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CRITIC: A prospective planning tool for crime prevention evaluation designs

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Crime Prevention and Community Safety Aims and scope

Abstract

Planners of crime prevention evaluations often face a dilemma: how to actively manage numerous interacting variables needing prospective consideration as part of a research design. Failure to consider one design component at the expense of another, or lavishing disproportionate attention on some and not others can increase the likelihood of non-convincing and/or non-significant findings. To assist the decision-making processes needed at the initial stage of evaluation design to avoid such outcomes, we describe an evolving systematic prospective planning tool given the acronym CRITIC. CRITIC raises awareness, and discusses the effect, of Crime history (how crime-prone the action and control sites are), Reduction (in terms of proportional reduction in the crime problem anticipated in the action sites when compared to the control), Intensity (in terms of the number and/or strength of interventions necessary per target exposed to crime risk), Time period (that over which the action and control sites are tracked before and after implementation), Immensity (in terms of the number of units of analysis at risk of crime to be tracked) and Cost (in terms of the unit cost per intervention) on the likelihood of statistically significant outcome analyses and cost-effective results. The application of CRITIC is demonstrated on a bag-theft reduction study in a chain of bars in central London. Its wider utility to other crime prevention evaluation contexts is also discussed.

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Notes

  1. The term troublesome tradeoffs was coined for highlighting the central task of design against crime in the real world, that of balancing design which is user-friendly whereas abuser-unfriendly. Its inclusion here is deliberate: creating evaluations that are fit for purpose is as much a matter of design, as creating the anti-theft clips that are the subject of this paper – evaluators having to envisage, and finesse, the optimum parameters for evaluation design.

  2. ‘herd immunity’ is a public health term referring to the situation when a critical proportion of animals (or humans) is immunised, at this point the rate of contagion becomes less than the ‘replacement level’ and the infection thus dies out. Ekblom and Sidebottom (2008) question if there similarly exists a critical proportion for crime prevention, in the present context, for example, where offenders judge bars as not worth entering to steal bags because of a perceived low likelihood of finding a bag which is not clipped and hence insecure.

  3. Problems have also been highlighted with the use of odds ratios in meta-analysis; in particular those associated with over-dispersion, which can be corrected for (see Farrington and Welsh, 2006).

  4. Currently, the highest possible price is based solely on the mean reduction. It would also be possible to use the two confidence limit values to produce a 95% confidence interval range on the highest possible/break-even unit price.

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Acknowledgements

The research described in this paper was funded by a research award from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (Award title: Turning the tables on crime: Boosting evidence of impact of Design Against Crime and the strategic capacity to deliver practical design solutions). The views expressed here are solely those of the authors. Thanks go to Professor Lorraine Gamman and colleagues at Central St Martins College of Art and Design.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science, University College London, 2nd Floor Brook House, 2–16 Torrington Place, London, WC1E 7HN, UK

    Kate J Bowers & Aiden Sidebottom

  2. Design Against Crime Research Centre, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts, London, UK

    Paul Ekblom

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  1. Kate J Bowers
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  2. Aiden Sidebottom
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  3. Paul Ekblom
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Correspondence to Kate J Bowers.

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Bowers, K., Sidebottom, A. & Ekblom, P. CRITIC: A prospective planning tool for crime prevention evaluation designs. Crime Prev Community Saf 11, 48–70 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1057/cpcs.2008.20

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