Crime Reduction - Helping to Reduce Crime in Your Area

Immediate precursors to Crime or disorder event

Possible interventions in cause

Crime promoters (culpable, negligent or innocent)

1. Some onlookers ignore fight

1. Encourage good citizenship – cautious social control.

2. Others egg offender on

2. Engender subcultural approval of good behaviour.

3. Victim was an active promoter – insulted offender

3. Avoidance – teach prudence.

4. Bar staff ignored confrontation until too late

4. Alert, motivate, empower bar staff to intervene effectively and early...

5. Bar staff failed to clear up empties – lie around available for misuse.

5. ...and to clear up glasses and bottles (restrict resources)

6. Pub management/ brewery adopted policy of attracting mainly young people – concentration of potential offenders, insufficient rule-setters/ role models

6. Broaden intake of clientele.

7. Pub management declined to change to toughened beer glasses.

7. Motivate management to change – persuasion, incentives?

8. Pub management indifferent to risks to which customers exposed.

8. Naming/shaming; threat of withdrawal of licence by magistrates.

Crime preventers

1. Passers-by do not intervene to try to separate protagonists, or call police. Due to fear of reprisal; hostility to police.

1. Witness protection; build social capital of trust to give bystanders motivation/ confidence to intervene (subject to level of danger); improve police-public relationships.

2. Police arrest offender (preventing further escalation of current event and hopefully leading to prevention of next offence/s). However, force is stretched since all pubs close at once.

2. Negotiate with pubs to stagger closing time; involve licensing magistrate.

Environment

1. Physical/tactical: restricted space outside pub, so difficult for protagonists to go their separate ways.

1. Reopen disused exit onto street.

2. Poor lighting inhibits surveillance and intervention.

2. Improve lighting after careful inspection – so offender can’t lurk unseen; and so facial recognition is possible, perhaps in conjunction with CCTV (although this is unlikely to deter expressive crime by intoxicated offenders, it could help catch and convict more serious ones and then deter people from getting drunk in first place).

3. Motivational: potentially rowdy young people attracted to entertainment district.

3. Find other attractions/venues for boisterous young people, to reduce concentration; attract alternative clientele; use planning authorities to avoid number of licensed premises in same location or on nodal points.

Target enclosure – pub

1. Provocation – crowded – collisions/spilled drinks readily occur.

1. Rearrange furniture; consider reducing demand/ spreading it more evenly over time; restrict numbers/enforce fire safety limits

2. Priming – very noisy music/games machines – stress shortens offenders’ fuses, makes preventers’ attempts at social control difficult.

2. Reduce noise.

3. Inadequate rules of acceptable behaviour established – generates and permits crime; reputation for rowdiness attracts people who like that sort of thing.

3. Establish and publicise rules; enforce them through staff training, more experienced staff, building relationships with clientele.

Target person

1. Passively provocative – wearing rival team’s strip.

1. Advise young people on street-wise prudence – avoidance tactics

2. Vulnerable – slight build.

2. Training for self-defence, assertion not aggression.

3. Present in pub due to away match.

3. Can't do anything about this.

Offender presence in situation

1. Routine visit to regular pub

1. If this regularly brings 2 rival sets of supporters into contact/ conflict, try to channel them to different pubs with different hours in different parts of town; and/or encourage culture of more friendly rivalry; police/magistrates role to restrict access on football related occasions, publican/doorstaff role to restrict access to pub

Decision to commit offence: Anticipation of risk, effort and reward

1. Not very salient – an impulsive, expressive crime.

1. Make aware of serious consequences for victims, and of penalties. (But both would have to be pretty extreme to have any impact.)

2. Supportive mates, ineffectual bar staff, poor lighting outside – little risk

2. Establish culture of non-aggression (stupid/uncool).

3. Weak appearance of target/ victim – little effort or risk.

3. Training for self-defence, confidence.

Prompting, provoking

1. Revenge, honour motives engaged.

1. As 2 above.

2. Sight of empty beerglasses prompts their use as a weapon.

2. Clearing up empties.

Resources for crime

1. Beerglasses – tempered – break into jagged edges.

1. Replace with toughened glass or plastic (and watch for displacement to bottles).

Readiness to offend – current life circumstances

1. Offender primed by history of conflict with victim’s team, and recent defeats.

1. Work with football team to encourage constructive attitude; or sack their manager.

2. Offender primed by significant consumption of alcohol.

2. Modify drinking culture; have attractive soft drinks available at reasonable price; train bar staff to monitor customer state and if necessary restrict consumption – include this in rules.

3. Offender primed by stressful noise/overcrowding in bar.

3. Reduce noise and overcrowding.

Resources to avoid crime

2. Lack of ability to de-escalate dispute

1. & 2. On a primary, secondary or tertiary basis, work with parents, schools, supporters club, prison or probation service to foster aggression management and social skills for de-escalation.

Criminality (predisposition)

2. Prone to provocation.

1. & 2. On a primary, secondary or tertiary basis, work with parents, schools, supporters club, prison or probation service to identify and reduce any underlying causes of aggression/ easy provocation, including changing subcultural approval, poor parental discipline; in shorter-term, supply resources to avoid crime as above.