They look good but don't work: a case study of global performance indicators in crime prevention

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Abstract

Around the western world global performance indicators are widely used by governments and bureaucrats to determine the effectiveness of community development programs. The worldwide shift to crime prevention models, relying upon the formation of community partnerships with police to effect safety in neighbourhoods, is no exception. Police and governments seem especially committed to using global performance indicators for measuring and assessing the effectiveness of these partnerships, probably due to the traditional measures of effectiveness of ‘crime fighting’ by police. The Waratah Crime Prevention Project was a pilot community based crime prevention project carried out in Victoria, Australia, which required the use of global performance indicators as a measure of effectiveness on the directive of government and police. This paper reports on the reasons for the total failure of these global performance indicators to measure the changes effected by the project in the three key performance areas of reducing violence in and around licensed premises; reducing violence in families; and reducing violence by young people. The paper discusses the problems with assigning only global measures to community crime prevention programs, and suggests recommendations for future projects.

Introduction

In recent years, there has been an international trend for governments to instigate community based crime prevention programs. Conflicting views have been, and still are, debated in the literature concerning whether this trend is a result of failed traditional policing practices (Sarre, 1997), a drift to a corporatist model of control (Crawford, 1994), or a genuine desire for community empowerment (Crime Prevention Resource Manual, 2000). Moreover, academic deliberations continue concerning the value of police working in partnership with community agencies and institutions (Crawford, 1994, Murphy, 1998). As well, historical definitional debates concerning what constitutes a community, continue to make it clear that the term community means different things to different people (Cohen, 1985, Dunham, 1986, Heller, 1989). Whilst these deliberations continue, i.e. why is there a trend towards community crime prevention programs? what is the value of partnerships? and what is a community? it is evident that program implementation is not waiting for the answers—community based crime prevention is proliferating.

Definitions and examples of community based crime prevention abound (Kelling and Bratton, 1993, O'Malley and Sutton, 1997). It is now widely accepted that community based crime prevention refers to changing the professional policing role of ‘the crime fighter’ to that of ‘safe community specialists’ (Kelling and Bratton, 1993, Kelling et al., 2000). This role transformation is not an easy one to accept for traditionally trained police, who for some 70 years have been socialised into the role of crime fighting as ‘real police work’. The early work of Kelling and Cole, 1996, Wilson, 1992, Wilson, 1994, Wilson and Kelling, 1982 suggested that the control of minor incivilities was the key to reducing more serious crimes in communities. Wilson and Kelling (1982) made three key points: (1) uncontrolled neighbourhood incivilities such as gangs, prostitution and drunkenness increase citizens' fear; (2) disorderly behaviour gives the signal that nobody cares in the community, members either tolerate or endorse the behaviour which, in turn attracts perpetrators and increase citizens' fear, and (3) police need to rely on citizens to legitimate police activities and assist when dealing with disorders. The central thesis of Wilson and Kelling's work know colloquially as Broken Windows Theory, was picked up as a law and order agenda by left-wing media and civil libertarians.

From these original seminal works has flowed a massive amount of funding in virtually all Western countries to facilitate the implementation of community based crime prevention. The effects of this international research, and the trend of community based crime prevention has triggered similar reactions from the Australian federal government. Crime prevention strategies, with considerable injections of funding, are implemented nationally. The language of these strategies are immersed in notions of ‘getting tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime’, involving ‘grassroots community input’ and ‘working in partnership with community’ (Queensland Crime Prevention Strategy, 2000). The myriad of crime prevention programs that have been implemented can be categorised loosely under three groupings.

  • 1.

    Situational crime prevention which reduces the opportunity of crime, by manipulation of the physical environment (examples include increased street lighting, security cameras, or introducing responsible serving of alcohol practices in licensed premises).

  • 2.

    Community or social intervention which attempts to manipulate the social conditions or institutions that may influence criminal activity (examples include targeting at-risk adolescents, strengthening communities, anti-bullying programs in schools).

  • 3.

    Managerialist crime prevention techniques which are aimed at making the criminal justice and other governmental agencies function more effectively to reduce criminogenic features (National Crime Prevention, 1999, Veno et al., 2000).

However, apart from the early work in highly decayed urban structures, there is very little research or proper evaluation evidence as to whether these programs have the capacity to reduce crime and violence in the community (O'Malley and Sutton, 1997, Sherman et al., 1997).

Indeed, the capacity to achieve reductions in violence and crime levels, as well as effecting community structural change in settings other than those characterised by urban decay, is problematic for a number of reasons. Community change is not only dependent on the quality of the program, or the quality of implementation of the program, but also the sensitivity and applicability of the evaluation and measuring instrumentation. Programs can be successful in achieving change and poor measuring instruments may not detect the change. Conversely, the measuring instruments may reflect movement, but the change can be attributed to events other than the program (Perrin, 1998).

Frequently, crime prevention programs have relied on the use of global performance indicators as a means of measuring levels of success. Global performance indicators predominate in community based crime prevention programs in Britain (Ekblom, 1992), Australia (Crime Prevention Resource Manual, 2000, O'Malley and Sutton, 1997, Sutton and Fisher, 1989, Winston, 1993), Germany (Dölling, 1992), Canada (Nuttall, 1989) and the USA (Sherman et al., 1997). There are various speculations as to why global performance indicators are so popular as measurement instruments for community based crime prevention programs. The most persuasive arguments seems to be that the funding bodies in all these countries find the logic intuitively attractive. This most likely may be a result of the carry-over by bureaucrats from traditional policing (crime fighting) to crime prevention. The reasons are unknown, but another explanation may be that many police departments are simply responding to the political and bureaucratic policies of the day which, in many cases, are unenlightened by the literature.

This paper reports on a three year, applied community based crime prevention project which commenced in 1996, called the Waratah Crime Prevention Project (WCPP). It was conducted in the state of Victoria, Australia, and had performance indicators built into the project outcomes by the funding body (The Department of Justice) and Police. The intent of the paper is to describe, from the practitioners' point of view, the difficulties with using global performance indicators on this project and to define alternative targeted performance indicators and other techniques more appropriate for the measure of crime prevention projects. The central concern relates to the failure of global performance indicators to evaluate the myriad of crime prevention programs that the community initiated and generated.

It is hoped that this paper will clearly communicate with politicians, policy makers and other practitioners the pitfalls in such an approach and to suggest workable alternatives. To aid understanding, a short contextualisation is provided below, followed by a detailed analysis of the utilisation of crime prevention performance indicators.

Section snippets

Contextualisation of the Waratah crime prevention project

As a result of economic downturn in the late 1980s, economic and social indicators suggested the Gippsland rural region was in decline. This was substantiated statistically with high levels of unemployment, a reduced population growth, a rapid increase in failed business, government pension recipients were triple the state rate (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 1986, 1996), and a youth suicide rate the highest in the state for the period 1990–1996 (van den Eynde, 1999). In 1989, the region's

Lessons learnt: crime prevention and performance indicators

Having identified the problems found with utilisation of specific performance indicators for the WCPP, let us now turn to a discussion at a slightly more generic level. This discussion is intended to identify less specific problems with performance indicators and to point the way to alternative ways of measuring success and failure in future crime prevention projects.

Discussion

The Home Office's Safer Cities Program (SCP), as complex an anti-crime program as the WCPP, shared similar evaluation problems, that is the researchers had to:

…detect the effects of a set of preventive schemes which are very diverse in size and nature (some being extremely modest), which may or may not be successfully implemented, which start up at different times, which possibly overlap, and whose locations are not merely scattered but unknown in advance. The effects have to be detected

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