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Crisis and disruption are often unpredictable and can create opportunities for crime. During such times, policing may also need to meet additional challenges to handle the disruption. The use of social media by officials can be essential for crisis mitigation and crime reduction. In this paper, we study the use of Twitter for crime mitigation and reduction by UK police (and associated) agencies in the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic. Our findings suggest that whilst most of the tweets from our sample concerned issues that were not specifically about crime, especially during the first stages of the pandemic, there was a significant increase in tweets about fraud, cybercrime and domestic abuse. There was also an increase in retweeting activity as opposed to the creation of original messages. Moreover, in terms of the impact of tweets, as measured by the rate at which they are retweeted, followers were more likely to ‘spread the word’ when the tweet was content-rich (discussed a crime specific matter and contained media), and account holders were themselves more active on Twitter. Considering the changing world we live in, criminal opportunity is likely to evolve. To help mitigate this, policy makers and researchers should consider more systematic approaches to developing social media communication strategies for the purpose of crime mitigation and reduction during disruption and change more generally. We suggest a framework for so doing.

In his 2018 Stockholm prize winner lecture, Goldstein highlighted the need for problem-oriented policing (POP) to be not only effective but also fair. Contributing to the development of POP, this study examines how a wider perspective on problem-solving generally, and scoping in particular, can be adopted to address some of the growing challenges in 21st century policing. We demonstrate that the concept of ‘problem’ was too narrowly defined and that, as a result, many problem-solving models found in criminology are ill-structured to minimize the negative side-effects of interventions and deliver broader benefits. Problem-solving concepts and models are compared across disciplines and recommendations are made to improve POP, drawing on examples in architecture, conservation science, industrial ecology and ethics. QC 20200102The article is published Open Access Creative Commons CC BY.The article was first published as an advance publication article of the journal on May 22, 2019 and included in Vol. 60(1) in January 2020.

The use of Cornish’s crime-scripts approach in situational crime prevention grows apace. However, we believe the conceptual foundation of cognitive scripts imported from Abelson and colleagues was rather unclear and is too narrow to support current script research. We therefore review the notion of scripts to both promote clarity and better connect it to mainstream situational prevention and criminology more generally. We also seek to broaden the approach by exploring additional cross-disciplinary links. We believe all this will support the progressively more demanding uses to which the procedural analysis of crime may be put in research and practice and—more broadly—challenge how human behaviour in crime is analysed.

Question: What makes connections (often deep ones) between diverse areas, has a network of equally diverse participants, and the potential to significantly impact the life of cities and their inhabitants? Answer: The researchers who combined to produce this special issue, of course. I was privileged to see them, and others, in action at a workshop convened in Stockholm by the Editor of this special issue, and to read the papers published here. I am no specialist in transport crime, but have a broad interest in research and practice in crime prevention and particular concern with the built environment and with design in general. The Editor has already capably summarised the content of the articles in the Introduction, which allows me, in what follows, to reflect on some of the many issues raised, both specific to transport and common to the whole of crime science.

Anyone trying to devise counter-terrorist designs for railway carriages faces a range of issues. In particular, designers need a framework for thinking about security. This article explores the specific practical design problem of securing railway carriages against explosive terrorist attacks and assesses the benefits of articulating such exploration through the use of the Security Function Framework (SFF). We present the SFF framework, apply it to the ExRes carriage and evaluate it according to defined criteria. Our evaluation shows that the SFF framework is clearly expressed, aids the designer in communicating design requirements, facilitates systematic creativity without necessarily generating completely new ideas, and appears practically applicable. However, we emphasize that ours have been ‘bench tests’; such tests are really no substitute for trying the SFF out with real life designers.

This paper describes the latest stage of an ongoing attempt to update and upgrade CPTED’s concepts and actions and link them more closely to developments in architecture, design and crime science. The concept of territoriality, for example, is central to the practice domain of CPTED. Yet territoriality is only vaguely defined within that domain, as are the other core concepts such as activity support and target hardening; and all of them confusingly intersect and overlap. The paper attempts a remedy by developing a suite of definitions in depth, relating the core concepts to various frameworks and discourses developed for crime prevention and design against crime, and more generally exploring ways in which CPTED could become richer and more subtle. It will also consider the ‘dark side’ of the environment, covering offenders’ countermoves to prevention and their own counter-exploitation of space, buildings and what they contain. The ultimate intention is to produce a more rigorous, yet deeper and better-integrated conception of CPTED useful for practice, research and theory alike. The paper should be considered as work in progress, indicating what might be possible and stimulating debate rather than offering a definitive resolution of the issue. Further steps are suggested and constructive contributions from readers are invited.

Paul Ekblom edited this thematic issue of the journal, 'European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research' The issue was called, ‘New Thinking on Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design'. In addition Ekblom wrote the introduction chapter. Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) is a familiar field of practice, particularly in English-speaking and Northern European nations, but now emerging too in countries such as Italy and France which have traditionally followed more community‐ and offender-oriented paths in crime prevention; and in Eastern Europe, Turkey and the Middle East. Although worthy of support, CPTED does have some serious limitations, which may limit its theoretical and empirical sharpness, practical relevance and its lasting adoption; and may even introduce harmful side-effects. So ‘old hands’ and ‘new hands’ alike need to proceed with some caution. The idea behind this thematic issue of EJCPR, containing articles from UK and Australia, is to support the concept of CPTED, and to respect the practical experience that has built up over the years, but to subject the language, the methodology, the theory, the detailed evidence and the working practice to constructive criticism. The intention, too, is to indicate directions in which CPTED should update and evolve as a practical but rigorous and evidence-based discipline. (Evidence of impact on crime of CPTED programmes is not covered here although equally important to the future of the approach.) In this introduction I will very briefly define and describe the basic principles of CPTED, as they are now; identify some of the main problems and limitations of CPTED; suggest some strategic ways in which CPTED and its component concepts could evolve and improve; look ahead to the papers in this issue which take things forward in quite diverse ways; and finish with a proposed redefinition of CPTED. Ideally the debate will not stop with this issue but continue elsewhere, contributing to a much-needed reinvigoration of the field.

This paper focuses on descriptions of crime prevention projects identified as ‘good practice’, and how they are captured and shared in knowledge bases, with the purpose of improving performance in the field as a whole. This relates both to evidence-based approaches to practice, and to growing attempts at explicit knowledge management. There are, however, fundamental issues in the transfer of effective practice in the crime prevention field, which few working knowledge bases have properly addressed. Evaluation often remains weak and descriptions of successful projects do not always contain the right information to help practitioners select and replicate projects suitable for transfer to their own contexts. Knowledge remains fragmentary. With these concerns in mind this paper systematically examines the projects contained in the UK Home Office ‘Effective Practice Database’, a repository of project descriptions volunteered and self-completed on a standard online form by practitioners. The Home Office descriptions (and their equivalents elsewhere) reveal significant limitations of richness, retrievability and reliability. Ways of addressing these issues are discussed, ranging from the media and processes of ‘knowledge-harvesting’ to the use of more purpose-designed frameworks such as 5Is. But the fundamental issue remains one of taking knowledge management seriously and investing sustained time, money and leadership effort to make it work.

Planners of crime prevention evaluations often face a dilemma: how to actively manage numerous interacting variables needing prospective consideration as part of a research design. Failure to consider one design component at the expense of another, or lavishing disproportionate attention on some and not others can increase the likelihood of non-convincing and/or non-significant findings. To assist the decision-making processes needed at the initial stage of evaluation design to avoid such outcomes, we describe an evolving systematic prospective planning tool given the acronym CRITIC. CRITIC raises awareness, and discusses the effect, of Crime history (how crime-prone the action and control sites are), Reduction (in terms of proportional reduction in the crime problem anticipated in the action sites when compared to the control), Intensity (in terms of the number and/or strength of interventions necessary per target exposed to crime risk), Time period (that over which the action and control sites are tracked before and after implementation), Immensity (in terms of the number of units of analysis at risk of crime to be tracked) and Cost (in terms of the unit cost per intervention) on the likelihood of statistically significant outcome analyses and cost-effective results. The application of CRITIC is demonstrated on a bag-theft reduction study in a chain of bars in central London. Its wider utility to other crime prevention evaluation contexts is also discussed.

Project MARC aimed to develop a mechanism to assess the risk of theft of consumer electronic products, and their corresponding security; and to devise an operational scheme for EU level to influence manufacturers to make their products less criminogenic. The project encountered serious difficulties in the assessment process due, among other things, to limitations of concepts and terminology. This paper describes and analyses those limitations; discusses an approach to redesigning language that draws on biological and risk management concepts; proposes a ‘basic grammar’ of risk and security covering their dual dimensions of probability and harm (underemphasised in crime prevention); focuses on sources of risk centred on the product, based on ‘crime scripts’ and criminal motivation; and explores wider ecological and evolutionary issues. It makes suggestions for improving any assessment scheme and raises wider issues on how crime science should tighten its terminology and bring together approaches to crime prevention and risk management. The present contribution comprises proposals for discussion and development rather than a perfected schema.

This paper outlines a framework which draws together the currently fragmented understandings of, and actions against, terrorism. The ‘conjunction of terrorist opportunity’ (CTO) stems from a widely known equivalent in crime prevention. Detailed distinctions emerge which clarify the relationship between crime and terrorism. There is special emphasis on historical and higher-level emergent causes, including terrorists' pursuit of strategic objectives and the career of the terrorist organisation itself, as it co-evolves with the society trying to frustrate and destroy it. But the framework seeks to anchor these understandings by reference to terrorist events and their immediate causes. On the basis of this analysis a suite of interventions can then be chosen to match terrorist problem and context and to reflect tactical and strategic priorities. Although the framework is only sketched here, it appears sufficiently promising to test out on a range of case studies by diagnosing causes and describing or suggesting interventions.

Background: The 25 Techniques of Situational Crime Prevention remain one of the bedrocks of research in Crime Science and play a key role in managing knowledge of research and practice. But they are not the only way of organising, transferring and applying this knowledge. Discussion: Taking the 25 Techniques and their theoretical underpinnings as our starting point, this paper presents the (currently) 11 Ds, a set of intervention principles which focus specifically on how the interventions are intended to influence the offender in the proximal crime situation. The context of this work was a project to help security managers detect and control attempts to undertake 'hostile reconnaissance' of public places by those planning to commit crimes or acts of terrorism. We discuss why we judged 25 Techniques as a model for emulation in general terms but unsuitable in detail for the present purpose. We also describe the process of developing the principles, which involved both reflection, and capture of new knowledge from theory and practice, including the security domain. The distinctive contribution of professional design to this process is noted. We then present the Ds themselves and show how, as generic principles, they relate to practical methods of prevention; how they can be further organised to aid their learning and their use; how they relate to other formulations such as the Conjunction of Criminal Opportunity; and how they might apply, with expansion perhaps, to the wider field of SCP. Summary: We discuss the process and the wider benefits of developing alternative – but rigorously linked – perspectives on the same theories and phenomena both for transferring existing research knowledge to practice and for sparking leading-edge theory and research.

The opening lines of the handbook issued by Sir Robert Peel to all officers of the Metropolitan Police in 1829, were these: ‘It should be understood at the outset that the object to be attained is the prevention of crime. To this great end every effort of the police is to be directed. The security of person and property, the preservation of the public tranquility, and all the other objects of a police establishment will thus be better effected than by the detection and punishment of the offender after he has succeeded in committing the crime.’ Quoted in Reith (1948:62). Mayne, one of the first two Commissioners, added this principle: ‘To prevent crime and disorder, as an alternative to their repression by military force and severity of legal punishment.’ Quoted in Boyd (2012). What exactly they meant by prevention is open to interpretation, and whether this was just a ruse to help convince a suspicious public that in England ‘continental’ methods of repression would not be adopted is not clear. But by the late 19th Century the reactive approach of catching criminals or ‘feeling collars’ had come to predominate; and in the 20th, the politically-significant rhetoric of ‘fighting crime’ achieved consensual hegemony, delivered huge resources to policing over the years and of course powerfully shaped the policing organisation. It was not until the 1960s that the first signs of resurgence of an explicit, practical, preventive role were seen.

Most evaluations of crime prevention are carried out with little regard for methodological probity. Of work that aspires to methodological adequacy, the standard designs are the before-after comparison group and the interrupted time series. The critical questions are whether a program has an effect (and if not, whether because of theory failure, implementation failure, or measurement failure), the extent of any effect achieved, and the means by which it was achieved. The reduction of crime is a measure of outcomes, but others are often used. Clarity is necessary in the use of noncrime measures. Too often, evaluators settle for the "consolation prizes" of reductions in fear and incivilities. Distinct evaluative requirements attach to different types of prevention. Improvements in standard methodology and innovation by nonstandard approaches are needed. The "scientific realist" tradition eschews conventional one-shot quasi experimentation in favor of repeated manipulations leading to the cataloging of possible mechanisms and consistency of outcome pattern with presumed mechanisms. Different actors (practitioners, evaluators, administrators) have different objectives and interests; evaluators must take account of those differences. Language: en

Now we can develop a detailed Specification for a knowledge framework for crime prevention, combining suggestions from previous chapters. As indicated, I shall use a design-like approach to identify and resolve contradictions and trade-offs between simplicity and complexity, and between brevity and familiarity of terminology versus articulacy clarity and precision. The content of the knowledge framework will also encourage practitioners to draw on design in their own work. I will be using the language of design, encouraging ‘design freedom’ in avoiding unnecessary restrictions of choice and execution of preventive action, and recommending design processes including requirements capture, and iterative development and testing. But freedom to innovate will be tempered by attention to clarity and rigour. You might wish the architects of your new office to be bold and creative, but unless you’re particularly adventurous you’d equally want them to be disciplined and professional!

(2001). Future Imperfect: preparing for the crimes to come. Criminal Justice Matters: Vol. 46, New Developments in Criminal Justice, pp. 38-40.

Part 1: Origins of the Concept 1. Transnational Organised Crime: The Global Reach of an American Concept 2. Europe's Response to Transnational Organised Crime 3. Global Law Enforcement as a Protection Racket: Some Sceptical Notes on Transnational Organised Crime as an Object of Global Governance Part 2: Measurements and Interpretations 4. Measuring Transnational Organised Crime: An Empirical Study of Existing Data Sets on TOC with Particular Reference to Intergovernmental Organisations 5. Classify, Report and Measure: The UK Organised Crime Notification Scheme 6. The Network Paradigm Applied to Criminal Organisations: Theoretical Nit-picking or a Relevant Doctrine for Investigators? Recent Developments in the Netherlands 7. Transnational Organised Crime: A Police Perspective Part 3: Case Studies 8. Bad Boys in the Baltics 9. Controlling Drug Trafficking in Central Europe: The Impact of EU Policies in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Lithuania 10. Recognising Organised Crime's Victims: The Case of Sex Trafficking in the EU Part 4: Current and Prospective Responses 11. The Legal Regulation of Transnational Organised Crime: Opportunites and Limitations 12. Countering the Chameleon Threat of Dirty Money: 'Hard' and 'Soft' Law in the Emergence of a Global Anti-money Laundering Regime 13. Criminal Asset Stripping: Confiscating the Proceeds of Crime in England and Wales 14. Proteiform Criminalities: the Formation of Organised Crime as Organisers' Responses to Developments in Four Fields of Control 15. Organised Crime and the 'Conjunction of Criminal Opportunity' Framework 16. After Transnational Organised Crime? The Politics of Public Safety

It has been debated for some time whether lower rates of personal victimisation among the elderly are due to the fact that - because of fear or other reasons - they shield themselves from situations in which they might be victimised. This ‘differential exposure’ explanation is examined using data from the 1982 British Crime Survey which provides risks for different age/ sex groups and detailed information about respondents' ‘lifestyles’. Looking at evening ‘street’ offences, differences in risks between the age groups change very little when account is taken of different patterns of going out: irrespective of frequency, means of travel, destination and activity, the elderly are still less frequently victimised. Some theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed.