@ Ba.ctl Blackwell I.td.

1994, I08 Cowley Road, OxJord OX4 IJF, U K

and 238 Main Street, Cambridge, M A 01242, USA
The Howard Journal Val 33 No 3. Aug 94
ISSN 02655527

Mu1ti-Agency Crime Prevention:

Some Barriers to Collaboration

DANIEL J. GILLING
Lecturer in Social Policy,
University of Plymouth
Abstract: This article considers some of the difficulties encountered by those seeking to develop a
collaborative approach to the prevention of crime. It reflects on the vagueness and elasticity of the
concept of crime prevention which, beyond the common sense appeal, encapsulates a variety of
dijjferent and not necessarily complementa7y discourses. The multi-agency approach seeks toforce
these discourses together, but the context of collaboration is such that certain discourses j n d
themselves in a more privileged position, and others j n d it d f j c u l t to establish themselves.

In a little less than a decade, since the issuing of Home Office Circular
8/1984 that urged a collaborative approach to crime prevention across a
range of public sector agencies, the so-called multi-agency approach has
established itself as a major strategy of crime control within the criminal
justice system. Much of the impetus for its growth must be attributed to
the promotional activities of the Home Office Crime Prevention Unit,
which first sponsored the Five Towns Initiative and a number of smaller
demonstration projects in the mid- 1980s, and latterly the more ambitious
and extensive Safer Cities Programme, which has, since April 1994, come
under the ‘owership’ of the new Urban Regeneration Agency.
Now, however, the multi-agency approach finds itself at a crossroads. I t
can move forward under the stewardship of the Home Office Crime
Prevention Unit, or it can turn off on a path towards local authority-led
community safety - an option which looks less likely given the lack of
finance available at the local level, and the Conservatives’ recent rejection
of the Morgan Report’s (Home Office 1991) recommendation that local
authorities should have the lead role in crime prevention. There are other
directions too: agencies might eschew the collaborative path and seek to
‘do their own thing’, riding off into a solitary crime prevention sunset, or
perhaps they might seek to extend collaboration into the other three
sectors which complete the mixed economy of crime control.
The choices are not free, and this article does not offer straightforward
solutions to the problems faced in making such choices. Rather, it raises
issues which require consideration before decisions can be made. I t does
so in the belief that the multi-agency approach is a bandwagon that is too
hastily joined when there is as yet no evidence to suggest it is a panacea.
There is an increasing literature on crime prevention, but notwithstanding

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the contributions of some (notably Sampson et al. (1988)) what remains
lacking is an understanding of processes. As Tilley (1993) points out, the
Home Office’s close involvement has turned many initiatives into large
scale action research projects, but the vast majority of this and other
research takes the form of outcome evaluations where an understanding of
processes is lacking. The structure of this article, which draws on the
available literature in the field together with my own single case study
research of a crime prevention initiative in north west England (Gilling
1992, 1993), is firstly, to consider how agencies are drawn into the
collaborative net; secondly, to document the pressures which effectively
bias the selection process of collaborative schemes in favour of the
situational] approach and to consider the difficulties raised by this; and
finally, to propose means by which such a bias might be avoided.

The Attraction of Collaboration

Crime prevention is nothing if not a good idea. Throughout the modern
history of the criminal justice system all the main services (police, prisons
and probation) have justified their creation in part through the persuasive
utilitarian logic of prevention. Indeed, the success of the professionalisation
process depends partly on convincingly defining something as a social
problem and then offering to prevent its recurrence. Thus, for example,
did Sir Robert Peel skilfully engineer a crime problem (since disputed -
see Emsley (1983) ) in his parliamentary strategy which culminated in the
passing of the 1829 Metropolitan Police Act. In a similar vein,
contemporary proponents of crime prevention have predicated their
approach upon the re-problematisation of crime in the light of the failure
of existing institutions of crime control. The promise of prevention, then,
is very powerful, and for those who can contribute, it is a rallying call and
a worthy pursuit, even if all too often a Holy Grail.
If crime prevention is a good idea, collaboration is even better. There
appear to be three main reasons for this. On a common sense level, the
idea that ‘two heads are better than one’ has obvious appeal. O n the level
of the more particularistic concerns of individual agencies, there is also the
matter of public relations. Collaboration certainly looks good in the public
eye. Hence, in the project I researched, the probation service gained a
good deal of local credibility from its collaborative role in the first year of
the project, even if it actually did very little, and on the admission of one
assistant chief this was a major reason for its continued involvement.
Media headlines along the lines of ‘local police and probation work
together to crack crime’ look good for the agencies concerned, and it was
interesting on one occasion to note the concern expressed by one other of
the collaborative partners when its agency name was inadvertently missed
off a newspaper report.
Thirdly, collaboration affords the opportunity for some agencies to tap
into the resources of another. This might either take the form of omoading
‘rubbish work’ onto others (something which certainly happened in my
case study with area constables seizing the opportunity to pass over victim

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support and Neighbourhood Watch maintenance functions to project
workers); or it might take the form of attempts to influence the spending
decisions ofothers in line with one’s own priorities. In my research, for
example, this certainly played a part in the ultimately unsuccessful efforts
of workers from a local voluntary Family Centre to expand the project’s
brief into such areas as domestic violence with which they were
specifically concerned. It seems likely that this aspect of collaboration
might appeal particularly to voluntary agencies where finances tend to be
much less secure. On a similar note, the promise of additional finance in
special projects such as Safer Cities must provide a strong incentive to
collaborate for those such as local authorities where the money might
profitably be used to make up some of the shortfall from otherwise tightly
squeezed budgets - something found in local authorities’ use of joint
finance in community care, for example. As Challis et al. (1988) have
found out in other areas of collaboration, finance is the strongest
collaborative incentive.
Finally, collaboration is a good end in itself when it affords the
opportunity for agencies to comply with the dictates of central government.
Certainly agencies such as the police and probation services are not
slavishly compliant, but, in a context of increasing central direction in
criminal justice policy, nor can they afford to disregard totally the
collaborative messages of Home Office Circulars 8/1984 or 44/1990, or of
the Home Office (1984) Statement of National Objectives and Priorities. In the
case of the latter, Lloyd (1986) makes the pertinent observation that
individual services remain unclear about whether their collaborative roles
need to extend beyond the purely representational - flying the flag, as it
were.
There are, then, several pressures which act to draw agencies into the
collaborative arena. Once there, however, certain problems can arise
which make collaboration more difficult than anticipated.

Pressures on Collaboration
In theory, collaborative crime prevention is quite straightforward.
Outlined in a Home Office Research and Planning Unit publication,
Gladstone ( 1980) describes a rational managerialist four-stage approach
to crime prevention which covers the identification and researching of the
problem, the consideration of a number of strategies, and the selection
and implementation of the most appropriate ones. To these Laycock and
Pease (1985) added two further stages of monitoring and evaluation,
whilst Ekblom (1988) outlined a blueprint preventive process which
basically follows a problem-oriented approach as is now familiar in
policing. So, there is no shortage of good practice upon which to draw,
and the close involvement of the Home Office Crime Prevention Unit in so
many crime prevention projects ensures that such a model is not
forgotten.
However, against this ideal must be set the reality: the ‘rational man’ of
these models rarely exists. The models assume a certain level of

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knowledge and consensus about the means and ends of crime prevention
which should not necessarily be taken for granted. For example,
researching other instances of inter-agency collaboration, Nocon ( 1989)
notes that the collaborative process is often characterised by a great deal
of ignorance. Agencies are drawn into the collaborative arena because the
attractions or inducements, as outlined above, are based more on form
than content. But, beyond the crass inter-agency stereotypes held by
occupational cultures (see, for example, Holdaway (1986) ), agencies do
not necessarily know much about the motives of the other agencies they
find there.
Initially they might be insulated from such uncertainty by the
definitional elasticity of crime prevention, which enables it to be stretched
to mean virtually anything undertaken in the name of criminal justice or
even social policy. Each agency has its own firm idea about what crime
prevention means, stretching it to encompass their own service functions
(when asked for a definition, a community constable told me ‘it’s what
bobbying is’, whilst a senior probation officer said ‘it’s what we’ve always
done’).
Consequently, the fact that other agencies have different ideas of what
crime prevention means can actually come as something of a shock to the
uninitiated, and sense has to be made of these differences. As the multi-
agency approach to crime prevention has become more prevalent,
however, this potential for shock has been replaced by a common sense
distinction between crime prevention ‘camps’.
It is not easy to provide a satisfactory typology of crime prevention, and
I have yet to see a thoroughly watertight one. I n the course of practice,
however, a common sense distinction has arisen between ‘social’ and
‘situational’ crime prevention. The former’s main focus is on the
offender’s motivation - so-called ‘true’ causes of criminality lying in such
factors as economic and political marginalisation, social disorganisation
and alienation. The latter’s focus is exclusively on opportunities for crime
and how they can be blocked, with only a passing interest in motivations
through the behaviourist hypothesis that blocked opportunities can break
the habits of learned behaviours.
With a background knowledge of criminological theory it is possible to
identify the origins of these variants of crime prevention in, respectively,
positivist and classical criminological discourses, but this distinction is not
usually so apparent to practitioners. Rather, both in the project I studied
and in many others it would seem that the differences are construed as
being primarily political in origin, rather than theoretical. This is
particularly true of the adherents of the social approach, who typically
perceive of themselves as liberals (drawn mainly from the welfare
professions), set against apparently conservative adherents of the situa-
tional approach. In reality, this political distinction does not hold: the
social approach can be applied illiberally, as King (1989) has ably
demonstrated, whilst there is no necessary coalition between conservat-
ivism and the situational approach. The assumption of such a coalition
seems to rest mainly on the fact that situational crime prevention has been

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promoted by a Conservative government, and that its closest associated
agency is the stereotypically conservative police organisation.
But the fact that this political distinction does not hold in reality is
largely unimportant - what matters is perceptions. My research identified
something of a siege mentality on the part of the probation side when
facing the combined might of Home Ofice and university researchers,
and representatives of the police: they believed that the political tide was
against them. This never really manifested itself in inter-agency meetings
where there appeared to be an established protocol of conflict avoidance,
but it was very much present behind the scenes.
Where there are no collaborative crime prevention projects this politics
does not matter - there is space for agencies to do their own things, which
might be both different and contradictory, within the criminal justice and
social policy systems. But in special collaborative crime prevention projects,
where there is some merging of decision-making structures, this perceived
political difference has to be resolved as priorities have to be decided
upon. In my research, when alternatives were considered, resolution was
determined simply by numerical strengths: hence on the main project the
adherents of the situational approach generally held sway, whilst on a
youth forum it was the social approach which dominated. So, although
liberal adherents of the social approach might feel that they are at a
political disadvantage, it is not inevitably thus, and anyway has little to do
with the inherent political appeal of social or situational approaches.
I n spite of this point, however, there do seem to exist a number of
factors which do effectively advantage certain preventive approaches over
others.
O n the face of it, the problem-oriented approach is entirely neutral in so
far as it presupposes no particular preventive method. But this is not wholly
the case. The starting point of the approach is to identify crimes of
particular prevalence - statistical ‘hot spots’. But as we know only too
well, crime rates are first and foremost artefacts of recording and reporting
practices. Consequently certain offences - particularly those against
property - are more likely to figure in these ‘hot spots’ than those which
are traditionally under-reported, such as domestic violence or racial
harassment (not technically a crime anyway). Moreover, whilst there is
not necessarily a perfect fit between types of crime and methods of
prevention, there can be little doubt that the elective affinity between
situational prevention and property crimes such as residential burglary is
particularly strong. O n such grounds it is possible to argue, therefore, that
the situational approach is advantaged.
The initial focus of the crime prevention project I researched was
residential burglary anyway, so there was no question of a competition
between crime priorities. However, in the second phase of that project
there were attempts by some agencies to widen the focus from residential
burglary to such matters as vandalism, drug misuse and domestic violence
- all reckoned to be serious problems by some of the local collaborative
partners. But this was based only on anecdotal evidence, and others were
able to use the official crime figures to declare that these were not in fact

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significant problems, and hence the focus remained only on residential
burglary.
There is another difficulty which emerges from the starting point of the
problem-oriented approach. Beginning with an examination of crime
problems, participants must rely on statistical information which has been
collected on a geographical basis, such as a police beat area. This
geographical information records the number of reported exploited
criminal opportunities in a given area - it says nothing about the nature of
criminal motivations in that area, because the offenders do not necessarily
live in the areas in which they offend. Thus, if the information is
principally about exploited opportunities, it should come as no surprise
that the methods which appear to offer the best prospect of preventive
success are those of opportunity reduction - again, the situational
approach. In the project I studied this problem could potentially have
been overcome by the use of a burglar survey, which could have provided
information on motivations to balance that on opportunities. However,
although this survey was conducted, for various reasons which had a lot to
do with the more practical managerial difficulties of inter-agency
collaboration, the survey was never used for this purpose. Furthermore, it
was always at a disadvantage when compared to the other sources of
information because in order to make the sample size statistically
significant the survey had to include burglars who lived outside the
project area, and thus it was always vulnerable to the allegation that the
sample was not representative of the motivations of offenders in that
particular area. In general, because offenders are less visible than most
property offences, it will always be easier to acquire information about
opportunities than about motivations.
If we move along the problem-oriented approach from the analysis of
the crime problem to the consideration of a range of possible preventive
solutions, we come across another set ofdificulties. T o begin with, we face
the probability that different agencies effectively speak different languages:
they have different cognitive frameworks, different assumptive worlds,
and different discourses. Thus, whatever the analysis of the problem
might say, agencies will seek solutions which square with their own
conceptions of what crime prevention is about - typically social
prevention for the probation service and situational prevention for the
police. It is naive to expect them to act otherwise, or to cede to some
higher mutual rationality. In my particular case study, the probation
service only participated in a wholly opportunity-reducing initiative for as
long as they were not involved in the decision-making process. As soon as
they were, they began to construct an alternative social agenda. There
was certainly a politics behind this, but it was also a wholly natural thing
in the context of the service’s own discourse.
This discursive difference has to be surmounted when priorities have to
be decided upon, but as mentioned above, this is made difficult by the fact
that such differences are frequently perceived as political in origin: social
versus situational, left versus right. Whilst, however, such a politics is not
intrinsic to the methods of prevention, it can be found in the constituencies

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which such methods support. Thus social prevention tends to be oriented
towards the offender or potential offender (to help them overcome their
criminal motivations), whilst situational prevention is oriented more
towards the victim or potential victim (to protect them by making
opportunities harder), although there are one or two exceptions to this
rule.
Over the last decade or so, the political importance of the victim, as an
object of our sympathy, has been significantly enhanced, whilst there has
been a concomitant decline in support for the offender or potential
offender, based partly on the perceived failings of probation work, the
reaction against the ‘dependency culture’ in social policy, and a general
paradigmatic shift to the right. Agencies do not operate in a political
vacuum, and particularly in projects in which the Home Office is involved-
as my case study was - there is likely to be a gravitation towards the
victim. In empirical research these pressures are not easy to discern, but
they help constitute the widely held notion of the mobilisation of bias,
which in the current context certainly would appear to work in favour of
the situational approach.
One way in which this politics is likely to manifest itself relates to the
wider acceptability of social crime prevention in the context of public
policies as a whole. Not only is social crime prevention’s immediate
beneficiary seen as being the offender or (typically working class)
potential offender - thereby raising political issues of desert; it also
requires contributions from other areas of social policy - such as
employment, education or housing - which have themselves been
subjected to tighter controls in a political and economic climate which is
hostile to their potentially welfarist ends.
I n arriving at decisions which prioritise certain methods of prevention
over others, inter-agency groups must give some consideration to the later
stages of the problem-oriented approach. I n theory, monitoring and
evaluation are considerations which follow implementation, but in
practice, particularly in closely researched projects, the choice of methods
is also partly dependent upon notions of their ‘evaluability’ and
measureability. All crime prevention projects with which the Home
Ofice’s Crime Prevention Unit is involved tend to be closely researched,
and the research aspect of these projects can serve to impose a framework
upon them. In particular, it imposes the requirements that the projects’
success or failure can be statistically measured within a relatively short
time period, usually through the employment of pre-test/post-test
measures, barked up by a comparison with a control area.
This framework might appear to be merely neutral and technical, but it
too can serve to prioritise particular methods. Hence, in the Five Towns
Initiative of the mid- 1980s, the selection of almost exclusively opportunity-
reducing measures was attributed in part of the fact that there was
insufficient time to consider implementing social alternatives - most of
which, because of developmental or social foci, take rather longer to
demonstrate results. Similarly, in my case study, probation representatives
encountered significant opposition from others on the inter-agency

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 management group to proposals oriented towards long-term community
development. I n general, there can be a poor fit between the short-term
interests of researchers and the longer-term vision of agencies permanently
based in a particular area. Especially where resourcing is not entirely
derived from the special crime prevention projects themselves, agencies
need not share the sense of urgency of the researchers, but where the
research interests are dominant, there is a strong pressure to select
situational methods which can be implemented quickly, and which can
show results very quickly.
Methodologically, the dominant form of research is that of the statistical
outcome evaluation, and the main issue here concerns the origins of the
data on which such evaluations are done. The most readily available
supply of data is the crime rate, which, as mentioned above, records the
number of exploited opportunities reported to the police. Notwithstanding
the weaknesses of such data sources, the crime rate remains the
benchmark for determining the success of preventive endeavours. I n
contrast, there is less available information on offender motivations, and it
is virtually impossible to identify the effects of motivation-reducing
methods on a largely unknown clientele.
Even where the offenders are known, the measures of motivation such
as unemployment, debt or community disorganisation suffer from
appearing to be only tenuously and tangentially related to specific crimes.
Without constructing an unacceptably deterministic model of human
agency, it is inherently more difficult to specify the link between
motivation and crime than that between opportunity and crime. It is the
difference between the latent and manifest causes of a phenomenon, where
the former is considerably less obvious, and usually less ‘common sense’,
than the latter.
Consequently, there is a great deal of pressure which makes situational
measures more attractive to the evaluative researcher. In the project I
researched, this issue manifested itself in the researchers’ insistence that
the probation side’s social crime prevention proposals had to be supported
by ‘hard data’ - something which was just not possible because it can
seemingly never be as ‘hard’ as the crime rate data. At its worst,
information about motivations relies purely upon the unverifiable
impressionistic assumptions of probation officers’ social enquiry reports.
Researchers seeking ‘hard’ data are bound to be dissatisfied with this, and
yet such reports represent the bases of probation oficers’ professionalism
(the denigration of which provides a potent source of conflict in inter-
agency groups).
Overall, then, there are a number of constraints which can tilt
collaborative initiatives in the direction of situational methods of
prevention - something which certainly happened in the project I
researched, as well as the schools’ vandalism project studied by Hope and
Murphy (1983). Over time, moreover, it is conceivable that this bias
builds up its own momentum through the establishment of an orthodoxy.
Thus, the more situational methods are selected as a result of these largely
invisible pressures, the more they come to be regarded as necessary

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elements of good crime preventive practice (admittedly it also helps that
some of them appear to work). So, the bank of knowledge of good practice
built up by the Home Ofice Crime Prevention Unit becomes another
factor in a cyclical process which can advantage the situational approach.
This undoubtedly places the proponents of social methods of prevention
in an awkward position in collaborative ventures. Depending upon the
constitution of inter-agency groups, their alternative resource sources, and
their adopted method of decision-making in particular, there are a range
of possible outcomes. Whilst the odds might appear to be stacked against
the proponents of social approaches, they can withhold their support from
situational ones, and groups can therefore find themselves descending into
talking shops, where there is no basis for joint decisions. Whilst this may
be a consequence of conflict, it can happen anyway, since there is no pre-
ordained form of collaboration.
As Davidson (1976) points out, there is a continuum of collaboration
ranging in intensity from communication, through co-operation, co-
ordination and federation, to merger. As one moves along the continuum
the stakes get higher: communication entails a minimal resource
commitment and preserves organisational independence, whilst merger
requires total resource commitment and the loss of all independence for
one or both of the parties.
Communication, then, is a low risk strategy which can be pursued when
there is no prospect of higher level collaboration, as in the above scenario:
it fulfils the requirement to collaborate, without making such collaboration
particularly productive in terms of crime preventive outcomes. However,
that is not to say that communication, and the proverbial talking shops,
are wholly unproductive. O n the contrary, one of the reasons why this
kind of low-level collaboration is sometimes regarded as a good thing in
itself is because it affords the opportunity to protect or advance
organisational resources. I am referring here specifically to the organisa-
tional resource status, which is a determinant of organisational power. As
mentioned above, collaboration looks good, and has a public relations
value which managers - those most likely to be represented on inter-
agency groups (certainly the case with Safer Cities) - are particularly
likely to value.
To this end, it was significant that issues relating to the media figured
prominently on the agendas of inter-agency meetings I observed. Given
the potential conflict between advocates of social and situational methods
of prevention, it was also noticeable that a large portion of the inter-
agency meetings was taken up with low level communication. To recap: a
heavy emphasis on communication is a likely outcome of collaborative
ventures either where the value of public relations is accorded a high
priority, or where to go further would render conflict a more likely
scenario. (In the project I researched a high premium was placed on
conflict avoidance, thus suggesting it is regarded as a less attractive option
than communication because of the personal and public damage that it
can create.)
An alternative scenario to communication is disengagement from the

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collaborative arena. This depends upon agencies having sufficient
alternative resource sources to effectively ‘go it alone’. After several
months of failure to gain the support of the inter-agency group for its
social measures, this is the position reached by the probation side in the
project I researched. Having encountered continued opposition to their
plans, particularly from the researchers on methodological grounds,
probation representatives took the decision to implement their proposals
regardless, leaving it to the researchers to choose if and what they wanted
to evaluate. Significantly, however, this decision was taken covertly, and
not in the inter-agency group, which continued to meet, but now more like
a talking shop than ever.

Concluding Discussion: Avoiding Collaborative Problems

This article has sought to identify some of the pressures which exist within
collaborative crime prevention projects and which tend to advantage
situational methods by virtue of their appearing altogether more
knowable, desirable, feasible and researchable. This does not, however,
mean that there is no space for social methods of prevention: these have
emerged from collaborative projects, including the Safer Cities Pro-
gramme, although it is unclear whether such methods owe their existence
to agencies ‘going it alone’ without the ‘sanction’ of the wider group, to
the persuasive powers of key individuals like Safer Cities Co-ordinators, or
to some other factor or factors. There is a need for more research here.
In general, however, situational methods seem to take precedence.
Indeed, given the express intention of key personnel within the Home
Office Crime Prevention Unit to broaden the base of schemes to include
both social and situational measures to counter the threat of displacement
(Heal and Laycock 1986), it is ironic that their own methodological
imperatives tend to militate against this. Consequently, one possible
solution might entail the Crime Prevention Unit adopting more of an
arm’s length policy towards schemes like Safer Cities, giving them greater
freedom over spending and research decisions, and thereby levelling the
playing field.
Alternatively, it might be that if the Crime Prevention Unit and the
Home Office were to take a step back and agree to the Morgan Report’s
proposals for giving local authorities the lead role, then the outcome
would be a much more even balance between methods, although possibly
at the cost of schemes not being evaluated to the standard required by the
Home Office, although the Audit Commission might make a useful
contribution here.
In more general terms, one might question the extent to which the
collaborative project approach is necessary. Were crime prevention to be
made a more permanent feature of the public policy landscape, then many
of the pressures, which originate in the requirements of short term
demonstration projects, might be removed, and the balance between
social and situational methods might in part be a product more of political
choice, and co-ordination, if required, might come more as part of a

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general corporate management strategy. I n the current political and
economic climate, this is unlikely.
One should not forget that the initial purpose behind setting up projects
is the laudable aim of finding out what works, to counter the ‘nothing
works’ pessimism of the 1970s and early-1980s. Consequently, rather than
altering the institutional structure of crime prevention, it might be better
to address the inherent weaknesses of social methods - assuming they are
practical and reformable. Principal amongst these are their ‘wooliness’
and failure to specify what they seek to change, and how such changes
might be measured. This ‘soft’ data could perhaps be hardened up, so that
social methods might compete with situational methods on a more equal
footing in these hard-nosed managerial days where the worth of
something has to be proved beyond matters of principle. Professional
hunches are no longer enough.
If these problems are not addressed, there is a danger of social methods
being marginalised before ever really being given a chance to prove
themselves (a point also made forcibly by Hope and Shaw (1988) ), or ofit
being restricted solely to its ‘a la Thatcher’ (King 1989) form, which
suffers all the above-mentioned faults without the baggage of political
unacceptability to the current government. Risking, as they do, the
‘criminalisation of the discourse of social policy’ (Sampson et al. 1988), it
would surely be better to afford these methods the opportunity to work
through the evaluative and conceptual problems which currently stand in
their way.

Notes
’ The term ‘situational’ crime prevention is widely used as a definition for
methods which seek to reduce criminal opportunities, in contrast to social
methods which focus on criminal motivations. However, the term ‘situational’
crime prevention was originally devised in the late-1970s by Home Office
researchers to describe a managerialist technique which did not presuppose any
particular method of prevention. I prefer the generic term ‘opportunity
reduction’ when referring to methods of prevention, but to stick with convention
I have used situational crime prevention to refer to methods, and the ‘problem-
oriented approach’ to refer to the managerial technique.

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Date submitted: April 93
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