As might be expected from this editor and contributors, this is a comprehensive text bringing together different perspectives under the umbrella of crime prevention and community safety. Importantly, despite its title, this is emphatically not simply a "nuts and bolts handbook" in the way in which cars or ever more complicated mobile phones have handbooks. This is a handbook of theories illustrated by examples that, by linking research with the development of strategies and tactics in crime prevention and community safety, demonstrate the importance of dealing with these areas of business in sophisticated ways. For practitioners and planners, it both demonstrates the need to use established tactics to define the boundaries of strategic development "on the hoof" and encourages the heuristic development of strategy to initiate new tactics. Throughout, properly formed concepts provide gateways to in-depth understanding and this book assembles and fully explores an extended vocabulary by means of which crime prevention, community safety and related issues can be intelligently discussed.
The span of this book is ambitious, encompassing a broad sweep of theoretical foundations and detailing practical applications, but it is timely to create a text that makes these links. When governmental policies increasingly support the development of social infrastructures by driving improvements in public service organizations, more than ever before there is a need to develop greater understanding at all levels within professional public service organizations of the link between research techniques and applicable knowledge, of the epistemological foundations that provide "strength" within the knowledge base available to professional decision-makers. For those whose work involves crime prevention and community safety at any significant level, this book should form a core text.
In the first of five sections, "Background and Context", the focus is upon exploring the wider domain in which the reduction and prevention of anti-social activities is embedded including conceptualization, legislation, socialization and organization. It is a strength of this important work that the considerations of crime and crime prevention are not held at a superficial level. In this introductory section, Hughes and Adams ably demonstrate the complex relationships between the social and material worlds and the necessity of considering epistemological issues in the development of strategies and tactics to deliver sustainable change.
The second section of the book, "Approaches to Prevention", builds upon the earlier discussions further demonstrating the need for practitioners to look "beyond the surface". If as Ronald Clarke suggests, "situational" crime prevention is outgrowing other forms of crime control, this may be because it possesses an "immediacy", a "tangibility" not readily accessible in "social" forms of crime control that makes it more easily commercialized. But today's "quick fixes" may fail to produce sustainable improvements or may in fact lead to problems in the future. An underlying message throughout this text is the need to look beyond "the easy" and for thinking about the subject to embrace different disciplines, and, by implication, to be practically implemented by sharing responsibilities across different organizations and sectors.
It is in this section with its description of successful approaches to crime prevention and again, particularly, in the final chapter of the book that support for the formation of links between crime and disorder reduction partnerships and local criminal justice boards can be found. Crime prevention is about how we deal with offenders and potential offenders as much as how we prevent potential offences. In Homel's chapter on developmental crime prevention is found a discussion about early-in-life interventions, the presence or absence of which has the potential to impact upon the success of later criminal justice interventions should they be required. This reinforces the need for a dialogue between those implementing such approaches and those establishing local criminal justice strategies in order that the work of different agencies or partnerships may have coherence and be mutually supportive. This message is reinforced by Kelling, who also emphasizes the need to properly identify the nature of problems and to tap into different knowledge bases in a chapter discussing community-based crime prevention. This section is concluded by chapters from Farrell, on "repeat victimisation", and Pease, who extends the plea for cross discipline thinking, reminding readers of the need to accept and embrace the interplay between society and nature, between the environment and those who act within it.
The third section provides a change of focus, moving to discussions about tactical themes, and opens with a chapter that describes many of the practical and political problems of developing bespoke solutions. In this chapter Ekblom emphasizes that problems, and their solutions, are dependent upon the sometimes rich contexts in which they are applied. Again this reinforces a key argument presented throughout the book: the need for understanding and expertise rather than the simple application of "sticking plaster" solutions copied from elsewhere. Encouraging the transference of good practice or "good" ideas developed at "ground level" from place of origin to other sites by simple replication glosses over the need to allow good practice to inform but not define subsequent solutions in different settings. Curiously, an idea that is hinted at but not explicitly advanced in this book is the concept of "user design" that, interestingly, attunes well with the current political focus upon encouraging local ownership of problems. Acknowledged in the broader design field, the "user-design" approach can overcome unseen problems of both context and acceptance in the development and implementation of new solutions whether with "small" projects, such as the introduction of (sometimes unwanted) "teen shelters", or on a much greater scale as described by Shaftoe and Read in their chapter on "planning out crime". A marriage of "expert knowledge" and "user-design understanding" could be developed through client/professional relationships between communities and criminal justice/community safety partnerships rather than the more "one-way" street of "customer" and "vendor".
Chapters by Sutton, on market dynamics, by Gill, on the "resources" upon which an offender draws to commit his or her crime and by Newburn and Souhami on youth diversion start to offer more tangible links between the limitations that can be placed upon crime opportunities and the ways in which limitations can be placed upon the ability for individuals to offend. Perhaps what might add to these discussions would be a more in-depth consideration of the behaviours of offenders and the constraints upon them, although lack of such discussion in this book is understandable in terms of both the remit of this work and the availability of appropriate research. Nevertheless, there would be potential advantages in bringing together such a body of work to underpin the future development of crime prevention strategies.
In the fourth section the discussions are focused around ways of dealing with commonly identified problem areas with chapters on domestic burglary (Hamilton-Smith and Kent), vehicle crime (Webb), "business" crime (Burrows and Hopkins), violent and sexual crime (Maguire and Brookman), and drugs and alcohol (McSweeney and Hough). The section is brought to a close by a discussion of factors surrounding "management of the fear of crime" by Ditton and Innes. Again, a strong message from these chapters is that problems of crime prevention and community safety should be considered individually, that each new problem requires in-depth consideration with reference to an extended and robust knowledge base. This stance rightly weakens arguments for "blanket policies" and "off-the-shelf" responses.
The final section of the book focuses upon the development of preventive actions with chapters on analysis (Hirschfield), selecting suitable approaches (Laycock), evaluating work (Eck) and issues surrounding partnership working (Gilling). In his initial introduction, Nick Tilley observed that the coverage of the book is restricted to issues related to crime yet it is easy to see how the discussions could be applied to a broader range of public safety issues and beyond. Just as Hirschfield's excellent chapter on "analysis for intervention" applies analytical techniques utilized in many other spheres to the declared subject area of this book, so the theorizing of many of the contributors will be of use to researchers dealing with subjects other than crime. The depth of these final discussions helps to make this work relevant not only to considerations of crime prevention and community safety strategies and tactics, but also to considerations of, for example, the feasibility of developing valid and robust measurements of non-crime-oriented partnership-based community initiatives: issues that are particularly relevant as diverse "communities" and "neighbourhoods" increasingly form a central currency in the determination of success.
In 1993, following the influential Morgan Report (1991) that reinvigorated crime prevention through partnership working, the Home Office published "A Practical Guide to Crime Prevention for Local Partnerships". Obviously fearing that the 41 pages of this guide would not be read by policy makers, they prepared a separately bound executive summary that stretched to five pages in length. As we move forward to further develop partnership working, a concern must be that those responsible for taking forward this work, an audience who would benefit hugely from this handbook, may not make time to become aware of its contents. It is too often the case that the wealth of knowledge brought together within a work such as this is not acquired or adequately utilized by those developing and implementing strategy in practice. If anything, the sheer breadth of this work is evidence of the need to better embed academic research within policing practice and yet throughout the text one encounters concerns over a slowing of investment in research and development, even, as Farrell points out, in previously promoted areas of study such as repeat victimization.
As this book demonstrates, we have emerged from the time when there was a dearth of research of sufficiently high quality to inform policing in its wider sense, that of the "welfare" of the community, and also to inform the work of other criminal justice agencies. Relevant knowledge is being developed and made available, but a defining characteristic of professions is that they have access to continually developed professional knowledge vested within individual "frontline" practitioners. This requires appropriate professional development focused upon individuals within organizations and the mechanisms, investment and will to continue to develop as hinted by Scott in his chapter on police responsibilities. Without these, to a significant extent, it will depend upon the personal interest of individuals to carry the efforts of these authors into the workplace.
