Crime Reduction - Helping to Reduce Crime in Your Area

Immediate precursors to crime or disorder event

Possible interventions in cause

Crime promoters

1. Local fence will buy airbags – has a ready outlet in local market.

1. Crackdown on local fences, and car parts sales over wider area.

2. Local group of offenders pass on MO for removing airbags.

2. Attempt to break up group/ prevent fresh recruitment by attracting youngsters into other circles.

3. Car owners still sometimes leave doors unlocked/windows open.

3. Publicity campaign to alert owners.

4. Some car makers still give insufficient attention to security. They may also adopt a strategy of selling cars cheap and spares dear, giving elevated value to the airbags.

4. National action on car design and pricing strategies.

Crime preventers

1. Hospital gives little priority to crime against visitors.

1. Mobilise hospital authorities to take responsibility – eg name and shame.

2. Part-time security guard with limited training, poor communications and on short term contract.

2. They may then improve provision of guards (if these are appropriate). CCTV might be considered as means of using guards to greatest effect.

3. Car park users hurry in and out of hospital, hence little time and little motivation to report suspicious activity – which would involve long walk back to reception area.

3. Reporting point for people seeing suspicious activity, conveniently placed in car park area – doubles as enquiry point and emergency help point in case of attack.

4. Not within sight of public space, hence no passing police patrols.

4. Lower wall/bush on road running beside car park, so patrols can look in. Consider altering traffic flow (if cheap, or reviewed for other reasons) to allow vehicle patrols easy access.

Environment

1. Hospital car park – many entrances, hence poor access control, and poor pursuit.

1. Reconfigure entrances/exits.

2. Thick bushes and weak lighting give good concealment and poor surveillance, hence tactically favouring offenders over preventers.

2. Trim/relocate bushes; improve lighting especially in hot-spots of theft within car park (but be alert to internal displacement). Take account of lighting, CCTV, surveillability and scope for response by guards, in integrated approach.

3. Rich concentration of targets.

3. Can’t do anything about this.

Target enclosure

1. Car body – despite recent improvements, still fairly easy to break into.

1. National action on car design.

Target person or property

1. Concealable (small)

1. National design solutions

2. Removable (for ease of repair/replacement)

2. National design solutions

3. Accessible (…..)

3. National design solutions

4. Valuable (£100) – marketing strategy

4. National action to alter marketing strategy

5. Disposable (serial numbers absent or easily removed).

5. National action to improve serial numbering, and facilities to check these, local checking procedures eg through Trading Standards

Offender presence in situation

1. Hospital car park acts as favourite hanging-around site for local youths – no others readily available.

1. Explicit exclusionary policy, enforced by guards; curfews and incarceration for high-risk offenders; more positively, create/adapt other places for young people to hang around – youth shelters, clubs?

Anticipation of risk, effort and reward

1. Risk and effort perceived low in relation to reward – at all stages: preparing for crime (hanging around, casing vehicles), executing the theft, escape, and carrying/ storing/ disposing of airbags.

1. Change offenders’ perceptions of risk etc, by publicity to deter (raised risk of getting caught, and convicted, with serialised airbags; bent cycle tyre levers accepted as going equipped), and discourage (people won’t be buying the airbags/ fences will give a lower price).

Resources for crime

1. Modus Operandi readily acquired from promoters – peers and fences.

1. (as under Promoters) – disperse/dilute peer group; crack down on fences – treat ‘schooling’ of offenders especially severely in court.

2. Adapted cycle tyre lever often used.

2. Confiscate bent tyre levers; (as under ‘Anticipation’) use as evidence of going equipped; nationally, redesign car/ airbag to require a special tool to extract it.

Readiness to offend – current life circumstances

1. Offenders have little honest entertainment.

1. Supply attractive and affordable entertainment facilities elsewhere.

2. Unemployed hence little money.

2. Economic regeneration.

3. Some have drug habit that requires funding.

3. Drug treatment, crackdown on dealers, education.

Resources to avoid crime

1. Some offenders have lack of basic literacy, which constrains job prospects.

1. Literacy scheme – for all young people, for those at risk of offending, for those who have offended.

2. Others are impulsive in the face of temptation.

2. Cognitive skills training – again, primary, secondary or tertiary targeting.

Criminality (predisposition)

1. High-crime subculture influences local youths’ attitudes to property from an early age.

1. Community-level interventions to alter subculture, ideally working with residents; perhaps changes in housing allocation policies to reduce concentration of families with a history of criminal activity or anti-social offences.

2. Risk factors for offending present include especially poor school performance/ truancy.

2. Mobilising families and schools to exert social control to reduce truancy; improving school performance/attractiveness to pupils.