60 Steps Revisited: Step 39 – Increase The Effort of Crime

Back in 2009, I did a series of posts covering the excellent book Crime Analysis For Problem Solvers. The book is published by the US DOJ's Problem Oriented Policing Center (POP Center). Because of the value I think this book has for crime analysts, and policing in general, I am going to re-post this series on here on the blog.

In my last post on Crime Analysis For Problem Solvers, we touched on the twenty five techniques of situational crime prevention. These twenty five techniques are broken down into five main categories. In this post, we’re going to cover the first category found in Step 39 – Increase The Effort of Crime.

To a certain degree, crime can be viewed using a principle of economics, the cost / benefit ratio. As it’s applied to crime, cost / benefit is not always about money. In fact, quite a number of crimes don’t really have a true economic motive. However, if we replace money in cost / benefit with some other advantage it seems to work out quite nicely.

For example, a graffiti tagger does not usually derive an monetary benefit from his crime. However, he does obtain a tangible benefit by committing this vandalism, the improved street cred amongst his tagger peers by seeing his tags spread far and wide.

If we can increase the cost to the criminal and/or reduce the gained benefit, we may be able to reduce crime. This chapter speaks to ways to increase the cost to the criminal by making it harder for them to commit the crime.

The five main ways to increase the effort of crime are:

1. Harden targets
2. Control access to facilities
3. Screen exits
4. Deflect offenders
5. Control tools and weapons

The authors of Crime Analysis For Problem Solvers have a number of examples for each of these five areas. Hit the link to the original article to explore them further.

Next time, we’ll cover Step 40 – Increase The Risks of Crime.