http://www.popcenter.org/library/reading/pdfs/55stepsUK.pdf
When people do consider causes of crime they tend to talk of distant issues that cannot be changed quickly (like parenting or poverty); they neglect the more immediate causes – things that it is often quite easy to influence. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that answers to crime are lying all around us waiting to be picked up. That is what this manual is all about.
But who will champion this new approach when almost all those in the crime industry have a vested interest in the status quo? The media prefer to see crime as a series of individual human dramas which every now and then reward them with juicy headlines. Lawyers are steeped in traditional ways of doing things (indeed they are taught that precedence is a virtue) and are broadly content with a system which puts them at the centre and feathers their nests. Most politicians, shuffling from one policy portfolio to another, reckon crime can be tackled intuitively which, for them, means being tougher if they’re of conservative inclination, and softer if they’re liberal. And many criminologists have been too interested in theorising to be of any practical value to anyone but themselves.
It has been left to a new breed of thoughtful police officers, plus a few diligent and unsung civil servants, and one or two enlightened politicians in high places, to recognise that a new approach is needed. This smarter way is based on the work of a precious minority of academics, many of whose names you will come across in these pages. They are mostly criminologists, but their brand of criminology is distinctive. For one thing it is intensely practical. It is concerned with outcomes.
For another, it is much more truly scientific and evidence-driven than the impenetrable analysis that sometimes passes for good work in social science essays.
In short, they are consultants in crime reduction. Yet there has been nothing to distinguish these intensely practical people from the great majority of sociological theorists that populate schools of criminology and criminal justice. This led me to coin a term for them and for the new approach they champion:
crime science.
Crime science has three features. Its sole purpose is to reduce crime and so reduce victimisation. It is scientific in its methodology, by which I mean it aims for the same high standards of evidence that would be accepted by physicists or aeronautical engineers. And thirdly it is multidisciplinary: it recruits every possible skill towards its cause. That is why in the following pages you will see ideas that come from geography, psychology, mathematics, epidemiology (the study of how disease spreads), economics and many other schools of knowledge.