Technology, Opportunity, Crime and Crime Prevention: Current and Evolutionary Perspectives

This chapter seeks to link technology and crime science, including situational crime prevention. It starts by briefly considering the nature of technology. It then looks at the relationship between technology, opportunity, problems and solutions. But opportunity is a more subtle concept than many in the field assume, needing further development for present purposes. It is therefore discussed in relation to both traditional frameworks of crime science and to a more integrated and detailed counterpart, the Conjunction of Criminal Opportunity. But all the opportunity frameworks need supplementing by an account of the dynamics of crime, especially through the concepts of scripts and script clashes. A major section then examines the relationship between crime and technological change, covering adaptations and clashes over longer timescales, in the shape of co-evolutionary arms races between offenders and preventers. This spans both biological and cultural evolution. Then come sections on the practicalities of adopting a deliberately evolutionary approach to prevention—gearing up against crime, innovation and design—and finally some weaknesses of purely technological approaches to crime prevention. The conclusion reviews the significance of understanding technology for crime science. This enhanced understanding of how changing technology can both create and block opportunity for crime, nuisance and terrorism (henceforth, crime) is needed to help us anticipate, detect and respond to the many changes in the crime and security world we can expect to encounter during the rest of the twenty-first century.