NCJ Number
227444
Editor(s)
Johannes Knutsson,
Nick Tilley
Date Published
2009
Length
227 pages
Annotation
This collection of seven papers examines the challenges that face those charged with determining "what works" in reducing crime.
Abstract
The first paper reviews the early development of evaluations of the impact of problem-oriented policing (POP) projects and discusses what should be the standard for these evaluations. This is followed by a paper that appraises the current body of situational-crime-prevention (SCP) evaluations by examining 206 evaluations of SCP efforts conducted from 1970 to 2007, reviewing the types of methodologies used, reports on the conclusions of these studies, and the implications for future SCP evaluation. The third paper discusses the logic of the argument that the analysis of crime "signature" change (data patterns that describe how crime is associated with various features of the opportunity structure), as part of crime prevention evaluations, can improve the internal validity of evaluation findings regarding opportunity-related crime-prevention interventions. The fourth paper examines the use of interviews with community residents in small areas in order to assess the effects of police crime-reduction strategies on citizen perceptions of disorder problems, police behaviors, and fear of crime. A paper then considers the evaluation questions asked in medicine--and the methods used to answer them--in order to determine whether the equivalent questions and methods are applicable in policing and crime prevention. The sixth paper demonstrates the importance of balancing treated and untreated study samples as well as the study population and the target population in order to accurately estimate effects of a crime-prevention intervention, generalize them to the study population, and extrapolate them to other target populations. The final paper considers the possibilities of computer-assisted computational methods, particularly computer simulation, in the evaluation of crime-reduction activities. Chapter tables, figures, notes, and references