Burglary
Burglary Prevention: Early Lessons from the Crime Reduction Programme
| This document is published for archival/historical purposes. It will not be updated. |
Home Office Crime Reduction Research Series Paper 1 (1999) by Nick Tilley, Ken Pease, Mike Hough & Rick Brown
The report provides an account of the lessons learned from development visits made to each of the 63 projects funded under Round 1 of the Reducing Burglary Initiative (RBI). It highlights the varied nature of local burglary problems are highlighted, summarizes the range of interventions employed and identifies some of the obstacles to developing effective burglary reduction projects.
The strategic development projects (SDPs) are to be evaluated in order to gain knowledge on the cost-effectiveness of burglary prevention interventions. Early issues that emerged with the SDPs included:
The burglary data (based on police areas) was not necessarily comparable to the house hold data (based on local authority areas);
Burglary problems were sometimes found to cross over administration boundaries (i.e. a burglary hotspot was found at a spot where two police beats met);
Examining trends over time was made difficult by changes in IT systems and/or administrative boundaries.
Recommendations to improve the bidding process and the types of projects funded under the RBI:
A strategic perspective should be taken that includes identifying and analysing the problem, developing a solution, reviewing the progress made, refining the approaches where deemed necessary, and evaluating the outcomes;
Local teams should be formed that combine the appropriate and necessary skills and experiences against available information;
The different parts of the strategy should compliment each other, and the interventions should be sustainable;
Savings gained from a reduction in burglary should be reinvested in order to provide a response to any future burglary problems;
The bidding criteria should be altered to allow for smaller geographical areas and for non-geographically defined problems (i.e. virtual communities); more time should be allocated to developing crime reduction plans; and
Funding should be related to the size of the burglary problem.
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Last update: Wednesday, August 27, 2008