Crime prevention works.
Many countries have proof that these preventive
approaches work. Some approaches that work include:
- Community crime prevention councils, with
joint planning shared between housing authorities, social services, schools and police, that
have reduced crime by 15 per cent in France.
- programme supported by the British Crime
Prevention Unit of the Home Office where police,
social workers, cities and university researchers
worked together to analyse the causes
of residential breakins and to implement remedies.
These remedies reduced breakins from
one in four houses to one in eight a year later
and by 75 per cent over four years. Another
example of a successful initiative has been the
1994 initiative entitled "Planning Out Crime".
- Scientific evaluations of demonstration projects
on which the Crime Prevention Directorate of
the Ministry of Justice of the Netherlands spends
10 per cent of its budget. A crime prevention
project in public housing, for instance, showed
a 50 per cent reduction in the first year of implementation.
- School programmes that have reduced school
violence by 50 per cent in Norway. School violence
prevention curricula have added to this
success in many schools in Europe, North America
and Australia and New Zealand.
- Headstart, a preschool programme for youth at
risk, which has reduced the proportion of
youths in the United States who become adults
with five arrests from 35 per cent to 7 per cent,
thus saving $7 in welfare and policing costs for
every $1 invested.
- A unit established by a policing service in the
United States to identify the factors generating
interpersonal crime in highrisk areas. The unit
worked with both municipal and private agencies
to change certain factors; the public housing project,
for instance, reduced burglary by 50 per cent.
In an effort to bring together some of these national
and international efforts, ICPC has compiled
a list of the growing body of practical literature
on workable ways of reducing crime
[6]
. The Centre is also developing services so that governmental
agencies, cities, police services, national crime
prevention agencies, and community development
groups can access the international expertise on
crime prevention and adapt it to local conditions.
ICPC will be able to provide needs assessments,
work plans and technical assistance to put crime
prevention into practice, designing and facilitating
awareness and training seminars, and preparing
occasional papers on promising crime prevention strategies.
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