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Situational crime prevention and Public Safety Canada’s crime-prevention programme

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Abstract

This study examines the work undertaken by Canada’s National Crime Prevention Centre (NCPC) under the auspices of the Public Safety Canada. NCPC operates with a social development approach to preventing crime, focussing largely on small pilot projects that work with at-risk youth. We suggest that this is a rather narrow definition of crime prevention and that it may not necessarily be an optimal strategy for all crime preventions in Canada. In particular, many international crime and safety organizations suggest the need for integrated approaches in crime prevention. In addition, there is an array of evidence-based situational crime prevention (SCP) strategies from which Canada might benefit. SCP has a history of success in designing out a wide range of crimes from credit card fraud to car theft and burglary. It is proposed that, at minimum, a more inclusive crime-prevention programme that incorporates SCP would produce a significant net benefit to the safety of Canadians.

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Notes

  1. Crime-prevention models had already emerged at this time. For example, an early model called Tandem, started in Montreal in 1986 and focussed on break and enters. The commitment to crime prevention emerged largely out of two conferences, on in Montreal in 1989 and one in Paris, France in 1991 (CMNCP 2016).

  2. This is the most recent evaluation of NCPC.

  3. The total cost of the strategy in one city was around $52 million. Interestingly, this is slightly more than the annual budget for the entire country for NCPC.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Criminology, Simon Fraser University, 8888 University Drive, Burnaby, BC, V5A 1S6, Canada

    Tarah Hodgkinson

  2. School of Law, University of Leeds, Leeds, LS2 9JT, UK

    Graham Farrell

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  1. Tarah Hodgkinson
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  2. Graham Farrell
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Correspondence to Tarah Hodgkinson.

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Hodgkinson, T., Farrell, G. Situational crime prevention and Public Safety Canada’s crime-prevention programme. Secur J 31, 325–342 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41284-017-0103-4

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