NCJ Number
180501
Editor(s)
Barry Webb
Date Published
1999
Length
49 pages
Annotation
The Burglary Reduction Initiative, initiated in Great Britain in 1998, involved a series of Strategic Development Projects (SDPs) in high burglary communities and was designed to extent current knowledge of cost-effective burglary prevention measures.
Abstract
Local crime and disorder partnerships participating in the initiative were required to identify areas with a burglary rate twice the national average over 3 years and with between 3,000 and 5,000 households. Many factors contributed to local crime problems and could be categorized according to offender-related, victim-related, community-related, specific situational, and wider locality factors. During the course of visits to the SDPs, several local burglary problems emerged that had not previously been fully appreciated. In most cases, burglary prevention projects developed in the SDPs involved a package of interventions. In some cases, these involved interactive approaches in which one intervention depended on others, such as crackdown and consolidation in which enforcement was followed by community self-confidence building. Some SDPs had planned contradictory approaches in which one intervention worked to the detriment of another, for example, target hardening prevented the success of covert detection methods employing tracking devices. Recommendations to improve burglary reduction efforts are offered that highlight the need for a strategic approach incorporating the analysis of local problems and the development of sustainable crime reduction measures. An appendix provides examples of key generators of high burglary rates in the SDPs. 25 references and 8 tables