Community Crime Prevention Guide
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Develop a Community Crime Prevention Action Plan
Identify Crime Issues
The challenge is to identify crime problems in the community and relevant issues in a logical and systematic way. Problem identification tends to take the form of a needs assessment or a mapping of community assets. A combination of both approaches is typically referred to as a safety diagnosis.
Needs Assessment
You can use a needs assessment to learn what the people or communities that you hope to reach might need generally or in relation to a specific issue. For example, you might want to find out about safety issues in your community, about access to services or about the extent to which your community is dealing with a certain type of crime or a certain form of victimization.
Your needs assessment may involve gathering information from the following sources:
- Police – Local police or RCMP detachments keep records of reported crimes. Their reports can give you a good idea of what crimes have taken place in your community, where they happened and how frequently they occurred. The police can provide information about related programs and services, statistics and other data and crime prevention strategies and approaches.
- Ministry of Public Safety and Solicitor General – This ministry's website provides comprehensive information on B.C. crime statistics, police resources, and municipal crime rates and case burdens. Also available on the website, is a useful resource called Identifying Your Community's Crime Problem: A Guide to Needs Assessment. (PDF/830KB)
- Schools, organizations and agencies – Community centres and small business owners usually document problems they have had with graffiti, shoplifting and vandalism. School authorities likely keep files on bullying incidents and other forms of school violence.
- Community – Gathering information from people is important because you need more than just statistics to tell you what your community really needs. It is particularly important to hear from diverse parts of your, including marginalized and vulnerable individuals.
- Local and provincial media coverage – The media reports on issues of crime, violence and victimization and shapes public opinion and perception.
Mapping Community Assets
Mapping can provide you with information on resources or skills that exist among the people or communities you hope to work with. Mapping is often conducted alongside a needs assessment. The mapping process helps you identify the skills that community members can contribute to your crime prevention project. It also helps you locate resources such as community space, in-kind and financial donations, likely sources of volunteers, and other assets.
Research has shown that it is important to make the mapping of community resources as wide and broad as you possibly can. In this way you can reach and engage those who will be willing to act in ways that aid the wider community.
Safety Diagnosis or Audit
In a safety diagnosis or audit, crime and victimization are examined in relation to the social, economic, political and institutional environments in which problems occur. Safety audits are a tool that citizens can use to evaluate different features in their neighbourhood with the goal of reducing crime and improving personal safety. A safety audit helps people to look at a space that feels unsafe and determine why it feels that way. Community members can look at where the site is, what is beside it, how it is designed and what happens there. Safety audits are also used to develop an inventory of the places and programs in a community that make that community a safe place to live.
A safety audit can simply be a checklist of the features in an area or building which you feel affect your safety. The audit results allow you to focus on taking steps to correct these issues. Items that may be considered are whether there is sufficient lighting, whether you would be heard if you call for help, whether there are people nearby who can help, or improvements you'd like to see made to enhance safety.
Resources
Identifying, Mapping and Mobilizing Our Assets
(PDF/99KB). This resource from the University of Wisconsin – Extension provides assessment tools for inventorying the assets of individual members and associations and organizations in communities. It outlines four basic steps in mapping assets of individuals:
- Identify groups of individuals where asset identification might be helpful to your project.
- Identify assets of these groups in a general way.
- Consider how these assets link to your project goals.
- Decide if more in-depth, first-hand assessment of assets of some of these groups would be helpful and important. Assessments might be conducted through surveys, interviews, focus groups or other research methods.
This resource also outlines basic steps in mapping assets of associations and organizations:
- Generate a list of associations in the community through brainstorming by the project committee. Extend this through a community forum or by reviewing local media coverage. Associations are informal, voluntary groups that bring people together to pursue shared interests.
- Generate a list of organizations in the community by polling the knowledge of the project committee. You can extend this by reviewing telephone or other directories. An organization is a formal government, private/business or non-profit organization with paid staff.
- Identify assets of associations and organizations in a general way.
- Consider possible links between the assets of the associations and organizations and your project goals.
- Consider how accessible the assets of various associations and organizations are to your project and how such access could be increased.
- Decide if more in-depth, first-hand assessment of assets for some of these associations and organizations would be helpful, e.g., survey, interviews, focus groups, etc.
Guidance on Local Safety Audits: A Compendium of International Practice: Published by the European Forum for Urban Safety, in collaboration with the National Crime Prevention Centre. The publication is divided into three parts.
- Part A is directed primarily at those responsible for crime prevention policy and legislation at the national level, as well as community leaders with a mandate for crime prevention at the city level. This section identifies who needs to be involved in the safety audit, skills needed to complete the work, the scope, principles of good practice and main stages of an audit activity.
- Part B focuses on issues that pose challenges because they are difficult to investigate. Theses issues relate to specific populations at risk, children and youth, women's safety, drugs and crime against businesses.
- Part C covers a range of technical subjects. It emphasizes the importance of combining quantitative and qualitative data to gain a good understanding of problems and causal factors. It also provides tips on the use of a range of tools and techniques for collecting information.
