risk, crime
The chance a target will be

involved in a crime
6, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 23, 26, 27,

28, 29, 31, 33, 34, 38, 39, 41
SARA
An acronym for the problem

solving process (see Scanning,
Analysis, Response,
and Assessment)
Scanning
The first stage in the SARA

process, involving problem
identification, verification,
and classification
9, 17, 20, 24, 26, 27, 28, 32, 37,

42, 44, 49, 51
7, 21
1, 7, 14, 16, 18, 38, 54
Definition
Step
Scripts
Standard actions carried out in a

particular order by offenders to
commit crimes
35, 36
Significance level
A threshold below which one

rejects the possibility that the
difference between two sets of
statistics is due to randomness.
Often, .05 (or 5%) is the rejection
threshold (see Significance test)
53
Significance test
A statistical procedure used to

determine whether the difference
between two groups of numbers is
due to randomness
53
Situational Crime Prevention
The science of reducing

opportunities for crime
Smoothing
Removing random fluctuations

from a time series by using a
moving average
(see Moving average)
26, 52
Standard Deviation
A common measure of spread

useful for symmetrical distributions
and ratio data.
22, 53
Standard model
Policing that relies primarily on the

use of patrolling, rapid response,
and follow-up investigations to
prevent crime
Target
The person or thing an offender

attacks, takes, or harms
(see Victim)
2, 8, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17,

20, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31,
34, 35, 38, 39, 41, 44, 47, 48, 49,
52, 54, 58
Targets at risk
Persons or things vulnerable to

being attacked, taken, or harmed
26, 27
Temporal clustering
Concentration of crime over 24

hours (See Acute, Diffused, and
Focused temporal clustering)
25
Time-window effect
The underestimation of repeat

victimization due to using a set
time period
29
1, 13, 16, 34, 38, 41, 54
GLOSSARY AND INDEX
Term
GLOSSARY AND INDEX
Term
60 small steps
Definition
Step
Treatment
See Response or Intervention
Treatment area
Areas receiving the response in

contrast to control areas
(see Response group)
48, 51
Treatment group
See Response group
49, 51
Trend
A steady increase, decrease, or

stable level of crime over some
period of time
Uncontrolled case study
A comparison of troublesome
persons, places, times, or events
without examining similar
untroublesome ones. The results of
such a study are often
highly misleading.
32
Victim
A human target or the owner of

stolen goods or damaged property
(see Target)
1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 14, 15, 16, 18,

21, 22, 23, 25, 28, 29, 30, 31, 33,
34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 42, 44, 46, 47,
48, 54, 55
Victim, repeat
A person or place with multiple

crimes or acts of disorder (see
Duck)
Victimization, repeat
The process leading to

repeat victims
Virtual repeats
Victimization of targets that are

very similar, though not identical
(as in the case of repeat victims or
places). Also called
"near" repeats
29
Wolf (ravenous) problems
Problems characterized by
offenders (see Crime triangle).
Occurs when offenders are able to
locate temporarily vulnerable
targets and places
8, 15
48, 49, 51
2, 20, 22, 26, 47, 49, 52, 57
18, 23, 28, 29
8, 28, 29, 30, 33, 38, 46
FOR MORE INFORMATION:

U.S. Department of Justice
Office of Community Oriented Policing Services
1100 Vermont Avenue, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20530
To obtain details on COPS programs, call the
COPS Office Response Center at 800.421.6770
Visit COPS Online at the address listed below.
www.cops.usdoj.gov
e01052683
ISBN: 1-932582-52-5
Created Date: August 8, 2005

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U.S.

CRIME ANALYSIS FOR PROBLEM SOLVERS

Center for Problem-O

Crime Analysis for Problem Solvers

his is a revised and extended version of a manual, Become a Problem-

Crime Analysis for Problem Solvers in 60 Small Steps

Ronald Clarke is university professor in the school of Criminal Justice at Rutgers,

Crime Analysis for Problem Solvers in 60 Small Steps

ne of the primary concerns in policing in the United

Many advances have been realized under the umbrella of

This reality is a powerful new force for rethinking the way

domain of technicians. We hope that, everyone else in a

In this manual, Ronald Clarke and John Eck set out a

Crime Analysis for Problem Solvers in 60 Small Steps

Meanwhile, the field of crime analysis itself has grown

read this first

read this first

his 60-step manual assumes that you are an

of the problem-solving team, that you must explore

We have not referenced the manual as fully as an

The Home Office and the British Police

Crime Analysis for Problem Solvers in 60 Small Steps

READ THIS FIRST

In some cases, we do deal with a particular topic in more

Crime Analysis for Problem Solvers in

Know how to use rates and denominators

Find a Practical Response

1 1. Rethink your job

ike most crime analysts, you probably think of your

often are crimes solved later through patient detective

The main purpose of this manual is to tell you about

This manual cannot tell you everything you must know or

Crime Analysis for Problem Solvers in 60 Small Steps

22. Be the local crime expert

ow often have you been asked the following sorts

Crime scenes receive a good deal of attention in serious

refuges or rape crisis centers know far more

Dusk to dawn light

Indoor timer light

Deadbolt on front door

Deadbolt front & side doors

Outdoor motion detector

Alarm company sign

Crime Analysis for Problem Solvers in 60 Small Steps

33. Know what is effective (and not) in policing

vidence on what makes police effective points to the

strategy must diversify its approaches to crime and

The lessons during a third of a century of research are

advantage of the details of crime situations to reduce

Effectiveness of Policing Strategies

Moderate evidence of effectiveness

Crime Analysis for Problem Solvers in 60 Small Steps

the fire department, the city codes department, and the

4 4. Become a POP expert

hen a serious crime occurs, the police are

problem-oriented policing seeks to find other potentially

These are good questions, but we believe that policing is

In short, there is no doubt that police will become