Community Crime Prevention Guide
Printable Version (PDF/1.4MB)
Promising and Effective Practices
The previous sections provide a great deal of information about how to organize your crime prevention effort, involve the partners, communicate the objectives, analyze the needs and develop a plan. Now it's time to think about what kind of activities your plan should include.
- What are the actual practices and programs you want your community to adopt?
- Is an after school basketball program the best activity in which to invest your time and resources?
- A support program for single parents?
- What about a program that helps seniors secure their homes and property?
You will want to make sure that the activities you choose are based on good evidence about what works to prevent crime, and what will attract the active support of your partners and the community. Here are three respected resources that will help you select appropriate activities.
National Crime Prevention Centre
The mission of the National Crime Prevention Centre (NCPC) is to provide national leadership on effective and cost-efficient ways to prevent and reduce crime by addressing known risk factors in high-risk populations and places.
The NCPC concentrates on two core activities:
- it supports targeted crime prevention approaches and interventions; and
- it builds and shares practical knowledge.
The NCPC is part of the federal Department of Public Safety and was created in 1998 to oversee the implementation of a National Crime Prevention Strategy. Since then it has administered federal funding to local crime prevention initiatives which meet the Strategy's criteria requiring programs which target known risk factors, and which employ evidence-based practices. The Centre works closely with provincial and territorial governments in making decisions about the most promising community programs to fund. In British Columbia, the Centre works with the Policing and Community Safety Branch of the Ministry of Public Safety and Solicitor General.
Promising and Good Crime Prevention Practices and Approaches
(PDF/683KB): This publication is part of an ongoing effort by NCPC to actively promote and disseminate information and knowledge on effective, evidence-based crime prevention programs, strategies and initiatives.
The programs selected for the 2007 document are examples of Canadian approaches and practices that respond to the NCPC's priorities:
- Prevention in Aboriginal communities
- Early risk factors among vulnerable families and children (ages six to 24) and youth at risk
- Priority crime issues (youth gangs, drug-related crime)
The identified programs have fundamental elements necessary to the success of their specific initiative.
The programs also have the following key elements for success that are universal to crime prevention programs:
- Identifying risk factors and promoting protective factors that focus the interventions;
- Developing programs and interventions that are evidence-based and that use a logic model for implementation and evaluation;
- Creating partnerships in order to identify gaps in existing community services and to use resources, expertise and time efficiently among the partners; and
- Assessing project impacts and results.
International Centre for the Prevention of Crime
The International Centre for the Prevention of Crime (ICPC) is based in Montreal. The ICPC provides an international forum for national governments, local authorities, public agencies and community-based agencies to exchange experience and consider emerging knowledge in crime prevention and community safety.
Specifically, ICPC seeks to:
- Enhance awareness and access to international knowledge on crime prevention and community safety policies;
- Promote best practices and tools in crime prevention and community safety;
- Facilitate international exchanges between cities and countries, the justice system and community associations; and
- Provide technical assistance facilitate expert exchanges.
On the ICPC website, you can find information on events and conferences, subscribe to email bulletins and online publications on emerging research, and access documents that provide information in five main topic areas:
- Policies/Strategies – Links to national crime prevention and related community safety policies and strategies, and national organizations specializing in crime prevention research in various countries.
- Indicators on crime prevention and community safety – Indicators on basic demographics, general development, crime, victimization, criminal justice, and risk and protective factors for various countries.
- Practices – Good practice projects that share ideas for action. They tell you what people are doing, illustrate "ways of working" and describe what communities have learned from their experience and how it made a difference.
- Relevant documentation – Key documents and reports that have informed crime prevention policy and practice (national to local), academic articles, reviews, training guides and manuals.
- Tools – Tools to assist in strategic action towards community safety and crime prevention including links to international declarations and conventions, best practice websites, crime mapping tools, toolkits and guides.
In 2004, the ICPC launched the International Institute on Crime Prevention whose purpose is to provide training and a forum for the review and testing of new strategies in crime prevention across the world.
Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence
Based at the University of Colorado in Boulder, the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence (CSPV) offers technical assistance for the development and evaluation of violence prevention programs and the identification of promising practices.
Blueprints for Violence Prevention: Identifies prevention and intervention programs that meet scientific standards in terms of program effectiveness. CSPV launched this project as part of a U.S. national violence prevention initiative. The 11 model programs, called Blueprints, have been effective in reducing, for example, anti-social behaviour, aggression, delinquency, substance abuse and violent crime among adolescents. Another 18 programs have been identified as promising programs.
CSPV conducts a detailed and comprehensive process evaluation at each program site. A CSPV objective is to build a body of knowledge about the implementation problems that cause many programs to fail by accumulating data on the Blueprints pilot projects (also known as replication sites) about problems encountered, and solutions that worked or did not work, and why.
CSPV also collects useful data for screening potential pilot projects such as:
- Organizational capacity needed;
- Funding;
- Stability;
- Commitment;
- Resources; and
- Other factors required for a high probability of success.
