Small Business Crime: The Evaluation of a Crime Prevention Initiative
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Small Business Crime: The Evaluation of a Crime Prevention Initiative Kate J. Bowers 1 There has been a dearth of evaluation research concerned with assessing the effectiveness of crime prevention schemes that aim to reduce levels of crime committed against businesses and non-residential properties generally. This paper describes the implementation of a scheme aimed at reducing small business crime, with a particular emphasis on burglary in the county of Merseyside. Details of the results of an evaluation of the scheme are then given. The evaluation found that contact with a Crime Prevention Officer significantly reduced levels of crime against businesses. Advice offered by such experts was more effective than the isolated installation of target-hardening measures. The paper also attempts to gather evidence regarding the means by which and the situations in which particular crime prevention measures are effective at reducing levels of crime. Keywords: Commercial victimization; repeat burglaries; situational crime prevention; evaluation; small businesses Introduction An area of criminology in which research has the potential to make an impact on practice is in the evaluation of crime prevention initiatives. The current political climate has encouraged investment in evaluation studies in an attempt to increase the impact of government resources by establishing which techniques are successful at reducing crime and in which circumstances they succeed. This is the aim of an in-depth evaluation, funded by the Home Office, of a recent national burglary reduction scheme. Much crime prevention to date, and therefore the majority of evaluations, have concentrated on residential crime, especially residential burglary. For instance, a large-scale evaluation of the Safer Cities programme has been conducted.2 The programme was nation-wide, and the evaluation of its domestic burglary element utilized information collected from 300 different schemes. The evaluation used before-and-after surveys and local police crime statistics. Control areas were set up, so it was possible to measure the extent to which any changes in the action areas reflected changes elsewhere. The overall results were comprehensive, showing that the survey and the crime figures both identified reductions in levels of burglary. Some evidence of displacement, both to other areas and to other types of crime, was found. A further residential burglary intervention, the ‘Biting Back’ initiative implemented in an area of Huddersfield, concentrated efforts on victims of repeat burglary. An in-depth evaluation of the scheme proved that it had been successful in reducing both overall levels of burglary and levels of repeat burglary against domestic dwellings over its period of operation.3
Copyright © 2001 Perpetuity Press Ltd
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Crime Prevention and Community Safety: An International Journal
An area which now needs addressing is the prevention of crime against non-residential properties, such as schools, businesses or community facilities. Evidence has been fo
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