Tilley Awards 2008
Entry Guidance (continued)
2 What are the Tilley Awards?
The awards were set up in 1999 by the Home Office to publicise the use of problem-oriented approaches to crime reduction and what can be achieved by tackling crime in a different and more strategic way. As crime reduction has moved away from being seen as the sole responsibility of the police, so the awards have sought to encourage different agencies to work together in partnership to create sustainable solutions to long term, recurring problems within local communities. The awards emphasize the skills that are often overlooked in crime reduction practice, but that have proven to have real results in terms of crime reduction and prevention. In particular, good and thoughtful problem analysis before planning a response and the evaluation of the project are recognised skills in these awards.
The Awards are named after Nick Tilley, a professor of Criminology from Nottingham Trent University who has made a considerable contribution to the development of problem orientated approaches to crime reduction in this country Developing the work of the US Criminologist, Herman Goldstein, Professor Tilley has established that UK police and partnership performance can be improved by adopting an evidence-based approach to crime reduction. Working extensively in collaboration with both the Home Office and the Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science, Nick has demonstrated the benefits problem orientated approaches can bring to crime reduction and has written extensively about this approach.
The Tilley Awards attract a high profile judging panel. Previous judges have included the award namesake Professor Nick Tilley, Sir Ronnie Flannigan, Professor John Eck amongst many others and the project winner from the previous year is invited to sit on the subsequent panel.
The annual award ceremony takes place at the UK POP Conference Gala Dinner is an opportunity to celebrate local successes. As well as being a welcome opportunity for the Home Office, sponsors of the awards, to recognise and to thank practitioners for their creative responses within a challenging field, it also offers the winners the opportunity to present their work to their peers. Both the practitioner workshops and the awards enable winners to share learning and winning entries are shared with a wider audience via the post-Conference publicity.
The awards are internationally recognised and in previous years the prize money, awarded to the winning organisations, has been used to fund travel and entry costs for individuals to attend the Problem-Oriented Policing Conference in the USA, supporting a culture of continual learning and improvement.
Summaries from the 2007 finalists' application forms will be added to the forthcoming Effective Practice Database and can also be viewed at
http://www.crimereduction.homeoffice.gov.uk/tilley/tilleyawards2007.htm .
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3 What is POP?
Problem oriented partnership (POP) approaches to crime reduction refers to the process used by agencies working in partnerships to address the fundamental problems that underpin crime in order to improve crime reduction and community safety in a locality.
POP approaches attempt to move beyond policing being solely a matter of dealing with offenders through the criminal justice system. Whilst an important part of the policing role, relying solely on response has been described as treating the symptoms but not the illness. POP encourages the wider use of intelligence within a partnership setting to identify patterns of offences in relation to type of offenders, localities or victims and to use problem solving techniques to get to the root of the pattern and to put in place solutions that will make the crime less likely to take place in the future.
Adopting a problem oriented approach involves several stages, which in the best practice are followed through meticulously; identifying a crime pattern using a variety of data sources from a range of agencies to order to better understand the pattern; examining the Problem Analysis Triangle (victim, offender and location) to identify how the pattern can be interrupted; put in place an effective and sustainable response which is tailored to address the cause and not the symptoms of the problem; and assessing whether the chosen response had the desired and expected effect on the problem. In essence the focus of POP is on analysing and understanding problems, developing tailored responses to reducing them and understanding why they have had the impact evidenced.
At its best, POP approaches engage all agencies that can have an impact in addressing the problem and research has shown that agencies working together in partnership, rather than the traditional expectation that police are the sole agency responsible for crime reduction, can bring benefits beyond crime reduction.
There are several different models that have been developed to help practitioners apply the problem solving approach in their work. The Tilley Awards use the shared language of the SARA model (Scanning-Analysis- Response-Assessment), used by crime reduction practitioners across many different organisations. A fuller explanation of the SARA model is available at: http://www.crimereduction.homeoffice.gov.uk/learningzone/sara.htm.
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Last update: Monday, January 07, 2008