21
Apr
2015
By Calvin at 14:05 GMT, 9 years ago
Have you noticed how few stories there are about crime prevention – as opposed to the number of stories giving details of crimes committed and the victims and perhaps the successful police operations to arrest the offenders? Open any newspaper to see for yourself. Yes, you’ll get the odd story about how the police are giving away property marking kits or how they are carrying out an initiative to prevent house burglary and will visit your home to give advice, but how often do you get to read about the results that they have achieved.
I have often heard the argument that it’s bad news that grabs the headlines and therefore our attention and yet every day the excellent work conducted by our police, our councils, the security industry and our neighbourhood watch volunteers goes largely unreported.
Here’s a sample of some headline grabbing crime stories from the today’s London media
- Elderly couple burgled while on holiday
- Four men jailed for violent robbery in Greenford
- Safer Neighbourhood Team discover cannabis factory
- Raising awareness about services for victims
- Crime rises, but burglary levels down
Here’s some examples of headlines from Fairy-Dairy Land where crimes prevented make the headlines
- Elderly couple have a lovely time on holiday and return to a secure house
- Nobody jailed for robbery in Greenford, because the crime was prevented
- Safer Neighbourhood Team discover absolutely nothing due to residents’ home security measures
- Victim Support Scheme shrinking due to too few clients
- Crimes prevented top all previous records
Of course these sorts of headlines won’t grab the headlines in the real world even though hundreds of thousands of crimes are being prevented every year.
By definition, a crime that was prevented didn’t happen and so there’s nothing to report, but actually that’s not really the case, because if our police services could find the time to delve into their stats they could tell us a lot about prevented crime.
For example, my now rather old ‘Alleygaters guide to gating alleys initiative’ in Ealing (the first pilot) was responsible for erecting 7 really difficult to climb gates across the entrances of a series of alleys running behind terraced houses. One year after the gates went in burglary in the area reduced from 20 down to 4, an 80% reduction. In the following year there was 1 and in the following year there were 2. So instead of the expected 60 burglaries across the three years, there were just 7. I took the details to the local newspaper and got it covered.
If the local police were to look at that initial pilot scheme area today they’d have about 25 years of data showing that the right-thinking residents who paid for the gates back then have probably prevented around 300 burglaries during that time (allowing for the downward trend in burglary since the mid 1990s) and saved many tens of thousands of pounds into the bargain. That is a front page headline as far as I’m concerned, but information like this is simply not presented to the press and if it is then it is certainly not often enough.
Good news prevention stories do take a little time to put together, because the results of crime prevention initiatives don’t come in instantly and often those that do the work don’t allow for a future analysis of their work. This is such a shame, because I think the police are doing themselves an injustice for all the hard work they do.
If you disagree with what I’ve just said and have some good news stories about crime prevention then let me know about them, because if your local police don’t supply them to the press or the newspapers won’t print them then I certainly will.
Contact me: http://thecrimepreventionwebsite.com/529/contact/
